Critical Fabulation: Imagining Barry Jenkins’ The Undeground Railroad
“A Real Railroad??”, reads the title of a user review of The Underground Railroad on IMdB. This represents the most recurrent critique of the award winning series directed by Barry Jenkins: historical inaccuracy. The Undeground Railroad, based on Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name, is set in antebellum America, around 1850 and follows the life of Cora, a teenager who decides to escape the cotton plantation where she is enslaved. Aboard a train running below the country, symbolizing the infamous network of abolitionists, Cora flees through the United States. Like in the case of the train, both in Whitehead’s novel and Jenkins’ series, fiction and fact intertwine almost seamlessly, weaving together the fictional narrative and the historical context. This can be analyzed as parallel to what Saidiya Hartman, in her essay Venus in Two Acts, has called “critical fabulation,” a mode of expression common in the exploration of trans-atlantic slavery and its archive. By bringing this methodology to the small screen, via the format of the television series, Jenkins steps away from specific narrative tropes on slavery. This essay will use visual analysis of selected scenes and cross-textual analysis to explore the role of fabulation in The Underground Railroad and how it impacts the mode of viewership of the series.
Saidiya Hartman defines Critical Fabulation as the combination of “fabula” and “what happened when”. Fabula is the primary matter of the narrative - as a series of events, of transformations and transitions from one state to another - and “what happened when” represents the recounted histories, told or untold. It operates under the premise that any history, with or without a capital “H,” has an archive and that this archive, here the archive of slavery, is full of gaps, and that one way of restoring or completing the archive is to invent, fabulate. The aim of this methodology is to collapse not only “historical facts” or “truth”, in recognizing their lacunae, but also time. In playing with the “what happened when” in a re-invented narrative, the past intertwines with the present. In The Underground Railroad, the complexity of the narrative is not in the development of the plot but in the scrambling of historical fact, diegetic narrative events and fantastical sequences.
In “Chapter Two: South Carolina”, Cora and Caesar, the man whom she has successfully escaped with, find themselves in a town named Griffin in which Black people are put in a “betterment” center where they are taught how to read and the general codes of life in white society. The two characters soon start to discover the true motivations of this center, in collaboration with the entire town: it poisons the men in the name of scientific research, and forces the women to get sterilized under false medical pretenses.
The narrative in this episode, as in each one in the series, contains many anachronisms and instances of close contact between fact and fiction.
The convergence point of these instances is the “sky-scraper” that defines the town throughout the episode. It is where the dark reality of the town unravels. The sky-scraper is where the medical procedures are performed and where the “vitamins” are researched by the doctor who employs Caesar as his assistant. This already represents a number of historical anachronisms. The term “sky-scraper,” started being used in the 1880’s, at least three decades in the future. Forced sterilization as part of eugenics, the attempt to control reproduction of certain individuals in the hopes of creating a “better” population, did not develop until the 1900s. What Jenkins seems to refer to is The Negro Project, a report drafted by Margaret Sanger that advocated for the use of birth control among African-American communities. To this day, debate on whether Sanger believed in eugenics and aimed at the decimation of African-American populations, is ongoing. This project, however, was established in 1939, almost a century after Cora and Caesar’s visit to Griffin. The “vitamins” taken by the men also refer to a specific historical event: the Tuskegee Experiment of 1932. By melding these temporally disparate elements together, Jenkins breaks down the conventional definition of historical time. By condensing the timeline of slavery, Jenkins, in turn, highlights, as does Hartman, the gaps in the documentation of black African-American history: the roots of medical racism, in this instance, are to be found scattered across rare documents. This episode, much like the others, represents a dive into the archive of slavery. It is not linear, nor is it sensical in the depth and breadth of its violence.
In juxtaposition with these historical re-arrangements, Jenkins used mise-en-scène and symbolism to scramble diegetic events and fantastical sequences. One scene that exemplifies this is Cora’s dream. After being informed of a possible new procedure that would protect black women from having to bear a child after being raped, sterilization in essence, Cora dreams that she returns to the room where she was examined, at the top of the sky-scraper. The scene essentially follows the same course as the earlier one; she is back in the elevator and walks up the spiral staircase to the top of the building. Meanwhile, the non-diegetic screams of a baby are heard. She enters the examination room and picks up a scalpel with which she slashes her mother’s throat, after a cut to a scene of Cora as a baby screaming in her mother’s arms. She turns to Caesar after the murder, who is typing behind a desk, wearing the doctor’s attire, complete with round glasses. As he pulls out a paper from the typewriter, Cora is awakened by the wailings of a woman in her dormitory. By mimicking a previous scene and building up the anticipation that Cora may want to have the procedure, this sequence leads the viewer into a fully unprompted impossible event. These displacements - the non-diegetic screaming, the sudden appearance of characters in non-sensical environments - are purposed in parallel to the historical displacements.
This sequence brings together the symbolic motifs of blood and screaming, by a baby or about a baby. Throughout the episode, the black characters are either said to have “bad blood”, are asked to provide “pints” of blood for medical analysis, taking vitamins because “it’s meant to be good for your blood”, or literally bleeding. In this sequence, Cora cuts her mother’s throat with a scalpel, her blood splattering on Cora’s formal yellow gown. This action is parallel with the town’s program to assimilate its black population in the “betterment” center, to negate its ancestry. Cora and Caesar change their names, their appearance, their manners of speech and movement. This is the symbolic eradication of bloodlines. The black women of Griffin are in turn robbed of lineage, offspring. Right after her visit to the doctor, before the dream sequence, Cora walks through the town and sees a group of lively children coming out of a store with candy. Wanting to go in but realizing the storefront’s mannequins, forming a family of five, are white, she crosses the street to the emporium displaying black mannequins. There are only two, adult, mannequins in this storefront. When she goes in to ask for “penny candies, for the children,” the store owner tells her that he had never sold any candy. The black population in Griffin is uni-generational, it has no roots or context. Much like Cora throughout the series, this population is in constant friction with its environment - in constant displacement.
Barry Jenkins toys with fabulation, narrative events and their temporal de-construction, in order to reflect not on “what happened” but on the humans and their experience of slavery as an affliction that reverberates through bodies and time, rather than a series of events. In this sense, The Underground Railroad is not historically accurate, it does not re-tell a story of the network of abolitionists that helped enslaved African-Americans find freedom. Nor does it attempt it. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Colson Whitehead explains that while writing his novel, his commitment was to “the truth of things, not the facts.” This is precisely the role that fabulation takes on in Jenkins’ series. The palimpsest of historical facts and narrative elements presents a critical examination of history and its record: how is it written, by whom, for whom? Ultimately, knowledge-creation and knowledge-sharing are at the core of The Underground Railroad, in content, as shown above and in form.
Jenkins’ choice to implement a form of critical fabulation in his series also makes a statement on the way in which stories on slavery are told and most importantly, received. This is evident in the highly contrasted reactions to Jenkins’ series. Public reviews on IMdB and Rotten Tomatoes report a high average score of around 75/100 (75% score on RT, and 7.3 stars on IMdB), but individual reviews oscillate at the extremities. The most common critiques seem violently baffled at the inaccuracy of the representation of the historical period, and of the infusion of fantastical elements in the narrative.
In American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film, Michael Boyce Gillepsie problematizes the presumption and almost requirement for black film, arguably especially film in which trans-atlantic slavery is a or the theme, to have
the “extradiegetic responsibility or capacity to embody the black lifeworld or provide answers in the sense of social problem solving.”
In other words, black film is seen as undetacheable from and resumed to its “socio-cultural” anchoring. In an interview on The Underground Railroad and black television mediated by Gillepsie, Walton M. Muyumba refers to the collapse of time in series such as Jenkins’ as a way to inhabit and in a sense re-populate Great Time, the collective space-time of African-American history. Muyumba then affirms that any kind of work featuring storytelling in this time requires “a practice of intentional viewing.” This represents the specificity and innovation of The Underground Railroad as a television series. Not only is the diegetic and the fantastical scrambled, demanding constant attention from the viewer, but the series arguably only reveals itself fully to viewers who are already, or at least, intentionally, informed on the history of slavery in the United States. It is not available for all to read, for example, the political undertone of Miss Lucy’s character (the headmistress at the school), as a potential accusation of Margaret Sanger’s contraception campaign among black populations in the 1940’s. Jenkins, in the non-direct disclosure of this subtext, establishes a different, much more demanding type of viewership, especially in the mode of serial television.
In the age of major streaming platforms dominating the landscape of television, the primary mode of consumption of this kind of media has become, conveniently, binge viewing. In TV Got Better, Chuck Tryon gives an account on Netflix’s strategy to re-brand television not as a lazy, glutonous escape from reality but as a legitimate mode of artistic entertainment, likening it to quality cinema. Since the advent of Netflix, platform such as Dinsey+ and Amazon Prime Video have emerged as powerhouses of content production and distribution, establishing massive-scale, collective binge viewing - the process of watching a certain amount of serial episodes uninterrupted - as the pre-requisite for the enjoyment of the serial mode. Jenkins however, does not give his viewers any of the tools usually given in binge-narratives. It is a stand-alone season, which means there are no recaps or any repetition of previous information. There are no generic opening credits, each episode presents itself as a short film. The sheer duration, finally, of each episode, makes it very hard to go through the series in one sitting. By resisting the codes of binge-viewing and the typical coaxing of viewers, Jenkins proposes a new kind of standard for viewership, specifically of narratives on black history, and black suffering.
By assimilating the codes of critical fabulation, the juxtaposition of diegetic narrative, historical facts and fantastical sequences, Jenkins seeks to represent slavery as an experience that reverberates accross bodies and generations.
It is a collective and seering experience that is neither linear nor sensical. In bringing this methodology to the small screen, Jenkins steps away from the role of the teacher, bound by the burden of realism: The Underground Railroad is not history chewed up and stuck on a screen, nor is it an attempt at educating an (Amazon Prime’s) audience. Jenkins sets a new precedent for the possibilities of black storytelling and questions the general mode of viewership of narratives on slavery and our general habits of content consumption.
Bibliography
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