Black Impact on Classic American Literature

African American Impact on Classic American Literature

June 12, 2018

Over the next five weeks, we shall have video lectures by Arnold Weinstein on works by Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison and my comments on the authors, which may differ in some degree those Weinstein has chosen to make.  Each of the works has to be thought of with reference to the institution of slavery and the psychological impact of enslavement on the slaver and the enslaved, the master and the slave. 

Today's handout on Frederick Douglass' novella The Heroic Slave (1853) introduces the thematic dimensions that are important for understanding Melville's parallel novella Benito Cereno (1855) and mutiny and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which transformed one of her primary sources -- Josiah Henson's life story --- into a sentimental novel teeming with stereotypes.  Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1885 ) is the boy's adventure book to be sure, but it is also very much adventure as criticism of American culture and the moral quandary occasioned by being complicit in a person's enslavement.  Ellison's Invisible Man (1953) brings remarkable visibility to  some consequences of America's history of slavery; Morrison's Beloved (1987) examines the emotional costs and the moral problems of enslavement from a woman's perspective.

With these works we have the 19th century having a conversation with the 20th century for the benefit of our 21st century pondering of what significance this angling of history and fiction might have in our lives as Americans. We have a challenge.

I want to frame that challenge by way of selective quotation from D. H. Lawrence's 1923 book Studies in Classic American Literature and Toni Morrison's lectures published as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992).

Lawrence's book is witty and packed with British humor and not always a compliment of American literature. He contrasted extreme Russians (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov) and extreme Americans (Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman), finding "that the Russians are explicit and hate eloquence and symbols, seeing in these only subterfuge, whereas the Americans refuse everything explicit and always put u a sort of double meaning.  They revel in subterfuge." (4)

Subterfuge is an apt word. We do evade the issue(s) and protect  ourselves with heart-warming slogans,  dreamy myths, and bald-faced lies.

If we ignore the fact that many guises of "enslavement" affect all human beings in 2018, we ought to admit that we will to be fools with dirty faces and dirty hands.

America was escape from Europe, and Lawrence wished to address the literature that emerged from the escape. Page 11 --"Escaped slaves …people the republics of Liberia and Haiti.  Are we to look at America in the same way? A vast republic of escaped slaves.  When you consider the hordes from eastern Europe, you might well say it: a vast republic of escaped slaves.  But one dare not say this of  the Pilgrim Fathers, and the great old body of idealist Americans, the modern Americans tortured with thought.  A vast republic of escaped slaves.  Look out , America!  And a minority of earnest, self-tortured people."

How deep is the irony of Lawrence saying the Pilgrim Fathers were "black, masterful men, they wanted something else."   …..The land of THOU SHALT NOT. Only the first commandment is : THOU SHALT NOT PRESUME TO BE A MASTER.  Hence democracy.

It is even deeper that Lawrence singled out people from eastern Europe as exceptionally problematic.  He might have added that the black Irish and the Africa-marked Italians were special problems.  White is not skin.  White is how the gears of cognition turn.

BUT if as Lawrence claims the founding fathers transformed themselves into free men who "discovered America and their own wholeness, still there will be the vast number of escaped slaves to reckon with, those who have no cocksure, ready-made destinies."(13)

Lawrence was throwing into our faces the hypocrisy of achieving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness on the blood, sweat, and tears stained soil of slavery and extermination of a native population. The making of whiteness!!!  One has to court and marry violence to be properly white.

Without mentioning Lawrence at all, Morrison picks up his admonishment; she says with more deliberate clarity than Lawrence that until very recently classic American literature was quite willfully incapable of admitting the presence of slavery and the descendants of the enslaved was an intimate ingredient in its being ----its veiled multiethnic, multicultural being. Morrison plunges a dagger into the heart of whiteness.

Morrison's conclusion about Ernest Hemingway is a mind-opening assertion. (Page 90-91)

"Ernest Hemingway…disrupting darkness before its eyes."

It is just here, out of disrupting darkness that Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton shine light by way of poetry from the  18th and 19th centuries

Quote Wheatley and Horton from Trouble the Water.

The African American impact on classic American literature is the perpetual raising of questions. Over the next five weeks we shall discover multiple responses to the questions.  We shall not, however, get answers that could leave us in a state of certitude.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.