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Life, Death, and Time in Edward P. Jones'
The Known World
Anjuelle D. Floyd
What interested me most about
The Known World
was how Jones maintained asense of tension between time on both the profane and celestial levels through hisdeceased protagonist Henry Townsend and the supporting character, Townsend’sslave, Moses. While the novel centers on Henry Townsend, a former slave, whoupon gaining his freedom purchases slaves and establishes a plantation of his own,Jones opens the story with Moses, a slave owned by Townsend.Jones writes:“...
The evening his master died he
[Moses]
worked again well after he ended theday for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back withhunger and tiredness to their cabins… When he, Moses, finally freed himself of theancient and brittle harness that connected him to the oldest mule his master owned, all that was left of the sun was a five-inch-long memory of red orange laid out in still waves across the horizon between two mountains on the left and one onthe right. He had been in the fields for all of fifteen hours
...”The very name, Moses, evokes the Biblical realms of Moses of the Old Testament,a leader of his people, who guided them out of slavery in Egypt and into the promised land of Israel. Yet in Jones's "The Known World" set in pre-Civil War
9/10/2007
(all excerpts taken from Edward P. Jones’
The Known World
of 5ISBN -
0007195303
)
1
Life, Death, and Time in Edward P. Jones'
The Known World
Anjuelle D. Floyd
Virginia, a tale of African Americans owning African Americans, where are we,the reader, to go with Moses, the character through which Jones reveals his dead protagonist, Henry Townsend?Alas, this is the very nature of Jones’s writing at its very best, a reflection of hisartistry in telling stories. Much like the southerners of olden times, and as we seetoday, Jones often starts out in the left corner of a room wherein he directs us tothe center of the matter--which in this case is the hypocrisy of a former slave,Henry Townsend, who grew up to enslave those of his own people.Jones's novel is a maze, a larger one filled with smaller ones embedded andrevealed over the course of the narrative in skillfully constructed scenes thatdeliver the foibles and secrets of human character along with the vibrant andhuman history sitting at the very heart of America. The personalities of Jones'scharacters display the crux and conundrum of the American and human psyche.We believe the novel is about Moses, since it opens with him masturbating in thefields of the deceased Henry Townsend’s plantation. And yet it is HenryTownsend, Moses’ deceased master and owner, on whom the narrative focuses.
9/10/2007
(all excerpts taken from Edward P. Jones’
The Known World
of 5ISBN -
0007195303
)
2
Life, Death, and Time in Edward P. Jones'
The Known World
Anjuelle D. Floyd
For to know Henry is to know ourselves as Americans.Reading the “Known World” is a bit like reading of Moses in The Book of Exodusto learn about Pharaoh in Egypt and then to find we, the reader have more incommon with Pharaoh versus the Israelites.
But what is it of Pharaoh that lives onin Moses? And what has been handed down to us. Furthermore, what insights gained of Henry Townsend’s character rendered through Moses, tell us about Moses himself, and ultimately our shadow as human individuals?
When Moses sleeps with Henry’s widow we wonder what was it that Henry never gave her, or that she didn’t ask for and receive as his wife that would allow her tohave intimate relations with a person that her deceased husband owned?
What resides in Henry's widow that she now yearns to unleash through such closeinteractions with Moses?
We are also left to wonder what to make of her actions of informing Moses thatwhile they have slept together she is not about to take a husband. What about her strength as a free woman of color, who incidentally came from a slave owningfamily, that so castrated Henry, a former slave, and left him possibly feelingimpotent?
9/10/2007
(all excerpts taken from Edward P. Jones’
The Known World
of 5ISBN -
0007195303
)
3
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