The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  Because these tales originated in slavery, we do not have to seek very far to find typological analogues for these three terms of an allegorical structure. Since to do so, inescapably, is to be reductive, is to redirect attention away from the materiality of the signifier toward its supposed signified, I shall avoid repeating what other scholars have done at such great length. For the importance of the Signifying Monkey poems is their repeated stress on the sheer materiality, and the willful play, of the signifier itself.

  While I wrote earlier in this chapter that a close reading of the Monkey tales is outside the scope of a book whose intention is to define an indigenous black metaphor for intertextuality as configured in Afro-American formal literary discourse, I am tempted to write that, like this signal trickster, I have lied! While I am forced by the demands of this book to defer such a series of readings to another text, it is necessary for me to turn to the poems, if briefly, to explain what I mean about their emphasis on the signifier and its materiality. To do so, I have drawn upon William K. Wimsatt’s well-known essay, “Rhyme and Reason,” printed in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1970), and Anthony Easthope’s equally perceptive but less well-known essay, “The Feudal Ballad,” printed in his Poetry as Discourse (1983).

  Easthope’s analysis of the structure of the English ballad dovetails nicely with my analysis of the structure of the Signifying Monkey tales. Because Easthope’s crucial point of departure is a passage from Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales, let me repeat it here:

  The method of language is like that of oral poetry, substituting in the framework of the grammar. Without the metrical restrictions of verse, language substitutes one subject for another in the nominative case, keeping the same verb, or keeping the same noun, it substitutes one verb for another.23

  Lord defines “substitutions,” as Easthope explains, similarly to what Saussure identified as the paradigmatic axis, while Lord’s “framework of the grammar” corresponds to the syntagmatic axis. Easthope’s summary of the defining features of the “discourse exemplified in the ballad” reveals an identity with those of the discourse of the Monkey tales:

  [The] syntagmatic chain does not aim for tight closure and rigid subordination of elements in a linear development; rather it works through juxtaposition, addition and parallel, typically . . . in binary and trinary patterns.

  [Disruption] in the syntagmatic chain means that the discourse of the ballad does not offer transparent access to the enounced [énoncé, the narrated event, as opposed to enunciation (enonciation), the speech event], and so no fixed position is offered to the reader as subject of the enounced.24

  Like the ballad, “vocabulary and phrasing” of the Monkey poem is “colloquial, monosyllabic and everyday.” Even more important to our discussion of language use in the Monkey poems, however, are the three aspects that Easthope locates in the operation of the ballad’s syntagmatic chain. These are intertextuality, stanzaic units, and incremental repetition.25

  Intertextuality

  As is apparent from even a cursory reading of the various Signifying Monkey poems, each poem refers to other poems of the same genre. The artistry of the oral narrator of these poems does not depend on his or her capacity to dream up new characters or events that define the actions depicted; rather, it depends on his or her display of the ability to group together two lines that end in words that sound alike, that bear a phonetic similarity to each other. This challenge is great when key terms are fixed, such as the three characters’ identities and their received relationship to each other. Accordingly, all sorts of formulaic phrases recur across these poems, but (re)placed in distinct parts of a discrete poem.

  One example demonstrates this clearly, especially if we recall that intertextuality represents a process of repetition and revision, by definition. A number of shared structural elements are repeated, with differences that suggest familiarity with other texts of the Monkey. For example, the placement of the figure “forty-four” is an instance of a formulaic phrase being repeated from poem to poem—because it has achieved a formulaic insistency—but repeated in distinct ways. For instance, the following lines in one poem:

  The Lion jumped back with a mighty roar,

  his tail stuck out like a forty-four,

  he breezed down through the jungle in a hell of a breeze,

  knockin’ giraffes to their knees. (p. 162)

  are refigured in another poem in this way:

  And the Lion knew that he didn’t play the Dozens

  and he knew the Elephant wasn’t none of his cousins,

  so he went through the jungle with a mighty roar,

  poppin’ his tail like a forty-four,

  knockin’ giraffes to their knees

  and knockin’ coconuts from the trees. (p. 164)

  and in another poem in this way:

  The Lion got so mad he jump up trimmin’ the trees,

  chopped baby giraffes, monkeys down on their knees.

  He went on down the jungle way a jumpin’ and pawin’

  poppin’ his tail worse in’ a forty-four. (p. 166)

  It is as if a received structure of crucial elements provides a base for poeisis, and the narrator’s technique, his or her craft, is to be gauged by the creative (re)placement of these expected or anticipated formulaic phrases and formulaic events, rendered anew in unexpected ways. Precisely because the concepts represented in the poem are shared, repeated, and familiar to the poet’s audience, meaning is devalued while the signifier is valorized. Value, in this art of poeisis, lies in its foregrounding rather than in the invention of a novel signified. We shall see how the nature of the rhyme scheme also stresses the materiality and the priority of the signifier. Let me add first, however, that all other common structural elements are repeated with variations across the texts that, together, comprise the text of the Monkey. In other words, there is no fixed text of these poems; they exist as a play of differences.

  Stanzaic Units

  Every Signifying Monkey poem is characterized by at least two predominant features of stanzaic structure: an introductory formulaic frame and a concluding formulaic frame, as well as a progression of rhyming couplets, each of which usually relates to the next in a binary pattern of a-a-b-b rhyme, although occasionally a pattern of a-a-b-b-c or a-a-b-c-c appears, especially to include a particular vivid (visual) or startling (aural) combination of signifiers. The frame consists of a variation of the following:

  Say deep down in the jungle in the coconut grove

  lay the Signifying Monkey in his one-button roll.

  Now the hat he wore was on the Esquire fold.

  his shoes was on a triple-A last.

  You could tell that he was a pimping motherfucker

  by the way his hair was gassed. (p. 162)

  He said, “Well, Brother Lion, the day have come at last,

  that I have found a limb to fit your ass.”

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

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

  I shall turn to the nature of the rhyme scheme and its import below.

  Incremental Repetition

  Incremental repetition in these poems assumes the form of the repeated binary structure of rhyming couplets, which function as narrative units in isolation or with a second or third set of couplets, and as larger narrative units in a tertiary relation that is contained within the binary frame described above. The frame defines a problem, the Monkey’s irritation at the Lion’s roaring, which disturbs the Monkey’s connubial habits, and ends with some sort of resolution of that problem. The tertiary relation of the intervening narrative units turns upon the repetition of confrontation and engagement: the Monkey engages the Lion by repeating insults purportedly said by the Elephant; next, the Lion rushes off helter-skelter and challenges the Elephant to a confrontation that the Lion loses; finally, the Lion returns to the scene of the crime, the Monkey’s tree, and enga
ges the Monkey, who insults the Lion, slips from his protective branch, then usually escapes certain defeat by tricking the Lion again with a Signifyin(g) challenge, such as the following:

  The Monkey said, “I know you think you raisin’ hell,

  but everybody seen me when I slipped and fell.

  But if you let me get my nuts up out of this sand

  I’ll fight you just like a natural man.”

  This tertiary repetition of confrontation-engagement-resolution occurs in representations of direct speech. The Lion’s combat with the Elephant is balanced by the Lion’s combat with the Monkey. Stasis is relieved by the Monkey’s trick of mediation, his rhetorical play on the Lion’s incapacity to read his utterance, a flaw that enables the Monkey to scramble back to his protective limb, only to continue to Signify.

  The most important aspect of language use in these poems, however, is the nature of its rhymes. Here we can draw upon Wimsatt’s analysis of the rhymes of Pope and Easthope’s analysis of the feudal ballad to elucidate the import of the rhyme in the Monkey tales.

  Wimsatt points out perceptively that Pope’s rhyming words tend to be different parts of speech, while Chaucer’s depend on the coincidence of parts of speech.

  Pope’s rhymes are characterized by difference in parts of speech or in function of the same parts of speech, the difference in each case being accentuated by the tendency of his couplets to parallel structure.26

  Easthope argues that “Such rhyming works to throw a stress upon the meaning so that meaning dominates sound and the rhyme is subordinated.” Such a rhyme scheme, he continues, implicitly emphasizes the crucial role of the phonetic in the production of meaning: “relative to subordination, coincidence in rhyme emphasizes the phonetic, so acknowledging the dependence of signified [on] signifier.” “Coincident rhyme,” on the other hand, “foregrounds the signifier.”27

  While both coincidence and subordination occur in the Monkey tales, coincidence tends to occur more frequently, especially in the use of nouns to end a line. “Phonetic similarity,” as Easthope maintains, links two words “at the level of the signifier.” When rhymes of the same parts of speech coincide, as in Chaucer’s poetry, the signifier and the signified are “in a relationship of equality” rather than subordination, such that “meaning is allowed to follow sound as much as sound does meaning.” The dominance of rhymes of the same parts of speech in the Monkey poems, then, serves to italicize the role of the signifier, and its materiality, by flaunting, as it were, “the dependence of the signified on the signifier.” As anyone who has heard these poems recited fully appreciates, they take their received meaning for granted and depend for their marvelous effect on the sheer play of the signifier.28

  What does such a foregrounding of the signifier imply for black vernacular discourse? We must remember that the Signifying Monkey tales are the repositories of the black vernacular tradition’s rhetorical principles, coded dictionaries of black tropes. First, the Monkey “tropes-a-dope,” the Lion, by representing a figurative statement as a literal statement, depending on the Lion’s thickness to misread the difference. Second, the ensuing depiction of action depends on the stress of phonetic similarity between signifiers. These poems flaunt the role of the signifier in relation to the signified, allowing it its full status as an equal in their relationship, if not the superior partner. Where meaning is constant, the (re)production of this fixed meaning, by definition, foregrounds the play of the signifier. Signifyin(g), then, is the sign of rule in the kingdom of Signification: neither the Lion nor the Elephant—both Signifieds, those Signified upon—is the King of the Jungle; rather, the Monkey is King, the Monkey as Signifier.

  If the rhyme pattern of the poems depends on coincidence more often than subordination, then the Monkey’s process of Signifyin(g) turns upon repetition and difference, or repetition and reversal. There are so many examples of Signifyin(g) in jazz that one could write a formal history of its development on this basis alone. One early example is relatively familiar: Jelly Roll Morton’s 1938 recording entitled “Maple Leaf Rag (A Transformation)” Signifies upon Scott Joplin’s signature composition, “Maple Leaf Rag,” recorded in 1916. Whereas Joplin played its contrasting themes and their repetitions in the form of AABBACCDD, Morton “embellishes the piece two-handedly, with a swinging introduction (borrowed from the ending to A), followed by ABACCD (a hint of the tango here) D (a real New Orleans ‘stomp’ variation),” as Martin Williams observes. Morton’s piano imitates “a trumpet-clarinet right hand and a trombone-rhythm left hand.”29 Morton’s composition does not “surpass” or “destroy” Joplin’s; it complexly extends and tropes figures present in the original. Morton’s Signification is a gesture of admiration and respect. It is this aspect of Signifyin(g) that is inscribed in the black musical tradition in jazz compositions such as Oscar Peterson’s “Signify” and Count Basie’s “Signifyin’.”

  In these compositions, the formal history of solo piano styles in jazz is recapitulated, delightfully, whereby one piano style follows its chronological predecessor in the composition itself, so that boogie-woogie, stride, and blues piano styles—and so on—are represented in one composition as histories of the solo jazz piano, histories of its internal repetition and revision process. Improvisation, of course, so fundamental to the very idea of jazz, is “nothing more” than repetition and revision. In this sort of revision, again where meaning is fixed, it is the realignment of the signifier that is the signal trait of expressive genius. The more mundane the fixed text (“April in Paris” by Charlie Parker, “My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane), the more dramatic is the Signifyin(g) revision. It is this principle of repetition and difference, this practice of intertextuality, which has been so crucial to the black vernacular forms of Signifyin(g), jazz—and even its antecedents, the blues, the spirituals, and ragtime—and which is the source of my trope for black intertextuality in the Afro-American formal literary tradition.

  III

  Signifyin(g): Definitions

  Signifyin(g) is so fundamentally black, that is, it is such a familiar rhetorical practice, that one encounters the great resistance of inertia when writing about it. By inertia I am thinking here of the difficulty of rendering the implications of a concept that is so shared in one’s culture as to have long ago become second nature to its users. The critic is bound to encounter Ralph Ellison’s “Little Man at Chehaw Station.”30

  Who is he? Ellison tells a marvelous story about himself when he was a student of music at Tuskegee. Having failed at an attempt to compensate for a lack of practice with a virtuoso style of performance, Ellison had sought some solace from the brilliant Hazel Harrison, one of his professors, with whom he had a sustained personal relationship. Instead of solace, however, his friend and mentor greeted his solicitation with a riddle. The exchange is relevant here:

  “All right,” she said, “you must always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there’ll always be a little man hidden behind the stove.”

  “A what?”

  She nodded. “That’s right,” she said, “there’ll always be the little man whom you don’t expect, and he’ll know the music, and the tradition, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform!”31

  This little man, who appears at such out-of-the-way places as the Chehaw Railroad Station, is, of course, a trickster figure surfacing when we least expect him, at a crossroads of destiny. This particular little man evokes Esu, the little man whose earthly dwelling place is the crossroads, as indicated in the following excerpts from a Yoruba poem:

  Latopa, Esu little man

  Latopa, Esu little man

  Short, diminutive man

  Tiny, little man.

  He uses both hands to sniffle!

  We call him master

  He who sacrifices without inviting the manumitter

  Will find his sacrifice unacceptable

  Manumitter, I call
on you.

  Man by the roadside, bear our sacrifice to heaven directly

  Master, and son of the owner of Idere

  Who came from Idere to found the town,

  The son of the energetic small fellow

  The little man who cleans the gates for the masquerade.

  Elderly spirit deity!32

  The “little man” or woman is bound to surface when the literary critic begins to translate a signal concept from the black vernacular milieu into the discourse of critical theory. While critics write for writers and other critics, they also write—in this instance—for “little” men and women who dwell at the crossroads.

  The critic of comparative black literature also dwells at a sort of crossroads, a discursive crossroads at which two languages meet, be these languages Yoruba and English, or Spanish and French, or even (perhaps especially) the black vernacular and standard English. This sort of critic would seem, like Esu, to live at the intersection of these crossroads. When writing a book that lifts one concept from two discrete discursive realms, only to compare them, the role of the critic as the trickster of discourse seems obvious. The concept of Signification is such an instance.

  What Ellison’s professor did to him was a salient example of Signifyin(g). His professor, subtle and loving as she must have been, Signified upon her young protégé so that he would never allow himself to succumb to the lure of the temptation to skip the necessary gates placed in the apprentice’s path, gates which must somehow be opened or hurdled. Ellison was Signified upon because his dilemma was resolved through an allegory. This mode of rhetorical indirection, as Roger D. Abrahams and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan have defined it, is a signal aspect of Signifyin(g). Despite its highly motivated, often phallocentric orientation, then, Signifyin(g), it is clear, can mean any number of modes of rhetorical play.

  An article printed in the New York Times on April 17, 1983, entitled “Test on Street Language Says It’s Not Grant in That Tomb,” affords an opportunity to expand somewhat on received definitions of Signifyin(g). The test referred to in the story’s title is one created by “some high school students” in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, “who were dismayed at [McGraw-Hill’s] own standardized tests.” The examination, a multiple-choice intelligence test, is entitled “The In Your Face Test of No Certain Skills.” It was created shortly after the students told their teacher, Rob Slater, that “they had trouble relating to a standardized achievement test.” As Slater explains, “They were taking one of these tests one day and one of my students looked up and asked what the reason for the test was, because all it did to him was make him feel academically inferior. After the test was over,” Slater concludes, “I asked them if they wanted to get even. They took it from there.”33