ENL 158B: "The Juxtaposition of History and Literature in Flight to Canada"

The Juxtaposition of History and Literature in Flight to Canada

The novel Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed misrepresents history of the United States in such a way that the reader is left to wonder the purpose for such a distortion and though it seems comical at first, the purpose of the distortion is more than just for comic effect. The history of the slave trade in the United States is haunting to all the citizens of the country, especially to those of African origins. It has become the topic that no one likes to speak of, and yet no one wants to forget, and this awkward silence has cultivated generations of people who wonder how this sordid history has shaped the social identity of our country. Flight to Canada offers a new perspective on the history of the emancipation of slaves, one that allows us to laugh at our past, but also, through these gross historical errors, allows us to see how history and literature can be interchangeable: by rewriting the past in literature, the present and future history can be changed.

The novel opens with a poem, before the first chapter, titled “Flight to Canada.” It is a letter from a slave to his master giving an account of his escape, and the liberties the slave took with the master’s women, property, and money. However, the poem includes the description of an airplane trip that slaves, or anyone from 1865 for that matter, would have never experienced. The poem integrates what the reader knows as modern invention with the history of slavery with no subtlety, and in doing so, brings slavery into the modern age. Slavery is now made timeless and ageless by this novel, despite the modern ingenuity of aircraft flight and modern thought. The author of the poem still manages, however, to incite laughter at the “modern” slave owner, who we can imagine recoiling at the thought of his slave running away, then returning several times to cause mischief and steal his money while the master is out of town. The poem becomes the reader’s first introduction to this world that is a mixture of past and present realities, which at first seems absurd. The poem, as a letter, ends with a signature from its author: “Your boy Quickskill” (5) and the reader is left to assume that what is written in the poem is the truth of a slave’s narrative about his own escape from slavery. What we learn later, though, is that the poem is a fictional representation of history, exactly like the novel itself.

Literature plays an important role in documenting events as they happen, but literature also helps to shape the minds of the public as time puts distance between past and present. Fiction, though by definition a work of human imagination, can document history in ways that can be more suitable to future generations. “Fiction, you say? Where does fact begin and fiction leave off? Why does the perfectly rational, in its own time, often sound like mumbo-jumbo?” asks the narrator (10). This question is the central idea in Flight to Canada, because the novel puts no distinction between fact and fiction. History can only tell us the events of the past as they happened, but fiction can tell us, through abstractions, about the truths not documented by history. By leaving out the truth of the past in his novel, Reed is telling us something more substantial about our current interpretations of our history, how our ideas of right and wrong have changed, and how even history, with all its facts, can be turn out different from its original interpretation.

Literature is powerful in changing the interpretation of current events, and when those events pass into history. Quickskill tells 40’s at the end of chapter 12 that “words build the world and words can destroy the world” (81) and this is especially true for Quickskill. He was the “first one of Swille’s slaves to read, the first to write, and the first to run away” (14), so, it one can argue that it was words that gave Quickskill his freedom. However, it is those very same words that threaten his freedom, since it is his poem that ultimately leads Swille to his runaway slaves’ whereabouts. Quickskill, like his creator Reed, was “so much against slavery that he had begun to include prose and poetry in the same book, so that there would be no arbitrary boundaries between them” (88). The blending of the literary forms mirrors the blending of history with fiction, and both of these fusions take place with the use of words on paper. The ideas contained within the words give freedom to the author, whether the author is using a poem to earn the money to go to Canada, or the author is rewriting history itself to give a new interpretation to the history of slavery.

One example of a different interpretation of history is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is mentioned in several places over the course of the novel, and at the very beginning the narrator alleges:

She [Stowe] popularized the American novel and introduced it to Europe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Writing is strange, though. That story caught up with her. The story she “borrowed” from Josiah Henson. (8)

Stowe gained notoriety with her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but the novel also paved the way for the emancipation of the slaves in the United States, as people who did not at first support the movement were inspired by its story. Her story narrates the life of a black slave, yet Stowe was white—the story she was telling was not hers to tell. She may not have plagiarized the story, but it was “borrowed,” not from one man, but from an entire race of people who lived the very story she was telling. History records her novel as being the key to swaying the masses to believe in emancipation and reserves for her an exalted place for influencing a generation to embrace this movement, but literature has the flexibility to see her as a villain: as a white woman who stole the story of one man who symbolized all black slaves.

This contrast between the interpretations of history and literature is an example of how history and literature influence each other to evolve the thoughts of society. Considering the following quote from chapter 13 of Flight to Canada:

Book titles tell the story. The original subtitle for Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “The Man Who Was a Thing”…Over one hundred years after the appearance of the Stowe book, The Man Who Cried I Am…was published. Quickskill thought of all the changes that would happen to make a “Thing” into an “I am.” Tons of paper. An Atlantic of blood. (82)

It is clear that history and literature are directly compared in Quickskill’s timeline of the book titles. A slave, in the novel, begins as nothing more than a “thing” but, over time, is finally given the liberty to use a pronoun, “I.” It took, not just history filled with blood, to supply this liberty, but paper in the form of books, novels, writing consisting of nothing more than words.

One of the best examples of fact and fiction fused together in the novel is the novel’s explanation of the assassination of Lincoln. According to the novel, the assassination is captured on television, with news reporters commenting on every gory detail of the death. Included with these details is a literary view of how history will see the event: “Booth, America’s first Romantic Assassin…leaping from the balcony, gracefully, beautifully, in slow motion” (103). This portrayal is more than just a recitation of facts of the death of a president—it is a prophecy of how history, at least in terms of his novel, will view this assassin. History will see both victim and perpetrator how literature portrays them in the role they are assigned: Booth as the “Romantic Assassin” (103) of “Lincoln, the American Christ” (11).

History and literature play an important role in shaping the how people view events, no matter how significant or insignificant they may seem at the time. Slavery, which was accepted and considered rational in the United States for a substantial amount of time, has evolved through the use of literature written by whites and blacks alike to form a new opinion. It started before Stowe, with her “borrowing” the story of the black man, but it continues today with many authors employing slavery to not only give depth to their own story, but to help build on the stories inspired by slavery. The juxtaposition of literature and history allows future generations to see events of the past more clearly, and to form opinions based on both the detailed account of the event and the literary interpretations of past and present. “Strange, history. Complicated, too. It will always be a mystery, history. New disclosures are as bizarre as the most bizarre fantasy” (8). Perhaps history, alone, is strange, and mysterious, too, but when we use literature to shed light on history we are given a more complete picture of where we have come from.