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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Zachary McLeod Hutchins is a professor of English at Colorado State University, where he teaches courses in American literature. His most recent monograph is Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

Abstract

Although Gloria Naylor repeatedly asked critics to consider the relationship between color and narrative structure in her novels, few readers have provided the analytical attention to form that she sought. From Naylor’s perspective, an insistence on structure in the era of poststructuralism represented her most important artistic contribution; she conceived of her novels as expressions of a moral vision centered in objective truth, and that perspective on truth is embedded in the form of her novels. Because the organization and narrative progression in each of her first four novels is based on preexisting poetic or symbolic scaffolding, Naylor cultivates an epistemological optimism in her readers, the expectation that her narratives communicate a truth accessible to readers attending to the structural imperatives of her work. Dante’s terza rima, African folktales, the call-and-response of jazz music, and biblical numerology provide the frameworks around which her novels are organized, offering readers who recognize these patterns—as Naylor asked them to—privileged access to truths and a coherent system of symbolic meanings that her characters, embedded in a chaotic world, could not recognize. Drawing on newly available archival materials, this essay answers Naylor’s plea for critical attention to the structural poetics of her novels.

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