Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Notes

Chapter II

1.     For the sake of my argument focused on the male and female black character, I enlarged Barbara Christian’s feminist perspective by including in her definition both women and men.

2.     Samira Kawash discusses this ambivalence of the color line: “When the racial knowledge seemingly guaranteed by the color line becomes tenuous, it becomes increasingly apparent that while the color line may be a condition for violence, it is also a condition for the security and certainty of identity, a way of ordering and organizing the social world” (1997, viii).

3.     In Cultural Hegemony and African American Development, Clovis Semmes explains: “Cultural hegemony has become the metaproblem out of which epistemological, conceptual, theoretical, and critical issues emerge in Black, African American, and Africana studies.” Semmes defines cultural hegemony “as the systematic negation of one culture by another.” He remarks that “the internal dynamics of one culture evolves in such a way that it calls into discussion the independence, coherence, and vitality of another culture to which it has a socio-historical connection. In a sense, the one culture bases its existence and well-being on the ability to absorb, redirect, or redefine institution building and symbol formation in the other” (1992, 1).

4.     In 1997, Mary Helen Washington, who was elected president of the American Studies Association, addressed her audience with a talk entitled “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?” Like many other black intellectuals, Washington insisted on the necessity of radically revising the literary, critical, and cultural canon.

5.     Marcel Cornis-Pope observes that “a literary pedagogy premised on the concept of rewriting would have to study the operations that set up interpretive narratives, but also to enable readers to perform them problematically, with a critical awareness of their underlying agendas and grammars of moves” (1992, 15).

6.     At the time, two views upon slavery understood it as either damaging or necessary. On the one hand, “slavery was considered an evil by colonizationists not because they had any empathy with the sufferings of the slaves—they were notably deficient in this regard—but because they viewed it as an economically unsound and dangerous institution” (Fredrickson 1987, 11). On the other hand, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “the leadership of the of the major cotton-producing states made it clear that a national colonization effort was unacceptable because in their view slavery was an essential and Constitutionally protected local institution which was no concern of the Federal government or the nonslaveholding states” (Fredrickson 1987, 43).

7.     While general emancipation of slaves took place in the North, in the post-Revolutionary South, the white power system prevented the emancipation of the blacks, by proliferating the idea that freedom would make the black population socially dangerous by turning them into a degraded pariah class. More and more, a colonization movement started to take shape (especially with the founding of the American Colonization Society in 1817) and advocate the necessity to send the blacks to Africa. More voices rose to spread the idea that colonization could gradually rid America of the social and political evil of slavery, while also insisting on the benefits brought by the “civilized” ex-slaves to the African “savage” population. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and William Wells Brown’s novels are classic examples of literary works tributary to this colonial scheme.

8.     See Barbara Christian, “Images of Black Women in Afro-American Literature: From Stereotype to Character,” in Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (1985).

9.     Robert Stepto comments on the three phases of the slave narration. The first is the Basic Narrative as an Eclectic Narrative, in which “the authenticating documents and strategies are appended to the tale.” The second is the Basic Narrative as an Integrated Narrative, in which “the authenticating documents and strategies are integrated into the tale and formally become voices or characters in the tale” (1979 a, 5). The third phase can be seen either as a Generic Narrative or as an Authenticating Narrative. In the Generic Narrative, “the authenticating documents and strategies are totally subsumed by the tale,” so that “the slave narrative becomes an indefinable generic text, e. g. autobiography.” In the Authenticating Narrative, “the tale is subsumed by the authenticating strategy,” so that the slave narrative becomes an authenticating document for other, usually generic, texts, e. g. novels, histories” (1979 a, 17).

10. Two emblematic instances of nineteenth century black writing, Douglass’ and Jacobs’ autobiographic texts dominate their narrative, they are the center of gravitation toward which the other events organize, in Stepto’s words, they alone “authenticate the narrative” (1979, 182 b). In this respect their very titles indicate their insistence on their own authorial freedom, as well as on their racial and sexual identities: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself.

11. In this directions, Sabina Draga specifies: “The black body, spatial projection of a self that emerges in the social world under the sign of a defining category, that of Blackness, is as such the product of an identity performance which is to a great extent designed for an audience who represents not the Same, but the Other” (2000, 41).

12. In this sense, Walter Mosley notices black authors’ need to free African American literature from the burden of representation: “Our writers have historically been regarded as... best suited to address the nature of our own chains. So if black writers wanted to branch out past the realism of racism and race, they were curtailed by their own desire to document the crimes of America. A further deterrent was the white literary establishment’s desire for blacks to write about being black in a white world, a limitation imposed upon a limitation” (1998, 34).

13. The word “polytropic” has its etymology in the Gr. polytropos, poly + tropos, “turning many ways, versatile, also much traveled.” As The Oxford English Dictionary points out, the word is invested with several meanings: 1. Capable of turning to many courses or expedients; 2. Math. Turning several times round a pole; also applied to a function which has several different values for one of the variable, being opposed to monotropic; 3. Of a bee: collecting nectar from many kinds of flower; 4. Physics and Astr. Pertaining to or designating a body of gas or process in which pressure volume changes in such a way that a specific heat remains constant. In the Odyssey, the word polytropus represents the epithet given to Ulysses, who is characterized by a series of attributes: “much-enduring,” “a man of many schemes,” “the man of twists and turns,” “godlike,” “great-hearted,” and “brilliant.” Moreover, the term can be later traced in Plato’s “Hippias Minor,” where the philosopher identifies the distinction between two types of human nature embodied by the Homeric heroes Achilles and Odysseus. The first is haplus, “simple,” “single,” and “all of a piece,” representing the straightforward but rudimentary nature, the second is polytropus, having “many ways of being,” always turning in various directions and multiplying the ways of his nature. As the Romanian philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu points out, there is a big distinction between the Achillean and the Odyssean types: the aspect of the Achillean simplicity, univocity (associated with the Story of the Iliad) is contrasted with the Odyssean complexity, plurivocity (specific for the many stories of the Odyssey) (1981). Importantly, Socrates reacts at Hippias’ claim that Achilles is superior to Odysseus, since the first is “true and simple,” while the latter is “false and wily.” Socrates’ idea of knowledge is supported by the notion of voluntary erring: the one that does something voluntarily is superior to the one who does it involuntarily.

14. Charles Johnson reintroduces this notion of a “round” character speaking about black identity in Being and Race (1988, 6).

15. In its turn, poststructuralism, with its pretense of no in-depth message, can be sometimes ill-suited for discussing black postmodernism. For example, Michael Awkward mentioned that poststructuralism fails “to recognize the positive search in black female texts for a black female wholeness” (1989 a, 8).

16. This idea is also sustained by Marcel Cornis-Pope who affirms that rewriting former texts implies “a better understanding of their own underlying ‘stories of reading’” (1992, 14).

17. Gates about Hurston’s writing in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1988, 239).

18. As Morrison affirms, the African character has contributed for centuries to the shaping of the American character: “Black slavery enriched the country’s creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American” (1992, 38).

19. The activist, social aspect of black literature is nothing new. Since 1922, James Weldon Johnson, one of the main figures of the Harlem Renaissance, stresses the social role of literature. In his Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, he remarked that literary and artistic creativity must represent basic means for an ethnic group’s value and advancement: “For the whites, art was the means to change society before they would accept it. For the blacks, art was the means to change society in order to be accepted into it” (Johnson 5, in Lewis 1994, xxi). Three years later, in The New Negro, Alain Locke insists on reconsidering the undervalued role of African Americans in the American culture. Inspired by Du Bois’ concept of the Talented Tenth, Locke affirms that a great social gain depends on releasing the talented group of African Americans “from the arid fields of controversy and debate to the productive fields of creative expression. The especially cultural recognition they win should in turn prove the key to that revaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany any considerable further betterment of race relationships” (1925, 50). To illustrate his ideas, Locke edited and published in 1926 an anthology with a symbolic title, The New Negro, in which he promoted a number of talented black men and women of letters (among which the poets Rudolph Fisher, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen).

20. When discussing the way in which historical discourse produces interpretations, Hayden White stresses that historical discourse does not “produce new information about the past, since the possession of both old and new information about the past is a precondition of the composition of such a discourse” (1999, 2).

21. In this direction, Paul Veyne comments: “The merit of historism will have been to bring to light the difficulties of the idea of History and the limits of the historical objectivity; it is even simpler not to begin to propose the idea of History and to admit right away that the sublunary is the realm of the probable” (1984, 30).

22. In this way, postmodern African American writers do not simply narrate the past events, but they also insist on their relevance for the present times. In many instances, anachronisms contribute to the actualization of the past message and the interrelation between the slave history and the contemporary times. Exemplary historiographic metafictions, such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, or Octavia Butler’s Kindred, either abolish temporal conventions (so that the amused reader discovers modern technology as an integrated part of slavery), or employ techniques of science-fiction (so that time travel makes the reader sympathize with the slave conditions).

23. I allude here to the famous definition in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). In this passage, the main character’s Nanny reveals the black women’s double burden in gender and racial terms: “Honey, the white man is the ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where the black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see” (1990, 19).

24. Moreover, there is also another basic issue tackled by these neoslave narratives: the transcultural and transracial exploitation of women. As Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose or Toni Morrison’s Beloved suggest, both black and white women have to face the rigor of a patriarchal system. In Williams’ and Morrison’s novels the meeting between a black and a white woman—characters that have different social and cultural backgrounds—initiates instances of reciprocal help and understanding. In William’s novel, a young slave woman who has given birth to a baby while running away meets a young white woman abandoned by her husband on their northern Alabama plantation. In Morrison’s novel, again, the focus is on a black woman who gives birth, while she is helped by a white servant in search for better social conditions.

25. The ellipses and gaps have their function in the nineteenth century slave narrative, since either racial or sexual reasons were invoked. For instance, Frederick Douglass’ reasons are mainly racial: “Before narrating any of the peculiar circumstances, I deem it proper to make known my intention not to state all the facts connected with the transaction. My reasons for pursuing this course may be understood from the following: First, were I to give a minute statement of all the facts, it is not only possible, but quite probable, that others would thereby be involved in the most embarrassing difficulties. Secondly, such a statement would most undoubtedly induce greater vigilance on the part of the slaveholders than has existed heretofore among them; which would, of course, be the means of guarding a door whereby some dear brother bondman might escape his galling chains. I deeply regret the necessity that impels me to suppress any thing of importance connected with my experience in slavery” (Douglass 1997, 99). Moreover, Harriet Jacobs’s motifs are sexual, pertaining to the nineteenth century understanding of gender: “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall far short of the facts. I have concealed the names of places, and given persons fictitious names. I had no motive for secrecy on my own account, but I deemed it kind and considerate toward others to pursue this course” (Jacobs 1861, 5).

26. These two tasks are ingeniously combined, for instance, in David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, where he offers an insight into the African beliefs that have survived in the American culture. As in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, or Paule Marshall's Praise Song for the Widow, an alternative African forma mentis is offered by means of the main character’s internalizing of black cultural inheritance. Not accidentally, Bradley’s main character, Washington, is a historian, who, “in the face of the ‘gaps,’ the lacunae in the historical record assembled by his father, and of African Americans in general… feels impotent, unable to interpret, but also feels continually impelled to interpret, to imagine” (Wilson 1995, 12).