The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  It’s a tendency that puts me in mind of my father’s favorite story about Father Divine, that historic con-man of the cloth. In the 1930s he was put on trial for using the mails to defraud, I think, and was convicted. At sentencing, Father Divine stood up and told the judge: I’m warning you, you send me to jail, something terrible is going to happen to you. Father Divine, of course, was sent to prison, and a week later, by sheer coincidence, the judge had a heart attack and died. When the warden and the guards found out about it in the middle of the night, they raced to Father Divine’s cell and woke him up. Father Divine, they said, your judge just dropped dead of a heart attack. Without missing a beat, Father Divine lifted his head and told them: “I hated to do it.”

  As writers, teachers, or intellectuals, most of us would like to claim greater efficacy for our labors than we’re entitled to. These days, literary criticism likes to think of itself as “war by other means.” But it should start to wonder: Have its victories come too easily? The recent move toward politics and history in literary studies has turned the analysis of texts into a marionette theater of the political, to which we bring all the passions of our real-world commitments. And that’s why it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the distance from the classroom to the streets. Academic critics write essays, “readings” of literature, where the bad guys (for example, racism or patriarchy) lose, where the forces of oppression are subverted by the boundless powers of irony and allegory that no prison can contain, and we glow with hard-won triumph. We pay homage to the marginalized and demonized, and it feels almost as if we’ve righted a real-world injustice. I always think of the folktale about the fellow who killed seven with one blow.

  Ours was the generation that took over buildings in the late sixties and demanded the creation of black and women’s studies programs, and now, like the return of the repressed, has come back to challenge the traditional curriculum. And some of us are even attempting to redefine the canon by editing anthologies. Yet it sometimes seems that blacks are doing better in the college curriculum than they are in the streets.

  This is not a defeatist moan. Just an acknowledgment that the relation between our critical postures and the social struggles they reflect upon is far from transparent. That doesn’t mean there’s no relation, of course, only that it’s a highly mediated one. In any event, I do think we should be clear about when we’ve swatted a fly and when we’ve toppled a giant.

  In the swaddling clothes of our academic complacencies, few of us are prepared when we bump against something hard, and sooner or later, we do. One of the first talks I ever gave was to a packed audience at the Howard University Honors Seminar, and it was one of those mistakes you don’t do twice. Fresh out of graduate school, immersed in the arcane technicalities of contemporary literary theory, I was going to deliver a crunchy structuralist analysis of a slave narrative by Frederick Douglass, tracing the intricate play of its “binary oppositions.” Everything was neatly schematized, formalized, analyzed; this was my Sunday-best structuralism, crisp white shirt and shiny black shoes. And it wasn’t playing. If you’ve seen an audience glaze over, this was double-glazing. Bravely, I finished my talk and, of course, asked for questions. Long silence. Finally, a young man in the very back of the room stands up and says, “Yeah, brother, all we want to know is, was Booker T. a Tom or not?”

  The funny thing is, this happens to be an interesting question, a lot more interesting than my talk was. And while I didn’t exactly appreciate it at the time, the exchange did draw my attention, a little rudely perhaps, to the yawning chasm between our critical discourse and the traditions they discourse on. You know—Is there a canon in this class? People often like to represent the high canonical texts as the reading matter of the power elite. I mean, you have to try to imagine James Baker curling up with the Four Quartets, Dan Quayle leafing through the Princess Cassimassima. I suppose this is the vision, anyway. What’s wrong with this picture? Now, Louis L’Amour or Ian Fleming, possibly. But that carries us a ways from the high canonical.

  When I think back to that Howard talk, I think back to why I went into the study of literature in the first place. I suppose the literary canon is, in no very grand sense, the commonplace book of our shared culture, in which we have written down the texts and titles that we want to remember, that had some special meaning for us. How else did those of us who teach literature fall in love with our subject than through our own commonplace books, in which we inscribed, secretly and privately, as we might do in a diary, those passages of books that named for us what we had for so long deeply felt, but could not say? I kept mine from the age of twelve, turning to it to repeat those marvelous passages that named myself in some private way. From H. H. Munro and O. Henry—I mean, some of the popular literature we had on the shelves at home—to Dickens and Austen, to Hugo and de Maupassant, I found resonant passages that I used to inscribe in my book. Finding James Baldwin and writing him down at an Episcopal church camp during the Watts riots in 1965 (I was fifteen) probably determined the direction of my intellectual life more than did any other single factor. I wrote and rewrote verbatim his elegantly framed paragraphs, full of sentences that were at once somehow Henry Jamesian and King Jamesian, yet clothed in the cadences and figures of the spirituals. I try to remind my graduate students that each of us turned to literature through literal or figurative commonplace books, a fact that we tend to forget once we adopt the alienating strategies of formal analysis. The passages in my commonplace book formed my own canon, just as I imagine each of yours did for you. And a canon, as it has functioned in every literary tradition, has served as the commonplace book of our shared culture.

  But the question I want to turn to now is this: How does the debate over canon formation affect the development of African-American literature as a subject of instruction in the American academy?

  Curiously enough, the first use of the word canon in relation to the African-American literary tradition occurs in 1846, in a speech delivered by Theodore Parker. Parker was a theologian, a Unitarian clergyman, and a publicist for ideas, whom Perry Miller described eloquently as “the man who next only to Emerson . . . was to give shape and meaning to the Transcendental movement in America.” In a speech on “The Mercantile Classes” delivered in 1846, Parker laments the sad state of “American” letters:

  Literature, science, and art are mainly in [poor men’s] hands, yet are controlled by the prevalent spirit of the nation. . . . In England, the national literature favors the church, the crown, the nobility, the prevailing class. Another literature is rising, but is not yet national, still less canonized. We have no American literature which is permanent. Our scholarly books are only an imitation of a foreign type: they do not reflect our morals, manners, politics, or religion, not even our rivers, mountains, sky. They have not the smell of our ground in their breath.

  Parker, to say the least, was not especially pleased with American letters and their identity with the English tradition. Did Parker find any evidence of a truly American literature?

  The American literature is found only in newspapers and speeches, perhaps in some novel, hot, passionate, but poor and extemporaneous. That is our national literature. Does that favor man—represent man? Certainly not. All is the reflection of this most powerful class. The truths that are told are for them, and the lies. Therein the prevailing sentiment is getting into the form of thoughts.

  Parker’s analysis, we see plainly, turns upon an implicit reflection theory of base and superstructure. It is the occasional literature, “poor and extemporaneous,” wherein “American” literature dwells, but a literature, like English literature, which reflects the interests and ideologies of the upper classes.

  Three years later, in his major oration on “The American Scholar,” Parker had at last found an entirely original genre of American literature:

  Yet, there is one portion of our permanent literature, if literature it may be called, which is wholly indigenous and original. . . . [W]e ha
ve one series of literary productions that could be written by none but Americans, and only here; I mean the Lives of Fugitive Slaves. But as these are not the work of the men of superior culture they hardly help to pay the scholar’s debt. Yet all the original romance of Americans is in them, not in the white man’s novel.

  Parker was right about the originality, the peculiarly American quality, of the slave narratives. But he was wrong about their inherent inability to “pay the scholar’s debt”; scholars had only to learn to read the narratives for their debt to be paid in full. Parker was put off by the language of the slaves’ narratives. He would have done well to heed the admonition that Emerson had made in his 1844 speech, “Emancipation in the British West Indies”: “Language,” Emerson wrote, “must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro slavery has been.” The narratives, for Parker, were not instances of great literature, but they were a prime site of America’s “original romance.” As Charles Sumner said in 1852, the fugitive slaves and their narratives “are among the heroes of our age. Romance has no storms of more thrilling interest than theirs. Classical antiquity has preserved no examples of adventurous trial more worthy of renown.” Parker’s and Sumner’s divergent views reveal that the popularity of the narratives in antebellum America most certainly did not reflect any sort of common critical agreement about their nature and status as art. Still, the implications of these observations upon black canon formation would not be lost upon those who would soon seek to free the black slave, or to elevate the ex-slave, through the agency of literary production.

  Johann Herder’s ideas of the “living spirit of a language” were brought to bear with a vengeance upon eighteenth- and nineteenth-century considerations of the place in nature of the black. Indeed the relationship between the social and political subjectivity of the Negro and the production of art had been discussed by a host of commentators, including Hume, Hegel, and Kant, since Morgan Godwyn wondered aloud about it in 1684. But it was probably Emerson’s comments that generated our earliest efforts at canon formation. As Emerson said, again in his speech on “Emancipation in the West Indies”:

  If [racial groups] are rude and foolish, down they must go. When at last in a race a new principle appears, an idea—that conserves it; ideas only save races. If the black man is feeble and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve, and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization; for the sake of that element, no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him; he will survive and play his part. . . . [N]ow let [the blacks] emerge, clothed and in their own form.

  The forms in which they would be clothed would be registered in anthologies that established the canon of black American literature.

  The first attempt to define a black canon that I have found is that by Armand Lanusse, who edited Les Cenelles, an anthology of black French verse published at New Orleans in 1845—the first black anthology, I believe, ever published. Lanusse’s introduction is a defense of poetry as an enterprise for black people, in their larger efforts to defend the race against “the spiteful and calumnious arrows shot at us,” at a target defined as the collective black intellect. Despite this stated political intention, these poems imitate the styles and themes of the French Romantics, and never engage directly the social and political experiences of black Creoles in New Orleans in the 1840s. Les Cenelles argues for a political effect—that is, the end of racism—by publishing apolitical poems, poems which share as silent second texts the poetry written by Frenchmen three thousand miles away. We are just like the French—so, treat us like Frenchmen, not like blacks. An apolitical art being put to uses most political.

  Four years later, in 1849, William G. Allen published an anthology in which he canonized Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton. Like Lanusse, Allen sought to refute intellectual racism by the act of canon formation. “The African’s called inferior,” he wrote. “But what race has ever displayed intellect more exaltedly, or character more sublime?” Pointing to the achievements of Pushkin, Placido, and Augustine, as the great “African” tradition to which African-Americans were heir, Allen claimed Wheatley and Horton as the exemplars of this tradition, Horton being “decidedly the superior genius,” no doubt because of his explicitly racial themes, a judgment quite unlike that which propelled Armand Lanusse into canon formation. As Allen put it, with the publication of their anthology:

  Who will now say that the African is incapable of attaining to intellectual or moral greatness? What he now is, degrading circumstances have made him. What he is capable of becoming, the past clearly evinces. The African is strong, tough and hardy. Hundreds of years of oppression have not subdued his spirit, and though Church and State have combined to enslave and degrade him, in spite of them all, he is increasing in strength and power, and in the respect of the entire world.

  Here, then, we see the poles of black canon formation, established firmly by 1849: Is “black” poetry racial in theme, or is “black” poetry any sort of poetry written by black people? This quandary has been at play in the tradition ever since.

  I won’t trace in detail the history of this tension over definitions of the African-American canon, and the direct relation between the production of black poetry and the end of white racism. Suffice it to point to such seminal attempts at canon formation in the 1920s as James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), and V. F. Calverton’s An Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929), each of which defined as its goal the demonstration of the existence of the black tradition as a political defense of the racial self against racism. As Johnson put it so clearly:

  A people may be great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art that they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

  The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.

  Johnson, here, was echoing racialist arguments that had been used against blacks since the eighteenth century, especially those by Hume, Kant, Jefferson, and Hegel, which equated our access to natural rights with our production of literary classics. The Harlem Renaissance, in fact, can be thought of as a sustained attempt to combat racism through the very production of black art and literature.

  Johnson’s and Calverton’s anthologies “frame” the Renaissance period, making a comparison between their ideological concerns useful. Calverton’s anthology made two significant departures from Johnson’s model, both of which are worth considering, if only briefly. Calverton’s was the first attempt at black canon formation to provide for the influence and presence of black vernacular literature in a major way. “Spirituals,” “Blues,” and “Labor Songs” each comprised a genre of black literature for him. We all understand the importance of this gesture and the influence it had upon Sterling Brown, Arthur Davis, and Ulysses Lee, the editors of The Negro Caravan (1941). Calverton, whose real name was George Goetz, announced in his introductory essay, “The Growth of Negro Literature,” that his selection principles had been determined by his sense of the history of black literary forms, leading him to make selections because of their formal “representative value,” as he put it. These forms, he continued, were Negro forms, virtually self-contained in a hermetic black tradition, especially in the vernacular tradition, where artistic American originality was to be found
:

  . . . [I]t is no exaggeration whatsoever to contend that [the Negro’s contributions to American art and literature] are more striking and singular in substance and structure than any contributions that have been made by the white man to American culture. In fact, they constitute America’s chief claim to originality in its cultural history. . . . The white man in America has continued, and in an inferior manner, a culture of European origin. He has not developed a culture that is definitely and unequivocally American. In respect of originality, then, the Negro is more important in the growth of American culture than the white man. . . . While the white man has gone to Europe for his models, and is seeking still a European approval of his artistic endeavors, the Negro in his art forms has never sought the acclaim of any culture other than his own. This is particularly true of those forms of Negro art that come directly from the people.

  And note that Calverton couched his argument in just that rhetoric of nationalism, of American exceptionalism, that had long been used to exclude, or anyway occlude, the contribution of the Negro. In an audacious reversal, it turns out that only the Negro is really American, the white man being a pale imitation of his European forebears.

  If Calverton’s stress upon the black vernacular heavily influenced the shaping of The Negro Caravan—certainly one of the most important anthologies in the tradition—his sense of the black canon as a formal self-contained entry most certainly did not. As the editors put it in the introduction to the volume:

  [We] . . . do not believe that the expression “Negro literature” is an accurate one, and . . . have avoided using it. “Negro literature” has no application if it means structural peculiarity, or a Negro school of writing. The Negro writes in the forms evolved in English and American literature. . . . The editors consider Negro writers to be American writers, and literature by American Negroes to be a segment of American literature. . . .