David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident: The Belly of the Text

David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident1, winner of the P. E. N. Faulkner Award in 1981, is a major novel by a Black American male. Bradley's novel builds on central themes in Black and white literary traditions, and creates a new dialectics both between and within these traditions. One sees Bradley's relation to Faulkner's “The Bear,” Melville's Moby Dick and Hemmingway's “The Old Man of the Sea” in his use of the hunt as a way to explore the relation of man and nature. Bradley's hero, John Washington, a professor of history, is a contemporary descendent of Faulkner's Ikkemotubbe; he knows the primal relation of man and animal, hunter and hunted. As Faulkner writes in the opening page of “The Bear”: “It was of the men, not white not black not red but men, hunters, with the skill and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive….” But Bradley's hero also embodies a broader consciousness from the study of the written word. He hunts in the fields of language and history. Moreover, Bradley does not exclude women from his universe. His hero wants more than what is considered in “The Bear” “the best of all listening, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exactitude among the concrete trophies….” For John Washington, the telling and listening to the telling of tales is a matter of spiritual life and death.

Bradley is also thematically related to Black writers, such as Baldwin, Ellison and Haley—in his hero's quest for identity as a Black man in America. John Washington's situation, however, is complicated by his mixed genetic heritage whose