Wright and the Figures of Slave Narrative

From a seminar on the three largest post-Harlem Renaissance figures, Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison, this is a fairly pedantic, unexciting piece that just cobbles together some continuities between the slave narrative tradition and the African-American literary tradition that succeeded it. There's no real motivation for it into a thesis, however. The precursor to this, from which I think I borrow a few lines about Douglass, is "Literacy as Symbol and Material Means in Douglass." Like that piece, I was still caught in an overbearing fascination with the orality/literacy thematic, an understanding still largely conditioned at this point by Ong's Orality and Literacy and Havelock's Preface to Plato.

References:
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Eds. John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter P. Hinks. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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I propose to trace out the functioning of three different figures inherited by Wright from the tradition of slave narrative, taking as emblematic Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: curiosity, literacy, and leisure. I will in each case briefly discuss how they work in Douglass before showing how Wright continues, extends, or alters each figure in the changed cultural landscape some 100 years after Douglass’ escape, though I shall spend most of my time on literacy.

An important theme struck by both Douglass and Wright is the repression of curiosity. In Douglass, this occurs frequently, usually in relation to literacy. Curiosity leads you out of your current nest of experience and into a new experience, thus leading to learning. Douglass, who didn’t even realize that literacy was a forbidden object (much as Wright had to learn his lessons the hard way), was taught the basics by his mistress, Mrs. Auld, before her husband corrected her: “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. … He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master” (Douglass 31). This is a “new and special revelation” (ibid.) for the young Douglass and it opens up the “pathway from slavery to freedom” (32). Likewise for Wright, in his own first pass at autobiography in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” when he shows curiosity to learn how to grind lenses, Morrie immediately “grew red.” “Whut yuh tryin’ t’ do, nigger, git smart?” (Wright 228) The notion that blacks might be “uppity” immediately changes the whites’ attitudes to them, as the first hint of it sours situations for both Douglass and Wright repeatedly.

The figure of literacy might be the most important figure in Douglass’ Narrative, functioning as both a symbol for freedom and an actual, material precondition for freedom. Literacy for Douglass is a skill that allows for the free acquisition of knowledge and the ability to negotiate the white man’s world. It is also a precious commodity carefully protected by slave masters, as illustrated before. The pathway of literacy consists in the attainment of “the more valuable bread of knowledge” (Douglass 34), which functions in two ways for Douglass: 1) knowing how to read and write aids materially in his ability to escape from captivity and 2) Douglass learns that slavery is a contingent institution and that one of its main means of enforcement is the stripping of the slave of his humanity.

The first echo we might point to is again in “Ethics.” Wright says, “it was almost impossible to get a book to read. It was assumed that after a Negro had imbibed what scanty schooling the state furnished he had no further need for books” (Wright 235). Wright here, however, doesn’t go into depth about the meaning of literacy, nor play it out much—all we see is that though African-Americans can read, they aren’t allowed access by white-run libraries. We get a much stronger look at how Wright uses the symbol of literacy in Lawd, Today! (his first significant piece of fiction, though only published posthumously). When the protagonist, Jake, goes by the Chicago Library on his way to his friend Bob’s, Jake says to himself, “That’s right. I ain’t never looked around in one of them joints” (69). What is striking is not that he hasn’t been in a library, or thinks there’s a cover charge, but that if he did go into a library, he muses, he could “tell old Bob and Al and Slim all about the big books I seen…” (ibid.). Seen—not read, or even opened.

What’s worse, upon seeing a black boy reading in the library, Jake immediately thinks, right on the heels of his reverie of setting his friends aflame with jealousy at all the books he had seen, that “too much reading’s bad” (ibid.). This is one of a series of stunning reversals of thought that happen within moments of each other, another being the rapid switch in the group’s opinion of the International Negro Uplift Association, from “Yeah, they’s smart” to nine lines later “Aw … They nuts as hell” (109). Jake says of reading that “it was all right to read the newspapers … but reading a lot of books … would drive you crazy.” “It addles your brains, and if you addle your brains you’ll sure have bookworms in the brain” (69). He then recalls, as justification and evidence for his view, that “his poor old grandmother had told him that when he was a child, and he had never forgotten it, and had never had bookworms” (ibid.).

Wright seems to be, at least in part, displaying literacy as a forgotten means of freedom. The psychology of oral vs. literate culture is such that remembered words and phrases, in an oral culture, function as thought-gatekeepers far more than in a literate culture. Words in the mind tumble over each other in sometimes quite odd associations, but the better and easier remembered (like in proverbs, rhymed aphorisms, or bits of wisdom from authoritative sources, like grandmothers), the more likely these bits will be recalled in connection with current experience. For instance, Jake assigns some prestige to books and being in the library, but then Jake sees the black boy, and thinks, “reading’s bad.” Why? Because “his mind went back to his boyhood; he remembered a schoolmate of his who had become queer from trying to memorize the Bible” (ibid.). When Jake saw the boy, he saw his queer schoolmate, and reacted to himself turning queer—his earlier thought (books good, maybe I should go into the library) was derailed by this fragment of memory. And then his mind immediately reinforced this new thought with a further stock association, the wisdom of his grandmother. His brain doesn’t quit, though, and Wright adds a further illustrative crinkle, as Jake then thinks, “But it was all right if you were studying for the pulpit” (ibid.), because God will protect you from going crazy—but then what happened to the kid memorizing the Bible? Jake’s mind has already moved on, however, and such reversals are never brought to account. A mind brought up in a literate culture, however, because of the opportunity to reinforce the ephemeral spoken word with the unchanging written word, has better opportunity to not be led down mental avenues with no hope of returning and asking, “Did anything I just think (say) make sense?” And when you write it down, you can look it over.

There are two other examples with Jake we might recur to for reinforcement. One is the scene in which he reads the newspaper, as he has said is okay to do. The joke of the chapter is that, when Jake reads the newspaper, all he does is read the headline out loud and then run off at the mouth about whatever he thinks about what he thinks the headline means. But there are several telling moments for my purposes. When Jake goes off on FDR and the Democrats, he closes by saying, “I’m going to stick with the Republicans. Old Abe Lincoln is the ship and all else is the sea . . . Now, who said that?” (29) That old chestnut for black electoral politics tells Jake who to vote for, but it is not an actual evaluation of who would be best for him.[fn.1] When Jake attempts to engage with Lil, she says “I wasn’t listening to you reading” (31)—by which she really means, listening to him spout—and Jake replies, “You could learn something if you didn’t keep that empty head of yours stuck into them Gawddamn Unity books all the time” (ibid.). The irony is, of course, that Lil is actually reading, whereas Jake does not (except for advertisements, which he spends much more time reading the entirety of as we see in the following chapter). But what’s more is what Jake says about God: “Gawd’s hooey! It’s a gyp game, that’s all!” It isn’t apparent that Jake is just saying this eristically, but that he truly believes it—at the time, for compare his relative reverence and respect for God in the Library scene discussed above. And finally, there’s the dialectical series between Jake and Lil beginning with his rant about the Communists. Lil counters him on every response, actually challenging him, recurring to the newspaper as a source of her views. Jake, possibly recalling the moment before she interceded having said, “That’s no lie, I was reading it just the other day in the Tribune…” (33), eventually finds himself backed into a corner and says, “Woman, is you a Red?” (ibid.) There are several fascinating points to this exchange: 1) he appears entirely sincere in his thought process and in thinking that Lil must be a Red for challenging him as she does; 2) it isn’t clear at all that Jake is cognizant of having just lost the debate or the jagged shifts in thought; 3) it isn’t clear why he didn’t recur to his response to Einstein, that “these old newspapers sure tries hard to fool folks” (32), when Lil challenged him, and since that is clearly a legitimately open mental avenue for Jake, it just punches up how rough and random any particular turn his mind seems to take.

Possibly the most illustrative example of the oral cast of mind in Jake, and therefore the importance of literacy to the idea of freedom, occurs when Jake is raging about the inspector at work: “You sonofabitch! It ain’t always going to be this way! His mind went abruptly blank. He could not keep on with that thought, because he did not know where that thought led. He did not know of any other way things could be, if not this way. Yet he longed for them not to be this way” (142). Literacy is the key to other worlds, the key to seeing how things might be another way. An imagination that cannot stretch beyond the things told to it by its immediates is an impaired imagination. Reading is what did it for Douglass and for Wright. Reading allows one to escape immediate surroundings and take flight, either to other actual realities (like in nonfiction, history, etc.) or to made-up realities—the effect is the same, as the circle of possibilities expands outwards, thus increasing the flex of mind that allows you to imagine more for yourself.

The last figure of leisure leads directly from here and shows Wright exerting a tremendous alteration over it. For Douglass, leisure time meant time to strategize and to think. The path to freedom lay open, but obscured, and at one point he says, amidst the “perpetual whirl of excitement” of working at the docks in Baltimore, that “I could think of nothing, scarcely, but my life; and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty” (Douglass 70) The most obvious shift from slave narratives to neo-slave narratives, of course, is that people like Douglass were escaping a fairly literal slavery, while that which holds Wright and his contemporaries is the more intangible cultural slavery left from continued racism. So, in Wright the figure of leisure plays differently. The image of the “lazy” black man is created. But why? Wright tells us—as the group watches some white students get off work, Jakes thinks, “Them white boys always in a hurry to get somewhere. And soon’s they get out of school they’s going to be bigshots. But a nigger just stays a nigger” (117). “Yeah, but ain’t no use of a black man rushing.” “Naw, ‘cause we ain’t going nowhere” (118). Douglass could imagine that slavery could be ended, and that eventually people could co-exist peacefully. Wright, 100 years later, is displaying the crushing, felt defeat at the hands of whites that debilitates the common black imagination and that begins to repeat itself—like Jake’s grandmother telling him that reading is bad.

Endnotes

[1] It was, in fact, Frederick Douglass about the Republican Party. I suspect this was a veiled slap at Douglass by Wright, with regards to the changed landscape of politics and how Douglass stuck by the Republican Party even after its disastrous effort at Reconstruction and subsequent takeover by the rich, of whom Jake says, “them men owns and runs the country!” (29)

Longing for the Apocalypse

This is another short paper written for a class that looked at how the concept of time worked in literature and theory. Every paper in the series takes up whoever we were reading and pairs them together. They aren't exactly haphazard pairings, but ya' know. It is an open question as to how forced brevity effected the efforts--good exercise; still not used to it. This one was the last one written, and since it was the last, it exploded into a cavalcade of diverse thoughts that I wanted to say, this being my last opportunity. It begins with some unknown German guy summarizing literature about the image of "apocalypse" in theory and slides into my first attempt to pull together a number of threads I've been thinking about lately--primitivism, intellectual influence, and literacy.

You'll also notice the forced MLA. God I hate MLA.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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In the most revealing passage in Klaus Scherpe’s serviceable summary of Continental intellectual trends relating to the notion of “apocalypse,” Scherpe says

In Kafka’s stories the exception begins and remains the rule; an idea’s reversal is always implicit in its being thought. Kafka’s literary modernity is a state of emergency, which means that the revolutionary impulse implicit in the notions of “interruption” and the “breakthrough” propagated by Benjamin’s theory of modernity can never occur; the catastrophe can never set any energy free nor provide the stimulus for change. (Scherpe 113)

Benjamin has swallowed the notion that modernity soaks us to the core, that the “‘age of information,’ when norms are purged of meaning and time is characterized by its ‘empty’ homogeneity” (106) requires the notion of a radical break to even conceive of change. After taking both notions on board, postmodernity becomes the last shock available as, for instance, Baudrillard “proclaims a condition of the absolute absence of events.” (100) The question would seem to be: why is such an absurd conclusion taken seriously by smart people? By using Don DeLillo’s White Noise, I would like to trace a path to re-engineer the position so-called postmodern intellectuals have found themselves.

The two positions Scherpe traces have Baudrillard on one side and his “German prophet,” Gerd Bergfleth, on the other. Baudrillard, in effect, pushes the self-directed ironic masks worn by the Romantics to achieve autonomy to its outermost reaches, what he calls “objective irony.” Baudrillard sees quite rightly that a truly all-pervasive irony, when taken out of its normal state of (subjective) context-dependence and amped up into a (objective) reality-rule, becomes an indifference that ultimately denies change: “Everything has already happened.”[fn.1] (100-1) This de-dramatizes reality because by denying change/events, we’ve effectively relieved ourselves of waiting around for something to happen (so-called “drama”). Scherpe says perceptively that the German side of the equation is missing the irony of Baudrillard’s position—whereas from Baudrillard’s position we might as well drop the nukes, from Bergleth’s vantage (a “typically German version of the postmodern condition,” (123) Scherpe says humorously), we need it. Bergleth has an “intense desire for some sort of deadly seriousness” (126) in the midst of French playfulness, a “longing for death” (127) as the last place to find meaning, the true flipside of Camus’ insistence that the only pertinent philosophical question was whether to commit suicide.[fn.2] Bergfleth must re-dramatize the notion of apocalypse to regain Benjamin’s hope for change and (for what ends up resting on the ability to see differences) meaning.

If we turn to White Noise, I believe we can trace the interesting patterns that accrue to the fascination with catastrophe and apocalypse. In Chapter 14, DeLillo shows us Jack and his kids watching television, “floods, earthquakes, mudslides,” “totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death.” (DeLillo 64) The significance, and ultimately the disturbing fascination Jack sees, is that “Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.” (ibid.) The next day Jack asks Alfonse why “people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe”? (65) He replies, not only that “it’s natural, it’s normal,” (ibid.) but that “We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.” (ibid.)

I would like to unpack this section in several different ways. First, DeLillo and the postmoderns all take very seriously the effect of technology on our culture and consciousness. This point should not be underestimated, as all other points fall from there. Modern society is not only bombarded with information, but it better stores and recalls that information. If info is blandly defined as our sensory input, then it is flatly false that we get more info now than before—it is everywhere and always the same saturated state. However, the creation of technology, Prometheus bringing the Gods’ fire to us, has expanded exponentially our ability to store and retrieve information and has altered our consciousness accordingly.[fn.3]

One consequence of our ability to retrieve the past more quickly and accurately has been the increasing sense that the past is a burden. This can be seen quite clearly in the evolution of poetry. In Homeric times, oral poetry was the only form of paideia. As this transferred into prose form, written poetry shuttled into a stage of theological instruction (Dante being the great exemplar). Petrarch marked a great change in all this, as the poet turned inwards, towards his own problems, personal and otherwise. By the time of the Romantics, that shift had been solidified—poets had become so self-conscious of the past that the insular search for something new to say began in true earnest.[fn.4] Irony was instrumental in their search for new ways to shrug off the past—as a stance, it put one in a skeptical relation to the past, and as a figure, one could repeat the past while meaning something else.

The last idea to put into play is that of primitivism—the notion that the past was a glorious time, if only we could restore it. This might seem entirely counterintuitive, but as anxiety over contemporary decadence increases, such that things as time goes on are getting worse, it seems natural to suppose that things were better earlier, before they got worse. Primitivism, in a simple sense, is a typical conservative reaction—too much change is bad for the system—and is as old as recorded time.[fn.5] Primitivism takes on a new cast during the Enlightenment, suffused in the form of Rousseau. Rousseau wished to reach back to the past, as a simpler time. But Rousseau realized the almost insurmountability of this problem because the problem was society itself.[fn.6]

Thus enters the fascination with apocalypse. Bernard Yack suggests that Rousseau transmitted to the European intellectual tradition a “longing for total revolution.”[fn.7] By locating the pernicious evil in the very civilizing, socializing process, Rousseau put out of practical reach our ability to change: “Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains,” he says famously in the Social Contract. As technological rates increase, the burden of the past chains us tighter and tighter to where we have been, and the more we dream of being released. For the poet, from the great masters of the past. For the political revolutionary or spiritual purist (who, in true Rousseauian spirit, end up being one and the same), from modern society. We become fascinated with catastrophe as our sense of “we’ve seen this all before” increases, and as time goes by, greater and greater catastrophes of greater magnitude are demanded to breach our attention. And as the Mountains of Time begin to blot out the Sun, we begin to pray for the Great Leveler. The turn in DeLillo, in post-apocalypse, is the same turn in Rousseau—a sudden, renewed sense of community as the TVs die away.

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Works Cited

Bate, W. Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, 1991.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 1997.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1984, 1985, 1999.

Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. New York: Universal Library, 1963, 1967.

Lovejoy, Arthur O. and George Boas. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934, 1997.

Nehamas, Alexander. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections From Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982.

Rice, Eugene F, Jr., with Anthony Grafton. The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970, 1994.

Scherpe, Fredric. “Dramatization and De-dramatization of ‘the End’: The Apocalyptic Consciousness of Modernity and Post-Modernity.” Cultural Critique. No. 5 (Winter 1986-7), p. 95-129.

Yack, Bernard. The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, 1992.

Endnotes

[1] Baudrillard is right about irony because the classic notion of irony is a directed notion, from speaker to audience, author to reader. What irony does is hide the meaning of a statement. Though often thought of as a simplistic “means the contrary of what it says,” Romantic irony has more to do with the irony of Socrates, as when Alexander Nehamas argues, against the traditional “contrary” version that Gregory Vlastos stands at the far end of in Socratic studies, that irony is a “concealment”: “Irony seems to create a mask. It does not show what, if anything, is masked. It suggests depth. It does not guarantee it.” (Nehamas 67) When Baudrillard expands the ultimately faceless mask of irony to a world-condition, he seems to understandably draw the conclusion that, since 1) all depths are created by a concealing mask, 2) everything is a concealing mask, and 3) every mask pulled off finds us with another concealing mask, the very notion of a “reality” to be taken seriously and differentiatedly is suspicious and should be treated indifferently because it can/could/should/has been revealed to be a different, faceless mask (hence his concept of the simulacrum, a representation with no represented—like a signifier with no signified—which means every representation represents the same thing: nothing).

[2] While L’étranger offers a wonderful portrait of a life seemingly devoid of internally generated meaning (and hence careening towards the only thing that would stand out: death), Camus investigates in prose the question of suicide in Le mythe de sisyphe.

[3] Here I would refer to the work of Walter J. Ong and Eric A. Havelock on orality, literacy and the beginnings of Greek (Western) thought. In our Homeric, oral state the only way to store info was in memorable pieces (because they had to be personally remembered) by the instrumental use of hexametric verse, rhyme, formulas, the use of heroic figures. As Ong says,

The new way to store knowledge was not in mnemonic formulas but in the written text. This freed the mind for more original, more abstract thought. Havelock [in Preface to Plato] shows that Plato excluded poets from his ideal republic essentially (if not quite consciously) because he found himself in a new chirographically styled noetic world in which the formula or cliché, beloved of all traditional poets, was outmoded and counterproductive. (Ong 24)

This marked the true birth of what we now think of as poetry—broadly, the attempt to write in an original way. Poetry had previously been involved in reproduction of noetic resources, but writing provided an external way to save these.
Our sense of accuracy has also increased as our technological capacities have. Writing allowed us to record thoughts. It also allowed us to record history, to record events in a more individuated way than ever before (the detailed History of the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides rather than the amorphously mythic Works and Days of Hesiod). The printing press registers as another significant event in the history of our consciousness. The reproduction of classic texts for the length of the Middle Ages were largely left to the hands of monastic scribes, most of whom were illiterate and were simply trying to copy as closely as possible the marks. The invention of moveable type changed everything:

Manuscripts, totally dependent on the skill, learning, and care of the scribe, had always been inaccurate and unreliable. Furthermore, this inaccuracy and unreliability were becoming increasingly great as successive generations of scribes copied the errors of their predecessors and added their own. The fundamental contribution of printing to learning was that it halted this progressive corruption and made possible the long and continuing effort to restore the great texts of the past to something approaching their original integrity. Printing gave scholars all over Europe identical texts to work on. (Rice 7)

The weight of the past has increased exponentially since that time as more and more is reproduced and preserved, not only the great and vast, but the boring and trivial. We have it all at our finger-tips.

[4] In this Walter Jackson Bate’s The Burden of the Past and the English Poet is instrumental, as is Harold Bloom’s transformation of Bate’s more historical thesis into a theory of poetry in The Anxiety of Influence.

[5] On this see Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas’ Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. One of the many benefits is their distinguishing between various senses of “primitivism.” The sense I shall use it is as a “cultural primitivism.” Lovejoy says, “The cultural primitivist has almost invariably believed that the simpler life of which he has dreamed has been somewhere, at some time, actually lived by human beings.” (Lovejoy 8)

[6] As Lovejoy says of Rousseau’s First Discourse, “The study of the arts and sciences does not contribute à épurer les moeurs [to the purification of mores], and there it is of minimal value, and often actually harmful.” (Lovejoy 274)

[6] Yack says that the “subjective awareness of the inability to produce a desired object distinguishes a longing from a desire….”

In both longing and desire we feel the uneasiness created by the lack of a desire object. But while in desire our uneasiness focuses on the desired object, thus promoting attempts at its acquisition, in longing the awareness of our present incapacity to acquire the object diffuses our uneasiness. The energy produced by that uneasiness has no obvious outlet—thus the vague, generalized feeling of uneasiness which most of us associate with longing. … When we discover the obstacle to our satisfaction we generate a new object of desire: a world without that obstacle to our satisfaction. And if we find ourselves incapable of removing this obstacle, our desire becomes a longing which, in turn, generates the definition of new objects of desire. (Yack 5-6, italics mine)

Compare this to Scherpe’s nice little slap at Baudrillard: “the curious manner in which this form of theorizing constantly creates new objects in order to make them disappear….” (Scherpe 99) On my reading, this is exactly what is to be expected at the long, self-conscious end of Platonic theory. Nietzsche saw Hegel grasp previous generations and drain them of their power for his own, thought it a neat trick and went directly at the main offender—Plato. Heidegger saw Nietzsche invert Plato, and saw the next step as an inversion of Nietzsche. Derrida sees Heidegger and ups the inverting ante, but by now the jig is up and the game of inverting back and forth infinitely becomes increasingly boring.