The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader
Page 38
Black people call this kind of lesson “schooling,” and this label denotes its function. The child must learn to hold a conversation. We cannot but recall Richard Lanham’s ideal presentation of rhetorical training and conclude that what Mr. Waters says to the child, Claudia, is analogous to an adult teacher of rhetoric attempting to show his pupils how to employ the tropes that they have memorized in an act of communication and its interpretation. This subtle process of instruction in the levels of Signification is related to, but far removed from, adolescent males insulting each other with the Signifying Monkey tales. The language of Signifyin(g), in other words, is a strategy of black figurative language use.
I have been drawing a distinction between the ritual of Signifyin(g), epitomized in the Monkey tales, and the language of Signifyin(g), which is the vernacular term for the figurative use of language. These terms correspond to what Mitchell-Kernan calls “third-party signifying” and “metaphorical signifying.” Mitchell-Kernan defines their distinction as follows:
In the metaphorical type of signifying, the speaker attempts to transmit his message indirectly and it is only by virtue of the hearers defining the utterance as signifying that the speaker’s intent (to convey a particular message) is realized. In third-party signifying, the speaker may realize his aim only when the converse is true, that is, if the addressee fails to recognize the speech act as signifying. In [the Signifying Monkey toast] the monkey succeeds in goading the lion into a rash act because the lion does not define the monkey’s message as signifying.88
In other words, these two dominant modes of Signification function conversely, another sign of the maturation process demanded to move, as it were, from the repetition of tropes to their application.
The Monkey tales inscribe a dictum about interpretation, whereas the language of Signifyin(g) addresses the nature and application of rhetoric. The import of the Monkey tales for the interpretation of literature is that the Monkey dethrones the Lion only because the Lion cannot read the nature of his discourse. As Mitchell-Kernan argues cogently, “There seems something of symbolic relevance from the perspective of language in this poem. The monkey and lion do not speak the same language; the lion is not able to interpret the monkey’s use of language, he is an outsider, un-hip, in a word.” In other words, the monkey speaks figuratively, while the Lion reads his discourse literally. For his act of misinterpretation, he suffers grave consequences. This valorization of the figurative is perhaps the most important moral of these poems, although the Monkey’s mastery of figuration has made him one of the canonical heroes in the Afro-American mythic tradition, a point underscored by Mitchell-Kernan.89
Mitchell-Kernan’s summary of the defining characteristics of “Signifying as a Form of Verbal Art” helps to clarify this most difficult, and elusive, mode of rhetoric. We can outline these characteristics for convenience. The most important defining features of Signifyin(g) are “indirect intent” and “metaphorical reference.” This aspect of indirection is a formal device, and “appears to be almost purely stylistic”; moreover, “its art characteristics remain in the forefront.” Signifyin(g), in other words, turns upon the foregrounding of the Signifier. By “indirection” Mitchell-Kernan means
that the correct semantic (referential interpretation) or signification of the utterance cannot be arrived at by a consideration of the dictionary meaning of the lexical items involved and the syntactic rules for their combination alone. The apparent significance of the message differs from its real significance. The apparent meaning of the sentence signifies its actual meaning.90
The relationship between latent and manifest meaning is a curious one, as determined by the formal properties of the Signifyin(g) utterance. In one of several ways, manifest meaning directs attention away from itself to another, latent level of meaning. We might compare this relationship to that which obtains between the two parts of a metaphor, tenor (the inner meaning) and vehicle (the outer meaning).
Signifyin(g), according to Mitchell-Kernan, operates so delightfully because “apparent meaning serves as a key which directs hearers to some shared knowledge, attitudes, and values or signals that reference must be produced metaphorically.” The decoding of the figurative, she continues, depends “upon shared knowledge . . . and this shared knowledge operates on two levels.” One of these two levels is that the speaker and his audience realize that “signifying is occurring and that the dictionary-syntactical meaning of the utterance is to be ignored.” In addition, a silent second text, as it were, which corresponds rightly to what Mitchell-Kernan is calling “shared knowledge,” must be brought to bear upon the manifest content of the speech act and “employed in the reinterpretation of the utterance.” Indeed, this element is of the utmost importance in the esthetics of Signifyin(g), for “it is the cleverness used in directing the attention of the hearer and audience to this shared knowledge upon which a speaker’s artistic talent is judged.” Signifyin(g), in other words, depends on the success of the signifier at invoking an absent meaning ambiguously “present” in a carefully wrought statement.91
As I have attempted to show, there is much confusion and disagreement among linguists about the names and functions of the classical black tropes. While the specific terminology may vary from scholar to scholar, city to city, or generation to generation, however, the rhetorical functions of these tropes remain consistent. It is a fairly straightforward exercise to compare the black slave tropes to the master tropes identified by Vico, Nietzsche, Burke, and Bloom, and to map a black speech act, such as Signifyin(g), into its component Western tropes. Chart 2 is intended to Signify upon Harold Bloom’s “map of misprision.”92 I echo the essence of this map here, adding columns that list the Yoruba and Afro-American tropes that correspond to their Western counterparts.
We can, furthermore, chart our own map, in which we graph the separate lines of a “Signifyin(g) Riff,” as follows:93
Slave Trope of Tropes, Signifyin(g)
Your mama’s a man (metaphor)
Your daddy’s one too (irony)
They live in a tin can (metonymy)
That smells like a zoo (synecdoche)
The fact that the street rhymes of blacks and their received rhetorical tropes configure into the categories of classical Western rhetoric should come as no surprise. Indeed, this aspect of black language use recalls Montaigne’s statement, in “Of the Vanity of Words,” that “When you hear people talk about metonymy, metaphor, allegory, and other such names in grammar, doesn’t it seem that they mean some rare and exotic form of language?” Rather, Montaigne concludes, “They are terms that apply to the babble of your chambermaid.”94 We can add that these terms also apply to the rapping of black kids on street corners, who recite and thereby preserve the classical black rhetorical structures.
Signification is a complex rhetorical device that has elicited various, even contradictory, definitions from linguists, as should be apparent from this summary of its various definitions. While many of its manifestations and possibilities are figured in the tales of the Signifying Monkey, most people who Signify do not engage in the narration of these tales. Rather, the Monkey tales stand as the canonical poems from which what I am calling the language of Signifyin(g) extends. The degree to which the figure of the Monkey is anthropologically related to the figure of the Pan-African trickster, Esu-Elegbara, shall most probably remain a matter of speculation.
Nevertheless, the two figures are related as functional equivalents because each in its own way stands as a moment of consciousness of black formal language use, of rhetorical structures and their appropriate modes of interpretation. As I have argued, both figures connote what we might think of as the writing implicit in an oral literature, and both figures function as repositories for a tradition’s declarations about how and why formal literary language departs from ordinary language use. The metaphor of a double-voiced Esu-Elegbara corresponds to the double-voiced nature of the Signifyin(g) utterance. When one text Signifies upon anoth
er text, by tropological revision or repetition and difference, the double-voiced utterance allows us to chart discrete formal relationships in Afro-American literary history. Signifyin(g), then, is a metaphor for textual revision.
Chart 2. The Figures of Signification
* N.B. “Naming” is an especially rich Yoruba. Positive naming is call Oriki, while negative naming is called Inagije. Naming is also an especially luxurious (if potentially volatile) trope in the Afro-American vernacular tradition. “Naming” someone and “Calling [someone] Out of [his] name” are among the most commonly used tropes in Afro-American vernacular discourse. Scores of proverbs and epigrams in the black tradition turn upon figures for naming.
NOTES
1.Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 66ff.
2.For a superbly lucid discussion, see Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 32.
3.See my discussion of the word “down” in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
4.Saussure, Course, p. 71.
5.Quoted in Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s “Diary of a Writer” and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 108.
6.Saussure, Course, p. 71.
7.Ibid., pp. 75, 72.
8.See, for example, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Language Behavior in a Black Urban Community (Monographs of the Language-Behavior Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, No. 2), pp. 88–90; and Roger D. Abrahams, Talking Black (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Publishers, 1976), pp. 50–51.
9.On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 147; and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Knopf, 1981).
10.Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes, then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Geneva Smitherman, Talkin’ and Testifyin’: The Language of Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 101–67. And on signifying as a rhetorical trope, see Smitherman, Talkin’ and Testifyin’, pp. 101–67; Thomas Kochman, Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in Urban Black America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972); Thomas Kochman, “‘Rappin’ in the Black Ghetto,” Trans-Action 6 (February 1969): 32; Alan Dundes, Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 310; Ethen M. Albert, “‘Rhetoric,’ ‘Logic,’ and ‘Poetics’ in Burundi: Culture Patterning of Speech Behavior,” in John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds., The Ethnography of Communication, American Anthropologist 66 (1964): 35–54. One example of signifying can be gleaned from the following anecdote. While writing this essay, I asked a colleague, Dwight Andrews, if he had heard of the Signifying Monkey as a child. “Why, no,” he replied intently. “I never heard of the Signifying Monkey until I came to Yale and read about him in a book.” I had been signified upon. If I had responded to Andrews, “I know what you mean; your Mama read to me from that same book the last time I was in Detroit,” I would have signified upon him in return.
11.Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 31; Dundes, editor’s note, Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, p. 310.
12.Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1970), pp. 51–52, 66–67, 264. Abrahams’s awareness of the need to define uniquely black significations is exemplary. As early as 1964, when he published the first edition of Deep Down in the Jungle, he saw fit to add a glossary, as an appendix of “Unusual Terms and Expressions,” a title which unfortunately suggests the social scientist’s apologia.
13.Ibid., pp. 66–67, 264. (Emphasis added.)
14.Gloria Hall is a well-known professional storyteller, and she includes in her repertoire the Signifying Monkey poems.
15.Ibid., p. 113. In the second line of the stanza, “motherfucker” is often substituted for “monkey.”
16.“The Signifying Monkey,” Book of Negro Folklore, ed. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958), pp. 365–66.
17.Lies is a traditional Afro-American word for figurative discourse, tales, or stories.
18.Also known as “the dozens.”
19.See Bruce Jackson, “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative Poetry from the Black Oral Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), esp. pp. 164–65. Subsequent references to tales collected by Jackson will be given in the text. Jackson’s collection of “Toasts” is definitive.
20.A clear example of paradigmatic contiguity is the addition of the metonym “hairy” as an adjective for “ass” in the second quoted line.
21.J. L. Dillard, Lexicon of Black English (New York: Continuum, 1977), pp. 130–41; Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935), p. 37; Sterling A. Brown, “Folk Literature,” in The Negro Caravan (1941; New York: Arno, 1969), p. 433.
22.Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (1953; New York: Avon, 1965), p. 386.
23.Quoted in Easthope, Poetry as Discourse, p. 82.
24.Ibid., pp. 82–83, 42.
25.Ibid., pp. 84–86.
26.Quoted in Easthope, Poetry as Discourse, p. 90. For a nineteenth-century commentary on black rhyme schemes in music, see James Hungerford, The Old Plantation and What I Gathered There in an Autumn Month [of 1832] (New York, 1859), reprinted in Eileen Southern, ed., Readings in Black American Music (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 71–81, esp. p. 73.
27.Easthope, Poetry as Discourse, pp. 90–91.
28.Ibid., pp. 89–90, 93. (Emphasis added.)
29.Martin Williams, The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1973), p. 16.
30.Houston A. Baker’s reading of Ellison’s essay suggested the alternative reading that I am giving it here. See Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, pp. 12–13, 64, 66.
31.Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” The American Scholar (Winter 1977–78): 26.
32.Oriki Esu, quoted by Ayodele Ogundipe, Esu Elegbara, the Yoruba God of Chance and Uncertainty: A Study in Yoruba Mythology, 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1978, Vol. II, pp. 12, 77.
33.“Test on Street Language Says It’s Not Grant in That Tomb,” New York Times, April 17, 1983, p. 30.
34.Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 8; “Test on Street Language,” p. 30. (Emphasis added.)
35.Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777, ed. L. MacVeigh (New York: Dial Press, 1924), pp. 17–19.
36.Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; New York: Doubleday, 1963), pp. 13–14. (Emphasis added.)
37.Ibid., pp. 13, 15.
38.Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Orton & Mulligan, 1855), p. 253.
39.William Faux, Memorable Days in America (London: W. Simpkins and R. Marshall, 1823), pp. 77–78. See also John Dixon Long, Pictures of Slavery in Church and State (Philadelphia: the author, 1857), pp. 197–98.
40.George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Vol. 5, Part 4, p. 198.
41.Clarence Major, Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (New York: International Publisher, 1970), pp. 104, 46, 34.
42.Hermese E. Roberts, The Third Ear: A Black Glossary, entry on signifying.
43.Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (New York: Random House, 1946), pp. 378, 230.
44.Ibid., pp. 230–31.
45.Malachi Andrews and Paul T. Owens,
Black Language (West Los Angeles: Seymour-Smith, 1973), p. 95. (Emphasis added.) See also their entry on “Wolf,” p. 106.
46.Dillard, Lexicon of Black English, pp. 154, 177.
47.Hurston, Mules and Men, p. 161. See also C. Merton Babcock, “A Word List from Zora Neale Hurston,” Publications of the American Dialect Society, No. 40 (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1963), pp. 1–12. I analyze Hurston’s uses of Signifyin(g) in Chapter 5 herein.
48.Dillard, Lexicon of Black English, p. 134.
49.See Jackson, “Get Your Ass in the Water,” esp. pp. 161–80.
50.Jim Haskins and Hugh F. Butts, The Psychology of Black Language (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973), p. 86.
51.Ibid., p. 51.
52.Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, comp. and ed., Dictionary of American Slang, Second Supplemental Edition (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), p. 477.
53.Peter Tamary, quoted in Robert S. Gold, Jazz Talk (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), p. 76.
54.H. Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die! (New York: Dial Press, 1969), pp. 25–26.
55.Ibid., pp. 26–29.
56.Ibid., pp. 29–30.
57.Ibid.
58.See Roger D. Abrahams, “The Changing Concept of the Negro Hero,” in The Golden Log, ed. Mody C. Boatright, Wilson M. Hudson, and Allen Maxwell (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1962), pp. 119–34; Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle, esp. “Introduction to the Second Edition” (1970).