On the Pequod the multiracial, mainly foreign, proletariat is at work to produce a commodity, but it is diverted and converted from that labor to Ahab’s more significant intellectual quest. We leave whale as commerce and confront whale as metaphor. With that interpretation in place, two of the most famous chapters of the book become luminous in a completely new way. One is chapter 9, “The Sermon.” In Father Mapple’s thrilling rendition of Jonah’s trials, emphasis is given to the purpose of Jonah’s salvation. He is saved from the fish’s belly for one single purpose, “To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!” Only then the reward—“Delight”—which strongly calls to mind Ahab’s lonely necessity.
Delight is to him … who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stand forth his own inexorable self …. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven (italics mine).
No one, I think, has denied that the sermon is designed to be prophetic, but it seems unremarked what the nature of the sin is—the sin that must be destroyed, regardless. Nature? A sin? The terms do not apply. Capitalism? Perhaps. Capitalism fed greed lent itself inexorably to corruption, but probably was not in and of itself sinful to Melville. Sin suggests a moral outrage within the bounds of New World man to repair. The concept of racial superiority would fit seamlessly. It is difficult to read those words (“destroys all sin,” “patriot to heaven”) and not hear in them the description of a different Ahab. Not an adolescent male in adult clothing, a maniacal egocentric, or the “exotic plant” that V. L. Parrington thought Melville was. Not even a morally fine liberal voice adjusting, balancing, compromising with racial institutions. But another Ahab: the only white male American heroic enough to try to slay the monster that was devouring the world as he knew it.
Another chapter that seems freshly lit by this reading is chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Melville points to the do-or-die significance of his effort to say something unsayable in this chapter. “I almost despair,” he writes, “of putting it in a comprehensive form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught” (italics mine). The language of this chapter ranges between benevolent, beautiful images of whiteness and whiteness as sinister and shocking. After dissecting the ineffable, he concludes: “Therefore … symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.” I stress “idealized significance” to emphasize and make clear (if such clarity needs stating) that Melville is not exploring white people, but whiteness idealized. Then, after informing the reader of his “hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek,” he tries to nail it. To provide the key to the “hidden cause.” His struggle to do so is gigantic. He cannot. Nor can we. But in nonfigurative language, he identifies the imaginative tools needed to solve the problem: “Subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls.” And his final observation reverberates with personal trauma. “This visible [colored] world seems formed in love, the invisible [white] spheres were formed in fright.” The necessity for whiteness as privileged “natural” state, the invention of it, was indeed formed in fright.
“Slavery,” writes Rogin, “confirmed Melville’s isolation, decisively established in Moby-Dick, from the dominant consciousness of his time.” I differ on this point and submit that Melville’s hostility to and repugnance for slavery would have found company. There were many white Americans of his acquaintance who felt repelled by slavery, wrote journalism about it, spoke about it, legislated on it, and were active in abolishing it. His attitude to slavery alone would not have condemned him to the almost autistic separation visited upon him. And if he felt convinced that blacks were worthy of being treated like whites, or that capitalism was dangerous—he had company or could have found it. But to question the very notion of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority, of whiteness as privileged place in the evolutionary ladder of humankind, and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority, to “pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges,” to drag the “judge himself to the bar”—that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now. To be “only a patriot to heaven” is no mean aspiration in young America for a writer—or the captain of a whaling ship.
A complex, heaving, disorderly, profound text is Moby-Dick, and among its several meanings it seems to me this “unspeakable” one has remained the “hidden cause,” the “Truth to the face of Falsehood.” To this day no novelist has so wrestled with his subject. To this day literary analyses of canonical texts have shied away from that perspective: the informing and determining Afro-American presence in traditional American literature. The chapters I have made reference to are only a fraction of the instances where the text surrenders such insights, and points a helpful finger toward the ways in which the ghost drives the machine.
Melville is not the only author whose works double their fascination and their power when scoured for this presence and the writerly strategies taken to address or deny it. Edgar Allan Poe will sustain such a reading. So will Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain, and in the twentieth century, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner, to name a few. Canonical American literature is begging for such attention.
It seems to me a more than fruitful project to produce some cogent analysis showing instances where early American literature identifies itself, risks itself, to assert its antithesis to blackness. How its linguistic gestures prove the intimate relationship to what is being nulled by implying a full descriptive apparatus (identity) to a presence-that-is-assumed-not-to-exist. Afro-American critical inquiry can do this work.
I mentioned earlier that finding or imposing Western influences in/on Afro-American literature had value provided the valued process does not become self-anointing. There is an adjacent project to be undertaken—the third focus in my list: the examination of contemporary literature (both the sacred and the profane) for the impact Afro-American presence has had on the structure of the work, the linguistic practice, and fictional enterprise in which it is engaged. Like focus two, this critical process must also eschew the pernicious goal of equating the fact of that presence with the achievement of the work. A work does not get better because it is responsive to another culture, nor does it become automatically flawed because of that responsiveness. The point is to clarify, not to enlist. And it does not “go without saying” that a work written by an Afro-American is automatically subsumed by an enforcing Afro-American presence. There is a clear flight from blackness in a great deal of Afro-American literature. In others there is the duel with blackness, and in some cases, as they say, “You’d never know.”
III
It is on this area, the impact of Afro-American culture on contemporary American literature, that I now wish to comment. I have already said that works by Afro-Americans can respond to this presence (just as nonblack works do) in a number of ways. The question of what constitutes the art of a black writer, for whom that modifier is more search than fact, has some urgency. In other words, other than melanin and subject matter, what, in fact, may make me a black writer? Other than my own ethnicity—what is going on in my work that makes me believe it is demonstrably inseparable from a cultural specificity that is Afro-American?
Please forgive the use of my own work in these observations. I use it not because it provides the best examp
le, but because I know it best, know what I did and why, and know how central these queries are to me. Writing is, after all, an act of language, its practice. But first of all it is an effort of the will to discover.
Let me suggest some of the ways in which I activate language and ways in which that language activates me. I will limit this perusal by calling attention only to the first sentences of the books I’ve written, and hope that in exploring the choices I made, prior points are illuminated.
The Bluest Eye begins, “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.” That sentence, like the ones that open each succeeding book, is simple, uncomplicated. Of all the sentences that begin all the books, only two of them have dependent clauses; the other three are simple sentences and two are stripped down to virtually subject, verb, modifier. Nothing fancy here. No words need looking up; they are ordinary, everyday words. Yet I hoped the simplicity was not simpleminded, but devious, even loaded. And that the process of selecting each word, for itself and its relationship to the others in the sentence, along with the rejection of others for their echoes, for what is determined and what is not determined, what is almost there and what must be gleaned, would not theatricalize itself, would not erect a proscenium—at least not a noticeable one. So important to me was this unstaging, that in this first novel I summarized the whole of the book on the first page. (In the first edition, it was printed in its entirety on the jacket.)
The opening phrase of this sentence, “Quiet as it’s kept,” had several attractions for me. First, it was a familiar phrase, familiar to me as a child listening to adults; to black women conversing with one another; telling a story, an anecdote, gossip about someone or some event within the circle, the family, the neighborhood. The words are conspiratorial. “Shh, don’t tell anyone else” and “No one is allowed to know this.” It is a secret between us and a secret that is being kept from us. The conspiracy is both held and withheld, exposed and sustained. In some sense it was precisely what the act of writing the book was: the public exposure of a private confidence. In order fully to comprehend the duality of that position, one needs to think of the immediate political climate in which the writing took place, 1965–1969, during great social upheaval in the life of black people. The publication (as opposed to the writing) involved the exposure; the writing was the disclosure of secrets, secrets “we” shared and those withheld from us by ourselves and by the world outside the community.
“Quiet as it’s kept” is also a figure of speech that is written, in this instance, but clearly chosen for how speakerly it is, how it speaks and bespeaks a particular world and its ambience. Further, in addition to its “back fence” connotation, its suggestion of illicit gossip, of thrilling revelation, there is also, in the “whisper,” the assumption (on the part of the reader) that the teller is on the inside, knows something others do not, and is going to be generous with this privileged information. The intimacy I was aiming for, the intimacy between the reader and the page, could start up immediately because the secret is being shared, at best, and eavesdropped upon, at the least. Sudden familiarity or instant intimacy seemed crucial to me then, writing my first novel. I did not want the reader to have time to wonder, “What do I have to do, to give up, in order to read this? What defense do I need, what distance maintain?” Because I know (and the reader does not—he or she has to wait for the second sentence) that this is a terrible story about things one would rather not know anything about.
What, then, is the Big Secret about to be shared? The thing we (reader and I) are “in” on? A botanical aberration. Pollution, perhaps. A skip, perhaps, in the natural order of things: a September, an autumn, a fall without marigolds. Bright common, strong and sturdy marigolds. When? In 1941, and since that is a momentous year (the beginning of World War II for the United States), the “fall” of 1941, just before the declaration of war, has a “closet” innuendo. In the temperate zone where there is a season known as “fall” during which one expects marigolds to be at their peak, in the months before the beginning of U.S. participation in World War II, something grim is about to be divulged. The next sentence will make it clear that the sayer, the one who knows, is a child speaking, mimicking the adult black women on the porch or in the backyard. The opening phrase is an effort to be grown-up about this shocking information. The point of view of a child alters the priority an adult would assign the information. “We thought … it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow” foregrounds the flowers, backgrounds illicit, traumatic, incomprehensible sex coming to its dreaded fruition. This foregrounding of “trivial” information and backgrounding of shocking knowledge secures the point of view but gives the reader pause about whether the voice of children can be trusted at all or is more trustworthy than an adult’s. The reader is thereby protected from a confrontation too soon with the painful details, while simultaneously provoked into a desire to know them. The novelty, I thought, would be in having this story of female violation revealed from the vantage point of the victims or could-be victims of rape—the persons no one inquired of (certainly not in 1965): the girls themselves. And since the victim does not have the vocabulary to understand the violence or its context, gullible, vulnerable girlfriends, looking back as the knowing adults they pretended to be in the beginning, would have to do that for her, and would have to fill those silences with their own reflective lives. Thus, the opening provides the stroke that announces something more than a secret shared, but a silence broken, a void filled, an unspeakable thing spoken at last. And they draw the connection between a minor destabilization in seasonal flora with the insignificant destruction of a black girl. Of course “minor” and “insignificant” represent the outside world’s view—for the girls both phenomena are earthshaking depositories of information they spend that whole year of childhood (and afterwards) trying to fathom, and cannot. If they have any success, it will be in transferring the problem of fathoming to the presumably adult reader, to the inner circle of listeners. At the least they have distributed the weight of these problematical questions to a larger constituency, and justified the public exposure of a privacy. If the conspiracy that the opening words announce is entered into by the reader, then the book can be seen to open with its close: a speculation on the disruption of “nature,” as being a social disruption with tragic individual consequences in which the reader, as part of the population of the text, is implicated.
However, a problem, unsolved, lies in the central chamber of the novel. The shattered world I built (to complement what is happening to Pecola), its pieces held together by seasons in childtime and commenting at every turn on the incompatible and barren white-family primer, does not in its present form handle effectively the silence at its center. The void that is Pecola’s “unbeing.” It should have had a shape—like the emptiness left by a boom or a cry. It required a sophistication unavailable to me, and some deft manipulation of the voices around her. She is not seen by herself until she hallucinates a self. And the fact of her hallucination becomes a point of outside-the-book conversation, but does not work in the reading process.
Also, although I was pressing for a female expressiveness (a challenge that resurfaced in Sula), it eluded me for the most part, and I had to content myself with female personae because I was not able to secure throughout the work the feminine subtext that is present in the opening sentence (the women gossiping, eager and aghast in “Quiet as it’s kept”). The shambles this struggle became is most evident in the section on Pauline Breedlove where I resorted to two voices, hers and the urging narrator’s, both of which are extremely unsatisfactory to me. It is interesting to me now that where I thought I would have the most difficulty subverting the language to a feminine mode, I had the least: connecting Cholly’s “rape” by the white men to his own of his daughter. This most masculine act of aggression becomes feminized in my language, “passive,” and, I think, more accurately repellent when deprived of the male “glamor of shame�
�� rape is (or once was) routinely given.
The points I have tried to illustrate are that my choices of language (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate coconspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as my (failed) attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts (many unsatisfactory) to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Afro-American culture into a language worthy of the culture.
In Sula, it’s necessary to concentrate on two first sentences because what survives in print is not the one I had intended to be the first. Originally the book opened with “Except for World War II nothing ever interfered with National Suicide Day.” With some encouragement, I recognized that it was a false beginning. “In medias res” with a vengeance, because there was no res to be in the middle of—no implied world in which to locate the specificity and the resonances in the sentence. More to the point, I knew I was writing a second novel, and that it too would be about people in a black community not just foregrounded but totally dominant, and that it was about black women—also foregrounded and dominant. In 1988, certainly, I would not need (or feel the need for) the sentence—the short section—that now opens Sula. The threshold between the reader and the black-topic text need not be the safe, welcoming lobby I persuaded myself it needed at that time. My preference was the demolition of the lobby altogether. As can be seen from The Bluest Eye, and in every other book I have written, only Sula has this “entrance.” The others refuse the “presentation”; refuse the seductive safe harbor, the line of demarcation between the sacred and the obscene, public and private, them and us. Refuse, in effect, to cater to the diminished expectations of the reader, or his or her alarm heightened by the emotional luggage one carries into the black-topic text. (I should remind you that Sula was begun in 1969, while my first book was in proof, in a period of extraordinary political activity.)
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