Writing for the Head, Heart, and Gut

The novel I’m reading right now achieves that lofty goal.

As an archive fiend, I’m regularly dipping into the Atlantic archives. Some days it is for the delight of finding good pieces of writing, and other times just for historic reference points. I recently did a search for Albion Tourgée, a Radical Republican congressman who also served as Homer Plessy’s attorney in the Plessy v. Ferguson case and wrote a series of novels.

Tourgée’s loss in Plessy is resonant these days for a couple of reasons. One is the disingenuous Republican analogy between that case and Roe v. Wade. That analogy likens the denial of rights to African Americans to the denial of rights to a fetus (as though pregnant people are mere incubators without rights of their own). The far more accurate analogy is between Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision overruling Roe, and Plessy. In the Plessy era, violent backlash took place against Reconstruction’s steps toward a multiracial democracy, and state-level apparatuses were set up to institutionalize Jim Crow. Likewise, we are witnessing yet another period in which there is systematic dismantling of hard-fought rights for people who have been historically marginalized.

I was reading a book review of Tourgée’s novel Figs and Thistles in the May 1880 issue of The Atlantic. It is one of the few Tourgée novels I’ve never read. But the substance of the review was resonant. The author wrote:

If one is content with an exciting story, and will take, by the way, a good deal of thinly veiled description of public life, and not look too closely for literary excellence, Figs and Thistles may be commended to him. It is a pity, however, that so much vigor and rough-and-ready faculty had not been more carefully trained to the special business of writing novels.

I wrote a good deal about Tourgée’s work in my doctoral dissertation. That was in the ’90s, an era in which studying the 19th century was popular. And I was in an American studies program. In that field, in those years, we were taught explicitly that the value of the literature we studied could not be reduced to the quality of the literature. We studied literature to get a grasp on cultural politics, social currents, intellectual and cultural history, language, and sensibilities. Tourgée, unlike others I studied, including Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt, was not a great storyteller. But his work was a treasure trove of information because he drew on his life experiences at a key historic crossroads.

That is a useful lesson. A compelling narrative is not the only important part of writing. Information and analysis are important too. Books have varying merits and ought not be held to a single standard. That said, sometimes, they all come together: art, detailed information, and intellectual work.

This week I’ve been reading British Turkish novelist Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees. It is a stunningly told story about star-crossed love, ecology, and coming of age. The main event that moves the plot along is the Cypriot civil war that formally began in 1974. Embarrassingly, I was completely ignorant about the history behind the division of Cyprus. I’ve become enchanted by this story, told by a writer who holds a Ph.D. in political science and is also deeply knowledgeable when it comes toTurkish folklore and traditions, and who became a diligent student of plant life in order to write this novel. The book has opened up new understandings of 20th-century history for me. Shafak achieves what I describe as my own aspiration: to meet readers at the head, heart, and gut.