“The Beginning of Things, And the End”: W.E.B. Du Bois, Archival Failure, and the Limits of the Novel

Abstract This essay considers the theoretical, methodological, and ethical stakes of reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1905 unpublished novel “Scorn” as a failure. Between publishing the landmark collection Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), W.E.B. Du Bois drafted a three-part, genre-defining historical romance set in the years preceding the Civil War. Within the expansive body of research on Du Bois and his fiction, “Scorn” is either overlooked or read as a predecessor to Black Reconstruction (1935). Rather than seeking to recover “Scorn’s” literary and political merits, this essay offers a reading practice that takes seriously “Scorn’s” failings—from its plots to publication plans—without attempting to resolve or redeem them. Approaching failure as a material reality, rather than a political posture, “Scorn” emerges as a text that indexes a particular moment in Du Bois’s early twentieth-century thinking when he was trying, and failing, to reconcile the novel’s formal demands with his burgeoning philosophy of history.