a title so spectuacularly good that upon reading it, your mind instantly forgot it in order to spare you the shock

Chapters ten and eleven represent a slight shift away from the world of race relations and into the world of high finance and industry. Here Ellison seems to be commenting on the oppression of the proletariat as much as the oppression of the black man, and this expansion into new territory provides some interesting points.

One item of note is the narrator’s isolation within the industrial complex, his inability to function in the factory due to a number of different causes. He fails in his paint-mixing task because, simply, no one tells him what to do (which tank to use when mixing paint). He later fails in his next task due to the isolation created by a union conflict, when the union views him as a fink and a traitor and Brockway views him as a union flunky and a traitor. Either way, he’s a traitor in someone’s eyes, and this puts him in a singular position within the factory. All this is indicitive of the broader alienation found thematically in Modernism, a result of the industrialization of the Western world, a trend which removed individuals from the comfort of small communities into vast urban centers full of lonely one-room apartments.

The other interesting item is the “factory hospital” scene (chapter eleven, I think), which is alarming due to its fractured sense of unreality. We are temporarily removed from the real world as the narrator possibly heals (or is possibly destroyed piecemeal in some elaborate super-villain machine of scary oblivion) (one or the other). This to me is once again a symbol of the increasing mechanization of Western existence, where human beings become part of a process, fuel for machines, lines on a form. All they are ultimately interested in is his name, so they know which lawyer to sidestep.

Hopefully, this was not all gibberish.

clever title

What really strikes me about this text is the surreal nature of it all. This is not the same sort of realism we saw in The Autobiography, nor is it the "magical realism" (god I hate that phrase) that seemed to be the style of Piano Lesson. No, this is something different, a story that wallows in eccentrities and bizarre tones, while maintaining a sort of groundedness in, at the very least, subject matter and relevance. This is frankly a strange little book. Naturally, then, I adore it. But as always, we have to ask why. Why must this life story be told through a sort of surrealism?
An obvious answer is that the African American experience is intrinsically different from the experience of the majority, and must be told differently. That's a simple answer, and it paws at the surface without getting any dirt under the nails. There has to be more.
As was mentioned in class, this is a very Modernist text, and Scott identified the African American experience as definitively Modern, in that it involves feelings of isolation, disassociated identity (fragmentation of the self into parts, or "double-consciousness" as That Guy put it), and a general pessimism toward the present and the future. This lifestyle ought to be told in a Modernist style then, if not in the hyper-brain-fuck style of Faulkner or Eliot, then at least it should be told with a healthy dollop of the surreal. This is the first text we've read that comes soon after the creation of the Modern aesthetic (Piano Lesson being post-post-modern, or whatever we're on now) (though I admit I like post-modernism as long as it doesn't take itself too seriously), so it makes sense that this would be the text which links the aesthetic with the experience of a race. And that answer would do, being an extrapolation of the first, but critical thought never occurs at the tree trunk; we have to scurry out on the limbs.
So, going with the theme of invisibility, and making reference to That Guy's notion of the veil, it's entirely possible that the predominantly white reading audience was 1952 was being mocked. Perhaps the surrealist style was more than a connection to African American life and culture; perhaps it is also an attempt to distance the white reader, to set him apart from a reality and an experience which he could not hope to understand. By employing a peculiarity of style, Ellison may have truly been making the black man's life invisible, the true facts impenetrable, or at least hopelessly murky. The white reader will never get a clear picture of this man's life, because he could never hope to understand it to begin with.
Whatever the reason, I like it.

Existential Primer: Introduction

This Existential Primer: Introduction is worth looking at if you want to know more about existentialism.

Friday, Mar 11--Johnson

How does Johnson's narrative reflect Du Bois's notion of the Veil and the Dual Consciousness?

Not this, not that

Johnson’s text is making an impression which is distinct from the other two we’ve digested up to now, because of its subject matter. The idea of the “fair-skinned negro” is an interesting one, very vast and complicated. These are the people who can, when they wish to, pass for white (or at least, close to white). Even those who aren’t as light-skinned as the protagonist of this work still gain more respectability in the world of the dominant whites than would someone with extremely dark skin.

But there’s a lot more to it than that.

I know that in modern culture, it’s believed that a division currently exists within the African-American race (this is all sociological theory), as the lower-class blacks resent the higher-class ones, saying that they are somehow inauthentic, “less black.” I couldn’t hope to proffer any kind of personal experience here, but I’ve seen some examples of this odd behavior, an insistence on the seperation between black culture and white culture by blacks. August Wilson cetainly seems to believe there is something that must stay separate, symbolized by the piano which ought to remain in black possession at all costs.

The mixed-race individual is certainly not accepted by the whites, but it would seem that he might be unacceptable to black groups as well. Example: why was there no place in The Souls of Black Folk which explicitly stated that DuBois was mixed-race? It was hinted at, certainly, and whenever his lineage came up in the introduction or footnotes it became vaguely clear, but how come it was never blatantly stated? Well, DuBois already has some things going against him if he’s trying to write about the lower-class black man of 1903; he’s a Northerner, he’s Harvard-educated so he probably isn’t exactly poor, and he’s a hypocritical anti-Semite (which the readers of the time might not have cared about…). Admitting his mixed heritage might have been a coffin nail, which would explain why it’s never mentioned, and why even the editors never note it.

Back to the text at hand. We see the protagonist of Johnson’s novel having his heritage hidden from him at the beginning, and once it is revealed he sets himself away from the other children, becoming a loner, a race of one. He seems to be accepted by no one, and I am interested to see if the trend continues in his college life.

For every positive, there lie a host of negatives lurking in the shadows and greedily licking their lips.

Monday, Mar 7

In The Piano Lesson, a play deeply concerned with the efffects of history, there is no written historical documents, but there are a number of different ways that history is accessed by the characters. What are some of the ways in which we learn about history, and what might that say about the nature of history and the past in African-American culture?

The Piano Lesson

Sorry I missed today's class. This cold finally caught up with me.

For next week: read the first half of The Piano Lesson for Monday. Read the second half by Wednesday. I would like everyone to post two questions about the play you would ask the director or the actors if we have that opportunity on Thursday when we see the play.

questions

If I were going, then I suppose these are the questions I would ask:
1. What do you feel the essential meaning or message of the play is, and what have you done to bring that out?
2. This is a very dense play, with a lot of information being tossed around; what have you done to make sure the most important information is properly emphasized or conveyed?

Friday, Feb 25`

Sundquist spends a lot of time talking about what is encoded in the spirituals at the beginning of each chapter. What does he mean by this and what are some of the things that he sees as encoded in these songs?

Wednesday, Feb 23rd

What does Rampersand mean when he argues that Du Bois is putting forth a new neo-slavery narrative to replace the "Up From Slavery" narrative of Washington?