The Emblematic Novel: Esoteric Realism in the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation

The Emblematic Novel reveals the hidden system of alchemical emblems, Tarot cards, photographs, and paintings that are coded into Carl Van Vechten's novel The Blind Bow-Boy. Chapter Two shows that Van Vechten's esoteric novel was the template for a large number of canonical modernist novels including works by Faulkner, Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee, Ralph Ellison, Raymond Chandler, John O'Hara, Thornton Wilder, Frank Yerby, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Thomas Wolfe, and many others.

Chapter Three is a close reading of Nella Larsen's Passing that demonstrates its influence from Van Vechten and traces the system of Tarot cards, alchemical emblems, photographs, and paintings that make sense of its ambiguous surface text.

Chapter Four reassigns Men, Marriage, and Me- the template for the modernist memoir- to the authorship of Zora Neale Hurston. Like the Van Vechten novel, Hurston's memoir-novel is written in code and contains a hidden system of esoteric symbols.

The Emblematic Novel is an important intervention in the understanding of the modern novel. This reassessment is accomplished through factoring in major implications about a school of modernist writing that has until now remained out of sight. Given the poor understanding of a host of modernist writers, such as Nathaniel West, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Ralph Ellison, the discovery of a linking commonality in the esoteric solves many of the interpretive mysteries surrounding these and other writers.

The Emblematic Novel contains a panoply of illustrations that relate to the surface narrative of the texts under discussion. Woodson's argument is grounded in the "conscious discrepancies" in the texts-intentional mistakes-that have remained beneath the notice of the literary scholars who have examined these texts. These intentional mistakes, along with the alchemical code that they point to, are convincingly brought to the surface through a detailed, irrefutable exposition.

The Emblematic Novel is a critical tour de force that opens the door to modernism as an evocation of spiritual alchemy.