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Constructing a Nervous System

Margo Jefferson

Granta (2022)

Review by Julian Vigo

 

From the moment I read On Michael Jackson (2006) by Margo Jefferson, I was hooked. In this critical study, Jefferson demonstrates how Jackson shifted the metaphors surrounding black ‘self-hatred’ noting, ‘What’s the point of calling someone an Oreo (black on the outside, white on the inside) when he isn’t even trying to be black on the outside?’ In her analysis of Jackson’s ‘freakery’ and the social performance of race, Jefferson had her finger on the larger cultural undertow of race. 

In many ways, her work on race within her study of Michael Jackson serves as a template for how Jefferson negotiates the subject of race within her second memoir, Constructing a Nervous System: a stage where biographical interpretation, highbrow culture, popular art, historical writing and her own memories meet. Jefferson’s innovative memoir is an homage to the power of language which simultaneously entraps and liberates the subject. Herself included.

In the first pages of her memoir, she notes how memory and reality collide:

There’s no escaping the stuff of memory and experience. Dramatize it, analyze it, amend it accidentally, remake it intentionally. 

Call it temperamental autobiography.

Be a critic of your own prose past. These words for instance.

She explains how her impetus for writing criticism and memoir are complementary; her aim in writing the former, she claims, is to ‘the-center American culture and in writing the latter, to ‘find language for the fractures there’.

Jefferson’s book explores the many layers of selfhood as positioned through memory and cultural rendering, addressing the reader: ‘Remember: Memoir is your present negotiating with versions of your past for a future you’re willing to show up in.’

Creating a text laden with layers of her own memories and castings of selfhood, Jefferson fashions her memoir through the retelling of the lives of Harriet Jacobs, a former enslaved person and author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); artists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Ike Turner; writers Charlotte Brontë, Katherine Mansfield, Ida B. Wells, Czeslaw Milosz, Willa Cather and James Weldon Johnson; and literary figures such as the character Topsy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She also invokes her late sister, Denise, bringing to the page the reality of how life and fiction intersect both within the framework of autobiography and cultural criticism.

Recalling the ballet music of her youth and her adoration of the protagonists of Coppélia and Giselle, Jefferson recalls the ‘racial imaginary creeping up’ on her, that zone of exclusions ‘artfully disguised by the narrative of worship I’ve just written’. Her own memories tease out that landscape of cultural exclusion, experienced despite her being the daughter of a prominent doctor who longed to be a jazz musician. The ironies, and interstitial fictions of a life that might have been, punctuate this memoir through the personal rendered social text, the cultural moment illustrated through personal history.

Jefferson recounts taking a handful of Ella Fitzgerald LPs from her parents’ record collection and notes how Fitzgerald’s sweat functions to render her less feminine, while underscoring how Fitzgerald’s ‘sweat and size’ made her squeamish. Jefferson fails to reconcile Fitzgerald’s feminine voice with the fact of her ‘perspiration’, a bodily function rarely demonstrated on TV by white women performers. She analyses her discomfort with the reality of the body, expounding on the relationship between sweat, labour, race, and glamour.

It would be a mistake to interpret this memoir as a framing of Jefferson’s life uniquely within the theoretical binds of sex or race, however. These aspects of American cultural history and her own personal trajectory of these subjects matter of course. But Jefferson explores how she is conscious of these trajectories, while others are simply not. She sets the critical course of her own ‘prose past’ as part of a beautifully constructed self-archaeology, entirely detached from monolithic readings of race or sex, liberated from any one school of thought, from any one philosophical tradition.

Her memoir speaks through the jazz and blues icons of her youth, a world of the 1950s where ideas of the female body’s potential were realised by trailblazing black dancers and athletes. In one startling passage, she revisits Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy rendered in the artwork of Kara Walker where ‘Topsy kills a chicken, sucks a penis, rides on the back of an aged Negro man, bends over to be anally fucked by an aging white man; drifts in space like a homunculus at nap time’. 

Just as poignantly, Jefferson interrogates white supremacy within the novels of Willa Cather; in  The Song of the Lark, Cather remarks upon the artistic and cultural influence made by Mexican-Americans and the Sinagua indigenous people of Arizona while entirely eliding any contribution made by black Americans. Jefferson admires the character of the novel’s heroine Thea Kronborg, writing, ‘I honored this young midwestern woman, fierce and solitary, who sought the most valuable part of herself in something larger than herself’, while struggling with what she calls Cather’s ‘whiteness rapture’, ultimately leading to Jefferson’s ambivalence towards Cather’s literary project as a whole. 

Constructing a Nervous System is a breathtakingly beautiful account of Margo Jefferson’s life that reveals itself to be simultaneously a critique and an exoneration of the constructed self.

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