“Montage of a Dream Deferred”: John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon

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Fanon, John Edgar Wideman’s penultimate novel, brings to a head the use of “modernist” experimental strategies by an author often defined as postmodern, notably a fragmentary aesthetic of collage, mixing, and montage. The latter technique is specifically foregrounded, as Thomas, the protagonist and one of Wideman’s doubles, intends to submit a script on Fanon to Jean-Luc Godard, while the writer takes the renowned Franco-Swiss director on a tour of Homewood, the Pittsburgh black neighborhood where he grew up. Godard, a pioneer of editing and montage, as well as a critic endowed with an acute awareness of the ambiguous intertwining of form and ideology, mediates the relation between the would-be writer and the historical figure he wants to represent. A jagged collage and palimpsest of heterogeneous pieces—including a severed head—conflating different genres, time frames, and levels of reality, the novel sketches a « pre-editing », inchoate portrait of Fanon, whose willed incompleteness calls for the readers’ collective elaboration. Yet, by insisting on its own impossibility, the text might run the risk of becoming, like Fanon’s emancipatory project, “a dream deferred.”