The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  —W. JACKSON BATE, “THE CRISIS IN ENGLISH STUDIES”

  Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.

  —MIKHAIL BAKHTIN, “DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL”

  They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.

  —KARL MARX, THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE

  WHAT IMPORTANCE DOES “race” have as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory? If we attempt to answer this question by examining the history of Western literature and its criticism, our initial response would probably be “nothing” or, at the very least, “nothing explicitly.” Indeed, until the past decade or so, even the most subtle and sensitive literary critics would most likely have argued that, except for aberrant moments in the history of criticism, race has not been brought to bear upon the study of literature in any apparent way. Since T. S. Eliot, after all, the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition have been defined as a more or less closed set of works that somehow speak to, or respond to, “the human condition” and to each other in formal patterns of repetition and revision. And while most critics acknowledge that judgment is not absolute and indeed reflects historically conditioned presuppositions, certain canonical works (the argument runs) do seem to transcend value judgments of the moment, speaking irresistibly to the human condition. The question of the place of texts written by the Other (be that odd metaphorical negation of the European defined as African, Arabic, Chinese, Latin American, Yiddish, or female authors) in the proper study of “literature,” “Western literature,” or “comparative literature” has, until recently, remained an unasked question, suspended or silenced by a discourse in which the canonical and the noncanonical stand as the ultimate opposition. In much of the thinking about the proper study of literature in this century, race has been an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence.

  This was not always the case, we know. By mid-nineteenth century, “national spirit” and “historical period” had become widely accepted categories within theories of the nature and function of literature which argued that the principal value in a great work of literary art resided in the extent to which these categories were reflected in that work of art. Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois considered a culture’s formal social institution as the repository of its “guiding spirit,” while Giambattista Vico’s Principi di una scienza nuova read literature against a complex pattern of historical cycles. Friedrich and August von Schlegel managed rather deftly to bring “both national spirit and historical period” to bear upon the interpretation of literature, as W. Jackson Bate has shown. But it was Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine who made the implicit explicit by postulating “race, moment, and milieu” as positivistic criteria through which any work could be read and which, by definition, any work reflected. Taine’s History of English Literature was the great foundation upon which subsequent nineteenth-century notions of “national literatures” would be constructed.

  What Taine called “race” was the source of all structures of feeling and thought: to “track the root of man,” he writes, is “to consider the race itself. . . the structure of his character and mind, his general processes of thought and feeling, . . . the irregularity and revolutions of his conception, which arrest in him the birth of fair dispositions and harmonious forms, the disdain of appearances, the desire for truth, the attachment for bare and abstract ideas, which develop in him conscience, at the expense of all else.” In race, Taine concludes, was predetermined “a particularity inseparable from all the motions of his intellect and his heart. Here lie the grand causes, for they are the universal and permanent causes, . . . indestructible, and finally infallibly supreme.” “Poetries,” as Taine puts it, and all other forms of social expression, “are in fact only the imprints stamped by their seal.”1

  Race, for Taine, was everything: “the first and richest source of these master faculties from which historical events take their rise”; it was a “community of blood and intellect which to this day binds its offshoots together.” Lest we misunderstand the naturally determining role of race, Taine concludes that it is “no simple spring but a kind of lake, a deep reservoir wherein other springs have, for a multitude of centuries, discharged their several streams.”2

  Taine’s originality lay not in his ideas about the nature and role of race but rather in their almost “scientific” application to the history of literature. These ideas about race were received from the Enlightenment, if not from the Renaissance. By 1850, ideas of irresistible racial differences were commonly held. When Abraham Lincoln invited a small group of black leaders to the White House in 1862 to present his ideas about returning all blacks in America to Africa, his argument turned upon these “natural” differences. “You and we are different races,” he said. “We have between us a broader difference than exists between any other two races.”3 Since this sense of difference was never to be bridged, Lincoln concluded, the slaves and the ex-slaves should be returned to Africa. The growth of canonical national literatures4 was coterminous with the shared assumption among intellectuals that race was a “thing,” an ineffaceable quantity, which irresistibly determined the shape and contour of thought and feeling as surely as it did the shape and contour of human anatomy.

  How did the pronounced concern for the language of the text, which defined the Practical Criticism and New Criticism movements, affect this category called race in the reading of literature? Race, along with all sorts of other “unseemly” or “untoward” notions about the composition of the literary work of art, was bracketed or suspended. Within these theories of literature to which we are all heir, texts were considered canonical insofar as they elevated the cultural; Eliot’s simultaneous ordering of the texts that comprised the Western tradition rendered race implicit. History, milieu, and even moment were then brought to bear upon the interpretation of literature through philology and etymology: the dictionary (in the Anglo-American tradition, specifically the Oxford English Dictionary) was the castle in which Taine’s criteria took refuge. Once the concept of value became encased in the belief in a canon of texts whose authors purportedly shared a common culture, inherited from both the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian traditions, there was no need to speak of matters of race, since the race of these authors was “the same.” One not heir to these traditions was, by definition, of another race.

  Despite their beliefs in the unassailable primacy of language in the estimation of a literary work, however, both I. A. Richards and Allen Tate, in separate prefaces to books of poems by black authors, paused to wonder about the black faces of the authors and the importance of that blackness in the reading of their texts.5 The racism often attributed to the Southern Agrarians, while an easily identifiable target, was only an extreme manifestation of the presuppositions forming much of the foundation upon which formalism was built. The citizens of the republic of literature, in other words, were all white, and mostly male. Difference, if difference obtained at all, was a difference obliterated by the simultaneity of Eliot’s tradition. For the writer from a culture of color, Eliot’s fiction of tradition was the literary equivalent of the “grandfather clause.”6 So, in response to the line in Robert Penn Warren’s “Pondy Woods”—“Nigger, your breed ain’t metaphysical”—Sterling Brown is fond of repeating, “Cracker, your breed ain’t exegetical.” This signifyin(g) pun deconstructs the “racialism” inherent i
n such claims of tradition.

  Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction. When we speak of “the white race” or “the black race,” “the Jewish race” or “the Aryan race,” we speak in biological misnomers and, more generally, in metaphors. Nevertheless, our conversations are replete with usages of race which have their sources in the dubious pseudoscience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One need only flip through the pages of the New York Times to find headlines such as “Brown University President Sees School Racial Problems” or “Sensing Racism, Thousands March in Paris.” In “The Lost White Tribe,” a lead editorial in the 29 March 1985 issue, the New York Times notes that while “racism is not unique to South Africa,” we must condemn that society because in “betraying the religious tenets underlying Western culture, it has made race the touchstone of political rights.” The Times editorial echoes Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility,” which he felt had been caused in large part by the fraternal atrocities of the First World War. (For many people with non-European origins, however, dissociation of sensibility resulted from colonialism and human slavery.) Race, in these usages, pretends to be an objective term of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope.

  The sense of difference defined in popular usages of the term “race” has both described and inscribed differences of language, belief system, artistic tradition, and gene pool, as well as all sorts of supposedly natural attributes such as rhythm, athletic ability, cerebration, usury, fidelity, and so forth. The relation between “racial character” and these sorts of characteristics has been inscribed through tropes of race, lending the sanction of God, biology, or the natural order to even presumably unbiased descriptions of cultural tendencies and differences. “Race consciousness,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “is a deadly explosive on the tongues of men.”7

  In 1973 I was amazed to hear a member of the House of Lords describe the differences between Irish Protestants and Catholics in terms of their “distinct and clearly definable differences of race.” “You mean to say that you can tell them apart?” I asked incredulously. “Of course,” responded the lord. “Any Englishman can.”

  Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which—more often than not—also have fundamentally opposed economic interests. Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application. The biological criteria used to determine “difference” in sex simply do not hold when applied to “race.” Yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations. To do so is to engage in a pernicious act of language, one which exacerbates the complex problem of cultural or ethnic difference, rather than to assuage or redress it. This is especially the case at a time when, once again, racism has become fashionable. The extreme “otherness” of the black African continues to surface as a matter of controversy even in such humanitarian and cosmopolitan institutions as the Roman Catholic Church. On a visit to west Africa in August, Pope John-Paul II sailed across Lake Togo to face Aveto, “supreme priest” of Togo’s traditional African religion, on the edge of the sacred forest at Togoville, the historical meeting point of the Roman Catholic and traditional black religions. It was a confrontation of primal dimensions: the Pope, accompanied by the Vatican Secretary of State and other top officials, and Aveto, accompanied by five of his chief priests and priestesses, exchanged blessings and then discussed the compatibility of their belief systems. The Pope, however, a rather vocal critic of the creative African integration of traditional black (“animist”) beliefs with those received from Rome, emerged from his confrontation with the mystical black Other in the heart of darkness, still worried about “great confusions in ideas,” “syncretistic mysticism incompatible with the Church,” and customs “contrary to the will of God,” thereby denying Africans the right to remake European religion in their own images, just as various Western cultures have done.8

  Scores of people are killed every day in the name of differences ascribed only to race. This slaughter demands the gesture in which the contributors to this special issue of Critical Inquiry are collectively engaged: to deconstruct, if you will, the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of race, to explicate discourse itself in order to reveal the hidden relations of power and knowledge inherent in popular and academic usages of “race.” But when, on 31 March 1985, twenty-five thousand people felt compelled to gather on the rue de Rivoli in support of the antiracist “Ne touche pas à mon pote” movement, when thousands of people willingly risk death to protest apartheid, when Iran and Iraq each feel justified in murdering the other’s citizens because of their “race,” when Beirut stands as a monument of shards and ruins, the gesture that we make here seems local and tiny.

  I have edited this special issue of Critical Inquiry to explore, from a variety of methodological perspectives and formal concerns, the curious dialectic between formal language use and the inscription of metaphorical racial differences. At times, as Nancy Stepan expertly shows in The Idea of Race in Science, these metaphors have sought a universal and transcendent sanction in biological science. Western writers in French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and English have tried to mystify these rhetorical figures of race, to make them natural, absolute, essential. In doing so, they have inscribed these differences as fixed and finite categories which they merely report or draw upon for authority. It takes little reflection, however, to recognize that these pseudoscientific categories are themselves figures. Who has seen a black or red person, a white, yellow, or brown? These terms are arbitrary constructs, not reports of reality. But language is not only the medium of this often insidious tendency; it is its sign. Current language use signifies the difference between cultures and their possession of power, spelling out the distance between subordinate and superordinate, between bondsman and lord in terms of their “race.” These usages develop simultaneously with the shaping of an economic order in which the cultures of color have been dominated in several important senses by Western Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman cultures and their traditions. To use contemporary theories of criticism to explicate these modes of inscription is to demystify large and obscure ideological relations and, indeed, theory itself. Before discussing the essays gathered here, it would be useful to consider a typical example of Western culture’s use of writing as a commodity to confine and delimit a culture of color. For literacy, as I hope to demonstrate, is the emblem that links racial alienation with economic alienation.

  Where better to test this thesis than in the example of the black tradition’s first poet in English, the African slave girl Phillis Wheatley, [as recounted in “In Her Own Write,” from the second section of this book]. . . . Why was the creative writing of the African of such importance to the eighteenth century’s debate over slavery? I can briefly outline one thesis: after Rene Descartes, reason was privileged, or valorized, above all other human characteristics. Writing, especially after the printing press became so widespread, was taken to be the visible sign of reason. Blacks were “reasonable,” and hence “men,” if—and only if—they demonstrated mastery of “the arts and sciences,” the eighteenth century’s formula for writing. So, while the Enlightenment is characterized by its foundation on man’s ability to reason, it simultaneously used the absence and presence of reason to delimit and circumscribe the very humanity of the cultures and people of color which Europeans had been “discovering” since the Renaissance. The urge toward the systematization of all human knowledge (by which we characterize the Enlightenment) led directly to the relegation of black people to a lower place in the great chain of being, an ancient construct that arranged all of creation on a vertical scale from plants, insects, and animals through man to the angels and God himself.

  By 1750, the chain had become minutely calibrated; the human scale rose from “the lowliest Hottentot” (black South Africans) to
“glorious Milton and Newton.” If blacks could write and publish imaginative literature, then they could, in effect, take a few “giant steps” up the chain of being in an evil game of “Mother, May I?” For example, scores of reviews of Wheatley’s book argued that the publication of her poems meant that the African was indeed a human being and should not be enslaved. Indeed, Wheatley herself was manumitted soon after her poems were published. Without question, Wheatley’s writing was learned, and its intellectual achievement was critical to the designation of her poetry as legitimate and her authorship as authentic. But implicit in her case was a hard economic fact, too. For Wheatley and other slave authors, writing was not an activity of mind; rather, it was a commodity which they could trade for their humanity.

  Blacks and other people of color could not write.

  Writing, many Europeans argued, stood alone among the fine arts as the most salient repository of “genius,” the visible sign of reason itself. In this subordinate role, however, writing, although secondary to reason, is nevertheless the medium of reason’s expression. We know reason by its writing, by its representations. Such representations could assume spoken or written form. And while several superb scholars give priority to the spoken as the privileged of the pair, most Europeans privileged writing—in their writings about Africans, at least—as the principal measure of the Africans’ humanity, their capacity for progress, their very place in the great chain of being.

  The direct correlation between economic and political alienation, on the one hand, and racial alienation, on the other, is epitomized in the following 1740 South Carolina statute that attempted to make it almost impossible for black slaves to acquire, let alone master, literacy:

  And whereas the having of slaves taught to write, or suffering them to be employed in writing, may be attending with great inconveniences;