Chart 1. Roger D. Abrahams’s Figure 1 in Talking Black, p. 46.
He could have listed several others. When black people say that “Signification is the Nigger’s occupation,” we can readily see what they mean, since mastering all of these figures of Signification is a lifetime’s work!
When a black person speaks of Signifyin(g), he or she means a “style-focused message . . . styling which is foregrounded by the devices of making a point by indirection and wit.” What is foregrounded, of course, is the signifier itself, as we have seen in the rhyme scheme of the Monkey tales. The Monkey is called the signifier because he foregrounds the signifier in his use of language. Signifyin(g), in other words, turns on the sheer play of the signifier. It does not refer primarily to the signified; rather, it refers to the style of language, to that which transforms ordinary discourse into literature. Again, one does not Signify some thing; one Signifies in some way.67
The import of this observation for the study of black literature is manifold. When I wrote earlier that the black tradition theorized about itself in the vernacular, this is what I meant in part. Signifyin(g) is the black rhetorical difference that negotiates the language user through several orders of meaning. In formal literature, what we commonly call figuration corresponds to Signification. Again, the originality of so much of the black tradition emphasizes refiguration, or repetition and difference, or troping, underscoring the foregrounding of the chain of signifiers, rather than the mimetic representation of a novel content. Critics of Afro-American, Caribbean, and African literatures, however, have far more often than not directed their attention to the signified, often at the expense of the signifier, as if the latter were transparent. This functions contrary to the principles of criticism inherent in the concept of Signifyin(g).
Thomas Kochman’s contribution to the literature on Signifyin(g) is the recognition that the Monkey is the Signifier, and that one common form of this rhetorical practice turns upon repetition and difference. Kochman also draws an important distinction between directive and expressive modes of Signification. Directive Signifyin(g), paradoxically, turns upon an indirective strategy:
. . . when the function of signifying is directive, and the tactic which is employed is one of indirection—i.e., the signifier reports or repeats what someone has said about the listener; the “report” is couched in plausible language designed to compel belief and arouse feelings of anger and hostility.68
Kochman argues that the function of this sort of claim to repetition is to challenge and reverse the status quo:
There is also the implication that if the listener fails to do anything about it—what has to be “done” is usually quite clear—his status will be seriously compromised. Thus the lion is compelled to vindicate the honor of his family by fighting or else leave the impression that he is afraid, and that he is not “king of the jungle.” When used to direct action, signifying is like shucking in also being deceptive and subtle in approach and depending for success on the naïvete or gullibility of the person being put on.69
Kochman’s definition of expressive Signifyin(g), while useful, is less inclusive than that proposed by H. Rap Brown, including as it does only negative intentions: “to arouse feelings of embarrassment, shame, frustration, or futility, for the purpose of diminishing someone’s status, but without directive implication.” Expressive Signifyin(g), Kochman continues, employs “direct” speech tactics “in the form of a taunt, as in the . . . example where the monkey is making fun of the lion.” For Kochman, Signifyin(g) implies an aggressive mode of rhetoric, a form of symbolic action that yields catharsis.70
While several other scholars have discussed the nature and function of Signifyin(g), the theories of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Geneva Smitherman are especially useful for the theory of revision that I am outlining in this chapter.71 Mitchell-Kernan’s theory of Signifyin(g) is among the most thorough and the most subtle in the linguistic literature, while Smitherman’s work connects linguistic analysis with the Afro-American literary tradition.
Mitchell-Kernan is quick to demonstrate that Signifyin(g) has received most scholarly attention as “a tactic employed in game activity—verbal dueling—which is engaged in as an end in itself,” as if this one aspect of the rhetorical concept amounted to its whole. In fact, however, “Signifying . . . also refers to a way of encoding messages or meanings which involves, in most cases, an element of indirection.” This alternative definition amounts to nothing less than a polite critique of the linguistic studies of Signifyin(g), since the subtleties of this rhetorical strategy somehow escaped most other scholars before Mitchell-Kernan. As she expands her definition, “This kind of signifying might be best viewed as an alternative message form, selected for its artistic merit, and may occur embedded in a variety of discourse. Such signifying is not focal to the linguistic interaction in the sense that it does not define the entire speech event.”72
I cannot stress too much the importance of this definition, for it shows that Signifyin(g) is a pervasive mode of language use rather than merely one specific verbal game, an observation that somehow escaped the notice of every other scholar before Mitchell-Kernan. This definition alone serves as a corrective to what I think of as the tendency among linguists who have fixed their gaze upon the aggressive ritual part and thereby avoided seeing the concept as a whole. What’s more, Mitchell-Kernan’s definition points to the implicit parallels between Signifyin(g) and the use of language that we broadly define to be figurative, by which I mean in this context an intentional deviation from the ordinary form or syntactical relation of words.73
Signifyin(g), in other words, is synonymous with figuration. Mitchell-Kernan’s work is so rich because she studied the language behavior of adults as well as adolescents, and of women as well as men. Whereas her colleagues studied lower-class male language use, then generalized from this strictly limited sample, Mitchell-Kernan’s data are derived from a sample more representative of the black speech community. Hers is a sample that does not undermine her data because it accounts for the role of age and sex as variables in language use. In addition, Mitchell-Kernan refused to be captivated by the verbal insult rituals, such as sounding, playing the dozens, and Signifyin(g), as ritual speech events, unlike other linguists whose work suffers from an undue attention to the use of words such as motherfucker, to insults that turn on sexual assertions about someone’s mama, and to supposed Oedipal complexes that arise in the literature only because the linguist is reading the figurative as a literal statement, like our friend, the Signified Lion.
These scholars, unlike Mitchell-Kernan, have mistaken the language games of adolescents as an end rather than as the drills common to classical rhetorical study as suggested in Lanham’s hypothetical synopsis quoted earlier in this chapter. As Mitchell-Kernan concludes, both the sex and the age of the linguist’s informants “may slant interpretation, particularly because the insult dimension [of Signifyin(g)] looms large in contexts where verbal dueling is focal.” In the neighborhood in which she was raised, she argues, whereas “Sounding and Playing the Dozens categorically involved verbal insult (typically joking behavior); signifying did not.” Mitchell-Kernan is declaring, most unobtrusively, that, for whatever reasons, linguists have misunderstood what Signifyin(g) means to black people who practice it. While she admits that one relatively minor aspect of this rhetorical principle involves the ritual of insult, the concept is much more profound than merely this. Indeed, Signifyin(g) alone serves to underscore the uniqueness of the black community’s use of language: “the terminological use of signifying to refer to a particular kind of language specialization defines the Black community as a speech community in contrast to non-Black communities.” Mitchell-Kernan here both critiques the work of other linguists who have wrestled unsuccessfully with this difficult concept (specifically Abrahams and Kochman), and provides an urgently needed corrective by defining Signifyin(g) as a way of figuring language. Mitchell-Kernan’s penetrating work enables Signi
fyin(g) to be even further elaborated upon for use in literary theory.74
Because it is difficult to arrive at a consensus of definitions of Signifyin(g), as this chapter already has made clear, Mitchell-Kernan proceeds “by way of analogy to inform the reader of its various meanings as applied in interpretation.” This difficulty of definition is a direct result of the fact that Signifyin(g) is the black term for what in classical European rhetoric are called the figures of signification. Because to Signify is to be figurative, to define it in practice is to define it through any number of its embedded tropes. No wonder even Mitchell-Kernan could not arrive at a consensus among her informants—except for what turns out to be the most crucial shared aspects of all figures of speech, an indirect use of words that changes the meaning of a word or words. Or, as Quintilian put it, figuration turns on some sort of “change in signification.” While linguists who disagree about what it means to Signify all repeat the role of indirection in this rhetorical strategy, none of them seems to have understood that the ensuing alteration or deviation of meaning makes Signifyin(g) the black trope for all other tropes, the trope of tropes, the figure of figures. Signifyin(g) is troping.75
Mitchell-Kernan begins her elaboration of the concept by pointing to the unique usage of the word in black discourse:
What is unique in Black English usage is the way in which signifying is extended to cover a range of meanings and events which are not covered in its Standard English usage. In the Black community it is possible to say, “He is signifying” and “Stop signifying”—sentences which would be anomalous elsewhere.76
Because in standard English signification denotes meaning and in the black tradition it denotes ways of meaning, Mitchell-Kernan argues for discrepancies between meanings of the same term in two distinct discourses:
The Black concept of signifying incorporates essentially a folk notion that dictionary entries for words are not always sufficient for interpreting meanings or messages, or that meaning goes beyond such interpretations. Complimentary remarks may be delivered in a left-handed fashion. A particular utterance may be an insult in one context and not another. What pretends to be informative may intend to be persuasive. The hearer is thus constrained to attend to all potential meaning carrying symbolic systems in speech events—the total universe of discourse.77
Signifyin(g), in other words, is the figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning. Mitchell-Kernan calls this feature of discourse an “implicit content or function, which is potentially obscured by the surface content or function.” Finally, Signifyin(g) presupposes an “encoded” intention to say one thing but to mean quite another.78
Mitchell-Kernan presents several examples of Signifyin(g), as she is defining it. Her first example is a conversation among three women about the meal to be served at dinner. One woman asks the other two to join her for dinner, that is, if they are willing to eat “chit’lins.” She ends her invitation with a pointed rhetorical question: “Or are you one of those Negroes who don’t eat chit’lins?” The third person, the woman not addressed, responds with a long defense of why she prefers “prime rib and T-bone” to “chit’lins,” ending with a traditional ultimate appeal to special pleading, a call to unity within the ranks to defeat white racism. Then she leaves. After she has gone, the initial speaker replies to her original addressee in this fashion: “Well, I wasn’t signifying at her, but like I always say, if the shoe fits wear it.” Mitchell-Kernan concludes that while the manifest subject of this exchange was dinner, the latent subject was the political orientation of two black people vis-à-vis cultural assimilation or cultural nationalism, since many middle-class blacks refuse to eat this item from the traditional black cuisine. Mitchell-Kernan labels this form of Signifyin(g) “allegory,” because “the significance or meaning of the words must be derived from known symbolic values.”79
This mode of Signifyin(g) is commonly practiced by Afro-American adults. It is functionally equivalent to one of its embedded tropes, often called louding or loud-talking, which as we might expect connotes exactly the opposite of that which it denotes: one successfully loud-talks by speaking to a second person remarks in fact directed to a third person, at a level just audible to the third person. A sign of the success of this practice is an indignant “What?” from the third person, to which the speaker responds, “I wasn’t talking to you.” Of course, the speaker was, yet simultaneously was not. Loud-talking is related to Mitchell-Kernan’s second figure of Signification, which she calls “obscuring the addressee” and which I shall call naming. Her example is one commonly used in the tradition, in which “the remark is, on the surface, directed toward no one in particular”:
I saw a woman the other day in a pair of stretch pants, she must have weighed 300 pounds. If she knew how she looked she would burn those things.80
If a member of the speaker’s audience is overweight and frequently wears stretch pants, then this message could well be intended for her. If she protests, the speaker is free to maintain that she was speaking about someone else and to ask why her auditor is so paranoid. Alternatively, the speaker can say, “if the shoe fits. . . .” Mitchell-Kernan says that a characteristic of this form of Signifyin(g) is the selection of a subject that is “selectively relevant to the speaker’s audience.”81 I once heard a black minister name the illicit behavior of specific members of his congregation by performing a magnificent reading of “The Text of the Dry Bones,” which is reading or gloss upon Ezekiel 37:1–14. Following this sermon, a prayer was offered by Lin Allen. As “Mr. Lin,” as we called him, said, “Dear Lord, go with the gambling man . . . not forgetting the gambling woman,” the little church’s eerie silence was shattered by the loud-talking voice of one of my father’s friends (Ben Fisher, rest his soul), whom the congregation “overheard” saying, “Got you that time, Gates, got you that time, Newtsy!” My father and one of our neighbors, Miss Newtsy, had been Signified upon.
Mitchell-Kernan presents several examples of Signifyin(g) that elaborate on its subtypes.82 Her conclusion is crucial to the place of her research in the literature on Signification. “Signifying,” she declares as conclusion, “does not . . . always have negative valuations attached to it; it is clearly thought of as a kind of art—a clever way of conveying messages.”83 A literary critic might call this troping, an interpretation or mis-taking of meaning, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, because, as Mitchell-Kernan maintains, “signifying . . . alludes to and implies things which are never made explicit.”84 Let me cite two brief examples. In the first, “Grace” introduces the exchange by defining its context:
(After I had my little boy, I swore I was not having any more babies. I thought four kids was a nice-sized family. But it didn’t turn out that way. I was a little bit disgusted and didn’t tell anybody when I discovered I was pregnant. My sister came over one day and I had started to show by that time.) . . .
Rochelle: Girl, you sure do need to join the Metrecal for lunch bunch.
Grace: (non-committally) Yes, I guess I am putting on a little weight.
Rochelle: Now look here, girl, we both standing here soaking wet and you still trying to tell me it ain’t raining.85
This form of Signifyin(g) is obviously a long way from the sort usually defined by scholars. One final example of the amusing, troping exchange follows, again cited by Mitchell-Kernan:
I: Man, when you gon pay me my five dollars?
II. Soon as I get it.
I: (to audience) Anybody want to buy a five dollar nigger? I got one to sell.
II: Man, if I gave you your five dollars, you wouldn’t have nothing to signify about.
I: Nigger, long as you don’t change, I’ll always have me a subject.86
This sort of exchange is common in the black community and represents Signifyin(g) at its more evolved levels than the more obvious examples (characterized by confrontation and insult) discussed by linguists other than Mitchell-Kernan.
The hig
hly evolved form of Signifyin(g) that H. Rap Brown defines and that Ralph Ellison’s anecdote about Hazel Harrison epitomizes is represented in a wonderful anecdote that Mitchell-Kernan narrates. This tale bears repeating to demonstrate how black adults teach their children to “hold a conversation”:
At the age of seven or eight I encountered what I believe was a version of the tale of the “Signifying Monkey.” In this story a monkey reports to a lion that an elephant has been maligning the lion and his family. This stirs the lion into attempting to impose sanctions against the elephant. A battle ensues in which the elephant is victor and the lion returns extremely chafed at the monkey. In this instance, the recounting of this story is a case of signifying for directive purposes. I was sitting on the stoop of a neighbor who was telling me about his adventures as a big game hunter in Africa, a favorite tall-tale topic, unrecognized by me as tall-tale at the time. A neighboring woman called to me from her porch and asked me to go to the store for her. I refused, saying that my mother had told me not to, a lie which Mr. Waters recognized and asked me about. Rather than simply saying I wanted to listen to his stories, I replied that I had refused to go because I hated the woman. Being pressured for a reason for my dislike, and sensing Mr. Waters’s disapproval, I countered with another lie, “I hate her because she say you were lazy,” attempting, I suppose, to regain his favor by arousing ire toward someone else. Although I had heard someone say that he was lazy, it had not been this woman. He explained to me that he was not lazy and that he didn’t work because he had been laid-off from his job and couldn’t find work elsewhere, and that if the lady had said what I reported, she had not done so out of meanness but because she didn’t understand. Guilt-ridden, I went to fetch the can of Milnot milk. Upon returning, the tale of the “Signifying Monkey” was told to me, a censored prose version in which the monkey is rather brutally beaten by the lion after having suffered a similar fate in the hands of the elephant. I liked the story very much and righteously approved of its ending, not realizing at the time that he was signifying at me. Mr. Waters reacted to my response with a great deal of amusement. It was several days later in the context of retelling the tale to another child that I understood its timely telling. My apology and admission of lying were met by affectionate humor, and I was told that I was finally getting to the age where I could “hold a conversation,” i.e., understand and appreciate implications.87
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