Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter I

Cultural and Theoretical Contexts:

Rewriting, Revision, and Black Postmodernism

 African American Revisionist Theories: “No More Separate Spheres”

The importance of resistance and revision stressed in the above sections is placed into relation in this final part with the recent directions taken by contemporary African American criticism. This part integrates the multiple modulations of my approach on rewriting into the field of black revisionist theories, whose common denominator stresses the necessity of changing the focus of the literary canon.²¹ This part bridges in this way main critical theories that focus on:

• the revision of black literary tradition (Robert Stepto);

• the revision of white literary tradition (Toni Morrison);

• the revision of both black literary tradition and Western ideas (Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Michael Awkward, and Mae Henderson).

Through a critical reading of these theories, my approach on rewriting is examined in connection with a larger theoretical concern for intertextuality, the black vernacular tradition, and comparative analysis.

One of the first models of revision in black literature was proposed by Robert Stepto’s From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979). Employing the structuralist method, he delimits the existence of some thematic and structural leitmotifs traceable in various black texts, and identifies a “pregeneric myth of freedom and literacy” circulating in these narratives. His book is divided into two sections—the Call and the Response—implying that certain black writers answered “the Call” of the prefiguring texts. Thus, the Call initiated by the slave narratives, the texts of Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois was answered by the texts of outstanding authors such as James W. Johnson, R. Wright, and R. Ellison.²²

In spite of Stepto’s notable influence, his method has two identifiable flaws. First, his intertextual reading of black literature contains only male authors; there is no account of female authors. Second, Stepto’s structuralist method establishes the existence of an African American tradition not on a chronological criterion, but on a shareable, identifiable pregeneric myth. As observed by Hogue, “the mere fact that Stepto selects ‘the search for freedom and literacy’ rather than another Afro-American myth, such as communal struggle, indicates that the choice is ideological, and his Afro-American tradition in From Behind the Veil is a discourse that permits and excludes” (1994, 339).

Furthermore, in their discursive negotiations between various literary works, African American authors have examined not only black texts, but also white texts. It is the task of the contemporary scholar to reread what has been miswritten, to analyze the reasons beyond the earlier representations of black characters, and to try to fill in these textual ellipses and gaps.²³ Thus, the critic has to identify how “languages of the unsayable spotlight what has been excluded by that which is sayable and said” (Budick and Iser 1989, xi).

A successful attempt to rewrite/reread the unsayable of racial aspects in white American texts appears in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, where she notes that “in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse” (1992, 9). Here she denounces the paucity of white literary imagination to recognize an Africanist presence as “willed scholarly indifference,” as exclusion of the Other from the former literary discourse (1992, 14). Morrison implies that writing is deeply interrelated with reading. She draws attention to both the reader’s and writer’s mission “to interpret and perform shareable imaginative worlds,” with the awareness that words are carriers of hidden messages of racial superiority and cultural hegemony (1992, xii). Her revisionist project is concerned with the way in which “literary whiteness” and “literary blackness” are fabricated in literature, and with the consequences of these constructions. She unravels the false pretensions of canonical American literature not to be influenced by the four-hundred-year-old African presence:

What became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence (1992, 17).

She engages throughout her book in an exercise of firing the canon, of looking back at those white authors who used to be traditionally considered the pillars of American literature, and seeing how black and white heroes are constructed in their works.²⁴ By examining the work of Cather, Poe, Melville, and Hemingway (and also alluding to James, Stein, and O’Connor) Morrison discloses these authors’ techniques of alterization, of scapegoating a non-white presence in order to reinforce the nature of white heroism. Morrison thus elaborates upon her main point that Africanism is part of Americanness, that the black character—who has been either demonized or reified—has served as an element of contrast underlining the superiority of the white character.²⁵

Morrison’s subtle reevaluation of the Africanist presence is consistent with the aim of this work that stipulates that canons are sociopolitical fabrications, human constructions of power that can be, in turn, deconstructed. Like other black writers to be discussed in this work, Morrison suggests that a writer’s mission is inextricably linked with that of a reader engaged in a conscious exercise of literary revision. Involved in discovering those misrepresentations of the African American character, Morrison is both an attentive reader and a gifted writer who proposes alternative racial configurations.

If Morrison pleads for a thorough revision of white texts, a large number of critics have elaborated upon the importance of black intertextuality as both a continuation of an African American tradition and a disruption of Western ideas. In signalling the ongoing literary influence that takes place in African American literature, the key name that should be invoked here is Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In his seminal work, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988), he identifies a black theory of literature and interpretation, with roots in black vernacular tradition. He starts by isolating a specific figure—the trickster god Esu—whom he considers to be a recurrent theme or topos found in the U.S. and in various African countries. Having countless characteristics and embodying the principle of interpretative indeterminacy, Esu finds his equivalent in the African American figure of the Signifying Monkey, a trickster, a mutable character with a thousand faces.

Suggestively, Gates’ analysis of the black concept of Signifyin(g) delimits a theory of textual rewriting, a “(re)naming ritual” that disrupts the nature of the sign by redoubling or multiplying the signifiers: “Black people vacated this signifier, then—incredibly—substituted as its concept a signified that stands for the system of rhetorical strategies peculiar to their own vernacular tradition” (1988, 47).²⁶ In this way, difference coils inside the conventional nature of the sign and the white sign is colonized by black meaning. Blacks thus articulate their personal experience by appropriating the white text, whose tropes they internalize through an endless process of linguistic rewriting.

The theory of black intertextuality proposed by Gates is highly relevant for the present work. His description of his theory as “a process of repetition and revision” shows not only that thematic and structural elements circulate from one text to another, but also that significant differences appear in the new, revisionist text (1988, 60).²⁷ This emphasis on “the creative (re)placement” of the old, standard meanings with new, unexpected ones has been part of the Afro-diasporic narrative tradition and it still functions today in postmodern black literature.²⁸