First, just a flat out endorsement: great novel. One of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in years. I am really impressed. What follows are some notes about it ….
The known world is the world as known by someone. And in this novel there are so many someones, inhabiting so many worlds, overlapping and not overlapping to such various extents, that there are almost an infinite number of known worlds. What makes sense to any person is delimited by their Known World. For example, one widow of a slaveholder is believed by some to have sold first her slaves, then her two white children:
Negroes said that somewhere in the world, known or unknown, someone might not think twice about buying two happy white children with plump cheeks and able to write and sing like angels and do basic ciphering. (56)
But a white woman selling off her white children we know not to be the case. But the known world that most of our characters inhabit is most strikingly (and repeatedly) defined by the fact of a black slaveholder. This mixed up world defines the epistemic barriers of all the characters here, but especially that black slaveholder’s many vassals. For example, Moses, his first slave, was owned by two white masters before being bought by Henry Thompson.
In contrast to the limited and incoherent known world of every character in Jones’ world, the narrator is striking in his omniscience, constantly flitting between generations past, jumping into the future to provide one-line narratives of minor characters’ ultimate fates, drumming up census data (there are no footnotes but they are laid out as Fact, part of the book’s known world) to describe the state of Manchester County, Virginia at various decennials, at one point even narrating into the future to describe the tenure path of a professor who studied the time and place of the book (43-44). One is reminded of the stills at the end of a documentary where you’re told the ultimate fate of this or that figure from the film, except that this narrator interleaves these mid-paragraph, in digressions, and even for exceedingly minor characters, who have an interest.
One feels the narrator is hovering over the map of the Known World like a cold, benign owl, swooping in to illuminate one sub-story then back in time to explain someone’s roots, or forward in time to deliver someone’s ultimate fate, or sometimes the fate of their descendants. And a couple maps are at the center of the novel. At the end of the 5th chapter we encounter the French murderer Broussard:
He pointed to the left wall where Skiffington had hung a map, a browned and yellowed woodcut of some eight feet by six feet. The map had been created by a German, Hans Waldseemuller …. Heading the legend were the words “The Known World.” … The map had come from the Russian in twelve parts, each weighing about three pounds. (174-5)
This is one portion of the novel that is tied to accepted historical fact, as there was a map created in 1507 by a Martin Waldseemuller, the sole copy of which was purchased by the US Library of Congress in 2001 (a couple years before _The Known World_ was published). It was also in twelve parts, and the dimensions mentioned in the book. Just a curiosity, since I haven’t found similar anchors in historical fact for other tidbits of the book.
More importantly, it does echo the structure of the book: twelve chapters, each prefaced by three summarizing weights, for example chapter 5’s “That Business Up in Arlington. A Cow Borrows a Life from a Cat. The Known World.” And a tidbit (also vouched for by the LOC): “it was the first time that the word America had ever been put on a map.” (174)
So Jones aspires to provide a map of the known world, situating America on the map. Of course, the soon to be executed murderer Broussard keeps reiterating “I get you better. I get you more better map.” (175) And Jones isn’t the only one who seeks to map the world; the book ends with a second map.
Alice the fool, escapes Manchester County for Washington D.C. and, in the epilogue, beyond the confines of the known world of Manchester County, she displays her own two maps, one “a kind of map of life of the County of Manchester, Virginia” and the other the Townsend plantation at the center of the novel’s action and characters’ lives.
The contrast between the confined world of many characters, such as the “world-stupid” (359) Moses whose tribulations frame the book, and the narrator who is not merely omniscient but worldly-wise, even elegaic, this contrast provides the extraordinary pathos of the book.
Horses and mules …