Of Gaines and Genre: Plotting the Racial Borders in Southern Louisiana

Abstract

Three works of fiction by Ernest J. Gaines, each from a different phase of his career, can be classified as significant exercises in using genre norms and styles of emplotment to achieve effects that remain obscured by the very relationship to genre that the novels embody. Of Love and Dust (1967) and A Gathering of Old Men (1983) often appear to simultaneously embrace and hide the elements of genre fiction that determine their narrative moves and plot dynamics. A particular narrative tactic in the third example, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), shows how Gaines deploys what one might call "genre identity" in his fiction as a means to complicate a conventional pattern. The realist mode of the novel, building up a perspective on Louisiana history that encompasses both the subjective and the broader collective frameworks of African American memory, is suspended briefly to give space to a subordinate narrative in a Southern Gothic mode.