Henry Loius Gates Jr.

8/3/2019 Henry Loius Gates Jr.

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Indiana State University

Introduction: Criticism in De JungleAuthor(s): Henry-Louis Gates, Jr.Source: Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 15, No. 4, Black Textual Strategies, Volume 1:Theory (Winter, 1981), pp. 123-127Published by: St. Louis UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904323 .

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INTRODUCTION: CRITICISM IN DE JUNGLEHENRY-LOUISGATES, JR.*

"Nigger, long as you don't change, I'll always have me a subject."-Traditional'

"Son, these niggers writing. Profaning our sacred words. Taking them fromus and beating them on the anvil of Boogie Woogie, putting their blackhands on them so that they shine like burnished amulets. Taking our words,son, these filthy niggers and using them like they were their god-givenpussy. Why . . . why 1 of them dared to interpret, critically mind you, thegreat Herman Melville's Moby Dick!!"-Ishamel Reed, Mumbo Jumbo2

The second epigraph, from Mumbo Jumbo, refers to thatsplendid work of criticism that C. L. R. James wrote whileimprisoned in 1952 on Ellis Island. James' work, Mariners,Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melvilleand the World We Live In, which he published himself inNew York in 1953, is a close reading of Moby-Dick andPierre,which James sees as allegories for the fascist years inthe post-War United States, of which Senator JosephMcCarthy remains only a convenient sign: "I publish myprotest [against racism and fascism],"writes the critic, "withthe book on Melville . . ." (p. 202). The only other literaryevent in the black tradition which strikes me with suchpoignancy is the publication of Madmen and Specialists, thefirst play Wole Soyinka wrote after emerging from twenty-seven months of imprisonment in Nigeria, twenty-four ofwhich he was forced to spend in solitary confinement. Whoamong us dares to claim to have made a critical gesture aspoignant as Soyinka's and James? Who, indeed?The act ofwriting, for James and Soyinka, was no idle matter; itrepresenteda profound definition, and defense, of self: Asan act of self-defense, the writer defends the integrityof theself through the device of displacement.I have edited the collection of essays which begin in thisissue of BALFand will continue through the next to answer,implicitly, a question that faces each critic of comparativeblack literature,as she or he struggleswith the crucial issuesof contemporary literary theory and the complex matter ofthe "applicability"of these theories to the Afro-American,Caribbean, and African literarytraditions. My own worksof criticism, since I returnedto Yale in 1975,from graduateschool in English at the University of Cambridge, to studywith the late CharlesT. Davis, haveattempted to drawuponcontemporary theories of readingboth to explicate discreteblack texts, and to define the precise structureof the Afro-American Literary Tradition itself by trying to link, inGeoffrey Hartman'sapt description, "the form of artand theform of its historical consciousness."3 I have been con-cerned, in other words, with that complex relationshipbetween what it is useful to call "therepresentative"n Afro-American letters and the process of "representation," ofmimesis, itself. To explore this relation, moreover, I haveattempted, with varying degrees of success, to "read"the

*Guest Editor Henry-Louis Gates, Jr., is Assistant Professor of Englishand Afro-American Studies at Yale Universityand the recentrecipientof aMacArthur Prize Fellowship.

black tradition closely, drawing rathereclectically upon theactivity of reading as practicedby criticsoutside of the blackliterary traditions.This has been no easy task. Difficulty has arisen notbecause of the supposedly insurmountable subtleties ofliterarytheoretical debate, but because of the very questionof the so-called "translatability" of these theories to thereading of works outside of what Geoffrey Hartman hasperceptively termed their"text-milieu."4Theory, like wordsin a poem, does not "translate" n one-to-one relationshipofreference.Indeed, I have found that in the "application"of amode of reading to black texts, the critic, by definition,transforms the theory, and, I mightadd, transformsreceivedreadings of the text, into something different, a constructneither exactly "like" its antecedents nor entirely new.Indeed, in two rigorous and frankly rather flatteringreadings of my own theories of criticism, I have beenreferred to as a "New Formalist," as a "Structuralist,"andeven as a "Deconstructionist."5 Not even the inherentindeterminancy of hsu the black trickster, a figure for thecritic and for indeterminancy which I have derived fromYoruba mythic discourse, could enable him to wear thesemasks simultaneously: Rather than to accept or identifywith these increasingly glib, and increasingly meaningless,labels of intellectual indenture, I have tried to take fromcontemporary Western critical theory that which enablesme, in some way, to respond to the signifyingstructures thata sensitive reading should produce in the texts of the blackcanon. Key texts, sign-posts of the tradition, seem todemand to be readin certainways. If theory and praxis fromFormalism, Structuralism, or Post-Structuralism aid thecritic in responding to these multi-various demands of thetexts of our tradition, then the critic mustembarkupon theirapplication. How can it be otherwise?Who would seek to deny us our complexity? Who,indeed? Wole Soyinka, whose vast corpus of works isperhaps the most sustained and challenging in the Africancanon, has reflectedupon this question, which is a profoundreformulation of the very question of the complex relationthe individual talent bears to tradition(s); in the instance ofthe writer of African descent, her or his texts occupy spacesin at least two traditions the individual's European orAmerican literarytradition, and one of the three relatedbutdistinct black traditions. The "heritage"of each black textwritten in a Western language, then, is a double-heritage,two-toned, as it were.Soyinka's recapitulation of this relation between theindividual black talent and Western traditions is an enter-prising one: "'A ? heb'ra hi tan, k'afiara wa nitan ya.' Afree translation would read: Kinship does not insist that,because we are entwined, we thereby rip off each other'sthigh. The man who, because of ideological kinship tries tosever my being from its self-apprehension is not merelyculturally but politically hostile."6 The "textual" radition inevidence here is one broadly defined, including as it does

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both the imaginativeand the ideological text. We, the criticsof black literary traditions, owe it to those traditions tobring to bear upon our readingsany "tool"which helps us toelucidate, which enables us more clearly to see, the com-plexities of figuration inherent in the rhetorical structuresthrough which our literary traditions configure themselves.Close reading of any intellectual complexion is that which Iadvocate; there can be no compromise here.Let me state my concerns bluntly: The criticism of Afro-American literature has floundered, badly. Critics of ourliterature seem to have undertaken the activity of readingtoo often to employ the text at hand to serve an essentially"political"function, in the long and continuing war againstfascism and racism. No one can, with integrity, deny theimportance, or the sheerurgency, of the struggle to criticizethat pernicious Western racism which has reinforced invarious ways the relation of the sign of blackness as anabsence to an economic order which attempts, system-atically, to deny persons of African descent the complexitiesof their full humanity. I seek to critiquehere not theattemptof our critics to redress these evils; rather, I critique onlytheir manner of explication.

By definition, the medium in which the critical activity isengaged is language, spoken and writtenwords. The ways inwhich language and literaturemediate between "reality" ofwhatever sort) and its reflections are both various andsubtle. Any meaningful effort to mediate this distancebetween text and "reality" s especially difficult for the criticbecause a text is a coded structurewhich must somehow bedecoded; its structures of signification can never be whatthey appear to be, or might be in literal discourse. Even toachieve a grasp of a text's reduced "meaning" not onlypresupposes but also demands mastery of the several modesof explication with which we are satisfactorily able toproduce a reading. For all sorts of complex historicalreasons, the act of writing itself has been a "political"act forthe black author. Even our most solipsistic texts, at leastsince the Enlightenment in Europe, have been treated aspolitical evidence of one sort or another, both implicitlyandexplicitly, and because our life in the West has been onepolitical struggle followed by another, our literature hasbeen defined without, and ratheroften within, as primarilyjust one more polemic in these struggles. The black literarytradition now demands, for sustenance and for growth, thesorts of reading which it is the especial province of theliterarycritic to render;and these sorts of readingall shareafundamental concern with the nature and functions offigurative language as manifested in specific texts. Nomatter to what ends we put our readings, we can never losesight of the fact that a text is not a "thing,"but is a rhetoricalstructure which functions in response to a complex set ofrules. It cannot ever be related satisfactorily to a realityoutside of itself merely in a one-to-one relation.How "black" is figuration? Given the obvious politicalintent of so much of every black literarytradition, is it notsomewhat wistful to be concerned with the intricacies of thefigure? The Afro-American tradition has been figurativefrom its beginnings. How could it have survivedotherwise?Ineed not here trace the elaborate modes of significationimplicit in black sacred and secular traditions of music andof painting, in black mythicand religious traditions, in ritualrhetoricalstructuressuch as "Signifying"and "TheDozens."

Black people have always been masters of the figurative:Saying one thing to mean something quite other has beenbasic to black survival in oppressive Western cultures.Misreading signs could be, and indeed often was, fatal."Reading," in this sense, was not play; it was an essentialaspect of the "literacy" training of a child. This sort ofmetaphorical literacy, the learning to decipher complexcodes, is just about the blackest aspect of the black tradition.If, as our folklore tells us, "Signification is the Nigger'soccupation,"7then we may also say rightfully that "Figura-tion is the Nigger's occupation." For a critic of blackliterature to be unaware of the black tradition of figurationand its bearing upon a discrete black text is as serious a flawas for that critic to be unaware of the texts in the Westerntradition which that black text echoes, revises,and extends.Hartman's definition of "text-milieu"("how theory dependson a canon, on a limited group of texts, often culture-specific or national") does not breakdown in the context ofthe black traditions;it must, however, be modified since thetexts of the black canon occupy a rhetoricalspace in at leasttwo canons, as does black literary theory. The sharing oftexts in common does allow for enhanced dialogue; but thesharing of a more or less compatible critical approach alsoallows for a dialogue between two critics of two differentcanons whose knowledge of the other's texts is less thanideal. The black text-milieu is extra-territorial.The black critic must face squarelyanother quandary, of amore subtle, and therefore more profoundly trying, nature.Barbara Johnson puts the matter exquisitely: "An enquirythat attempts to study an object by means of thatvery objectis open to certain analyzableabberations (this pertains,"shecontinues, "to virtuallyall important investigations: the selfanalyzing itself, man studying man, thought thinking aboutthought, language speaking about language, etc.)."8 Theproblem, for us, can perhaps be usefully stated in the ironyimplicit in the attempt to posit a "black self" in a Westernlanguage, one in which blackness itself is a figureof absence,a negation. Ethnocentricism and logocentrism bear a fun-damental relation in Western discourse as old as thePhaedrus of Plato, in which appears one of the earliestfigures of blackness as an absence, a figure of negation. IfKeats called the Enlightenment in Europe"thegrandmarchof intellects9 logocentism and ethnocentrism marchedtogether to deprive the black human being of even thepotential to create art, to imagine a world and to figure it.The so-called arbitrarinessof the sign, of the ways in whichconcepts divide reality arbitrarily and of the relationbetween a sign, such as blackness, and its referent, such asabsence, can help us to engage in sophisticated readings ofblack texts, but also of the figurations of blackness inWestern texts. Edward Said's clever use of post-structuraltheory to "read" the representation of the "Oriental" inWestern discourse provides only one reason for my stillwondering why what is commonly referred to as "decon-struction" was not "invented"by Third World philosophers,and remains under-utilizedby them even still. 0 Indeed, fewtheories of reading are as implicitly subversive as is decon-struction.My published analyses of what I termed "Race andSuperstructure"criticism arose not from political disagree-ments with the ends of that form of reading, but from afundamental disagreement with the tautology inherent in

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this theory, which I have elaborated upon at length else-where." To render as radical a critique as I could muster,and to engender as radical a response as I sought, I selectedto mount my argument from a radically formalist stance. Idid this so that those proponents of this theory of Race andSuperstructure would have a broad space on their rightthrough which to move. Despite the energetic responses tomy essays, it is safe to say that vulgar Black Aestheticcriticism, as practiced in the theoretical and practicalworksof the Black Arts movement, no longer can be producedwithout the knowledge of its central and fundamentalmethodological misconceptions. Indeed, two principal pro-ponents of that theory have openly adopted Stanley Fish's"Affective Stylistics" and "Reader-Response" criticism.These, of course, are the theories most compatible with thetheory of Race and Superstructure, since the role of the(black) reader is central here. In fact, these are the verytheories which I had assumed would be drawn upon toreplace the Black Aesthetic. Insofar as my critiquemay havehelped to influence these results, I am gratified. For it is a farmore pleasant, engaging, and creative task to critique"Affective Stylistics" than to critique Race and Super-structure criticism, which in practice at least tended to bedifficult to take too seriously.I am pleased by these gestures of critical change (andexchange), for it is clear even to the most casual observerthat literarytheory has never before been as discussed in theblack traditions as it has since 1975. In my essay on TheSignifying Monkey and on Mumbo Jumbo, which willappear several issues hence in BALF, I supplement myanalysis of Race and Superstructure with a second on theidea of a transcendent signified, a belief in an essence called"blackness"which our tradition has tried of late to will intobeing, to negatetwo and one-half millenia of its figuration asan absence. As healthy politically as such a gesture was, asrevealing as it was in this country and abroad of the veryarbitrariness of the received sign of blackness itself, we mustalso criticize the idealism, the notion of essence, implicit ineven this gesture. To think oneself free simply because onecan claim can utter the negation of an assertion is not tothink deeply enough. Negritude already constituted such aclaim of blackness as a transcendent signified, of a full andsufficient presence; but to make such a claim, to feel thenecessity of making such a claim, is already to reveal toomuch about perceived absence and desire. It is to take theterms of one's assertion from a discourse the universe ofwhich has been determined by an Other. Even the terms ofone's so-called "spontaneous"desire have been presupposedby the Other. I render this critique of blackness as atranscendent signified to help to break through the enclo-sure of negation.The enclosure of negation is only one trap. That sort ofintellectual indenture which we might call, after Jules deGaultier, "Bovarysm"is quite another, and equally deadly,trap. De Gaultier defines"Bovarysm"as the phenomenon ofbeing "fated to obey the suggestion of an external milieu, forlack of an auto-suggestion from within."'2The challenge ofblack literary criticism is to derive principles of literarycriticism from the black tradition itself, as defined in theidiom of critical theory but also in the idiom whichconstitutes the "language of blackness," the signifyingdifference which makes the black tradition our very own. To

borrow mindlessly, or to vulgarize, a critical theory fromanother text-milieu is to satisy de Gaultier's definition of"Bovarysm"; but it is also to satisfy, in the black idiom,Ishmael Reed's definition of "The Talking Android." Thecritics whose works I have collected for publication haveavoided nicely these dangers. The sign of the successfulnegotiation of this precipice of indenture, of slavish imita-tion, is that each of these essays refers to two contexts, twotraditions, the Westernand the black. Each utterance, then,is double-voiced.In a 1925 review of James Weldon Johnson's Book ofAmerican Negro Spirituals, W. E. B. Du Bois argued thatevidence of critical activity is a sign of a tradition'ssophistication, since criticism implies an awareness of theprocess of art itself, and is a second order reflection uponthose primarytexts that define a tradition, a canon. Insofaras we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, weserve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape theirdirection. All great writers demand great critics. Theimperatives of our task are clear.I have edited here a collection of essays, of theoretical andpractical criticism, which exemplifies various modes ofreading: Formalist, Marxist, Structuralist, and Post-Structuralist. I have even included a wonderfully perceptivecritique of the activity of structuralism (as applied toAfrican texts) by an analytic philosopher trained in theEnglish tradition. The black literaryand critical traditionsneed all sorts of close readings; the body of practicalcriticismwhich enabled new theories of readingto emerge inthe Western tradition has yet to be created in the blacktraditions. The tradition needs readings of several kinds,before it can "move" into the mainstream of critical debatein the profession. Such a move, it seems to me, is a desirableone, since ultimately our subject is literary discourse, andnot the blackness of blackness. Nevertheless, I am notadvocating a new form of de Gaultier's "Bovarysm," inwhich we seek to imitate, from the critics we have decided tobe, "all that can be imitated, everything exterior, appear-ance, gesture, intonation, and dress." To do so would be torepeat the mistake of a neo-Romantic poet, such as CounteeCullen, for whom "form" was a container into which hecould pour "a precious and black content." Rather than toseek to proselytize for one warring faction of criticism oranother, or to vulgarizea theory by reducing t to "summary"or "method,"this collection of essays seeks to encourage aplurality of readings, as various as are the discrete texts inour literary tradition, and as black. These essays addressissues fundamental to critical theory and to the nature ofblack literary discourse. Our subject is the discipline ofliterature.

The order of these essays enables the readerto move fromtheory, in this issue, to the readingof individual texts, in thenext, from abstract argument to practical criticism. Themovement here is from the generalto the particular.Theory,in this way, serves as discourse upon our texts. This diversecollection exemplifies the broad range of possibilities in theuse of close readingsto interpretthe black tradition. What'smore, I have included readings which are, in essence,antithetical to one another. The work of Sunday 0. Anozie,who can safely be called the first black structuralist,andJayEdwards' seminal work on the morphology of the Afro-American folktale, and James Snead's stimulating defini-125


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tion of the trope of repetition, can be readagainst AnthonyAppiah's sustained critique of structuralism;Susan Willis'Marxist reading of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon canbe read against Wole Soyinka's critique of contemporaryapplications of Marxist theory in African literarycriticism.Barbara Bowen's essay is a superb interpretation of JeanToomer's Cane as the confrontation of two opposedrhetorical strategies the ideal of the "un-self-consciousvoice" implicit in the written uses of traditionally blackantiphonal patterns, and the self-consciousness of anywriterwhose works refiguretropes from any formal literarytradition. Bowen sees Cane as the narration of the dialogicstructure comprised of the traditional Afro-American oralform and the Romantic lyric.Vera Kutzinski'sclose readingof William Carlos Williams'literaryrelation to the poetry ofSterling Brown reveals the complex canonical standing ofeven the "blackest"text. Wendy McCredie'sand MariaTaiWolff's readings of Zora Neale Hurston's TheirEyes WereWatchingGod firmly establish Hurston'splace in the Afro-American canon as a precursor of Ralph Ellison andredefinethe matterof the "voice"and the frameof this majortext of the American, the Feminist, and the Afro-Americancanons. The close readings of the works of Jean Toomer,Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison,Ishmael Reed, and the generally overlooked "post-black"novelists read in Graham Clarke'sfine essay can be thoughtof as exemplifications of theory. The work of Toomer,Hurston, Morrison, and Reed, moreover, cannot in even theslightest sense be dismissed from serious consideration indefinitions of the black canon, since their works "frame,"asit were, those of Wrightand Ellison, through theirrhetoricalstrategies, which Toomer and Hurston pre-figure, andwhich Morrison and Reed re-figure. These texts signifyupon each other, in the Afro-American sense of that term.This collection is intentionally eclectic. Nevertheless, itrealizes its unity from the concerted stress each essay bringsto bear upon the play of the signifier, and from the beliefthat, as Rene Girard puts it,

great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through themedium of their art, if not formally, the system in which theywere first imprisoned together with their contemporaries.Literary interpretation must be systematic because it is thecontinuation of literature.It should formalize implicitor alreadyhalf explicit systems .... The value of acritical thought dependsnot on how cleverly it manages to disguise its own systematicnature or on how much literary substance it really embraces,comprehends, and makes articulate.The goal may be ambitiousbut it is not outside the scope of literary criticism. Failure toreach it should be condemned but not the attempt. Everythingelse has already been done.'3In an essay called "For Whom Does One Write?",collected in WhatIs Literature?,Jean-Paul Sartreasks none

too rhetorically, "To whom does Richard Wright addresshimself?"Sartre'sanswer helps us to answerour own centralquestion, "For Whom Does the Critic of Black LiteratureWrite?":... each of Wright'sworkscontains what Baudelairewould havecalled "a double simultaneous postulation";each word referstotwo contexts; two forces are applied simultaneously to eachphrase and determine the incomparable tension of his tale. Hadhe spoken to the whites alone, he might have turnedout to bemore prolix, more didactic, and more abusive; to the negroesalone, still more elliptical, more of a confederate and moreelegiac. In the first case, his work might have come close to

satire; in the second, to prophetic lamentation. Jeremiah spokeonly to the Jews. But Wright, a writerfor a split public, has beenable both to maintain and go beyond this split. He has made itthe pretext for a work of art.'4We write, it seems to me, primarily for other critics oliterature. Through shared theoretical presuppositions, tharduous process of "culturaltranslation,"if not resolved, imost certainly not hindered. To "maintain"yet "go beyondthis split" of text-milieux is our curse and, of course, ouchallenge, as is the fact that we must often resurrect he textin our tradition before we can begin to explicate them. Torendermajor contributions to contemporary theory's questo "save the text," in Hartman's phrase, is our splendidopportunity. Unlike critics in almost every other literartradition, almost all that we have to say about our literaturis new. What critics of the Western tradition can make aneven remotely similar claim?Jeremiah could speak only tothe Jews; we, however, must address two audiences, thJews and the Babylonians, whose interests are distinct yeoverlapping in the manner of interlocking sets.I end this polemical introduction with an apt quote fromthe great blues artist, Junior Parker:"Anybody can boil upsome greens, but a good cook a good one has a speciaway of seasoning 'em that ain't like nobody else's. Soanybody can do it, but it's only somebody who can do it theiown way."'5The literary critics collected here do it in theiown way. This, after all, is the imperative of all literarcriticism.

Because of my personal debt to Charles T. Davis, as amentor, as a colleague, and as a friend, I dedicate thicollection of essays to his memory. His death is a profoundloss for the tradition, for the profession, and most of all forthose of us who were fortunate enough to be his friends. Hilegacy will be measured not only through his works ocriticism, and through the scores of critics that he trainedbut especially through the integration of "thecanon,"whichonly a strong critic can effect.

NOTES'Quoted in Claudia Mitchell-Kernan,"Signifying,"in Mother Wit romthe Laughing Barrel, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1973), p. 321.21shmaelReed, Mumbo Jumbo (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972), p. 113"Toward Literary History," in Beyond Formalism: LiterarYEssay1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press), p. 363.4Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Todai' (NewHaven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), p. 5. The title of my essay is in part a plaupon Hartman's title, apt, perhaps, since the essay is a play on the idea otext-milieu. It also plays upon that space where dwells the SignifyinMonkey, "deep down in dejungle." Hartman's theories of literature are omajor import to the critics of comparative black literature. His work ialways witty, always provocative, always profound, and eclectic.5SeeJerry W. Ward, Jr., "TheBlack Critic as Reader,"Black AmericaLiterature Forum, 14(1980), 21-23, and Houston A. Baker, Jr., "Genertional Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro-American Literature,"BlacAmerican Literature Forum, 15 (1981), 3-22. Baker'sessay is a reading ofamong other critiques, three essays I published in Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, edited by Dexter Fisher anRobert B. Stepto (New York: Modern Language Association, 1979).6Wole Soyinka, Mi'th, Literature and the African World (LondonCambridge Univ. Press, 1976), pp. x-xi.7Quoted in Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: NegrNarrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Chicago: Aldine1970), p. 53.

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8'Translator's Introduction," in Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. xvi. Johnson's introduction isthe clearest, most succinctly written summation of Derridian philosophythat I have encountered. Johnson's own work, The Critical Difference:Essavs in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: The JohnsHopkins Univ. Press, 1980), is a clear, precise, stimulating readingof "thelogic of a text's own disagreements with itself." Her work, like Hartman's, san especially apt model for critics of black literature."Letter o John Hamilton Reynolds, in The Letters of John Keats: 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.Press, 1958), 1, 282."'Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). The uses ofsensitive Marxist interpretations of black literature will be limited, it seemsto me, until we have in hand aparticular history of discreteblack-and-white

economic relations. How can we ascertain, otherwise, the complexrelationship between material relations, on the one hand, and art, on theother?"See "Preface to Blackness: Text and Pre-Text," in Afro-AmericanLiterature, ed. Fisher and Stepto, pp. 44-71.'2Quotedin Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Selfand Otherin Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: The JohnsHopkins Univ. Press, 1965), p. 5.'3Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, p. 3.'4Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans.Bernard Frechtman

(London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 57, 59.'5Quoted in Charles Keil, UrbanBlues (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,1966), p. 169.

NEGRITUDE AND STRUCTURALISMSUNDAY 0. ANOZIE*

Dans les oeuvres poetiques, le linguiste discerne des structures dontI'analogie est frappante avec celles que I'analyse des mythes reve'le'a1'ethnologue.De son c6ote",celui-cie sauraitm'connaltre que les mythes neconsistent pas seulement en agencements conceptuels: ce sont aussi desoeuvres d'art ....With this preface, Levi-Strauss and Roman Jakobsonembarked upon one of the rareinterdisciplinarycollabora-tions in recent memory between an ethnologist and alinguist-the dissection of Baudelaire'spoem "LesChats."'Since this date and as a result of innovative work ingenerative grammar2and in semiotics,3 critics, especially inthe United States and France, have begun to show someinterest in the structurallinguistic analysis of literaryworks,particularlypoetry.4In each case the underlyingassumptionis twofold. The first is the realization that a poetic work

contains a system of ordered variants which can be isolatedand represented vertically in the form of superimposedlevels such as phonological, phonetic, syntactic, prosodic,and semantic. The second is that modern structuralism-especially in the form of its offshoot, generativegrammar-provides an adequate theory and method for accounting forsuch levels and in dealing with the internal coherence of thegiven work of art.Some Africancriticsof African literaturehave objectedtothis search for internal coherence. Abiola Irele, a Nigeriancritic well-known for his several defenses of negritude, forexample, has argued strongly in favor of a "sociologicalimagination" on the part of a critic of African literature,without showing in what essential way(s) this differsfrom astructuralist imagination.5 Is it true, for example, that theassertion that man is a structural animal precludes theAfrican?6On the contrary, I have argued elsewhere that noadequate sociological theory of African literature,the novel

*After taking his B.A. at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Sunday 0.Anozie studied for his doctorate under Roland Barthesat the Sorbonne.Founder, editor, and publisher of The Conch, he is currently VisitingProfessor of English at the State Universityof New York at Buffalo. Hisessay is reprinted, in a somewhat amended form, from Neo-AfricanLiterature and Culture:EssaYsin Memory of Janheinz Jahn, ed. BernthLindfors and Ulla Schild (Wiesbaden, W. Germany: Haymann, 1976), pp.43-56.

in particular, can be formulated outside a framework ofstructuralism.7 More recently, too, I have insisted on thepossibility of defining such a structuralistframework withinthe terms, necessarily more narrow, of the conceptualframework of negritude.8 Such integration will serve notonly to revitalize negritude but also to provide it with theone thing it so far lacks-a scientific method of inquiry.In the present contribution, I wishto add to this argumentby submitting that negritude and structuralism have more incommon than at firstmay strike the eye of a casual observer,and, consequently, that the search for internal coherence inan African or any other work of art does not necessarilydetract from its aesthetic or ideological value as such; ifanything, it can enhance appreciation and respect for both.The paper falls into two parts. In the first part, I willsketch a brief structuralanalysis of one of Senghor's shorterpoems, "Le Totem." In the second part, I will examine, alsobriefly, a few developments within negritude, especiallySenghor's, in relation to the concept of structuralism,especially Le'vi-Strauss'.This movement from practice totheory will, I hope, underline, if not the innate scientificdisposition of negritude, at least my belief in its potential todevelop into one.

The Concept of "Problematic" in PoetryTwo remarks must be made from the outset. The first isthat the composition of Senghor's "Le Totem" contains nodiachronic problematic. As an isolated event, it has no

special recorded "history"of its own (if it does, this paper isnot at any rate interested in that, but in the poem itself as asynchronic event) beyond the fact that it is the fourteenthpoem in the author's 1945 collection of poems publishedunder the title Chants d'ombre.9 I use the term "problem-atic" in the same way as both Althusserand Levi-Strausstodefine a particular theoretical system or "thought struc-ture."'0Miriam Glucksmann has cogently demonstrated thecorrelations between the uses of the concept of "problem-atic"by Althusser to define the specificitiesof Marx'stheoryand by Levi-Strauss to designate systems of totemic classi-fication in "primitive cultures."" Thus in refusing to see127

Henry Loius Gates Jr.

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