The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  Alan Dundes’s suggestion that the origins of Signifyin(g) could “lie in African rhetoric” is not as far-fetched as one might think. I have argued for a consideration of a line of descent for the Signifying Monkey from his Pan-African cousin, Esu-Elegbara. I have done so not because I have unearthed archeological evidence of a transmission process, but because of their functional equivalency as figures of rhetorical strategies and of interpretation. Esu is the Yoruba figure of writing within an oral system. Like Esu, the Signifying Monkey exists, or is figured, in a densely structured discursive universe, one absolutely dependent on the play of differences. The poetry in which the Monkey’s antics unfold is a signifying system: in marked contrast to the supposed transparency of normal speech, the poetry of these tales turns upon the free play of language itself, upon the displacement of meanings, precisely because it draws attention to its rhetorical structures and strategies and thereby draws attention to the force of the signifier.11

  In opposition to the apparent transparency of speech, this poetry calls attention to itself as an extended linguistic sign, one composed of various forms of the signifiers peculiar to the black vernacular. Meaning, in these poems, is not proffered; it is deferred, and it is deferred because the relationship between intent and meaning, between the speech act and its comprehension, is skewed by the figures of rhetoric or signification of which these poems consist. This set of skewed relationships creates a measure of undecidability within the discourse, such that it must be interpreted or decoded by careful attention to its play of differences. Never can this interpretation be definitive, given the ambiguity at work in its rhetorical structures. The speech of the Monkey exists as a sequence of signifiers, effecting meanings through their differential relation and calling attention to itself by rhyming, repetition, and several of the rhetorical figures used in larger cultural language games. Signifyin(g) epitomizes all of the rhetorical play in the black vernacular. Its self-consciously open rhetorical status, then, functions as a kind of writing, wherein rhetoric is the writing of speech, of oral discourse. If Esu is the figure of writing in Ifa, the Signifying Monkey is the figure of a black rhetoric in the Afro-American speech community. He exists to embody the figures of speech characteristic to the black vernacular. He is the principle of self-consciousness in the black vernacular, the meta-figure itself. Given the play of doubles at work in the black appropriation of the English-language term that denotes relations of meaning, the Signifying Monkey and his language of Signifyin(g) are extraordinary conventions, with Signification standing as the term for black rhetoric, the obscuring of apparent meaning.

  Scholars have for some time commented on the peculiar use of the word Signifyin(g) in black discourse. Though sharing some connotations with the standard English-language word, Signifyin(g) has rather unique definitions in black discourse. While we shall consider these definitions later in this chapter, it is useful to look briefly at one suggested by Roger D. Abrahams:

  Signifying seems to be a Negro term, in use if not in origin. It can mean any of a number of things; in the case of the toast about the signifying monkey, it certainly refers to the trickster’s ability to talk with great innuendo, to carp, cajole, needle, and lie. It can mean in other instances the propensity to talk around a subject, never quite coming to the point. It can mean making fun of a person or situation. Also it can denote speaking with the hands and eyes, and in this respect encompasses a whole complex of expressions and gestures. Thus it is signifying to stir up a fight between neighbors by telling stories; it is signifying to make fun of a policeman by parodying his motions behind his back; it is signifying to ask for a piece of cake by saying, “my brother needs a piece a cake.”12

  Essentially, Abrahams continues, Signifyin(g) is a “technique of indirect argument or persuasion,” “a language of implication,” “to imply, goad, beg, boast, by indirect verbal or gestural means.” “The name ‘signifying,’” he concludes, “shows the monkey to be a trickster, signifying being the language of trickery, that set of words or gestures achieving Hamlet’s ‘direction through indirection.’” The Monkey, in short, is not only a master of technique, as Abrahams concludes; he is technique, or style, or the literariness of literary language; he is the great Signifier. In this sense, one does not signify something; rather, one signifies in some way.13

  The Signifying Monkey poems, like the ese of the Yoruba Odu, reward careful explication; this sort of extensive practical criticism, however, is outside the scope of this book, as fascinating as it might be. The stanzaic form of this poetry can vary a great deal. The most common structure is the rhyming couplet in an a-a-b-b pattern. Even within the same poem, however, this pattern can be modified, as in the stanzas cited below, where an a-a-b-c-b and an a-b-c-b pattern obtain (followed in the latter example by an a-b-a concluding “moral”). Rhyming is extraordinarily important in the production of the humorous effect that these poems have and has become the signal indication of expertise among the street poets who narrate them. The rhythm of the poems is also crucial to the desired effect, an effect in part reinforced by their quasi-musical nature of delivery.

  The Monkey tales generally have been recorded from male poets, in predominantly male settings such as barrooms, pool halls, and street corners. Accordingly, given their nature as rituals of insult and naming, recorded versions have a phallocentric bias. As we shall see below, however, Signifyin(g) itself can be, and is, undertaken with equal facility and effect by women as well as men.14 Whereas only a relatively small number of people are accomplished narrators of Signifying Monkey tales, a remarkably large number of Afro-Americans are familiar with, and practice, modes of Signifyin(g), defined in this instance as the rubric for various sorts of playful language games, some aimed at reconstituting the subject while others are aimed at demystifying a subject. The poems are of interest to my argument primarily in three ways: as the source of the rhetorical act of Signification, as examples of the black tropes subsumed within the trope of Signifyin(g), and, crucially, as evidence for the valorization of the signifier. One of these subsumed tropes is concerned with repetition and difference; it is this trope, that of naming, which I have drawn upon as a metaphor for black intertextuality and, therefore, for formal literary history. Before discussing this process of revision, however, it is useful to demonstrate the formulaic structure of the Monkey tales and then to compare several attempts by linguists to define the nature and function of Signifyin(g). While other scholars have interpreted the Monkey tales against the binary opposition between black and white in American society, to do so is to ignore the trinary forces of the Monkey, the Lion, and the Elephant. To read the Monkey tales as a simple allegory of the black’s political oppression is to ignore the hulking presence of the Elephant, the crucial third term of the depicted action. To note this is not to argue that the tales are not allegorical or that their import is not political. Rather, this is to note that to reduce such complex structures of meaning to a simple two-term opposition (white versus black) is to fail to account for the strength of the Elephant.

  There are many versions of the toasts of the Signifying Monkey, most of which commence with a variant of the following formulaic lines:

  Deep down in the jungle so they say

  There’s a signifying monkey down the way

  There hadn’t been no disturbin’ in the jungle for quite a bit,

  For up jumped the monkey in the tree one day and laughed

  “I guess I’ll start some shit.”15

  Endings, too, tend toward the formulaic, as in the following:

  “Monkey,” said the Lion

  Beat to his unbooted knees,

  “You and your signifying children

  Better stay up in the trees.”

  Which is why today

  Monkey does his signifying

  A-way-up out of the way.16

  In the narrative poems, the Signifying Monkey invariably repeats to his friend, the Lion, some insult purportedly generated by their mutual
friend, the Elephant. The Monkey, however, speaks figuratively. The Lion, indignant and outraged, demands an apology of the Elephant, who refuses and then trounces the Lion. The Lion, realizing that his mistake was to take the Monkey literally, returns to trounce the Monkey. It is this relationship between the literal and the figurative, and the dire consequences of their confusion, which is the most striking repeated element of these tales. The Monkey’s trick depends on the Lion’s inability to mediate between these two poles of signification, of meaning. There is a profound lesson about reading here. While we cannot undertake a full reading of the poetry of the Signifying Monkey, we can, however, identify the implications for black vernacular discourse that are encoded in this poetic diction.

  Signifyin(g) as a rhetorical strategy emanates directly from the Signifying Monkey tales. The relationship between these poems and the related, but independent, mode of formal language use must be made clear. The action represented in Monkey tales turns upon the action of three stock characters—the Monkey, the Lion, and the Elephant—who are bound together in a trinary relationship. The Monkey—a trickster figure, like Esu, who is full of guile, who tells lies,17 and who is a rhetorical genius—is intent on demystifying the Lion’s self-imposed status as King of the Jungle. The Monkey, clearly, is no match for the Lion’s physical prowess; the Elephant is, however. The Monkey’s task, then, is to trick the Lion into tangling with the Elephant, who is the true King of the Jungle for everyone else in the animal kingdom. This the Monkey does with a rhetorical trick, a trick of mediation. Indeed, the Monkey is a term of (anti)mediation, as are all trickster figures, between two forces he seeks to oppose for his own contentious purposes, and then to reconcile.

  The Monkey’s trick of mediation—or, more properly, antimediation—is a play on language use. He succeeds in reversing the Lion’s status by supposedly repeating a series of insults purportedly uttered by the Elephant about the Lion’s closest relatives (his wife, his “mama,” his “grandmamma, too!”). These intimations of sexual use, abuse, and violation constitute one well-known and commonly used mode of Signifyin(g).18 The Lion, who perceives his shaky, self-imposed status as having been challenged, rushes off in outrage to find the Elephant so that he might redress his grievances and preserve appearances. The self-confident but unassuming Elephant, after politely suggesting to the Lion that he must be mistaken, proceeds to trounce the Lion firmly. The Lion, clearly defeated and dethroned from his self-claimed title, returns to find the Monkey so that he can at the very least exact some sort of physical satisfaction and thereby restore his image somewhat as the impregnable fortress-in-waiting that he so urgently wishes to be. The Monkey, absolutely ecstatic at the success of his deception, commences to Signify upon the Lion, as in the following exchange:

  Now the Lion come back more dead than alive,

  that’s when the Monkey started some more of his old signifying.

  He said, “King of the Jungles, ain’t you a bitch,

  you look like someone with the seven-year itch.”

  He said, “When you left [me earlier in the narrative] the lightnin’ flashed and the bells rung,

  you look like something been damn near hung.”

  He said, “Whup! Motherfucker, don’t you roar,

  I’ll jump down on the ground and beat your funky ass some more.”

  Say, “While I’m swinging around in my tree,”

  say, “I ought to swing over your chickenshit head and pee.”

  Say, “Everytime me and my old lady be tryin’ to get a little bit,

  here you come down through the jungle with that old ‘Hi Ho’ shit.”19

  This is a salient example of Signifyin(g), wherein a verbal fusillade of insults spews forth in a structure of ritual rhetorical exchanges.

  What happens next is also fascinating. The Monkey, at this point in the discourse deliriously pleased with himself, slips and falls to the ground:

  Now the little old Monkey was dancing all around

  his feet slipped and his ass must have hit the ground.

  The startled Monkey, now vulnerable, seeks to repair his relationship with the Lion in the most urgent manner. So he begs initially:

  Like a streak of lightning and a bolt of white heat,

  the Lion was on the Monkey with all four feet.

  Monkey looks up with tears in his eyes,

  he says, “I’m sorry, brother Lion,” say, “I apologize.”

  The Lion says, “Apologize, shit,” say, “I’m gonna stop you from your signifyin’.” (p. 165)

  The Lion now turns on the Monkey (only, incidentally, to be tricked rhetorically again), not because he has been severely beaten but because he has been beaten, then Signified upon. Another text substitutes the following direct speech of the Lion for that quoted immediately above:

  [The Lion say], “I’m not gonna whip your ass ’cause that Elephant whipped mine,

  I’m gonna whip your ass for signifyin’.” (p. 168)

  The Monkey’s trick of Signification has been to convince the hapless Lion that he has spoken literally, when all along he has spoken figuratively. The Lion, though slow-witted enough to repeat his misreading through the eternity of discourse, realizes that his status has been deflated, not because of the Elephant’s brutal self-defense but because he fundamentally misunderstood the status of the Monkey’s statements. And still another poem represents this moment of clarity:

  Said, “Monkey, I’m not kicking your ass for lyin’,

  I’m kicking your hairy ass for signifyin’.” (p. 172)20

  The black term to lie, as J. L. Dillard, Sterling A. Brown, and Zora Neale Hurston amply demonstrate, signifies tale-telling and constitutes a signal form of Signifyin(g).21 But it is the naming ritual, in which the Monkey speaks aloud his editorial recapitulation of the previous events and their import, which even the dense Lion recognizes to be his most crucial threat, and against which he must defend himself, especially since the Lion returns to the Monkey’s tree initially, at least, to impose his interpretation on his interchange with the Elephant:

  Now the Lion looked up to the Monkey, “You know I didn’t get beat.”

  He said, “You’re a lyin’ motherfucker, I had a ringside seat.”

  The Lion looked up out of his one good eye, said, “Lord, let that skinny bastard fall out of that tree before I die.” (p. 172)

  Which he, of course, does, only (in most cases) to escape once again, to return to Signify on another day:

  He said, “You might as well stop, there ain’t no use tryin’

  because no motherfucker is gonna stop me from signifyin’.” (p. 163)

  While the insult aspect of the Monkey’s discourse is important to the tales, linguists have often failed to recognize that insult is not at all central to the nature of Signifyin(g); it is merely one mode of a rhetorical strategy that has several other modes, all of which share the use of troping. They have, in other words, mistaken the trees for the forest. For Signifyin(g) constitutes all of the language games, the figurative substitutions, the free associations held in abeyance by Lacan’s or Saussure’s paradigmatic axis, which disturb the seemingly coherent linearity of the syntagmatic chain of signifiers, in a way analogous to Freud’s notion of how the unconscious relates to the conscious. The black vernacular trope of Signifyin(g) exists on this vertical axis, wherein the materiality of the signifier (the use of words as things, in Freud’s terms of the discourse of the unconscious) not only ceases to be disguised but comes to bear prominently as the dominant mode of discourse.

  I do not cite Freud idly here. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and The Interpretation of Dreams have informed my reading of Signifyin(g), just as have Lacan’s reading of Freud and Saussure, and Derrida’s emphasis on the “graphematic” aspect of even oral discourse. Just as jokes often draw upon the sounds of words rather than their meanings, so do the poetry of the Signifying Monkey and his language of Signifyin(g). Directing, or redirecting, attention from the semant
ic to the rhetorical level defines the relationship, as we have seen, between signification and Signification. It is this redirection that allows us to bring the repressed meanings of a word, the meanings that lie in wait on the paradigmatic axis of discourse, to bear upon the syntagmatic axis. This redirection toward sound, without regard for the scrambling of sense that it entails, defines what is meant by the materiality of the signifier, its thingness. As Freud explained, there is nothing necessarily infantile about this, although infants, of course, engage in such paradigmatic substitutions gleefully. Similarly, there is absolutely nothing infantile about Signifyin(g) either, except perhaps that we learn to use language in this way in adolescence, despite the strangely compulsive repetition of this adjective as a pejorative in the writings of linguists about Signifyin(g).

  If Freud’s analysis of the joke mechanism is a useful analogue for Signifyin(g), then so too is his analysis of the “dream-work,” which by now is so familiar as not to warrant summary here. The Signifying Monkey poems can usefully be thought of as quasi-dreams, or daydreams, dream narratives in which monkeys, lions, and elephants manifest their feelings in direct speech. Animals, of course, do not speak, except in dreams or in mythological discourse. As Freud puts it in The Interpretation of Dreams,

  this symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, but is characteristic of unconscious ideation, in particular among the people, and it is to be found in folklore, and in popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes, to a more complete extent than in dreams.22 (emphasis added)

  The Signifying Monkey tales, in this sense, can be thought of as versions of daydreams, the Daydream of the Black Other, chiastic fantasies of reversal of power relationships. One of the traditional Signifying poems names this relationship explicitly:

  The Monkey laid up in a tree and he thought up a scheme,

  and thought he’d try one of his fantastic dreams. (p. 167)

  To dream the fantastic is to dream the dream of the Other.