Prof: So I'm not sure how long this lecture is going
to be.
We could be finished in ten minutes,
though I doubt that, and if we're not finished at
the end of the fifty, there are some things that I've
reserved for the end of the lecture that I definitely do
want to get said.
I don't know if you've noticed that there are times when the
last point or two that I appeared to have been preparing
to make never get made, but in this case I want to make
sure that they are made so that if I don't finish today,
or if I still have a point or two to make,
I'll definitely be taking up those points at the beginning of
Thursday's lecture.
All right.
Now the African-American tradition of literary production
is rich and long standing.
As Henry Louis Gates tells you, the first really rather
important poet in the tradition, Phillis Wheatley,
is an American colonial writer.
The flourishing of the slave narrative form begins in the
eighteenth century, continues into the nineteenth,
the nineteenth century witnesses extraordinary works of
fiction, and in the twentieth century,
of course most conspicuously in the Harlem Renaissance,
but throughout the century there has been extraordinary
work done in the African-American literary
tradition.
It's a very rich tradition--in other words,
somewhat in contrast with the very rich but also very recent
tradition of African-American literary theory and criticism.
It's possible to argue that the development of theory and
criticism in this tradition was somewhat balked by a preliminary
way in which it found itself at odds with itself.
Black criticism and black feminist criticism from the
beginning saw that they didn't have quite the same agenda.
This is something that can resonate,
perhaps, later in this lecture when we move to other topics,
but in the meantime critics like Barbara Christian,
Barbara Smith, Hazel Carby,
and Bell Hooks were in their variety of ways working with
emphases that other, male African-American critics
weren't quite comfortable with.
So while work, especially beginning in the
eighties, proliferated,
there was, as I say, a kind of internal divide which
has been a complex matter to negotiate and which is,
I think, now largely sort of--well,
and African-American literary theory is moving forward
unfettered any longer by these concerns,
or at least by any excess of these concerns.
But in the meantime that may partly account for a certain
delay in the emergence of theory and criticism given the
long-standing richness of the literary tradition.
Now the role of Henry Louis Gates in African-American
criticism is, it seems to me,
exemplary, although there are some rather harsh moments in
this essay, moments that I wish to take up,
that would suggest an element of--
what shall I say?--extremism or overkill in Gates's thinking.
This is actually not at all the persona that he has projected.
Indeed what's extraordinary about Gates, whose
administrative power and whose abilities as a program builder
are remarkable.
After he left Yale to go to Harvard,
he was able to gather to Harvard Anthony Appiah,
Cornel West, and others who have since
departed from Harvard, but Gates is in a way an empire
unto himself and he has been an extraordinary figure.
The earliest work, which is actually among the
earliest work in African-American criticism,
is what you've been reading for today,
and it established his reputation together with--
not so much discovery of, but authentication of--
a manuscript by Harriet Wilson which he published,
an important contribution to our knowledge of
nineteenth-century African-American literature.
In any case, what happened then was that
Gates who by some miracle or other--
he was a perfectly good writer in the first place but gradually
became a marvelous writer-- began writing for The New
Yorker, and during this phase of
his career, when among other things he
produced a remarkable autobiography about growing up
in West Virginia, during this phase Gates really
and racial factions.
In other words, he was a voice of moderation
without incurring any imputation of Uncle Tom-ism or anything of
the sort.
His sheer urbanity as the remarkable writer that he is in
those years when he wrote under Tina Brown for The New Yorker
was just a remarkable achievement,
and his career is still going strong.
Now for Gates, as for Elaine Showalter last
week and for Woolf before her, the problems surrounding the
concept of identity persist.
Identity--which of course is an important anchor for the
thinking of people who feel the need for voices,
for a place in the literary and cultural horizon--
is nevertheless at least potentially,
as we've begun to notice already, a kind of quicksand.
There are two problems really that dog the issue of identity.
One of them is the problem of "essentializing"
which I'll take up now, and then, as I'll take it up
next, also the problem of what might be called the identity
queue.
In other words, I am a lower-class black
lesbian feminist whose nation is Palestine.
Needless to say, I have a variety of identity
options to choose from, but the result is I've got to
figure out which of them has priority.
In other words, which of those identities do I
suppose has the underlying integrity and essence,
essentiality, that can motivate,
as it were, the characteristics of my other identities,
which are therefore somehow or another placed further down in
the queue?
So this is a topic that I'll come back to in a minute,
but in the meantime the problem of essentializing,
as we call it: for example,
as Gates describes it on page 1893 in the right-hand column,
where he's very clear on the dangers of ascribing,
whether positively or negatively, attributes to any
group that is constituted as or thought of--
because of course, the notion of race and whether
there is race is in itself according to Gates
problematic-- the problem of ascribing
attributes even honorifically to a race is,
as he describes it on page 1893:
The sense of difference defined in popular usages [finally my
voice is changing] >
of the term race has been used both to describe and
inscribe differences of language,
belief system, artistic tradition,
"gene pool," and all sorts of supposedly
"natural" attributes such as rhythm,
athletic ability, cerebration,
usury, and fidelity.
In other words, obviously, apportioning out
stereotypes to the various groups that may come forward as
candidates to be races-- he's pointing out that all of
these stereotypes do nobody very much good.
So the problem of essentializing,
which undergirds the wish to make manifest the existence of
race gives pause.
Think about it.
On the other hand, Gates seems to be divided at
the beginning of his essay between a certain candor about
race, as in the work of Hippolyte
Taine that he describes, in which "race,"
"milieu" and "cultural moment"
are considered the key determining issues of any kind
of artistic or cultural production.
He says of that in effect, "Well,
at least race is being talked about," while at the same
time obviously wincing away from the implications of race and
from the belief that there is such a thing as race,
which goes all the way back to Montesquieu and others from
Taine.
Nevertheless, as I say, he's rather cheerful
about the fact that at least race is being discussed,
unlike the twentieth century when the whole thing is swept
under the rug and a kind of ersatz and hypocritical
politeness prevents anybody from talking about such categories at
all, and gives rise to the idea that
we all exist in the same Great Tradition,
that work either belongs to that tradition or,
if it for some reason seems egregious or outside the
tradition, it just can be shoved aside and
neglected.
That's the supposition of the twentieth century when folks
don't talk about race.
So the very question whether it is an issue is part of this
problem that is dogged by the more complicated issue of
essentializing.
For example, suppose--and of course,
you've been reading about this in Showalter as well--
you ascribe positive value to what another person might call a
stereotype.
This is what the important Francophone African poet Senghor
does, as Gates says at the top of page 1901,
the right hand-column.
Gates says: When we attempt to appropriate,
by inversion, race as a term for an
essence, as did the Negritude movement,
for example ("We feel, therefore we are,"
as Senghor argued of the African),
we yield too much, such as the basis of a shared
humanity.
Such gestures, as Anthony Appiah has observed,
are futile and dangerous because of their further
inscription of new and bizarre stereotypes.
So you can see there are a lot of landmines to be avoided in
negotiating the discourse of race, and certainly Gates is
aware of them.
Now there's also the problem, as I say,
of the identity queue, and Gates himself may have a
little difficulty with this, at least from time to time,
because as I said at the beginning,
with feminism in the African-American critical
tradition still to work within.
So for example, on page 1894,
a somewhat problematic passage in which the identity queue
seems to be at issue, about a third of the way down,
the left-hand column, he says:
The sanction of biology contained in sexual difference,
simply put, does not and can never obtain when one is
speaking of "racial difference."
Yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will
this sense of natural difference into our
formulations.
So what he's saying is in biological terms there's
definitely a difference between the sexes,
but in biological terms there is not necessarily a difference
among the so-called primary races.
The result is that at least when one speaks of women and men
in the feminist tradition, one has to come face to face
with the problem of actual difference;
whereas when one speaks of black and white in the
traditions of discourse about race, one isn't actually talking
about a genuine difference at all.
Therefore the discourse with the greater integrity of the two
is the one which is about differences that are absolutely
ephemeral, as opposed to the one which is
about differences, which, whatever one thinks of
them and whatever one wants to make out of them,
are nevertheless essential.
Now plainly when we go back to feminist criticism,
particularly the gender theory of Judith Butler,
we'll see of course that the whole question of the biological
basis of sex, the biological difference
between the sexes which essentializes what we will be
wanting to talk about, is of course something that is
profoundly in question, and not just because of
so-called trans-gender issues but also,
at the same time, because of the way in which our
very sexual identity is something which,
according to Butler, we construct.
So there is an insistence here on a biological difference
between these two forms of discussing identity which may or
may not seem to us to be problematic.
Now I think this is the point at which we can see the
importance of the extraordinary essay that I've also asked you
to read, by Toni Morrison.
We know her best, of course, as a novelist,
but she's also a distinguished critic, as she has been a
distinguished editor of other important work.
Here it seems to me that her reflections in some ways give us
a sideways exit from the predicaments that I have been
talking about, the problem of essentialism and
the problem of the identity queue,
because what Morrison wants to say--
and I think she borrows here particularly from the famous
discussion of the master-slave dialectic in Hegel's
Phenomenology of Mind-- what Morrison wants to say
is that identity isn't so much a question of what something is
but rather a question of what it is not.
She says not that we should be so much preoccupied with what it
is to be black, but rather that,
as we think about the way in which being black is inscribed
within the white tradition-- as we think about that,
we need to think about what white is not:
in other words, as she says repeatedly,
about black as absence, as negation, as negativity.
We have to understand the absolute--
and this is where she drives her argument from the
master-slave dialectic-- the absolute necessity in the
construction of white identity for there to be,
as an absence and as a lack over against white identity,
the existence of the African American and,
more particularly, for the better part of the
American cultural tradition, of the slave.
Let me quote then from her essay on page 1795,
the left-hand column, where she says:
In that construction of blackness [this is a third of
the way down] and enslavement could be found
not only the not-free but also the projection of the not-me.
The result was a playground for the imagination.
And what rose up out of collective needs to allay
internal fears and rationalize external exploitation was an
Africanism-- a fabricated brew of darkness,
otherness, alarm and desire--that is
uniquely American.
Then she points out that although her subject is the
American tradition, there also exists a European
Africanism with its counterpart in its own colonial literature.
To reinforce this, she takes a remarkable example
which must have reminded you, those of you who know Faulkner,
of Thomas Sutpen or at least reminded you in some ways of
Thomas Sutpen-- the example of this character
Dunbar, who actually rose up not so
much out of the swamp as out of the Scottish Enlightenment and
came to the United States and-- according to Bernard Bailyn,
the historian from whom she cites her information--
became a completely transformed character.
I won't quote to you the long passage from Bailyn's text which
makes what Morrison wants to take from it clear,
but rather from what Morrison summarizes of it on page 1796,
the top of the right-hand column:
I take this [William Dunbar] to be a succinct portrait of
the process by which the American as new,
white, and male was constituted.
It is a formation that has several attractive consequences,
all of which are referred to in Bailyn's summation of Dunbar's
character and located in how Dunbar feels "within
himself"-- "a power,
a sense of freedom he had not known before."
This is uncannily parallel by the way to the rationalization
for slaves in Greek culture.
The Greeks always said that the reason they had slaves was so
they could be free: in other words so that the home
or ruling population was liberated in the case of the
Greeks from performing the daily necessities that are life
sustaining and keep us going.
In other words, to be free according to the
citizen of the Greek polis is to be free from
work.
Now in a certain way, this is still a rationalization
that Tony Morrison sees in the American slave-owning tradition,
but it's not so much in the case of this Dunbar a freedom
from work.
It's a more broad and insidious idea of freedom:
freedom from responsibility, freedom from the need to
acknowledge otherness as human-- freedom, in other words,
from the sorts of constraint imposed by old world civility in
Scotland and in London; freedom on this frontier,
in this wilderness, in this swamp,
simply to be whatever one wants to be.
That freedom is achieved on the backs of the black slaves.
It is in some ways similar, as I say,
to the rationalization for slavery in Greece,
but it is in a way more insidious and certainly more--
in the terms that Morrison's giving it to us in--
more dialectical.
That is to say, it is the question of whether a
person could become white without the availability of a
black absence, of that which can be
oppressed-- like a kind of spring for the jack-in-the-box--
which allows the white jack-in-the-box to leap out of
the box because of that which has been suppressed down below.
All of that is part of Toni Morrison's concern,
and it colors her, well, certainly controversial
reading of Huckleberry Finn--
which nevertheless, it seems to me,
has a quite profound interest.
Now my own first instinct when people single out Huckleberry
Finn for blame is to wince away, because it's an
extraordinary novel.
The controversy about it in the school districts which made it a
banished book had mainly to do with the "N-word,"
to which we'll return, and the question of who has the
right to use the "N-word,"
which is not an easy question to answer,
as we'll see.
But that controversy, while it had an authentic
basis, was nevertheless certainly in
literary terms and in terms of the imagination perhaps rather
limited.
Morrison gives rise to another equally and intensely critical
way of thinking about Huckleberry Finn.
She argues that to liberate Jim--
which of course is the tremendous failure at the end of
the novel, a failure of imagination on the
part of Tom Sawyer and a failure of will or independence of mind
on the part of Huck himself-- that the failure to liberate
Jim, which would have been the easiest thing in the world,
because all they had to do was point out the right fork in the
river, is an absolute necessity for
the ongoing self-definition of whiteness as it's available both
to Tom and to Huck and, after all, by implication,
to Mark Twain himself.
He couldn't figure out how to end the novel.
He wrote it, then it lay on his desk for a
long time because he just couldn't figure out what to do
with it, and he finally comes up with
this--as we all agree-- appalling ending.
Toni Morrison says it's the only ending available
because in ways that the, as she sees it,
sentimentality of the novel and the sentimentality of the
relationship between Huck and Jim,
which is so strong that it caused another critic named
Leslie Fiedler to talk about a homoerotic relation between
them-- the title of Fiedler's famous
essay is "Come Up on the Raft,
Huck, Honey"--with all of that in the background,
Toni Morrison says the basic structure of consciousness in
Twain's novel is obscured, a basic structure which makes
it absolutely imperative that Jim not be free.
If Jim is free, then there is no Other over
against which whiteness can define itself.
That's the way in which she makes use of the general
argument about the traditions of American literature in culture
in applying it to Huckleberry Finn.
All right.
Let's go back to Skip Gates--Henry Louis Gates's
nickname, sorry--another person who was at Yale and whom I knew
very well.
I actually had a little bit to do with the origin of the notion
of the signifying monkey; I'll come back to that later.
Barbara Johnson, also now at Harvard,
and I had a lot of conversations with Skip at that
period about this, and so it's not that I feel
proprietary-- it's Skip's idea--but I was in
on that, and so it's not just name
dropping.
I get to call him by what his friends call him.
However, I'll try to remember to say Henry Louis Gates,
and in any case to return to him now.
I want to talk a little bit simply about his understanding
and the understanding of others of the African-American
tradition-- both of the critical tradition
and of the literary tradition.
First of all, the grasp of the critical
tradition as basically a two-step or two-part progression
is something that he shares with Elaine Showalter from last time.
You remember Showalter says that the important movement of
feminist interventions in literary criticism begins with
the moment that she calls "feminist":
that is to say, the moment of Kate Millett and
other authors who talk about the degradation and unfair treatment
of women in male books, and then what Showalter prefers
and supposes to have supervened and to have become more
important, "gynocritical
criticism," which is women's appropriation
of literary traditions for themselves,
the archival work that makes the canon of women's literature
not just leaping from great name to great name,
but an actual unfolding and continuous development from
decade to decade, as Showalter puts it.
Now Gates on page 1896, the right-hand margin,
sees it in much the same way for the development of
African-American criticism.
You can do two things basically, says Gates.
He doesn't put them chronologically,
but you could map onto what he's saying here the same
chronological sequence.
He says: What I mean by citing these two overworked terms [he's
talking about "the other" in particular]
is precisely this: how blacks are figures in
literature [that is to say, how they're represented in
literature, demeaningly,
even perhaps honorifically], and also how blacks
figure, as it were,
literature of their own making.
[You can see, in other words,
the same movement in his thinking about these issues.]
As Showalter argued too, the question of the
literary tradition is more complicated;
it has more steps.
In other words, the powers of self-expression
available to women from the beginning of their creative
expression passed through more than just two stages,
and the same thing is true of African-American literature.
Now I think that Gates simply takes for granted as an implicit
premise of the work that was done the year before he
published this essay in Critical Inquiry by
another colleague of ours here at Yale--
who died tragically not too long thereafter--
named Michael Cooke, who in 1984 wrote a book called
Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century:
The Achievement of Intimacy.
Cooke argued in this book that the history of African-American
literature passes essentially through four stages.
It begins with what Cooke calls "self-veiling":
the period, in other words,
in which people attempting for the first time to write--
and of course Gates talks about the way in which writing is
really writing oneself into the human community for black
people-- the people who first attempted
to write used white models.
Phillis Wheatley, the poet whom Gates talks
about, a remarkable poet and a very
interesting one, nevertheless wrote in the
manner of Alexander Pope, so much so that a great deal of
her work is almost impossible-- which is course a point of
praise--to distinguish from that of Alexander Pope.
She is an instance of the first phase, which Cooke calls
"self-veiling."
The second phase, which Cooke calls
"solitude," involves continuing to use
white models, a white prose style,
a way of narrating which is obviously derived from white
teachers and white models but which nevertheless involves,
as its central theme, self-definition.
Here you might want to think of Douglass and of slave narratives
in general, where the emphasis is on being
taught by white people, but nevertheless there is a
tension which exists and which founds and governs the
possibility of self-liberation and self-freedom.
In other words, the slave narrative as an
ongoing form partakes of this second phase in the development
of African-American literature as Cooke understands it.
Thirdly, there is what Cooke calls "kinship,"
a literature in which African Americans reach out to each
other, identify themselves as a
community, not as individuals struggling
to be free but rather as a community.
Cooke identifies this phase with the experimentation with
dialect and a way of narrating and poetizing which involves a
self-conscious insistence on verbal and linguistic
difference.
You can think of many of the poems, for example,
of Langston Hughes in this regard and of a great deal else
that goes on in the Harlem Renaissance;
so that's the third phase, kinship.
Then the last phase--and what I'm going to want to say is that
Gates doesn't think we've reached this.
In other words, the point of disagreement
between Cooke and Gates is precisely about this.
The last phase, which Cooke calls
"intimacy," is the freedom to expropriate
any and all models, not in other words to insist
necessarily on one's own creative paradigms as a racial
tradition but to expropriate anything that comes ready to
hand.
Ellison's Invisible Man, for example,
is a masterpiece of High Modernism.
It takes freely, in other words,
from whatever traditions come to hand and are most readily
available for the kind of work that Ellison wants to do.
Cooke identifies this perhaps rather optimistically with what
he calls "intimacy": in other words,
a merger, a finally achieved merger of traditions such that--
and this is plainly the ideal of Virginia Woolf as well--
such that one no longer has to write as a spokesperson.
One no longer needs to be concerned with thematizing the
kinds of identity out of which one's writing has arisen.
One can write just anything one wants to--
in other words, the utopian vision of "no
matter who I am, I have access to absolutely any
forms and themes I care to work with."
That is the vision of Michael Cooke,
which Gates, I think, unfortunately,
rightly feels that we haven't quite arrived at,
and that's why I deliberately used the word
"expropriate" in talking about Cooke's fourth
phase.
If I use models other than models made available by my own
tradition, I'm not just kind of pulling them out of the air.
I'm using them with a calculated purpose.
I always have something in mind in choosing the model that I
choose.
We're not really quite at intimacy because self-definition
is still at issue.
You can talk about the High Modernism of the Invisible
Man all you like, but think of what the
Invisible Man is about.
The Invisible Man is still about what it means to be
black.
What is "passing"?
What does it mean in other words to have this racial
identity?
So that, yes: traditions, manners,
styles have been expropriated, but at the same time the
business of writing as an African American continues,
and it is as much, after all, a question of
self-definition as it has been hitherto.
As Gates sees it, it continues to be the issue.
We use other models.
We need to make them our own.
Otherwise we're just colonized by them, and then after all
we're back in phase one, right?
We're back in self-veiling because, after all,
Phillis Wheatley used other models.
Phillis Wheatley actually aspired to the idea that she was
just a poet.
She could write about anything she wanted to write about--
the tears of Niobe in the painting by Richard Wilson--
whatever it might be, she could write about it
because she was just a poet.
That was her great aspiration, to be received not as
that amazing thing, a young black slave woman who
could write.
She wasn't interested in that.
She wanted to be a poet, and so in a certain sense you
can see the problem.
If intimacy is achieved in the fourth phase,
well, then that's finally just the realization of what Phillis
Wheatley wanted in the first phase,
>
and we have to admit, for all of the complicated
reasons that these critics go into,
that this is not a moment which can be said yet to have been
achieved.
Okay.
Now this brings us to Gates's key concept: what does it mean
to expropriate other people's traditions,
more particularly the white tradition,
Here Gates is after all thinking primarily about
criticism.
How can we do theory and criticism in the white man's
language?
How can we appropriate or expropriate for ourselves the
white man's language?
The necessity of bending language to one's own purposes
is what is emphasized in the remarkable epigraph on page 1891
that Gates takes from Bakhtin.
This is, it seems to me, as central a passage in
Bakhtin, by the way, as anything that we
studied when we were actually reading Bakhtin,
and I'd like you to make note of it because I think it really
can illuminate a great deal that's going on in Bakhtin that
we didn't perhaps fully articulate at the time.
This is what Bakhtin says: … language,
for the individual consciousness,
lies on the borderline between oneself and the other.
The word in language is half someone else's.
It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker
populates it with his own intention,
his own accent [and you can hear Gates wanting to emphasize
that word "accent"], when he appropriates the word,
adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.
Prior to this moment of appropriation,
the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language
(it is not, after all, out of a dictionary
that the speaker gets his words!)
[how true], but rather it exists in other people's mouths,
in other people's contexts, serving other people's
intentions: it is from there that one must take the word,
and make it "one's own."
Now actually during the course of his essay,
Gates echoes this sentiment of Bakhtin by quoting Derrida at
the very top of the right-hand column on page 1901,
where he says, "We must master,
as Derrida wrote, 'how to speak the other's
language without renouncing (our) own."
Now how do you do this?
How do you set about talking the language you are given?
This isn't, of course, just a question of the
difference between the races.
It's a question of all of us in relation to each other.
As Bakhtin says in what you have already read,
most of the time we're speaking other people's languages.
It is rare indeed that we can say, feeling very much like
creative writers when we do so, that we have somehow wrenched
other people's language out of its conventional usages and made
it our own, slightly rewritten it so that
it is truly our own.
So more broadly speaking, this is the challenge that
faces a theoretical tradition or a theoretical enterprise,
I should say, that doesn't want to be just
derivative from what other folks have already said.
The concept that Gates brings to bear on this,
because after all he recognizes, as does Showalter
too, that the notion of the
sign is probably the cornerstone of white male
literary theory-- he recognizes that in order to
perform this expropriative act, he's got to do something with
the notion of the sign, and so he talks about the way
in which one can signify on something.
He introduces it very quietly on page 1900,
the right-hand column, just seemingly in passing,
near the top of the right-hand column:
Since writing, according to Hume,
was the ultimate sign of difference between animal and
human, these writers implicitly were
Signifyin(g) upon the figure of the chain itself…
Notice the accent.
You don't necessarily pronounce the g:
they were signifyin' on the chain.
Of course, the great chain of being, which is hierarchical,
is very different from the vertical chain of the chain
gang, isn't it?
It's very different from the chain that holds slaves
together.
That's part of what it means to "signify on"
something.
At least allegedly, the "signifier"
in the white male theoretical tradition is just a kind of
placeholder in a play of linguistic differences.
The question of the underlying sociological and cultural basis
of this play and of the way in which this play takes shape
isn't taken into account-- again, allegedly--
because--well, in ways that you can probably
grasp from what we've said all along,
this is slightly to oversimplify,
but this is the position taken up.
In any case, you therefore need to take the
signifier and signify on it.
Well, what is it to signify on something?
This is an expression that Gates takes from the trickster
tradition, the tradition of African
storytelling in which the weaker is also the smarter,
and the monkey or Anansi the Spider--
some of you may remember the songs of Rafi from your
childhood about Anansi the Spider--
in which the monkey or the spider tricks the big,
bad guys, the elephant, the lion.
All of the bad guys get tricked because they are stupider,
and the little guy is always able to signify on them,
to trick them, and to lie to them without
their realizing what's going on.
This way of talking about signifying is very much in the
tradition of African-American folklore and first comes to
public consciousness in a song by the scat singer Oscar Brown,
Jr., written by Oscar Brown, Jr., called "The
Signifyin' Monkey."
If I could sing, I'd sing it to you.
Fortunately, I can't sing,
but it became extremely popular and was picked up by various
instrumental jazz groups and was a staple in the jazz tradition
of the fifties and sixties.
In any case, Oscar Brown Jr.'s notion of the
signifying monkey is where Gates takes his essay's title from and
which is where also he gets this idea of taking somebody else's
discourse out of its context and insisting on bending it into an
African-American context-- in other words,
a context which is one's own and not just the context one is
given.
Now the other example of "signifyin' on"
that Gates gives is the culminating example of The
Color Purple, and the conversation about "gettin'
the man out of your eye," which is a way of taking back a
problem that exists even within the African-American tradition.
As Gates has been pointing out, Wheatley and later Rebecca
Jackson take their models of education and self-development
from white male figures who have taught them how to read.
In each case of course, this is pernicious because the
existence of the white male figure is very much still in
your eye.
You got to get the man out of your eye, at least according to
the dialogue Gates quotes from The Color Purple.
Well, the interesting thing there is that in a way the issue
of feminist criticism comes back to haunt Gates's argument
because plainly Shug doesn't just mean the white man
when she says "the man."
A big issue in The Color Purple, of course,
is the emergence of a possible feminism from social
constructions that aren't just defined by race;
so that when Gates says "the man,"
which all of us recognize as shorthand for "the white
man," can be signified on by an African-American
tradition, making it a term of opprobrium,
right?-- "get the man out of your
eye"-- at the same time it can be
signified on by the feminist tradition,
making it a term of opprobrium not in a completely different
way, but in an overlapping and
partially different way.
Gates, in emphasizing the one as opposed to the other,
is perhaps tilting again toward a certain imbalance.
Now finally I want to take up the example,
the most controversial example in his essay,
one which is a source of outrage for most readers,
at the bottom of page 1893 in the left-hand column.
He's been talking about the New Agrarian moment out of which
there emerged a number of figures associated with the New
Criticism, including Robert Penn Warren,
who very early on repudiated the New Agrarians and became a
politically progressive figure in his own writing.
Many of you have probably read All the King's Men,
certainly, and his poetry as well.
He was an avatar, a central figure,
in the development of the thinking of the New Criticism,
which we have briefly studied.
Now Warren wrote a poem called "Pondy Woods,"
which is quoted completely out of context by Sterling Brown and
unfairly out of context in the passage which I'm not going to
read because I don't think I have the right to speak the
"N-word"; so I'll just have you look at
it--and I'll come back to that in a minute.
Sterling Brown's response is also recorded there for you.
Well, the problem is, from the standpoint of anybody
who's actually read the poem-- but remember in some ways it's
a problem raised by a New Critical perspective,
and I'll explain what I mean in a minute--
that expression is spoken by a buzzard or vulture from--
I forget whether it's Tennessee or Kentucky.
The episode takes place in northern Louisiana,
and the buzzard is sitting expectantly on a tree waiting
for a fugitive slave who has been chased into the swamp by
his white pursuers to die.
The vulture is sitting there--well, if it could it
would be--rubbing its hands with glee waiting for this to take
place.
It's the vulture that says it in the poem: nothing to do in
other words, as we say, with the author of
the poem, Warren, who is writing a
completely sympathetic evocation of what it's like to be a
fugitive slave in this state of terrible and overwhelmed panic.
So it seems completely unfair and it is, I think,
unfair as Sterling Brown took it up and as Gates then
perpetuates the idea in his own reference.
The one thing I would add, however, is that it's a New
Critical idea that we invoke to say that it's unfair.
It's the New Criticism, in which Robert Penn Warren was
a participant, that tells us we shouldn't
confuse speakers in poems with authors.
In other words, an author is someone,
according to the New Criticism, who is dispassionate and who
introduces dramatic voices even in lyric poems,
voices with which we are merely confusing ourselves if we
associate them with an author.
Now this is something that we just take for granted when we
read poems.
All poems for us are to some degree dramatic monologues on
the model of Browning and others in the nineteenth century.
We read them that way now, but it is,
as I say, a New Critical idea, and it comes back to the
question, "Who has the right to use
the 'N-word'?"
It's a frequent term used on the street,
as you know, in African-American culture,
used almost with a certain fondness as a form of mutual
greeting, but at the same time it is a
term that continues rigorously to be rejected as available to
anyone other than someone who belongs within this community.
And so that issue lingers.
It's an issue that Warren--because of course he
wrote long before this controversy began to arise
around the word-- the controversy really boiled
over precisely at the time of the banning of Huckleberry
Finn from public schools, much later, and so there's a
kind of innocence perhaps in Warren's use of the word.
Nevertheless, in the critical tradition it's
a question, "Who has the right to use it?"
This gives rise perhaps to the suggestion of a certain
insularity in the thinking of the New Criticism.
Use any model you like: the model of the Freudian
unconscious, the model of the political unconscious.
In other words, we've been reading a lot in
this course about our never quite saying what we mean to
say, of our never quite being fully
in control of our discourse because it bubbles up from the
unconscious, right?
Now if you take a model like this, even though it's a nasty
buzzard from Kentucky that's saying what Gates quotes,
nevertheless there is an author, and it has bubbled up
from the unconscious of that.
Well, what are you going to do with that?
There's a kind of impasse there.
We feel distinctly and vividly and even bitterly--
because I love Warren, I love "Pondy Woods"
and I also am something of a New Critic--
so we feel a bitterness about the expropriation,
the "signifying on" what Warren says in this
fashion.
At the same time, we have entertained these ideas
of a subliminal author, not an authority but an author
welling up from below.
If that's the case, then we have to worry a little
bit about how an expression like that got into the poem after
all.
I call it a lingering problem because it strikes me as one of
those moments when probably it would have been better if Gates
hadn't followed Sterling Brown, one of those moments when there
is a kind of overkill in the zeal of argumentation,
but which at the same time we can't absolutely dismiss out of
hand for the variety of reasons that I have mentioned.
Okay.
I'll leave it there, and we'll return to many of
these issues in a new vocabulary and in new forms when we read
the examples of post-colonial criticism on Thursday that
you've been assigned.