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RELOCATIONS OF THE SPIRIT by Leon Forrest

RELOCATIONS OF THE SPIRIT

by Leon Forrest

Pub Date: Feb. 1st, 1994
ISBN: 1-55921-068-0

Thoughts on Afro-American writers, artists, and sports figures by novelist Forrest (Two Wings to Veil My Face, 1984, etc.), assembled largely from magazines such as The Carleton Miscellany and Callalloo and from book reviews in the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere. Aside from biographical delights about his home in Chicago, Forrest covers the expected territory: Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Billie Holiday, poet Sterling Brown, James Baldwin, Roland Kirk, Jackie Robinson, Faulkner's treatment of blacks, musings on Michael Jordan—and white writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and John Gardner, whose The Art of Fiction he compares with Dostoyevsky's notebooks, James's The Art of the Novel, and Forster's Aspects of the Novel, a comparison that is meaningful only in kind, not in ideas. Forrest's heaviest efforts focus on Faulkner: ``Reinvention is a primary attribute of intelligence, identity, and endurance in the character make-up of many memorable black figures in...The Sound and the Fury: Dilsey, Deacon, Louis Hatcher, and Reverend Shegog. I believe that this major Afro- American cultural attribute—reinvention—was also used by Faulkner as a salient and ironic instrument of structural linkage to reveal the discontinuities and failure of Quentin Compson...and the decline of the South.'' This is lit-crit of a milder sort, not so dense that you can't more or less follow it, and yet it raises the question: Do you want to? We sense that Faulkner himself would not get past the essay's title—``Faulkner/Reforestation.'' A lively interview with Ralph Ellison subjects Ellison to more structural salience, linkage, and ``metaphorical patterning, ``under a viscous dose of Kenneth Burke's ``formula of purpose, passion and perception.'' Some may call it luminous, others windy.