Ellison, Baraka, and the Faces of Tradition Author(s): Kimberly W. Benston Source: boundary 2, Vol. 6, No.

2, (Winter, 1978), pp. 333-354 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/302327 Accessed: 03/05/2008 12:50
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Ellison, Baraka,and the Faces of Tradition

Kimberly W. Benston
I could hear him: "Stephen's problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face.... We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture." - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man1 Each morning . . . I stare out at the horizon until it gets up and comes to embrace me. I make believe it is my father. This is known as genealogy. - Amiri Baraka, "Hymn for Lanie Poo," Part 4 333

The enduring strength and liveliness of Afro-American literature is due to nothing so much as the dynamic consciousness of a shared tradition. Without the belief in a common cultural heritage black writers would struggle fitfully for meaning and their literary community would break up into isolated individuals with artistic methods resembling private codes rather than communally raised songs. Clearly, the underlying ideological bond within the Afro-American literary cosmos has not been any political or "moral" idea. Rather, black artists have long recognized that any culture which exists as a self-communing entity must possess a mythology of some kind. And, of all its components, the very notion of "tradition" has been the invigorating element of the mythology, or ethos, of Afro-American literature. The writers themselves - from Phillis Wheatley, with her awkward nomination of Terence as cultural ancestor, to Ishmael Reed in his insistently parodic stance - have given us signals of their concern with tradition as a personal construct that facilitates the artistic act. Yet the role of tradition in modern black literature has been difficult to perceive behind the masks of iconoclasm and apocalypse. Although the past several decades have constituted a period of intensive experimentation in Afro-American writing, it is noteworthy that the work usually considered to be the most revolutionary in achievement is that which, in certain respects, has been the most concerned with tradition. This is not so surprising as it may seem to readers who have accustomed themselves to think of modern black art as a complete break-away from the creations of the past, for it might justifiably be contended that nearly all the major changes in Afro-American literature have been initiated by those writers who were most deeply conscious of Afro-American and Euro-American traditions. As T. S. Eliot aptly wrote in a more general vein: The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling
that the whole of literature . . . and within it the whole

of the literature of his own country, has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal, and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.2 Ralph Ellison, one of the outstanding innovators of AfroAmerican literature, has, of course, always insisted upon his allegiance to tradition in very Eliotean terms. The validity and function of his attitude would have been appreciated much earlier by younger Afro-American artists and critics had it not been for the prevalent 334

misconception of tradition as an entirely static force and, in particular, for its identification with the work of white Western writers. We are perhaps now better equipped to understand the radical and decidedly AfroAmerican - almost "nationalist" - relation between Ellison and the cultural roots of his art.3 Ellison's work has declared, by precept and by example, that if it is true that every artistic movement is, in origin, a reaction against the ideas and techniques of preceding generations, it is also true that every new movement is a rediscovery of what has been lost, a re-emphasis upon what has temporarily been forgotten or neglected. And after every period of experimentation it is necessary to trace the various lines of development, to assimilate and interpret, and to assess the achievement in relation to the whole of tradition. Such an effort seems appropriate at the present, a time when younger black writers are intensely scrutinizing and affirming their relations to various literary forebears. What we need, however, is not so much another compendium of formal and psychic "roots" as a radical re-evaluation of the notion of "tradition" itself. The presence of available Euro-American structures and of the blues, the folktale, the chanted sermon, and many other vernacular forms in the works of writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Henry Dumas is generally well-documented. Unfortunately, interpreters of black literature have been less attuned to the mythological aspect of tradition which, in fact, is the crucial precondition for the poets' art. Some critics - generally speaking, those whose attention is directed toward pre-Black Arts Movement literature stress the conservatism and benignity of tradition. Others, following the manifestos of contemporary writers, emphasize the novelty and revolt of modern black art. As histories of poetic declarations such approaches might be viable. As investigations of poetic practice they offer nothing other than facile restatements of the poets' own mythological constructs. We have too often accepted the idea of tradition at face value, taking it to be one or another version of the given, inveterate, unproblematic fund of tales, tricks, and tropes which folklorists and literary historians describe for us. Little allowance has been made for what might be termed "creative evolution"4 in black literature: the capacity for the poet, as poet, to exercise control over the rate and direction of his own adaptation. "Tradition" is, in fact, imaginatively reconstituted anew with and within the work of every strong black writer. Yet we have not probed much the black artist's intentional regulation of his multifarious influences.5 We must ask, what role does a Ralph Ellison's or an Amiri Baraka's image of tradition play in the creation of his art? I have chosen Ellison and Baraka as examples (and exemplars) for comparison because their works (both creative and critical) comprise the most pervasively influential critiques of black culture now current; because they are much closer in spirit than is usually supposed; and because their differences are thus all the more crucial to the future of Afro-American

335

literature. As already suggested, Ellison's concern - as evinced by the hero's struggles in Invisible Man and by Ellison's own critical essays - with the continuity and celebration of black culture is a crucial aspect of his work. Taken as a whole, Ellison's writings offer a unified cultural theory whose central emphasis is upon the beauty, durability, and persistent value of Afro-American responses to life. This attitude is particularly apparent, of course, in the estimable position granted black folk culture in Invisible Man. Those critics who have been aware of Ellison's folkloristic roots seek to resolve the "complexities" (Ellison's word) of Invisible Man in terms of these sources, often by reducing the novel to a repetition of its prototypes and ignoring or overlooking its crucial divergences from them. Other commentators - especially those with political axes to grind, or those anxious to existentialize Invisible Man - tend in their reflections to identify the novel with its surface anti-Communism or with its symbolism of blindness and selfhood. The former approach might be called conservative or archeological and the latter political or romantic. The conservative approach demystifies the novel by attempting to explain it in terms of its tradition. But it also remystifies it by presupposing a fundamentally unselfconscious author through whom the voice of tradition speaks for itself. The romantic approach, while demystifying the novel by treating its hero as a real sufferer not unlike you and me, also remystifies it by endowing its creator with a remarkable freedom from the burden of received cultural ideas. Yet both possibilities of response are implicit within the novel itself, are actually inscribed into it, and arise as a consequence of Ellison's radically ambivalent ("complex") relation to the traditions and sources which he utilizes, but which he can neither definitively join nor leave behind. What I wish to suggest, then, is that Ellison is both the most traditional of Afro-American writers (insofar as he demands our constant attention to the details and wisdom of black culture) and the most revisionary critic of tradition (in that he constantly focuses our attention on the ambiguities inherent in any embrace of the past). Herein lies the direct link between Ellison's and Baraka's art. Baraka, too, has made the relation to black culture and tradition the focus of his efforts. His early novel, The System of Dante's Hell, shares many essential characteristics with Invisible Man: the explicitly Dantesque descent to literal and psychological undergrounds, the experimental prose, the dream-ritual sequence from which the hero emerges tested and shaken but whole. Yet the fundamental resemblance lies in the heroes' underlying journeys toward selfhood, quests which turn out to be as much the prodigal's return to racial origins as the picaresque adventurer's advance upon new frontiers of identity. Like Ellison, Baraka writes of the individual's encounter with tradition - both Afro-American and Euro-American - and in so doing provides a radical critique and revision of every convention he exploits. Thus, in dealing with Ellison and Baraka, the study of their 336

innovativeness must begin in the study of their attitudes toward the literary and cultural past. Just as their novels are organized by strikingly similar patterns, symbols, and didactic thrusts, so have their cultural theories been focused upon several common issues. Foremost among these is their attention to black music, and particularly the blues, as the core of the Afro-American cultural matrix. (If they share this concern with a number of other black writers and theorists it is fair to say that their own theories, while dramatically opposed to one another, are the most influential among other commentators.) From their attitudes toward the blues several other key problems of mutual interest arise: the continuing impact of slavery on contemporary black life; the idea of history as a philosophical and mythological construct; and, most relevant to the present essay, the relation between the individual and culture and, by extension, the relation between the artist and his affective precursors. For both authors, the list of important influences includes a plethora of Euro-American as well as Afro-American authorities and, for both, the confrontation with tradition has been a dual encounter. The treatment of these various sources within a theory of black music is one of the most fascinating and highly charged aspects of their literary achievements.
II

Baraka's writings on black music are well-represented by two volumes, Blues People (1963) and Black Music (1967). Black Music is a sheaf of essays and liner notes about avant-garde jazz of the 1960's. Blues People, the better known of the two, is a theoretical/historical treatise dealing with black music from its African origins to the "new wave" jazz discussed extensively in Black Music. The earlier work, because of its unifying historical interpretation and self-conscious theorizing, provides the basic text for our analysis of Baraka's music aesthetic. Baraka's music criticism is not primarily concerned with "music appreciation" or questions of style, formal innovation, or individual method, although he often examines these at great length. Rather, he seeks to demonstrate that black music "is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world"; it is "only secondarily an attitude about the way music is made."6 The musician's notes are merely "musical" insofar as they are susceptible to technical a n a Iy s i s. More crucially, these notes emanate from a "body of sociocultural philosophy" and convey a precise emotional response to life. Thus a meaningful history of black music would be a description of a historically valid black "attitude" (ethos): The African cultures, the retention of some parts of these cultures in America, and the weight of the stepculture produced the American Negro. A new race. I 337

want to use music as my persistent reference just because the development and transmutation of African
music to American Negro music. . . represents to me

this whole process in microcosm. Blues People sets forth Baraka's vision of the cultural conflict which produced the Afro-American musical dynamic. Specifically, Baraka describes black music's evolution as a dialectical journey energized by the competing forces of Western and African aesthetics. Briefly stated, the African aesthetic (as depicted by Baraka) emphasizes emotive, communal, and improvisational qualities, while the Western ethos values the finished, perfected, and nonfunctional artifact.7 The important subject matter of Blues People is not the blues per se but the opposition between the changing, ever-becoming activity fundamental to African culture and the formalistic impulse of Western art. The survival of the African process in Afro-American music is, in fact, of greater concern to Baraka than the styles, schools, and creators of that music, for these latter elements are merely the artifacts produced by the African sensibility. At every stage of his investigation, Baraka esteems in black music the qualities indicative of Africanesque emotiveness: the shout, holler, or "scream"; roughness; atonality; improvisation; communal modes. Against these he sets the opposed values of "white" music that often found their way into jazz: softness or "legitimacy" of tone; fixed arrangements the musician could simply learn by note; commitment to a generally sweet "artifact-like" beauty. Baraka illustrates the difference between these styles, not only by contrasting contemporary white and black practitioners of the same jazz instrument (for instance, Louis Armstrong's strident, brassy, dramatic sound versus Bix Beiderbecke's learned, "intellectual," reflective tone), but also by noting how these interests conflicted (Miles Davis) or blended (Duke Ellington) in the work of a given black musician. Clearly, Blues People's "history" of black music is an attempt to praise the African in Afro-American music at the expense of the American, to define black music in terms of an African ethos subsumed in an American form. Baraka proposes that the African essence, while present in each phase of black music's development, crystallizes at very special moments in forms that may be called "roots." The archetypical root form is the blues, the first native American musical expression. Baraka takes great pains to show that the blues was an extension of African music's basic elements: the shout and its three-line structure, the call-and-response pattern, dissonant accents, etc. The bluesman is, for Baraka, the very model of the "freedman" (or nonassimilationist) Afro-American. Thus blues music is "roots" not only in a musical but, even more significantly, in an emotional sense: Blues as an autonomous music had been in a sense 338

inviolable.... It was as if these materials were secret and obscure, and blues a kind of ethno-historic rite as basic as blood. (BP, 147-48) If the "secret" ritual impulse of the blues finds its source in African spirit, the blues themselves reflect the more complicated experience of the Negro. Although the basic pattern of call-and-response is a communal form, the blues have really been the expression of the individual. As with their African ancestors, blues singers created from "natural inclination" rather than from formal training. But their songs dealt with personal exploits, not the community's. Whereas the arguments of African songs concerned the gods, nature, general qualities of earthly life and religious expectations, the blues spoke of love and love-loss, sex, travel, and other private experiences. Baraka delivers his explanation of this discrepancy with trenchant clarity: this intensely personal nature of blues-singing is also the result of what can be called the Negro's "American
experience."
. .

. [It]

is a manifestation

of the whole

Western concept of man's life, and it is a development that could only be found in an American black man's music. (BP, 66) The blues, even as "roots," is thus a mixed blessing to Baraka. On one hand, it is the ritual link between the African and Afro-American sensibilities in black music; on the other hand, it developed an area of private expression nonexistent in African culture. Such individuality often degenerated into the facile "style" of the artisan, with its accompanying tendency toward professionalism and formalism. This, Baraka argues, is precisely what took place in the "classic blues," which became popular at a time when the Negro began to feel he might become a member of the dominant society. One might say that the frank sexuality and harshness of classic blues were its ties to the blues as roots, while its slickness, entertainment-consciousness, and "universal" themes constituted the classic or commonly acceptable element of this music. The second great moment Baraka sees in black music is bebop. By returning to the rhythmic orientation of earliest Afro-American (and, indeed, of African) music, and by making unprecedented harmonic variations available to the improvising musician, bebop introduced a whole new lexicon to black music comparable only to the original blues improvising. Not only were the functions of several instruments revolutionized, but the nature of the musical group was also reformed considerably to conform to the collective thrust of the new music. Bebop set out to redefine the "basic blues impulse" in black music. Yet Baraka designates it as "roots" because it also initiated a true advance, and this 339

was again more a matter of cultural than of specifically musical statement. The boppers "sought to erect a meta-culture as isolated as their grandparents' but issuing from the evolved sensibility of a modern urban black American who had by now achieved a fluency with the socio-cultural symbols of Western thinking" (BP, 201). The black musician's new embrace of alienation involved a significantly split reaction to earlier Negro roots: it inculcated a sense that "roots" both existed and were valuable, but took issue with certain conventional sentiments of these roots - "White is then not 'right,' as the old blues had it, but a liability, since the culture of white precludes the possession of the Negro 'soul'" (BP, 219).8 Bebop, then, is roots for Baraka because it began the Afro-American's march away from America toward a purer African
"soul."

Finally, Baraka, writing in the early and mid-1960's, felt that the contemporary "new wave" jazz of Coltrane, Rollins, Taylor, Coleman, and others represented a third, and yet more valuable, form of roots. Again, this is not merely because this music, taking up where the boppers left off, developed even greater harmonic and rhythmic methods, or because the new musicians' aching lyricism recalled the old blues cry. The avant-garde jazz (like the new musicians themselves) is perhaps the most communal of all black musics, for here the improvising individual and the improvising group create sounds interdependently. Moreover, adoption and use of alien forms are no longer acceptable actions - in pieces such as Coltrane's renditions of Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes, these forms are employed only to be dissected, twisted, and finally destroyed, as the musician negates the fixed idea in favor of present expression. Baraka's desire (subliminally expressed throughout Blues People) to obliterate the American element of blues roots, to re-Africanize black musical expression, seems to him fulfilled by the new jazz. Full of the screaming, improvisational, natural emotiveness central to the African aesthetic, this music harks back to the Negro roots of blues and field hollers; but at the same time it leaps back beyond American origins to the pure tribal ur-root of the African collective: "New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it."9 Baraka's conception of Afro-American music, especially of the blues "root," has received vociferous criticism from a group of thinkers who regard the blues in quite another fashion. In contrast to his rigorous discrimination between African and American elements in the blues and in black music as a whole, this school holds the blues to be a distinctly American art form developed from a welter of complex and often contradictory experiences which, while directly associated with the Negro's life, have reference to a "universal" meaning. Among the most articulate proponents of this view has been Ralph Ellison. Ellison has argued eloquently for an understanding of the music which accounts for the "variety" and "mystery" as well as the obvious
340

features of the Afro-American experience. Along with fellow Tuskegeean Albert Murray, he has asserted that the blues, far from being an extension of African culture completely opposed to the enveloping white society, constitutes the very spirit of the American "mainstream." His bluesman is a "harmonizer of chaos" - even, one infers, a "harmonizer" of cultural chaos - rather than a purely "expressive" ex-slave whose style confronts that of the Western oppressor. In his review of Blues People, Ellison presents this view in direct opposition to Baraka's: Jones attempts to impose an ideology upon this cultural complexity, and this might be useful if he knew enough of the related subjects to make it interesting. But his version of blues lacks a sense of the excitement and surprise of men living in the world - of enslaved and politically weak men successfully imposing their values upon a powerful society through song and dance.10 Ellison's bluesman is thus the archetype, not of the re-emerging African, but of the ever-various and decidedly mainstream "OmniAmerican" (to borrow Murray's phrase). In the review of Blues People and in the seminal essay, "Richard Wright's Blues," Ellison defines the blues as both tragic and comic. They encompass the extremes of human experience and perception, "harmonizing" disparate conditions by giving expression to the manifold of human emotion: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.1 1 While Ellison notes that the ability to combine the tragic and comic modes in poetic form reflects "a profound sense of life shared by many American Negroes,"12 he also clearly appeals to our sense of a timeless or "universal" response to "the human condition." Ellison would have us see the blues in a double light: as the quintessential idiom of the black folk tradition (albeit one which ultimately flows into American society at large), and as an embodiment of atemporal and cross-cultural expression. If for Baraka history is a dialectical process resulting in an increasingly refined black ethos, for Ellison it is a multi-directional, self-contradictory, and unpredictable ("What if history was a gambler?" [IM, 381] )collection of individual actions and reactions as inclusive as the tragicomic blues itself. And the essence of Ellison's attack on Baraka emanates precisely from this conflict between ideologies, or mythologies of history: "Jones's theory flounders before that complex of human

341

motives which makes human history."1 3 Perhaps the most crucial component of Afro-American "history" for both authors is slavery. Baraka uses slavery as his metaphor for the whole of the African experience in America.14 Like the residue of Euro-American influence in black music, remnants of the slave experience must be purged for a pure black selfhood to re-establish itself. Ellison takes sharp exception to this view of slavery and especially to Baraka's statement in Blues People that "a slave cannot be a man" (BP, 60). Baraka sees slavery and humanity as absolutely incompatible because "there is no dream of Man that haunts him such as Freedom!"1 5 Ellison would agree with Baraka's premise, yet his claim is for the symbolic freedom of self-expression from which actual transcendence often springs. In contrast to the cringing slave characters of Baraka's plays,16 Ellison's slave figures are fighters and teachers who survived oppression "through song and dance." One such exemplar in Invisible Man is the old man who starts a spiritual at Tod Clifton's funeral: I looked into the face of the old man who had aroused the song and felt a twinge of envy. It was a worn, old, yellow face and his eyes were closed and I could see a knife welt around his upturned neck as his throat threw out the song. . . . 7 Even white brothers and sisters were
joining in.... I looked at the coffin and the marchers,

listening to them, and yet realizing that I was listening to something within myself, and for a second I heard the shattering stroke of my heart. (IM, 391-92) Ellison would claim that such scarred yet enduring guides whose singing is emulated by black and white alike, are the real "blues people." These arguments over the nature of history are readily converted into a dispute over the nature of the blues tradition itself. Ellison's particular quarrel is with Baraka's discussion of classic blues. Again, he eschews Baraka's Manichean division of the form into good ("blues" as African "blood rite") and bad ("classic" as Western formalism). His method is that of inclusion: "Classic blues were both entertainment and a form of folklore."1 8 As with all art forms, Ellison argues, the meaning of the classic blues depended on the contexts and functions - that is, upon the cultural referents - which surrounded them. And, he implies, such determination is not a matter of ideological presuppositions or the development of some historically determined consciousness, but a function of aesthetic choice. Thus Ellison goes on to accuse Baraka of ignoring the ritual aspect of the blues - the very element which, as we have seen, Baraka isolates as the spiritual link between African art and the blues "root." Here, Ellison seems to be seriously misreading his antagonist. Indeed, the 342

review seems marred in several places by his insistence that Baraka mistakes the blues as "political protest" when "they are [in fact] an art form." How can we explain such assertions by so perceptive a critic as Ellison when clearly the genius of Blues People resides in its analysis of an art form's evolution as a confrontation of the artist with tradition? Obviously, Ellison has deliberately misread Baraka in order to write his own myth of the blues tradition. This strategy of "misprision"1 9 is one by which Ellison confronts tradition generally. In "Richard Wright's Blues," for example, he claims for Wright's Black Boy a "ritual" and "blues" thrust which is, if anything, actually repudiated by that novel.20 In this manner, he assimilates Wright into his vision of a viable Afro-American tradition and, moreover, effectively remystifies for himself the folk tradition which Wright had attempted to demystify. In "The World and the Jug," Ellison similarly overreads the blues into Hemingway's fiction, thereby making the latter a part of his "useable past." These sly "miscalculations" merge two essentially non-blues writers - one Afro-American, one Euro-American - into Ellison's concept of tradition, and illustrate his claim that one can, as an artist, "choose one's 'ancestors.' "21 Certainly, Ellison and Baraka have decided not to choose one another, as their variant mythologies of the blues tradition make clear. It is noteworthy, however, that both writers place great emphasis upon the self's role in the creation of Afro-American music and literature. According to Baraka, the individual must obliterate the shackles of personality (whether created by unwarranted desires or by unwanted influences) and proceed to make his voice and the community's one. According to Ellison, consciousness must so arrange its burden of desires and influences as to make the individual a responsible, yet distinct, entity within culture ("the blues . . . offer no scapegoat but the self").22 These views, when transformed by each author within the crucible of his craft, result in stunning, and stunningly different, artistic acts.
111

The prevalent theme of Baraka's aesthetic treatises is the need for Afro-American writers to develop new, "post-Western" forms of expression. Both the Euro-American and Afro-American literary traditions, Baraka maintains, must be supplanted by some third, hitherto unsought mode. While black music has long established autonomous canons and techniques, black writing has labored slavishly under the "evil sun" ("Hymn for Lanie Poo") of white values. The result has not been a useful tradition but "the myth of a Negro literature."23 In his noted essay, "Technology and Ethos," Baraka expresses with almost selfmocking intensity his desire to shape a new "kind of instrument," one that supersedes the standards of his predecessors: 343

A typewriter? - why shd it only make use of the tips of

the fingers. . . If I invented a word placing machine, an

"expression-scriber," if you will, then I would have a kind of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps. . .24 In its search for an "expression-scriber" as fresh and radical as the content of Baraka's revolutionary vision, Baraka's art has always been concerned with the anxiety of Western influence. The lack of psychological subtlety and general "crudity" of form evident in certain of Baraka's poems and plays (especially in the poetry of Black Magic and in the agit-prop drama) reflect his most enraged repudiation of inherited conventions. Yet in most of his writings, and particularly in the early and late works, the ideological rejection of traditional systems is held in dramatic tension with the poet's exorcistic struggle with those systems. The heroes of such dramas as Dutchman, The Slave, and A Black Mass encounter within the plays and within themselves the very forms of consciousness they despise. Baraka, like every great revolutionary poet, has realized that he can only begin to say what he is, or wishes to become, by saying what he is not. And, like his self-limited and self-liberating heroes (for example, Clay of Dutchman or Walker of The Slave), he can create anew only with some recourse to the dead grammar of previous and pernicious generations. But by shocking that grammar sufficiently, by twisting it into unprecedented postures, he can make it generate new and living forms. It is only with the typewriter that, paradoxically, he can inscribe into his art the blueprint for a new instrument. Thus, in composing what the old man of The Slave calls a "meta-language," much of Baraka's best poetry incorporates the words of an alien or older idiom in order to transcend them. The most revealing poems in this regard are the five "Crow Jane" pieces of The Dead Lecturer, which remain among Baraka's finest, if extravagantly complex, creations. Their primary subject matter - which exists as subtext to the surface development of Crow Jane's character - is the relation of Baraka's poetic voice to the competing forces of Western and Afro-American cultures. The former authority is represented by Yeats, specifically the Yeats of the "Crazy Jane" poems; the latter is evinced in the epigraph to Baraka's Crow Jane verses: Crow Jane, Crow Jane, don't hold your head so high, You realize, baby, you got to lay down and die. - Mississippi Joe Williams In Mississippi (Big Joe) Williams' blues poem, "Pallet on the 344

Floor" (from which Baraka is quoting), Crow Jane appears simultaneously as a cleverly veiled personification of Southern racism's Jim Crow and as the typical faithless woman of the blues lament whose cruelty and uppityness drive her man away ("I'm going pretty woman, may get lonesome here/ I got nobody, you don't relieve my cares"). Baraka also allegorizes Crow Jane; but in his lyrics she becomes a type of Western civilization, modelled in every significant detail on Yeats's, not Williams', Jane. Indeed, until the Crow Jane series is understood as a totality, Williams' figure merely casts an ominous Afro-American shadow over an essentially mock-Yeatsean landscape. Baraka's poems thus sequentially explore the character of Western literature before specifically including non-Western elements in a final assessment of poetic influence. Yeats's Crazy Jane poems exploited violent, sexual, and scatological imagery in an attempt to forge an uncompromising resolution of opposites, of what Yeats elsewhere called "all those antinomies/ Of day and night." Crazy Jane, like Yeats's Old Tom, presses the common claims of body, soul, and heart ("love") as she celebrates natural processes. Baraka borrows Yeats's language and intonation but, as we have seen Ellison do to Baraka, he deliberately and creatively misreads Yeats's theme. The opening verse, "For Crow Jane," is cast in the haunting idiom of "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman" as Jane is introduced in all of her Yeatsean grotesquerie: "Cold/ stuff, placed against/ strong man's lips." Baraka then explicitly identifies Jane with Yeats by associating her creations with the Byzantium poems' golden artifices. Moreover, he invokes her career as a precedent for reshaping tradition, while reducing that career's accomplishment to the status of a lifeless, if glittering, artifact: The wealth is translated, corrected, a dark process, like thought, tho it provide a landscape with golden domes. 'Your people without love.' And life rots them. Flux, mutability, process - those forces with which Yeats's genius grappled and which later, in The System of Dante's Hell, invigorated young LeRoi Jones's spiritual transformation - are depicted as putrefying agents in Yeats's stilled world. Warmth, love, and life itself are incompatible with that world. Crow Jane - like Crazy Jane an "Old
Lady .
.

. of useless thighs"

("For Crow Jane") - represents all of Yeats's

"people"; in Baraka's second poem, "Crow Jane's Manner," she alone is "without love" and, elevated beyond personality to a principle of being, 345

she is described as the "Dead virgin/ of the mind's echo. Dead lady/ of thinking." In a rather sharp swerve (or clinamen, to borrow again Harold Bloom's terminology) from Yeats's true sensibility, Crow Jane's haggard infertility is identified with the worst aspects of Western rationalism as set forth in Blues People. Appropriately, in the final poem, "The Dead Lady Canonized," Crow Jane's (again, Western culture's) legacy is pictured as a heap of artifacts, those sterile products of the Western imagination
delineated in Blues People: "A trail/ of objects. the night's image. Erect . . . a grave of her own." Dead nouns. . . propose

The specific quality of Baraka's revision of Yeats is clearly seen in two particular paraphrases of the Crazy Jane poems that occur in "The Dead Lady Canonized." The poem begins, "A thread/ of meaning. Meaning light" - a direct reference to the lines intoned by Yeats's Jane in "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman": For love is but a skein unwound Between the dark and dawn.... I- love's skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb Shall leap into the light lost In my mother's womb. Yeats's poem developed from his quasi-mystical notion of "the black mass of Eden"; and his Jane rejects her idea of Blakean utopia for the double-edged reward of sexuality, accepting ghostly isolation as the price for rapture. Baraka now claims the power of revolutionary vision for himself, ironically performing a black mass around Yeats's figure. Crow Jane's "thread" unwinds, not to the intense experience of night, but to the "meaning" of dawn, or rather to the emptiness of "light" which, in Baraka's poems, is identified with disease, futility, and cold sterility. As in the poem that concludes his essay, "State/Meant,"25 Baraka here rejects the West as "death/ly white" and asserts of the true black magicians, "we own/ the night." Yet Baraka's clinamen does not rest here; recasting these lines from "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent Baraka seeks to kill forever his loveless, infertile Jane and to propose his own image of the (black-owned) night:
may . . . Damballah, kind father,

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sew up her bleeding hole. Yeats's lines, with their equivocations, "sole" (or soul) and "whole" (or hole), weld body and soul in a vision of antinomian frenzy producing ecstatic wholeness. Baraka violently inverts this purpose, conjuring the African gods in an effort to repair what is "rent," to close the womb - the creative fount - of his Western protagonist. The "grave" (Yeats's "tomb") of Baraka's Jane is not a door leading toward a pure, illuminated ancestral womb, but a grim end to the "dark process" of her tradition's continuity. Baraka divests Crazy Jane of her sublime madness, leaving only the literal excrementitious mansion of her dead and deadening "images." Yet this is not all; Baraka does not simply transform, or rather, bomb, the Yeatsean landscape. He is, in fact, a crucial player in this new black mass. He enters the scene in "Crow Jane's Manner": "Me, the last. . . black lip hung/ in dawn's gray wind." And in "Crow Jane in High Society" he attacks himself as Crow Jane's poetic lackey: "And I tell/ her symbols, as the grey movement/ of clouds." Like Walker Vessels, the "grey" hero of The Slave, Baraka's persona is here venerating Yeats's symbols,26 thereby investing them with authority and power. He performs for her like a Willie Best, the shucking and jiving hero of Baraka's eight-part masterpiece "A Poem for Willie Best." Yet (like both Willie Best
and Walker Vessels), he is a renegade entertainer ("black lip hung . ." is

an explicit link to this aspect of the Willie Best figure).27 "Tell" means, of course, relate; but it may also mean understand or, more radically, discover. And, indeed, Baraka, as author of the Crow Jane poems, is dis-covering his image of Western culture. His struggling voice within these poems is a prisoner of a foreign language; yet he may say, with King Lear's fool, "I can tell what I can tell." Ultimately, Baraka-the-author and Baraka-the-persona merge and pronounce Crow Jane's death sentence in
unison.

This complete rejection of Crow Jane joins the end of the series with its opening epigram, forming an African/Afro-American frame to the examination of Western tradition. For, like Williams, Baraka tells Crow Jane, "I'm going . . . you don't relieve my cares." The sequence as a whole is entirely characteristic of Baraka's most revolutionary works: it appropriates a classic Euro-American form, inverts its imagery and themes, and molds it into a new structure by wedding furious critique to conventional Afro-American expressions and the language of Pan-African mythologies. Just as Baraka's notion of the "myth of a Negro literature" is itself a myth that enables him to feel free from a predetermined literary "legacy," so his later disavowal and abuse of Western influences lend his recent art the appearance of indeed representing a "post-Western form."

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His career has thus progressed in the manner of his image of black music's evolution: challenging unwanted influences with "root" African and Afro-American expressions, it has developed dialectically toward a purer reflection of his essential vision. If this movement has appeared at times confusing and self-contradictory, it is due less to the revolution's or Baraka's own uncertainty than to the demands thrust upon him by the past. Ralph Ellison has also sought to forge a unique cultural instrument, one consonant with his conception of Afro-American identity. Toward this end, he has espoused an aesthetic of inclusion whereby influences are "chosen" freely from all available traditions: I felt that I would have to make some sort of closer identification with the tradition of American literature, if only by way of finding out why I was not there - or better, by way of finding how I could use that very powerful literary tradition by way of making literature my own, and by way of using literature as a means of clarifying the peculiar and particular experience out of which I came.28 Ellison's eclecticism, while surely contrary to Baraka's nationalist aesthetic, is oriented toward a similar elevation of the black self in relation to a given image of culture. Though Ellison absorbs influences more openly than Baraka, he faces the same problem of creatively and coherently renovating his models. The result is a critique of tradition as strenuous as Baraka's, but one which, because of Ellison's simultaneous embrace and revision of borrowed material, engages our ceaseless capacities for mystification and demystification of his intentions. And it is precisely the indeterminacy in relation to their prototypes that sets Ellison's patterns and characters apart from those prototypes and makes them unconventional, original, and lifelike.29 The complexity of Ellison's aesthetic is evident in many aspects of Invisible Man. Using a wealth of folkloristic material, Ellison shows us black and white characters enacting the same archetypical roles. For example, Bledsoe, Peter Wheatstraw, and Brockway are cast as guileful trickster figures of contrasting moral value. Yet the insidious Brother Jack is also a trickster, a rabbit (his "movements" are "those of a lively small animal" [IM, 250] ) who ensnares the bearish narrator. At the same time, the Brotherhood leader is "Jack the bear" as prefigured in the hero's meeting with the rabbit Wheatstraw. A similar problematizing of folk motifs is evident when the narrator, having entered a drugstore restaurant, is repelled by the "special" of pork chops, grits, and hot biscuits which a white man then orders (IM, 157-58). As with the blues, Ellison seems to be 348

asserting that the meaning of inherited patterns is not given but determined by function and context. If the purveyors of folk culture are the "bearers of something precious" (IM, 381), this "something" cannot be uncritically imposed on life but must be shaped into currently meaningful form, and this - again, as in the blues - is the individual's responsibility. Ellison structures into his narrative several exemplars of false and proper uses of tradition. Homer A. Barbee - himself a complex amalgam of European (blind Homer) and Afro-American roots - manipulates the details and techniques of black sermon and classical mythmaking traditions to create a deleterious historical allegory (that of the legendary Founder's struggle up from slavery). Tod Clifton, on the other hand, employs the worst aspect of minstrel tradition, the Sambo image, only to transcend its stereotypical implications. He refuses to allow the image to control his identity; instead, with his invisible puppeteer's thread, he controls the Sambo doll. Of all the paradigmatic artists in Invisible Man, however, Jim Trueblood best exemplifies the individual's acceptance and creative transformation of tradition. Having fomented chaos in his home, Trueblood becomes a wounded outcast caught in the tragic web of absurd circumstance ("I had to move without movin' " [IM, 58] ). As a suffering figure cast in the mold of classic tragedy, Trueblood faces the paradox of inevitable sin: "I thinks and thinks, until I thinks my brain go'n bust, 'bout how I'm guilty and how I ain't guilty" (IM, 63). Yet soon, he creates form where chaos had reigned, ordering the warring details of his past by accepting their ambiguities and his own isolated identity. To the tragic protagonist's ability to suffer and question his fate, Trueblood adds the comic lyricism that mitigates and structures experience. He becomes, in other words, the tragicomic bluesman who, in recognizing his necessary distinction from society, simultaneously reshapes tradition and reconnects his personal voice with the community's: Finally, one night, way early in the mornin', I looks up and sees the stars and I starts singin'. I don't mean to. I didn't think 'bout it, just start singin'. I don't know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All I know is I ends up singin' the blues. I sings me some blues that night ain't never been sang before, and while I'm singin' them blues I makes up my mind that I ain't nobody but myself and ain't nothin' I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen. I made up my mind that I was goin' back home and face Kate; yeah, and face Matty Lou too. (IM, 63) Trueblood's narrative effectively combines the Afro-American 349

idioms of blues-singing and tale-telling with the universal themes of incest and tragic suffering. Yet even these traditions are, as Ellison would say, "distorted in the interest of a design" (IM, 380). For, as Gene Bluestein notes, Trueblood's shattering tale of incest, which arouses Norton's horror and the hero's shame, "undercuts the conventional image of the Negro folk character whose major reference for most readers is the kindly Uncle Remus."30 In addition, the incest tale's standard function of establishing taboo is undermined by Trueblood's blues-inspired acceptance of his absurd predicament. Trueblood, then, uses the trappings of venerated custom to transcend the bonds they would impose on life. The blues tradition (which, from Louis Armstrong's lament in the "Prologue" to the "Epilogue's" final line, is evoked throughout the novel) serves as a foil to the quasi-picaresque chronicle of the hero's quest. It also serves as an inescapable touchstone of judgment on that quest. The hero learns that he must become a kind of Trueblood who, after sifting through the contradictory details of the past (as embodied by such models as his grandfather, Bledsoe, Trueblood, Barbee, Mary Rambo, Wheatstraw, and Brockway), forges anew the "possibilities" of selfhood. His bumbling journey from darkness to light and back again is, in effect, a tour through the collective history of his race during which he meets and chooses from among his ancestors. Yet when, near the novel's end, the hero burns the contents of his briefcase - among them his diploma, Clifton's doll, and the paper on which Jack had written his new name - he renounces any specific claims of the past. Through this exorcistic act he accepts the blues' lesson that there is "no scapegoat but the self," for this rejection of prefabricated models calls attention, by the sheer diversity and internal tension of the roles it invokes, to the ultimate necessity of self-definition. It would be a mistake, however, to take this scene as a final dismissal of acquired symbols and modes. Ellison is careful to point out the functionality of the hero's fire - it must light his way through the underground passageway. The past is not destroyed but rather transmuted into a form useful in the present. After all, the figure of Rinehart, whose fluid purity of possibility is equivalent to faceless chaos, has already made the hero realize that some form, some defining pattern, must be imposed upon one's experience. The value of the past, for Ellison, is that it provides us with tested and pliable patterns that best facilitate formation of our unique features. If the gifts of the past are of ambiguous value, it is only because they manifest the curious splendor of human complexity. And if, as Trueblood claimed, "I ain't nobody but myself," that "I" gives birth to itself by choosing its fathers: "I yam what I am!" (IM, 231). IV Like Trueblood singing the blues alone, Ellison's hero goes underground to write his "memoirs," to organize his past as prerequisite 350

for reassimilation with society as a presumably named and visible entity. He is creating the features of his face and the many styles he employs to do so reflect not only creativity in the presence of chaos but an appreciation for the variety of alternatives supplied by a variety of traditions. Ellison has exhorted all of us to join his hero and "make up our faces and our minds."31 A major motif throughout Invisible Man and the critical works is the metaphor of masking implicit in this appeal. Here, again, is a striking parallel to Baraka's work which, from Willie Best ("a renegade behind the mask") to those heroes of the drama who struggle with split loyalties, explicitly employs the same device. And, once more, we find revealing difference within a common symbol for identity. The mask worn by Baraka's characters is a legacy of slavery, a debasing subterfuge heretofore necessary for survival. Just as the Afro-American's past must be stripped away to recall seminal African strength, so must the inherited mask of servility be lifted to reveal the true black self. Willie Best, who resembles Clifton's Sambo doll with its two grinning faces and doubled fists (IM, 385-86), speaks for all of Baraka's people when he shirks his "renegade disguise" and declares, "I'm tired of losing./ 'I got ta cut 'cha' " ("A Poem for Willie Best," Part 7). For Ellison, "masking is a play upon possibility" that gives man an "ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind."32 The narrator of Invisible Man is constantly made the butt of this joke. While he discovers that Bledsoe is villainously deceptive behind his mask ("his face twitched and cracked like the surface of dark water" [IM, 125]), he also learns that Trueblood is heroically shrewd "behind his eyes" (IM, 59). He encounters the ambiguously "veiled" statue of the Founder (a former slave) and both good and bad masked tricksters (Wheatstraw and Jack, respectively, with Rinehart, like his prototype, Melville's Confidence Man, embodying a bit of both good and bad). Even the Willie Bestean minstrel mask takes on conflicting values when placed on Mary Rambo's antique coin-bank or
Clifton's doll (whose "dance . . . was completely detached from the black,

mask-like face" [IM, 373]). The narrator calls the image on Mary's bank "self-mocking," and Baraka would agree. Yet Ellison's hero suffers precisely because he does not perceive the bridge erected by the mask between the violence of social history and the beauty of his people's continual transcendence within that history. The mask, for Ellison, is a formal response to experience and tradition. It may be stifling sham (Bledsoe, Jack) or, like the blues, a liberating self-creation (Trueblood, Wheatstraw). Ellison suggests that the Sambo image is more valuable controlled than rejected. He might say, to rephrase Mary's attitude toward Harlem, "I may shape the mask but it doesn't shape me."

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This leads us to perhaps the most revealing parallel between these two tradition-conscious writers: their very Afro-American concern with names. Baraka, who believes the slave past and its attendant masks must be abandoned for new forms, symbolically enacted his vision by supplanting "Everett LeRoi Jones" with "Imamu Amiri Baraka." Following his mentor Malcolm X, Baraka believes only the namer controls the history and identity of the named. Acceptance of one's given, "slave" name (whether
individual - "Jones" - or generic - "Negro") is symbolic resignation to

the oppressor as both literal and dozens-playing "signifier." Ellison, on the other hand, embraces his European appellation (Ralph Waldo Ellison) as a valuable reflection of the multi-cultural heritage available to him. He finds a strong, rich identity in the very complexities of his given yet chosen name: We must learn to wear our names within all the noise and confusion of the environment in which we find ourselves.... They must become our masks and our shields and the containers of all those values and traditions which we learn and/or imagine as being the meaning of our familial past.33 Ellison and Baraka have fashioned two distinct images of the Afro-American "familial past." Their art teaches us that this past is not a static, ideal form but a protean idea freshly rethought and revalued by the black artist's individual consciousness. Despite Ellison and Baraka's differences, there is an essential correspondence between their efforts. Both writers, as critics and creators of tradition, have sought strategies for saving and improving the best aspects of the black self. How tomorrow's poets will reconstruct that self, and how they will name it, depends on their own critiques of their predecessors' visions. Yale University NOTES
1 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952, rpt. New York: New American Library, Signet, n.d.), p. 307. All references to Invisible Man (henceforth designated IM) are from this paperback edition. "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Selected (London: Faber, 1932), p. 14. Essays 1917-1932

2 3 4

A seminal effort in this regard is Larry Neal's essay, "Ellison's Zoot Suit," Black World, 20, No.2 (December 1970), 31-50. I borrow this term from Howard Felperin's forthcoming study of literary tradition in Elizabethan tragedy, Shakespearean Representation: Imitation and Innovation in Elizabethan Tragedy.

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A notable exception is Charles T. Davis' essay, "Jean Toomer and the South: Region and Race as Elements Within a Literary Imagination," Studies in the Literary Imagination, 7, No. 2 (1974), 23-39, which examines Toomer's figurative and idealized conceptions of race and geography as the enabling forces of his art. Neil Schmitz's "Neo-HooDoo: The Experimental Fiction of Ishmaei Reed," Twentieth Century Literature, 20, No. 2 (April 1974), 126-40, is also a step in this direction. This and other quotations in this paragraphare from Black Music (New York: Morrow, 1967), pp. 13-14, and all other quotations in the following discussion of Baraka's theory, unless otherwise noted, are from Blues People (New York: Morrow, 1963). Page references to Blues People (abbreviated BP) will be given in parentheses. For greater exposition of these concepts see "The Pre-Revolutionary Writings of Imamu Amiri Baraka," by William C. Fischer, The Massachusetts Review, 14, No.2 (Spring 1973), 259-305, and my Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), Chapter 3. It may be relevant, as a prelude to discussion of Ellison's objections to Baraka's blues theory, to note that Ellison cites just this blues formula as a gloss to Invisible Man in "The Art of Fiction: An Interview," in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1964), p. 173: Interviewers. Can you give us an example of the use of folklore in your own novel? Ellison. Well, there are certain themes, symbols and images which are based on folk material. For example, there is the old saying amongst Negroes: If you're black, stay back; if you're brown, stick around; if you're white, you're right.... In my book this sort of thing was merged with the meanings which blackness and light have long had in Western mythology.

9 10 11 12 13 14

Black Music, p. 176. "Blues People," in Shadow and Act, p. 256. "Richard Wright's Blues," in Shadow and Act, p. 78. "Blues People," p. 256. My emphasis. "Blues People," p. 253. This idea, inchoate in Blues People, becomes increasingly evident in Baraka's drama from Dutchman and The Slave to Great Goodness of Life, and finally becomes the guiding thesis of his latest major play, Slave Ship. From "Precise Techniques," Black Magic (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 90. See especially Court Royal of Great Goodness of Life and the whole black community during the Middle Passage section of Slave Ship. The old man's knife wound explicitly connects him to the blues tradition of fellow slave-figure Jim Trueblood. Trueblood's tale is discussed below.

15 16 17

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"Blues People," p. 256. Harold Bloom employs this term as a label for the poet's misinterpretation of a prior poet which, Bloom asserts, is the necessary starting point of the post-Renaissance writer's creativity. See The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Ellison admits as much in the later essay "The World and the Jug," Shadow and Act, pp. 107-43. Compare in the two essays, for example, Ellison's analyses of Black Bov's "cultural barrenness of black life" passage. "The World and the Jug," p. 140. My emphasis. "Richard Wright's Blues," p. 94. "The Myth of a 'Negro Literature,' " in Home (New York: Morrow, 1966), pp. 105-115. Raise Race Rays Raze (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 156. Home, p. 252. Near the beginning of The Slave, Walker quotes from Yeats's "News for the Delphic Oracle," illustrating his later claim that "I learned so many words for what I wanted to say.... But almost none of them are mine." In Part 7 of "A Poem for Willie Best," Willie is described as having "Black skin/ and hanging lip." "On Initiation Rites and Power: Ralph Ellison Speaks at West Point," ed. Robert H. Moore, Contemporary Literature, 15, No. 2 (Spring 1974), 167. Felperin observes the same quality in such Shakespearean characters as Hamlet and Falstaff and notes further that this space between character and traditional model makes Shakespeare's world in general seem "real." "The Blues as a Literary Theme," in The Voice of the Folk (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), p.130. "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," in Shadow and Act, p. 156. "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," in Shadow and Act, pp. 55 and 53. It is interesting, in light of Baraka's treatment of Yeats in the "Crazy Jane" poems, that Ellison cites Yeats's theory of the mask in this essay with great enthusiasm. "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," p. 148.

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