Casanova’s article on literary time has stood out for me all semester. It’s been one of those readings that I never stop thinking about and the ways that it applies to my life as well as my other classes. The theory that he is exploring is much bigger than just within modernist literature. It’s something that has continued to this day. The idea that you must travel to a certain esteemed place to truly study art or academia is alive and well. It is one of the primary reasons that I moved to Boston. It’s one of the reasons that my family is so proud of me. To “get out” of a small town or rural area has many complicated layers, but one is the belief that there are no smart people in rural places. That intelligence can only be found in large cities with lots of money and white people. To have a smart child is an anomaly and thus they are sent off to get “educated” as soon as possible, so as to not contaminate them. Casanova is alluding to a much larger system in The World Republic of Letters. He is acknowledging the fact that only those from white and rich places are allowed to be intelligent and thus taken seriously. If someone is from outside of that world, they must move there quickly. In the US, the South and the Midwest are considered to be poor while the Southwest along with the South again have large populations of people of color. In the same way, France and England were comparatively white and rich in the Modern Era. This sets Paris, London, Boston, New York, and Silicon Valley as places where intelligence can flourish. It has nothing to do with talent. Only race and class.
Category Archives: Black Modernism/Black Modernity
Dialect in Rhys and Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston is know for her intriguing dialogue choice in Their Eyes Were Watching God. She contrasts beautiful and high caliber “proper” English with a 1920s Black dialect. This striking verbal contrast helped to propel her novel into literary acclaim. By proving that she could access and craft the language of white publishers she was able to draw them into reading a story of and about Black people. This striking contrast helped to illuminate the racist disparities felt between white America and Black.
Rhys uses a similar concept in “Let Them Call It Jazz”. The entire story is written in working class British English. However, her other stories are all written in “proper” English. This distinction feels so slight that your eyes almost glance over it on the first page. It is as if there were just a few typos before you begin to see the pattern of grammar. This dialect helps the reader to take on the identity of the speaker and begin to see how the world seems constantly stacked against her.
Both Rhys and Hurston use their natural dialects compared to “proper” English to help manifest the difficulties of their characters and themselves for the reader. While Rhys uses slight verb changes, and Hurston transliterates a completely different dialect, these points of language work to internalize the reality of time and oppression by creating distance between the characters and those in power, meanwhile drawing the reader into these different experiences in a unique and compelling way.
Interplay of dialect and descriptive prose
As I read Hurston for this time, as with the short story of hers that we read, the novel’s parallel regional dialect and more formal descriptive prose struck me. It occurred to me that reading these two tones of language alongside each other is like listening to a symphony: first, you might hear the more expressive, upbeat, jolty part of the music, and then it slows to a flowing, more pensive section that somehow seems to explain or contextualize the first. For example, Janie’s utterance to her grandmother that “‘Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think. Ah…'” is very evocative of her sense of mourning in and of itself (24). However, this feeling of mourning and disappointment is enriched by the text that follows shortly after, which I find absolutely transcendent:
“She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind….She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making….She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (25).
Janie “knew” all of the above, but she couldn’t say it all to her grandmother; neither would her grandmother want to hear it, nor might Janie be able to communicate this newly acquired wisdom to anyone other than herself. I love the way Hurston lets us into Janie’s conscience here, without necessarily breaking down that divide that still exists for her between her inner self and the characters around her.
Narrator or Author
In our last class we discussed the line that exists between the author and the narrator. The narrator of a story is just another character of the novel. All the opinions and thoughts expressed by the narrator do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the author. This was one of the critics expressed by Du Bois for Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. Thurman’s narrator would both criticize Emma Lou, while at the same time express her thoughts, almost always self-hating, as his/her own opinions. In these instances it can be difficult to distinguish the author from the narrator. Had the novel been in the first person point of view, from Emma Lou’s perspective, there would not have been any accusations towards Thurman. Another example provided in class was Nabokov’s famous work, Lolita. In this case as well, the narrator, who also happens to be the main character, is often confused for the author. This caused Nabokov a lot of problems as well as creating a lot of controversy.
This brings me to The Berlin Stories. In this case the author and the narrator both share the same name and a lot of other similarities, including the experiences mentioned in the novel. Since the work is fiction, are we as the readers supposed to separate the author or from the narrator? This is made very difficult with the fact that they both share a name.
Something else I found very interesting was the fact that this is the first piece or writing that has the average man as the storyteller. Stories such as The Great Gatsby and All the King’s Men have this same man. In The Great Gatsby the main character is Gatsby, but the narrator, who is also a character in the story, is Nick Carraway and in All the King’s Men, the story is about Willie Stark but the story is told by Jack Burden. Up until now, we have only had an unknown, invisible character as the narrator. This is the first instance of a character being a vessel to tell the stories of other people, such as Sally Bowles. The Berlin Stories, were published in 1945, maybe this technique is a more recent development.
Staring
Deemed a “monstrosity” (192) by his own mother, Alva Junior is an unfortunate, misshapen creature, with “a shrunken left arm and a deformed left foot.” (192). Even the narrator refers to Alva Junior as an “it” (192), rather than using the more humanizing pronoun “he.” Alva Junior is presented as an object, a product of the shallow, loveless union between Alva and Geraldine. To further develop Alva Junior’s role as an object, the child is completely static and lifeless, for “it neither talked or walked.” He is both figuratively and literally a burden and for people who place such a premium on physical appearance, Alva Junior is a cruel and ironic existence– a bad joke with “thick grinning lips” (192). If Alva Junior has inherited anything from his parents, its is perhaps his “insanely large and vacant eyes” (192), for that empty gaze is reminiscent of how Alva, Geraldine (and perhaps their peers) live: forever fixated on someone’s appearance and the color of the color of his or her skin.
Let us now turn to Alva Junior and Emma Lou. As readers, we can’t help but shake our heads in disapproval when she decides to return to Alva Senior. She takes responsibility of Alva Junior, and under her care, manages “to make little Alva Junior take on some of the physical aspects of a normal child” (208). At first glance, he seems to be getting better, yet the one thing that doesn’t change is “his abnormally large eyes” which “still retained their insane stare” and “appeared frozen and terrified as if their owner was gazing upon some horrible yet fascinating object or occurrence” (208). What is the “horrible yet fascinating object” that the child is looking at? Emma Lou? His father? The society that he will have to grow up in? If children are the future, than the future seems to be portrayed as horribly grotesque.
We can explore another dimension to Alva Jr’s symbolism if we agree that Alva Junior is a caricature of Black society and its obsession with skin tone (as discussed in the first paragraph). If this true, then can’t we also say that his relationship with Emma Lou is metaphorical of her relationship with the rest of society? Her decision to stay with Alava Junior is in a way self destructive because although she “loved to fondle [Alva Junior’s] warm, mellow-colored body, loved to caress his little crooked limbs” (211), her actions and affections place her in the stereotypical role of “a black mammy,” something that she even admits to on page 218. This is perhaps analogous to the catch 22 of wanting to be part of a system that will only spurn and marginalize you in the end.
New Women
The character of Sally in The Berlin Stories helped me to gain a better understanding of Modernism’s New Woman. As I was reading I began to see the essence of Sally in several of the female characters in modernist literature. I thought of Sally Seton from Mrs. Dalloway, Daisy Buchanan from the The Great Gatsby, Kitty Baldry from The Return of the Soldier, Lily from The House of Mirth, Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun also Rises, Petronella from “Till September Petronella.” (Although not within the modernist time frame, I also thought of Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s because of the parallels in the relationship between Holly and the narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the relationship between Sally and Chris.)
Notwithstanding the individuality of these women, to varying degrees they share very similar characteristics and personality traits. They are sexaully liberated and are very aware of the power of their bodies to their male counterparts and even to themselves. They are explicit in their desires. They are outspoken. They are at times selfish. Their personalities are sometimes dramatic and purposely exaggerated as if they constantly have to perform to an audience. They are also clever and skilled at manipulation if not checked by other characters. One thing that is important to note is that they are also all seemingly white.
Is Emma Lou a New Woman? Are there Black female characters in modernist literature that are New Women? We have discussed in class the supposed responsibility put upon Black writers to be representative of their race. There were damaging stereotypes that plagued Black women at the time. These writers must “uplift” the race. Does that mean not including women characters that share the characteristics of New Woman? I think Emma Lou is a type of New Woman.
Internalized Racism in The Blacker the Berry
We talked in our last class about W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of the “Talented Tenth,” and how, as unfair as it may be, it is the talented tenth’s responsibility to uplift African Americans. Wallace Thurman’s characters in The Blacker the Berry seem to believe in a similar ideal, except they have interpreted the talented tenth as becoming as white as possible, to ingratiate themselves into white culture instead of to fight for racial equality. Emma Lou’s own family motto reflects that:
“Whiter and whiter every generation. The nearer white you are the more white people will respect you. Therefore all light Negroes marry light Negroes. Continue to do so generation after generation, and eventually white people will accept this racially bastard aristocracy, thus enabling those Negroes who really matter to escape the social and economic inferiority of the American Negro.” (37)
Naturally, by believing that black people should strive to be whiter in order to be respectable, black people themselves must believe that they are inferior. At one point, Emma Lou refers to her African heritage as “primitive” (44). The extent of the internalized racism is actually astounding. The black community has not only established hierarchies based off of the darkness of one’s skin color (as well as where a person is from, as we see in Emma Lou’s treatment of Hazel Mason), but also treats it like religious dogma. Even amongst college-educated people, the lighter a woman’s skin, the more desirable a woman is as a romantic partner/spouse because, as white society has instilled in everyone, light skin screams intelligence and respectability, while dark skin does just the opposite.
Time Capsule: The “Roaring Twenties”
Comparisons of the different Modern Movements
In “Negro Youth Speaks”, Alain Locke introduces a new wave of black artists. This essay is very similar to Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” as well as Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Woolf talks about recording “the atoms as they fall upon the mind” and “the incident scores upon the consciousness”. Locke describes the new young black artists as having “a deepening rather than a narrowing of social vision” as well as a an achievement of “an inner mastery of mood and spirit”. Just like high modernism, described by Woolf, the “Young Negro” creates stories that center around the individual experiences, while the black artists of the past would create stories that centered around the whole racial population.
In his preface, Wilde states that “all art is quite useless”. He makes the argument that art is not created to fix something or to make people morally correct, but simply to be admired. Locke mentions a similar idea in that the new artists do not write or create works that are meant to represent and fight for the entire black population but are simply meant to document their individualistic experiences as black people. He clarifies a fine distinction between the past writers who spoke “for the Negro” verses the new modern poets who “speak as Negroes”. The new artist have “helped in bringing of the materials of negro life out of the shambles of…cheap romance and journalism into the domain of pure and unbiassed art.”
Locke believes that this new method actually does a better job of detailing the lives of “the Negro” than any of the previous works. That in order to express what it is like to be something, for example black, it not necessary to actually talk about being that something but simply to tell an experience from the perspective of that person. “For race expression does not need to be deliberate to be vital. Indeed at its best it never is.” “Racial expression as a conscious motive…is fading out of our latest art”. Just like the previous definitions of modernism, the scope has narrowed. While previously the narrative described a group of people, the modern narrative focused on the individual perspective.
I find it very interesting that almost all of the books we have read so far had a narrator that entered at least one character’s mind and revealed their inner thoughts and feelings and yet the story, “Spunk”, provided in the “The New Negro” by Zora Neale Hurston has a narrator that is almost completely removed from the story. The narrator doesn’t even tell us all of the important information, but simply allows the characters, specifically Elijah and Walter, to describe the plot and the emotions of Joe, Spunk, and Lena. There is a lot less internal analyzing than in the previous works we have read. I’m looking forward to reading more black authors from the Modern movement to see if this pattern continues.
“Harlem: The Culture Capital”
“Harlem: The Culture Capital” by James Weldon Johnson places the New Negro in an interesting position within society, as an outsider to creative production centered in a place like Paris, but as an insider within the new cultural capital of Harlem. The pieces in this collection aim to prove the cultural centrality of Harlem and of the artists living and working there. James Weldon Johnson describes Harlem as “the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious and the talented of the whole Negro world; for the lure of it has reached down to every island of the Carib Sea and has penetrated even into Africa,” and he highlights the centrality of Harlem within New York City, stating that Harlem “is not a slum or a fringe” (301). With these passages, the author establishes Harlem as a new cultural center for a new worldwide Negro community. This centrality is somewhat contradictory, therefore, because although Harlem is a center of creative production, the author also asserts that Harlem serves as this cultural center for a distinct Negro community.
Furthermore, James Weldon Johnson describes the complex relationship between Harlem and the rest of New York City: Harlem is a separate, “well-defined and stable” community, but he also states, “Harlem grows more metropolitan and more a part of New York all the while” (309). As the community in Harlem evolves, the neighborhood experiences “a constant growth of group consciousness and community feeling” that the author states is “typically Negro” (309). It is this quality that makes Harlem unique and enables this area to retain a separate identity from the rest of New York City. While Harlem is a cultural center, it is a different kind of cultural center and is central to a different kind of community. This distinction places the New Negro in a complex position, then, as a member of a distinct community that shares in worldwide events and artistic movements, but that operates around its own cultural center. This work presents the New Negro in Harlem as an artist holding a unique position between insider and outsider.