Edward P. Jones’s Mythopoesis: A Reading of Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children

Much of the critical attention on Edward P. Jones’s work revolves around the importance of geographical space and specificity in his fictions. Addresses, geo-codes, streets, buildings and structures define his Washington D.C and its Black neighborhoods where his fictional characters thrive or perish. Jones scholars have explored how the meaning and merit of his literary work evolve from the precise and definitive details of the story locales in and around the Capitol. These “geographic markers constitute characters” in Jones’s tales, notes Daniel Wood while A.O. Scott in his review says that in Jones’s stories, abundant and accurate information about the story locales endows “the stories with a distinctive credibility.” The author has his own claims about the “places” of his fiction when introducing his work. Against the backdrop of such critical commentaries and authorial claims, this paper explores how with his imaginative and transformative power Jones moves the boundaries of the actual and definite, and creates a mythopoeic world out of the spaces and locales in his fiction. His Washington D.C. becomes like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Cheever’s Shady Hill and Bullet Park, Anderson’s Winesburg, Fitzgerald’s St. Paul and Updike’s Brewer. His mythopoesis transforms all that is limited (the lives of his men and women, the use of language, geographical boundaries and the range of experience) into un-limiting possibilities of multi-layered meanings, literary provocations, and an expansive creative vision. This paper critically analyses both Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children, and reads Jones’s complex fictional world, one that is a mix of poetry, tragedy, the uncanny, the real, the epiphanical, the dark and light and the haunting which have all been encapsulated in the symbolic structure of the Washington D.C. of his fiction.