The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Cattle Killing by John Edgar Wideman
Robert Zamsky

Wideman, John Edgar. The Cattle Killing. Houghton Mifflin, 1996. 212 pp. $22.95.

John Edgar Wideman’s fiction is always a good stiff shot, clearing away the fog of certainty and revealing the terrifying depths of complexity. Whenever you step into one of Wideman’s books, all bets are off: certainties of race, class, gender, and family are all gone. In their place Wideman elaborates the much less comforting, and much more real, contingencies of modern life.

In The Cattle Killing Wideman’s engagement with complexity contributes a sobering voice to the contemporary clamor over identity. For Wideman, identity is fluid and anti-essentialistic. It exists in the relationships between individuals, in the movement of the histories that create, sustain, and connect them. It is about the business of making do.

The novel takes its name from a historical account of European slave traders who turned the African Xhosa’s own religious beliefs against them: as the traders watched the Xhosa die from European diseases, they spread the myth that the only way to survive the disease and famine was to sacrifice the spiritually revered and life-sustaining cattle. Eventually believing the myth, the Xhosa did so, and thus condemned themselves to starvation and capture. Wideman recounts this story within a weave of other narratives from the eighteenth century: an English nobleman’s clandestine anatomy studies, the racial tensions underpinning a Philadelphia cholera epidemic, a preacher, and an interracial marriage. Finally, the entire novel is framed by the author’s own apparently personal reflections on his relationships with his father and son.

This tangled structure enables Wideman to assert the value of storytell-ing. Here, facts matter only as far as they survive in and contribute to the narratives of individuals. Facts cannot be ignored; in fact scientistic rationalism haunts this novel. But for Wideman, storytelling is about surviving the real events of history, as well as other people’s versions of them. As such, forging an identity is a never-ending and always contingent process of narrating your way through this muck.

In the letter that ends the book Wideman revisits the advice he had given his own imprisoned son in Philadelphia Fire: “hold on.” In this world where there are no certainties upon which to ground an identity and all we have are the fleeting moments when our stories seem to cohere, perhaps this is the only advice there is. [Robert Zamsky]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Cattle Killing by John Edgar Wideman Robert Zamsky Wideman, John Edgar. The Cattle Killing. Houghton Mifflin, 1996. 212 pp. $22.95. John Edgar Wideman’s fiction is always a good stiff shot, clearing away the fog of certainty and revealing the terrifying depths of complexity. Whenever you step into one of Wideman’s books, all bets are off: certainties of race, class, gender, and family are all gone. In their place Wideman elaborates the much less comforting, and much more real, contingencies of modern life. In The Cattle Killing Wideman’s engagement with complexity contributes a sobering voice to the contemporary clamor over identity. For Wideman, identity is fluid and anti-essentialistic. It exists in the relationships between individuals, in the movement of the histories that create, sustain, and connect them. It is about the business of making do. The novel takes its name from a historical account of European slave traders who turned the African Xhosa’s own religious beliefs against them: as the traders watched the Xhosa die from European diseases, they spread the myth that the only way to survive the disease and famine was to sacrifice the spiritually revered and life-sustaining cattle. Eventually believing the myth, the Xhosa did so, and thus condemned themselves to starvation and capture. Wideman recounts this story within a weave of other narratives from the eighteenth century: an English nobleman’s clandestine anatomy studies, the racial tensions underpinning a Philadelphia cholera epidemic, a preacher, and an interracial marriage. Finally, the entire novel is framed by the author’s own apparently personal reflections on his relationships with his father and son. This tangled structure enables Wideman to assert the value of storytell-ing. Here, facts matter only as far as they survive in and contribute to the narratives of individuals. Facts cannot be ignored; in fact scientistic rationalism haunts this novel. But for Wideman, storytelling is about surviving the real events of history, as well as other people’s versions of them. As such, forging an identity is a never-ending and always contingent process of narrating your way through this muck. In the letter that ends the book Wideman revisits the advice he had given his own imprisoned son in Philadelphia Fire: “hold on.” In this world where there are no certainties upon which to ground an identity and all we have are the fleeting moments when our stories seem to cohere, perhaps this is the only advice there is. [Robert Zamsky]

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