On a racial turn (Black Impact on Classic American Literature, Part Three)

OWED  ON A RACIAL TURN

The African American impact on American literature, whether that writing is classic or just ordinary, makes us self- conscious about language.  What does it do to us?  How do we do things with it?  Once upon a time in the beginning was the N_____word, and the N_____word was all consonants and a hanging letter that pretended to be a vowel.  Often in post-1865 American history, the false vowel is turned downside up to become a device to appease the nation's insatiable rage for race and imaginary retribution. Often the device is a novel.

Language.  People who possess more than average cultural literacy allow J. L. Austin, a professor of moral philosophy, to define their constative and performative utterances by way of How to Do Things with Words( 1962).  They are likely to value Mikhail Makhailovich Bakhtin's Vorprosy literatury i estetiki , translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist as The Dialogic Imagination (1981), because it allows them to put French theory in its place and get on with the more crucial task of dealing with the real thing, the entanglement of language as language. If the people are African American, they may smile with polite civility as they abandon the race for theory with judicious nuance.

Language  drives our  anxiety  to explain, particularly to non-Americans, why in the USA there is no exit from the binary cage of white and black .  We have a lot of explaining to do about the contemporary unfolding of the national narrative, a saga marked by  "Hs" ----hope,  headaches, hyperbole, homelessness, hesitation, hatred, hype, and heartaches.  Harriet Beecher Stowe's book Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) is a rich source for contemporary anxiety regarding enslavement and moral action. Or would language correct us in 2018 and force us to say we are overinvested in slavery and bankrupt in all things moral and ethical?

In 1949, a very young,  agitated  James Baldwin "preached" a secular sermon in the guise of a critical essay titled "Everybody's Protest Novel" in the pages of Partisan Review.  For him, Mrs. Stowe's book was a problem, and she was "not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer."  Baldwin wrote:

Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women.  Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel;  the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.  Uncle Tom's Cabin ---like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants ---is a catalogue of violence.  This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe's subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality ---unmotivated, senseless ---and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.

Baldwin planted a landmine question in the next paragraph ----

How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth?

Baldwin, made disconsolate by Mrs. Stowe's evasion of Uncle Tom's complex humanity,  put her  in the good company of Richard Wright's famous Native Son (1940) and its protagonist Bigger Thomas, who is the logical antithesis of Uncle Tom.

All of Bigger's life is controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear.  And later, his fear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape; he dies, having come, through this violence, we are told, for the first time, to a kind of life, having for the first time redeemed his manhood.  Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy.  Bigger is Uncle Tom's descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses.

After reading Mrs. Stowe's iconic abolitionist lecture and Mr. Baldwin's critical lecture/sermon on the failure of the protest novel, I am moved to revisit the closing lines of a classic English Romantic poem, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819) by John Keats:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," ---that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Yes, the pagan platitude which Keats embalmed  has the effect of teasing me into thought, as does eternity, that  Uncle Tom's Cabin is a fine companion for  a song published in the Atlantic Monthly  (1862) ten years after the novel.

The Internet provides the lyrics -----

First published version[edit]

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

(Chorus)
Glory, Glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal";
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.

(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies^[14] Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die* to make men free,^[15]
While God is marching on.

(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
While God is marching on.

African American impact on American cultural products begets a catalyst for the searching of the soul. Had Baldwin listened both to Julia Ward Howe and Harriet Beecher Stowe, he might not have so rashly  accepted a modernist theology of the aesthetic which enthralled him to misunderstand Richard Wright, to misunderstand how sublimely American protest fiction was (and still is in 2018). His landmine question, of course, is still ice for winters of discontent in the Age of Trump.  The language makes it so.  Nevertheless, Mr. James Baldwin  indicted himself as much as he condemned  Mrs. Stowe and Mr. Richard Wright: Baldwin, seen through the window of language is a far better impassioned essayist than a novelist.  It is a not nice thing for the kettle to call the pot white!  If tragedy is all we know on earth, language tells us it is not all we need to know as it throws the human comedy in our path. On the journey  we do well to undertake before Eternity happens, that comedy has bleached hair, flapping hands, and a tweeting mouth. Ah, language.  Ah, humanity.  Now let us search our souls and discover what is owed on a racial turn.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                            June 29, 2018