the joy of reading

THE JOY OF READING

Blessed are astute, critical readers; they most often avoid incarceration in ignorance,

*In "Blueprint for Negro Writing," (1937) Richard  Wright noted the Negro writer's "vision need not be simple or rendered in primer-like terms; for the life of the Negro people is not simple.  The presentation of their lives should be simple, yes; but  all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence, should be there. To borrow a phrase from the Russians, it should have a complex simplicity. Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo, and Jack London no less than the folklore of the Negro himself should form the heritage of the Negro writer."  1937.  Wright was of his time. He was  also in advance of it. His mind had already detected  what is stated plainly in



Kluger, Jeffrey. Simplexity. New York: Hyperion, 2008.



"Complexity, as any scientist will tell you, is a slippery idea, one that defies almost any effort to hold it down and pin it in place.  Things that seem complicated can be preposterously simple; things that seem simple can be dizzyingly complex." (page 11)



Kluger reminds us we are wired to be awed by a star ("…just a furnace, a vulgar cosmic engine…" 12) more than by a guppy ("…a symphony of systems ---circulatory, skeletal, optical, neurological, enzymatic, reproductive, biomechanical, behavioral, social."  Those systems, assembled from cells, "have subsystems; the subsystems have subsystems……it's the guppy we ought to praise." (12)

Despite his strategic  denial late in his life that he wasn't enormously influenced by Wright, Ralph Ellison absorbed an important idea from Wright, an idea for which Kluger's observation is a meaningful gloss, especially when Kluger further reminds us that "across all disciplines ---chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, economics, sociology, psychology, politics, even the arts ---investigators are making similar discoveries, tilting the prism of complexity in new directions and seeing the light spill out in all manner of unexpected ways." (12)  Yes, Invisible Man is a guppy not a star.  Ellison illuminates his pragmatic reasons for distancing himself from Richard Wright and forging the insider outside the cage of race in the recently published The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner (New York: Random House, 2019).  It can be argued , particularly from international perspectives, that Wright was the more powerful blacksmith.



That is one of the many lessons I have learned since I began conducting special classes for senior readers  in the continuing education People Program in New Orleans [www.peopleprogram.org ]. The efforts to remember and examine our life histories through dedicated acts of reading are rewarding.  The joy of reading is bittersweet, but it does allow us to have a small taste of what bliss might be. 



Our  initial forum (Spring 2018) took up the challenge of works by Richard Wright, because we need to do more by way of moving "literature" into "culture" as we try to expand knowledge.  Summer 2018 found us  examining  African American impact on classic American literature, we experience and a reciprocal impact of classic American literature on African American narratives.  Those narratives expose that the bright sheen they cast on sordid existence is often the dull but ominous fog present in Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mrs. Stowe produced a surplus of fog and sheen.  Invisible Man returns the spilled light to the prism of complexity, returns us to a grappling with D. H. Lawrence's notion in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) of "the true democracy, where soul meets soul, in the open road. Democracy.  American democracy where all journey down the open road, and where a soul is known at once in its going" (186).  The simple Homeric plotting of Ellison's novel complements the complex Homeric plotting of James Joyce's Ulysses ----n.b. Joyce was one of Ellison's literary ancestors. The secret name of the unnamed narrator of Invisible Man is Telemachus Hamlet.



Like some early 20th century Russian formalist  literary critics -- Boris Tomashevsky, Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Ellison desired  that art be disconnected from politics and not be confused with  sociology.  Read his collected essays, especially "Hidden Name and Complex Fate" (1964) . Our reading of Ellison's novel from many angles and on many levels restores what we need most: the simple complexity of cognition. In 2018, we spoke for our visible selves at a higher frequency outside the pit of pity.



The lessons learned from a summer of discontent ---the person with whom I led the summer forum truly believed it sufficient to listen to lectures about literary works rather than to read the works ---were based on my re-reading D. H. Lawrence's  description of what's classic,  and they  served me well in designing the Fall 2018 forum on five African American writers and the Spring 2019 forum on Southern writers, because the senior readers and I could return to conversations predicated on our shared authority.  We returned to the joy of reading how Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Ernest J. Gaines chose to deal with vital 20th century topics and discussing why the issues they addressed have relevance in our 21st century practice of everyday life. One reader wanted to know if the grandfather's deathbed advice in Invisible Man was reflected in our country's present day climate and whether, as she put it so poignantly -----"Is there something faulty in my response, my milquetoast feelings toward the narrator ,as I respond today?  In retrospect, I believe that long   ago, when I first read Invisible Man, I agonized about what was a "proper" interpretation..  Perhaps I did not want to engage in intellectual fight of the kind  Ellison's novel requires.  Age and the hindsight that is denied to youth  allows me to determine whether  I would  choose to take this book or the Bible to a deserted island, if I could only take one. 

In our  Spring 2019 forum, senior readers devised their own strategies of making sense of Toomer's modernism in Cane; of Eudora Welty's peculiar Southern humor in The Ponder Heart, of Ellen Douglas's creative architecture in Can't Quit You, Baby (they absolutely loved listening over and over to Willie Dixon's singing "Can't Quit You, Baby" and turned the forum into a blues session);  they were content to remain  in uncertainty about fathers, sons, and corruption in Wright's The Long Dream.  they were exceptionally interested in the discourse on race in  Minrose Gwin's The Queen of Palmyra.

Toni Morrison: Four Books encouraged us to do battle with and triumph over the difficulty of confronting social, aesthetic,  political, and cultural dimensions of our human condition in Fall 2019. Morrison is uncanny in catching readers and persuading them that reading is a necessity.  We imagined ourselves to be people in the village Morrison chose to address.  "If my work is to be functional to the group (to the village as it were) then it must bear witness and identify that which is useful from the past and that which ought to be discarded; it must make it possible to prepare for the present and live it out; and it must do that not by avoiding problems and contradictions but by examining them; it should not even attempt to solve social problems but it should certainly try to clarify them" (The Source of Self-Regard 331). We used the imperatives (it must, it must, it must, it should not, it should) Morrison issued in a conditional mode.

In Spring 2020 we shall begin ADVENTURES IN ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE, an exercise in seeing and hearing through the voice and imaginations of five ethnic groups.  We shall read the books in thematic clusters:  the earth and acquisition of knowledge--Braiding Sweetgrass; coming of age --Bless Me, Ultima and Fifth Chinese Daughter; moral and ethical issue in society ---We Cast a Shadow and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Carson McCullers, Rudolfo Anaya. and Jade Snow Wong  shall guide us through these clusters into other themes.  We can orient ourselves with two questions that resist consensus in our nation: What is American?  and Who are Americans?

When senior readers explore the territory of African American narratives or the American mindscape inspired by those narratives or the Omni-American terrain where we find  more division  than unity, what really happens is a partial recovery of sanity and civility.  In our cultures of reading we have communion.

Appendix:          PEOPLE PROGRAM CLASSES

Spring 2018-----Richard Wright: Selected Works

Black Boy

The Outsider

The Color Curtain

A Father's Law



Summer 2018 --African American Impact on Classic American Literature

The Heroic Slave

Benito Cereno

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Huckleberry Finn

Invisible Man

Beloved





Fall 2018 ----Five African American Writers

Invisible Man

Go Tell It on the Mountain

The Third Life of Grange Copeland

The Bluest Eye

A Lesson Before Dying



Spring 2019 ---Southern Writers

Cane

The Ponder Heart

Can't Quit You, Baby

The Long Dream

The Queen of Palmyra

Fall 2019---Toni Morrison: Four Books

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Tar Baby

Jazz

Song of Solomon

Spring 2020--Adventures in Ethnic American Literature

Braiding Sweetgrass

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Fifth Chinese Daughter

We Cast a Shadow

Bless Me, Ultima

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            December 5, 2019