Failure, of course, was one of Melville’s few forms of success. The Confidence Man was the last novel he published in his lifetime, and it’s hard to argue that he went out with a bang. Foisted on the world on April Fool’s Day 1857, it was met with almost uniformly negative notices: I don’t know if he was surprised or not. Most reviewers found it incomprehensible; several claimed to have read it, first forwards and then backwards, looking in vain for some sense to it. It was not Typee, they all said. In fact it was not a novel:
The New York Dispatch:
It is not right—it is trespassing too much upon the patience and forbearance of the public, when a writer possessing Herman Melville’s talent, publishes such puerilities as The Confidence Man.
*
The New York Times:
Melville has not the slightest qualifications for a novelist.
*
Putnam’s Monthly:
The sum and substance of our faultfinding with Herman Melville is this. He has indulged himself in a trick of metaphysical and morbid meditations until he has perverted his fine mind from its healthy productive tendencies.
Well, it’s easy enough to make fun of the blindness of the critics. But I don’t think they were really wrong: Melville was indeed being puerile, and inept, and morbid; and not entirely on purpose, though not quite by accident, either. He was after something; he was aiming in some direction so little known to literature that it’s taken us all this time—an astounding ninety-two years lapsed between the book’s first printing and its second—to bring our own gazes around to follow.
What he wanted, I think, was a story strange enough to capture the strangeness of the country as he understood it; because however long the man may have lived among the Polynesians, he knew of no people as extraordinary and inexplicable as the citizens he might meet on board a Mississippi steamboat, none so ridiculous, so fascinating, so tempting. The rest of the world was peculiar, perhaps, but Americans were insane, they had gone berserk in Eden, they were not to be believed. They were fair matches for the Devil, so Melville sent the Devil to walk among them.
The book strolls alongside, poking its head here and there, circling back, tossing off grim anecdotes as it goes: a man who hated Indians, a man who reluctantly borrowed money, a bad wife. The effect is effortlessly odd—not merely eccentric, but deeply uncanny. Reading it is an adventure in aesthetic credulity; it feels as if some stricture on intention is constantly being broken, that it’s impossible that anyone—especially a man who wrote such carefully tuned dramas as Moby-Dick and Billy Budd— could mean to do this. And yet Melville does, apparently, mean it; in any case, he never lets on otherwise. And he must be doing something purposeful, because the themes seem to achieve a kind of consistency, even as they divide and redivide, double up, hide themselves and then jump out unexpected. It’s a style and strategy that the film critic Manny Farber described perfectly, in a brilliant but forgotten essay called “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” He’s discussing movie-making in the early 1960s, but he might as well be speaking of novel writing a century earlier (I have elided a few references to specific films):
Good work usually arises where the creators are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. The best examples appear in places where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.
A termite art aims at buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.
Well yes: The Confidence Man is wasteful, ornery and unkempt: the book is a barnacle, a stubborn and inert parasite on the hull of the great, gliding culture above it, fastened there by a drowning man. You can’t outsmart it, you can’t lose it, you can’t even criticize it; it seems to defy every attempt at understanding. It takes you as the confidence man takes his victims: with a patience and tenacity that will wear you down if it can’t win you over.
I love the book for its cranky brilliance, its slipperiness and mystery, its refusal to apologize or clarify, its fat humor. I love it for its dissolution and monstrousness. And I love it, as much as anything, because it is such a colossal disaster.
How often have I wished that I could write as badly as Melville did when he was writing The Confidence Man. God knows I’ve tried. It isn’t easy; I can’t imagine it was very easy for him, either. In a letter he wrote to Hawthorne celebrating the publication of The House of the Seven Gables, he says that the novelist’s job is to say “No! in thunder.” It is a harder thing to say than yes. But to succeed, to build a bomb of a book, in such devious and uncompromising fashion … a career-ender … to be willing to wait a century, long past the first flowerings of American art and well into one’s own death, for the glory of its strange explosion. … Has there been any act in the history of our literature more admirable?
W. E. B. Du Bois. Drawing, circa 1910. The Granger Collection, New York.
Black Reconstruction:
Du Bois & the U.S. Struggle For Democracy & Socialism
Amiri Baraka
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IS, FOR revolutionaries in the U.S., particularly for the militants of the Black Liberation Movement, as cogent a work in laying out the history and field of our struggle as the singular works of the great international teachers. Some have carped at the work, because they claim it is not strictly Marxist, others because it did not make a “sharp enough” class analysis of pre-Civil War whites in the South, but to both questions I answer, read it again.
By 1935, when this work was issued, Du Bois had been a socialist twenty years. Though he had joined then unjoined the Socialist Party because, as he said, they tried to push Black folks into the background. This has been a problem throughout the movement, anywhere you look or investigate. That there has been a consistent belittling of the Black Liberation Movement. Ironically, not just from the mostly white, or multinational political forces, but, alas, even from those Negroes and white folks claiming to represent the best interests of the Afro American people.
Certainly, this was true for the NAACP, the organization Du Bois helped found, which was coopted by the bourgeoisie who replaced him with the comedy team of White and Wilkins. The Left too has been outrageously in evidence when such policies and ideological reaction is cited. So that given the fundamental relationship of the Afro American people to almost any segment of the organized U.S. body politic, aside from the identifying jargon that separates them, there has been a stunning similarity.
What Black Reconstruction does is present the historic development of the Afro American people, across the U.S. and most pointedly in the South, the area Du Bois called The Black Belt in The Souls of Black Folk. It is in Souls that we also receive his earliest perceptions and attempts to understand just what the South was and is, to Black people, to white people, to Afro America, to “White America” (the media fiction) and to the world.
By the 1930s, after his first removal from the NAACP, Du Bois had initiated the most scientific and detailed study of the South (Atlanta University Publications on “The Study of the Negro Problems 1897-1910,” edited by Du Bois; conferences covered by Du Bois at Atlanta University), from his chair at Atlanta University. But from the time he arrived at Fisk, astonished at the wonderful beauty of the sisters there, and believing he was, indeed, in heaven, there are few people who we will claim studied or knew more about the South than Du Bois. And that was obviously the strength and thoroughness of his analysis, and the penetrating force of Black Reconstructi
on. So that by 1903, when Souls appeared, with its millennium shattering force, Du Bois was already deeply immersed in Black southern studies, for, as he said many, many times, “The future of the Negro is in the South.”
What Souls did was to clarify the present by presenting it as a continuum, politically, socially, economically, culturally, psychologically, of the past. The African past and the Afro American present, both of which were hidden, obscured, crushed, belittled, denied, exploited beneath the Veil of “otherness” which slavery had placed upon Black people, which not only hid us from the world, but hid the world from a great part of itself, its history and its potential for salvation in the real world.
From the outset, those jarring words—“How does it feel to be a problem?”—he goes on for sixty more years to tell us. In Souls, he deals with the South before and after the Civil War in a general agitational overview, presenting at the same time a new form of presentation, the multiformed essay, poem, short fiction, analytical work, that Langston Hughes claimed was the single spark of the Harlem Renaissance. This is important in accessing Black Reconstruction, because the seeds of all his later explorations and conclusions are there.
First, the surgical dismantling of Booker T. Washington, to clean the slate and announce a new dispensation, a new generation’s assault on Black oppression. He speaks at length of the conditions, psychological, social and cultural and political, of the Black Belt, imparts to us a sense of its being, actually, somewhere other than the U.S. but exploited by being inside the U.S. at the same time. This is the thesis of the Veil, and the revelational description of the “twoness” of the Afro American. Being in it but not in it. To see ourselves through the eyes of those who hate us. That “double consciousness.” Am I Black or am I American? That double consciousness that we still until this very hour must deal with. And this is the overriding victory of studying Du Bois, because you understand, moving along with him through the years, through the twists and turns and small and substantial victories and defeats, the constant changes and regroupings, the common self-criticism and often sharp criticism of others, you understand the seriousness of the man and his work, but also the infinitely sensitive consciousness and self-consciousness which spurred him to move forward, to go back, to change, to modify, but to continue, always, at the very top of the mind he carried, always to struggle for Black Liberation, as he said, through “Self-Assertion.” It is this Self-Assertion that we must understand is at the root of everything Du Bois has ever said, or is moving to say, or why he will dismiss things he has said before. This is personal and intellectual and scholarly Self-Consciousness, which he urged on us—to seek a “True Self-Consciousness.”
Souls had to clear Booker T. and the submissionist sector of the Black national bourgeoisie out of the way, because for all that might pass as the practical motherwit of Washington, Du Bois could see that nothing lay in that direction but submission, the emergence of a comprador Black Bourgeois, rich servants of the same white master.
Souls dealt with Afro America, the history and culture of the U.S., but as a context in which Black life, the Afro American people, had developed. His essay on “ATALANTA,” the Atlanta, which he had experienced as the site of anti-Black riots, which actually had some part of the early tragic death of his First Born, and his wife’s lifelong partial withdrawal from the world, laid out the root of that city’s corruption. That it was an artificial thing created by the northern conquerors to control the South, that Atlanta was a city of the bribed. The essay is brilliant and evocative until this day. How prophetic that not only Booker T. Washington gave us back into new slavery there, but in 1988, Jesse Jackson followed suit.
The essay on African religion and the Sorrow Songs are touchstones of modern Afro American scholarship. They should be the base of any new studies on Afro American history, culture, psychology and social life. Du Bois was endeavoring to get down, to get all the way Down, to see from the very bottom of up under the Veil. He says “between the other world and me” … he wants to see from all the way back, clear back, forward beyond ourselves. And help shape this hazardous road we’ve taken, help point us to a new and more humanly rewarding “there.”
When Reconstruction appears thirty years later, Du Bois had been on quite a journey himself. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, The Philadelphia Negro, Darkwater, The Negro, The Atlanta Studies, Crisis are all leading to this major work. Again and again in innumerable articles, essays, speeches, letters, he keeps moving toward this major work, this great work which should be and will be as impacting on the BLM as Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was and remains. Actually, the work it is most comparable to of the great teachers is Marx’s The Civil War in France. That work also dealt with civil war and the role of different classes within the war, which led to the first “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”; though short lived, it was still the model Marx used to project what the fully constructed Dictatorship should look like. It is also a work analyzing the emergence of Imperialism, where the French bourgeoisie actually enlisted the Prussian (German) bourgeoisie for aid against the French working class! How perfect an analogy to the Civil War in the U.S., where the northern forces, after utilizing the 200,000 Black runaway slaves to defeat the Southern slavocrat secessionists, then enable and empower these same secessionists to impose a fascist dictatorship on Afro America (the Black South) and the whole of the Afro American people.
Black Reconstruction is such an immense and profound work, and still incompletely grasped by the Left, that its analysis and summation of the U.S. Civil War, the most central conflict in this country’s history, has still not been put to clear and consistent USE. Most of us are still trying to rationalize, to put into understandable form, what we have learned from the work, the practical and revolutionary use, as a weapon of theory, as Cabral said, to help us lay waste to Black national oppression and U.S. and all imperialism forever.
First, Du Bois makes a masterful class analysis of the vital class forces of the South and the rest of the U.S., historically and in their interrelationship, particularly how these various classes impact on the Black struggle for democracy. Du Bois had read Marx by this time and Lenin and had visited the Soviet Union for an extended period, so that some of his earlier uncertainty about what the USSR meant to do, and in fact what the great socialist teachers were saying, had been laid to rest.
For instance, he had foreseen the updating that Lenin would have to do to the basic Marxist analysis of capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Indeed, Du Bois thought that Marx relied too heavily on the “productive forces” as ideological and political transporters of the working class to fully revolutionary positions. So that he welcomed the emphasis that Lenin makes on the formation of “a party of a new type,” i.e., the proletarian headquarters the revolutionary party must be.
Du Bois still rejected entrance into the Communist Party USA at this time, because he thought the CP dismissed the leveling quality of Black national oppression by insisting that the class structure of the Afro American people was the same as the oppressor nation’s. That is, the CP, except for the impact of Lenin’s 1920s paper on The National Question and Marx’s nineteenth-century analysis of the U.S. Civil War, has always tended to minimize the revolutionary function of the Black Liberation Movement, as a form of revolutionary democratic struggle against imperialism. This is a common failing of social democrats who make the struggle for socialism a single laser focus disconnected from (except for recruitment and too generalized propaganda) the spectrum of democratic struggles in the society.
This is the very opposite of what Lenin proposes in his works on the national question, certainly in Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution and the essay “Our Tasks,” among many other works, where he points out that the Vanguard party must be a leader in the democratic struggle, while all the time putting out the Communist program. In fact the party must develop a minimum line, which is its analysis and propos
al for mass struggle for democracy, and a maximum or socialist line, which calls for the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism and the eventual emergence of Communism. Particularly when Du Bois, trying to grapple with the “twoness” of Afro Americans in the relationship to the U.S. as would-be citizens and an oppressed nation, begins to put forward more directly and openly his growing theories on the need for Self-Determination and the building of a broad political united front for Afro American democracy and economic and cultural cooperative organizations to begin to deal with the many problems Black people have which will not be solved by merely protesting. Because no matter how long and how strong we protest, the very protest itself is an act of self-determination. And this initial act must be followed by other such acts to raise the level of the struggle itself.
Some of the social democrats, and the Left, began to say that Du Bois was advocating segregation and nationalism. This was one of the sticking points in his struggle with White, Wilkins and their Black and white classmates, that protest, legal struggle, was not enough, that there had to be some substantive building of institutions and organizations even to further the struggle for democracy. At one point, some Negro said to Du Bois, when he was planning a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, that for Du Bois to raise the EP was racist!
Tributes Page 6