304 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 16 color and 8 b&w illus., notes,
bibl., index
$49.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2586-7
$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-4899-9
Published: Fall 2000
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Clarence
Major and
His Art
Portraits of an
African
American Postmodernist
Edited by
Bernard W.
Bell
Copyright
(c) 2000
by the University of North Carolina Press. All
rights reserved.
Introduction.
Although Clarence Major's poetry is known in some circles and his novels
in others, the full range of his work is neither widely known nor
generally taught, even in black institutions. Poet, novelist, essayist,
editor, anthologist, lexicographer, and painter, Major is one of the most
compelling, challenging, prolific, and multitalented contemporary American
artists of African descent. Inspired as a teenager by the impressionistic
paintings of van Gogh and the symbolist poetry of Rimbaud, as well as by
such black writers as Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and
Willard Motley, Major has produced a collection of art whose trajectory
suggests the complex dynamics of his transgressive voice and double
consciousness as an African American postmodernist artist. By
transgressive I mean boldly moving beyond traditional literary
limits and cultural boundaries in experimenting with different,
occasionally multiple, narrative voices. Although voice refers
basically to informal everyday speaking and to formal public oratory, it
is used here primarily to signify the reader's sense of the particular
qualities of the human presence, especially intellectual, political, and
moral sensibility, that has selected, constructed, and expressed the
pattern of materials in the text. By double consciousness I mean,
on the most basic level, the sociocultural and sociopsychological
doubleness or dualism of Major's cultural productions. This double
consciousness ranges from editing the Journal of Black Poetry and
writing "A Black Criteria" in the late 1960s to writing a column for the
American Poetry Review in the 1970s and founding the Fiction
Collective with Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, and other white writers
in order to control the production and distribution of their avant-garde
publications.
Some readers may resist--or reject--Major's bold assumption of the
consciousness and voices of a Navajo guitar player and folksinger in his
novel Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar (1988), of a black southern
matriarch in Such Was the Season (1987), and of blues singers in
Dirty Bird Blues (1996). But as his boundary-crossing in these
books and the discussion of hybrid identities in the introduction to his
anthology of twentieth-century African American short stories, Calling
the Wind (1993), make explicit, Major believes that "to some degree
doubleness describes the condition of all Americans, whether or not they
know it" (Calling the Wind xviii). A 1993 California exhibition of
his watercolor paintings and the 1994 publication of Juba to Jive,
the revised and expanded edition of his 1970 dictionary of African
American slang, are additional milestones that chart the ironies and
paradoxes of the boundaries Major has crossed to become one of the most
critically respected black American postmodernist artists. Moving beyond
the apparent academic exclusivity, aesthetic elitism, and critical jargon
of much postmodern art, Major invites general readers and students, as
well as book reviewers and literary critics, to join him in becoming
explorers of interior landscapes and the complex contemporary
relationships of life to art and language to literature.
Major's complex style and structure may be the primary reasons that we
find his books on neither the New York Times's best-seller lists
nor Oprah's Book Club. Many readers, especially African Americans, not
only reject a willing suspension of disbelief to experimental fiction by
black writers but also resist the authority and authenticity of a black
American postmodernist artist who seeks to reduce reality and the quest
for an imaginary new democratic social order to a linguistic invention.
But like Ishmael Reed, the most frequently identified and critically
acclaimed African American postmodernist, Major responded to the excessive
violations of artistic freedom and racial chauvinism of the Black Arts
movement of the 1960s and 1970s by rejecting social realism. His
imaginative processes and products are nevertheless still grounded in a
compelling, occasionally playful blend of visual, visceral, and cerebral
interior responses to social reality. Turning to a different muse and
joining a Fiction Collective of white experimental writers to publish his
novels during the 1970s and 1980s, Major challenges readers to join him in
subordinating race to impressionistic and expressionistic explorations of
sex, language, identity, and cultural hybridity as a liberating,
imaginative construction and affirmation of self.
On one level, then, the dialectic and dialogic tension in Major's art is
between Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism. Afrocentrism means many things to
many people, based on their ideological position; it is not necessarily
the demonizing of whites, the deification of blacks, or the disuniting of
America. In contrast to the paradoxical enslavement and enlightenment of
nonwhite, non-Western peoples by the Christianizing, civilizing agents of
Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism is most constructively defined and practiced as
a pedagogical mode of humanistic, critical inquiry that is grounded in the
experiences of peoples of African descent. Unlike Eurocentrism, it does
not legitimize itself by suppressing other points of view (Wiley 20-21).
Instead, by affirming the evidence of paleoanthropologists, molecular
biologists, and population geneticists that Africa was the cradle of
humankind, Afrocentrism at its best seeks to validate and valorize a
nonhierarchical, multiracial, multiethnic world order. Therefore, readers
who respond to Major's cultural syncretism and to highly selective details
of the shifting moods of characters and scenes at specific moments will
discover alternative, nonlogical ways of knowing and being in the world
with others.
Mapping the historical trajectory of the frequently quoted classic
definition of double consciousness by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of
Black Folk (1903), Major glosses the comments on American ethnic
identity by George S. Schuyler, Toni Morrison, Jack Hicks, William
Boelhower, and Werner Sollors. He writes in his introduction to Calling
the Wind:
The American presence is so varied and so complex that exchange and
conflict between the black image and the white image tend absurdly to
diminish the richness of a network of ethnic cultures that truly is the
American human landscape. Most individuals in these groups feel some sense
of doubleness, feel their otherness and their Americanness. One
indication of an internal struggle can be seen in their tendency to
hyphenate the names signaling the two different selves--African-American,
Native-American, Asian-American, Mexican-American, and so on. (xviii)
Black American postmodernism, in other words, strongly suggests a specific
racial, historical, and cultural relationship to white American modernism
and postmodernism. This relationship is best expressed through some form
of oppositional discourse or dialectic derived from and appropriate to the
particular experiences of difference, marginality, and Otherness that have
shaped the consciousness of the artist, especially, in this case, his
attitude toward life, art, language, and literature.
Even though he wrote the frequently anthologized "A Black Criteria"
(1967), which called for black poets to destroy the hold of white
standards on their minds and work, edited the Journal of Black
Poetry (1968) and The New Black Poetry (1969), and published
the often-quoted Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (1970), Major
disavows ever being a black cultural nationalist. Because black cultural
nationalism ranges widely in meaning from racial and ethnic pride to
radical Pan-Africanist activism, and because he has long resisted
violations of artistic freedom from blacks as well as whites, this
disavowal reinforces Major's practice of subordinating politics to his
aesthetic principles. Responding in 1973 to a question about the thesis of
"A Black Criteria," he stated that he found "repulsive the idea of calling
for black writers to do anything other than what they each choose to do. .
. . No style or subject should be alien to them. We have to get away from
this rigid notion that there are certain topics and methods reserved for
black writers. I'm against all that. I'm against coercion from blacks and
from whites" (O'Brien 129). In 1986 he told a reporter, "Even from the
first, I kept writing about the human condition, not necessarily the black
condition. . . . I do not write racial literature. I am a human being
first, and then a black man. I write books about people who are black,
yes, but they are human beings first. Of course, I am a member of my
family, my race, my culture, but I feel a kinship with people of good will
and integrity, no matter their color or background" (Carlin 35). For many
readers this statement probably evokes disturbing memories of their own
double consciousness, as well as that of important modernist black
writers, ranging from Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen to Robert Hayden and
James McPherson.
Unlike these black modernists, and like white European American
postmodernists Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme, and Ronald Sukenick,
Major believes that the novel is a linguistic invention that exists on its
own terms. He is therefore concerned, he explains to an interviewer, with
writing "one that takes on its own reality and is really independent of
anything outside itself. . . . You begin with words and you end with
words. The content exists in our minds. I don't think that it has to be a
reflection of anything. It is a reality that has been created inside of a
book. It's put together and exists finally in your mind" (O'Brien 130).
How, then, is black postmodernism different from modernism? For many white
academic literary critics the term modernism generally refers to
the radical loss of faith in traditional nineteenth-century beliefs and
values concerning the stability, order, and continuity of Western culture
and civilization. This social and moral crisis was largely the result of
developments in science and philosophy by people like Darwin, Marx, and
Freud, as well as of the carnage and subjugation of peoples by machines,
nationalism, and colonialism in the First and Second World Wars. Painters
like Picasso and writers like Conrad, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and
Beckett led impressionistic and expressionistic experiments in subject
matter, style, and structure to reconstruct their personal anxiety about
and alienation from the nature of modern reality, scientific truth, and
conventional authority.
For most black academic literary critics and artists, modernism is related
to the mass migrations during the world wars of blacks from the natural
disasters, white terrorism, and deadly daily indignities of the rural,
agrarian South to the illusory refuge and opportunities of the urban,
industrialized North. Modernism for many of them meant the irresistible
attraction of the radical cultural redefinitions of white and black
American identities during the New Negro (Harlem) Renaissance of the 1920s
and the continuing search into the 1940s for new modes of vernacular and
formal artistic expression. These new modes of expression included
innovative reconstructions and improvisations of black speech, myths,
legends, rituals, and music. Thomas Dorsey, W. C. Handy, Eubie Blake,
Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Count Basie,
Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes,
Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Jessie Redmon Fauset,
Nella Larsen, Sterling A. Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and
Robert Hayden were among the stars of these decades of black modernism.
In contrast, as Cornel West observed in 1989:
The current "postmodernism" debate is first and foremost a product of
significant First World reflections upon the decentering of Europe that
take such forms as the demystification of European cultural predominance
and the deconstruction of European philosophical edifices. With the
emergence of the United States as the world center for military arms,
political direction, and cultural production and the advent of
Third World politically independent nations, the making of a new world
order seemed quite likely. Ironically, most First World reflections on
"postmodernism" remain rather parochial and provincial--that is narrowly
Eurocentric. For example, Jean-Francois Lyotard's well-known
characterization of the postmodern condition, with its increasing
incredulity toward master (or meta) narratives, a rejection of
representation, and a demand for radical artistic experimentation, is an
interesting but insulated Eurocentric view, a kind of navel-gazing in
which postmodernism becomes a recurring moment within the modern that is
performative in character and aesthetic in content. (87-88)
The ahistoricism of postmodernism, in short, undermines for many people
its philosophy and rhetoric about the absence, silence, and impotence of
those subjectspersons who are the sum of the psychic effects
of
their interactions with cultural and institutional codesviewed as
marginal and Other, especially blacks and women. Cultural critic bell
hooks perceptively asks: "Should we not be suspicious of postmodern
critiques of the 'subject' when they surface at a historical moment when
many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first
time?" (28).
Addressing the reinscription in much of postmodern theory of the absence
of black women and the resistance of most black people to the relevance of
postmodernism to their experience, bell hooks writes:
Radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a
"politics of difference," should incorporate the voices of displaced,
marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black people. It is sadly ironic
that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity,
the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of
Otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized
audience that shares a common language rooted in the very master
narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to
have a transformative impact, then a critical break with the notion of
"authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device. It
must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well
as chosen subject matter. (25)
Postmodern theory and practice, in short, must be transgressive in order
to be transformative.
Black modernists and postmodernists are obviously influenced on some level
by the traditions of Western culture and committed to the freedom of
hybrid narrative forms. However, because the legacy of institutional
racism and sexism that shaped and continues to shape their consciousness
fosters ambivalence about their culture, and because the struggle for
social justice continues, most modern and postmodern African American
novelists, for example, are not inclined to neglect moral and social
issues in their narratives. Unlike white postmodernists, they are deeply
concerned with fictive visions that focus on the truths about the
perversity of American racism and the paradoxes of African American double
consciousness. Unlike their white contemporaries, black American
modernists and postmodernists like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade
Bambara, Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman, and Charles Johnson are not
merely rejecting the arrogance and anachronism of Western forms and
conventions; they are also rediscovering and reaffirming the power and
wisdom of their own vernacular expressive tradition: African American ways
of seeing, knowing, and expressing reality, centering especially on black
speech, music, and religion.
But Major moves beyond black sites of cultural production and consumption,
as well as beyond thematic and structural concerns with racial and
political consciousness, to a preoccupation with exploring the boundaries
of language and imaginative consciousness. This transgressive movement can
be traced in his trajectory as a black postmodern artist, especially in
his eight novels. Except for Such Was the Season and Dirty Bird
Blues, they are primarily transracial, transcultural, expressionistic
narratives that thematize a self-reflexive process of creation of a
dynamic, multifaceted self and art. Each novel is told by an unreliable,
dramatized narrator who is generally a black male and is often the
protagonist. Except for the latest three, each is more fragmented,
discontinuous, and open-ended in structure than its predecessor. Finally,
each engages in self-conscious linguistic play that blurs the line between
the worlds of fantasy and social reality.
As a collection of writing and art by and critical essays about one of the
most outstanding yet underappreciated African American postmodern artists,
this book should be useful to general readers, students, and scholars of
African American culture and literature. Its interdisciplinary,
transgressive organization, an attempt to highlight Major's aesthetic
movement across literary and cultural boundaries, illumines the complex,
compelling relationship between writing and painting. Although Major's
artistic vision is grounded in the historical experiences of black and
Native American peoples, he boldly experiments with crossing boundaries of
all types in realizing his creative potential as a cultural worker and an
African American postmodern visual and literary artist. Therefore, a
primary focus of this book is the relationship between modern abstract
painting and the double voices of Major's literary texts.
Following this Introduction, the section of work by Major begins with
thirteen of his poems. The first, a long epic poem on the Middle Passage,
establishes the transhistorical, transracial, and transcultural identity
of African Americans that informs this book as well as Major's art. It is
discussed in the critical essay section by Linda Selzer. The other twelve
poems, analyzed in Nathaniel Mackey's essay, are from four of Major's nine
books of poetry. Following the poetry are brief excerpts from five of his
eight novelsDirty Bird Blues, Such Was the Season,
My
Amputations, Reflex and Bone Structure, and All-Night
Visitorseach of which is subsequently examined in the critical
essay
section. Similarly, several of the sixteen representational and
nonrepresentational paintings by Major that are grouped after page 000 are
analyzed in an essay by Lisa Roney. The selection of Major's work
concludes with an autobiographical essay and an interview by Larry
McCaffery and Jerzy Kutnik in which we overhear a dialogue on black
aesthetics, postmodern form, and Major's creative productions.
Major's work is followed by ten critical essays on his poetry, fiction,
and paintings by specialists in the fields of American and African
American studies. Linda Selzer reveals how Major uses a "technique of
associative collage" to parody and subvert "the discourse of empire and .
. . analy[ze] . . . the difficulties inherent in the project of fashioning
an identity through art." Nathaniel Mackey argues that Major's poetry
contains "deconstructive impulses . . . as a gesture on behalf of the
repressed or ignored areas of experience and awareness, on behalf of
civilization's discontents." Using Major's innovative fiction, Jerome
Klinkowitz breaks down the binaries of realism and postmodernism and
argues persuasively that Major's achievement "has been to show just how
concretely we live within the imagination--how our lives are shaped by
language and how by a simple act of self-awareness we can seize control of
the world and reshape it to our liking and benefit." Lisa Roney
intriguingly illumines how "Major's questions about his own identity as an
African American and his relationship to the African American community
seem to have led him to become a man of double vision, searching for a
colorful, but color-blind existence, both through the visual image and the
written word." Stephen Soitos convincingly demonstrates how in "its
pursuit of metaphysical themes, its black double consciousness parody of
literary and detective forms, and its lack of final solution, Reflex
and Bone Structure falls within the anti-detective tradition . . . but
also extends the boundaries of the black detective tradition."
Using various critical paradigms, especially Calibanic discourse, James
Coleman develops a compelling argument for the narrative achievement of
All-Night Visitors as "a black male text that reflects the problems
of black male freedom, empowerment, and voice in ways that are
characteristic of other contemporary black male texts." Equally compelling
is Stuart Klawans's argument for a connection between My
Amputations and Cubism because both are "made up of jagged,
discontinuous, paradoxical fragments, which evoke or suggest . . . someone
who is both a figure drawn from life and a recollection of other fictional
characters."
My essay demonstrates through a close textual analysis of Such Was the
Season that while Major "succeeds in capturing the literary idiolect
of the time, place, class, sex, and individuality of Annie Eliza," the
black matriarchal narrator/protagonist, his "homecoming voice is
characterized by social and cultural ambivalence" about her and his
southern roots. Impressed by Major's resistance either to commodifying
Zuni culture or to situating it in a "diorama," which would freeze it in
time and space, Steve Hayward provides an intriguing interpretation of
Some Observations of a Stranger at Zuni as Major's "postmodern
response to the artist's representational paradox: How is it possible to
follow the will-to-represent, without falling into a colonial
will-to-dominate?" Finally, Joe Weixlmann argues that "Major's recent
fiction shows that he has found ways to extend his reach as a novelist
while continuing to explore the issues that have long fueled his literary
imagination. Through the voices of his singers, and through his own
singing voice(s), Major has staked out important new literary terrain in
the past decade." The essays are followed by a selected bibliography,
compiled by Clarence Major, that identifies most of his published writing
in the United States from 1954 to 1999.
Clarence Major's aesthetic principles and practice clearly deserve wider
critical and pedagogical attention by both black and white readers. As
bell hooks states, "The idea that there is no meaningful connection
between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture
must be continually interrogated" (23). By showcasing Major's
artistic achievements along with critical commentary on his work, this
volume takes a giant step in providing the materials for this
interrogation.
Works Cited
Carlin, Margaret. "CU Professor Savors Literary Award." Rocky Mountain
News, 29 April 1986, 35.
hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston:
South End Press, 1990.
Major, Clarence, ed. Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century
African-American Short Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
O'Brien, John, ed. Interviews with Black Writers. New York:
Liveright, 1973.
West, Cornel. "Black Culture and Postmodernism." In Remaking
History, edited by Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, 87-96. New York:
Norton, 1987.
Wiley, Ed, III, ed. "Afrocentrism: Many Things to Many People." Black
Issues in Higher Education, October 24, 1991, 20-21.
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