Integrative Studies and the Speaking Subject in Some African-American Art

Integrative Studies and the Speaking Subject in Some African-American ArtAuthor(s): Bruce TuckerSource: Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, Vol. 4 (1998), pp. 19-24Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College ChicagoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177067 .

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Integrative Studies and the Speaking Subject in Some African-American Art Bruce Tucker

Much of the twentieth-century African-American art that the Integrative Studies Roundtable has considered works along the fault line between various unities and their corresponding multiplicities in a fairly specific way: by addressing the issue of the speaking subject, black subjectivity, and cultural identity. In the course of our discussions, the presence of a speaking subject in this art has come up in various guises. Lawrence Kramer showed us how Langston Hughes carefully worked between the diction of the speaker of "Weary Blues" and the diction of the jazz musician to produce "interstitial zones of subjectivity" in which knowl- edge can arise (see page 1ff in this issue). Samuel Floyd gave us the example of Robert Hay- den, who brought to bear on the literally shattering experience of the Middle Passage all the high modernist techniques of collage, perspectivism, montage, polyphonic voice, and inter- textuality (see page 25ff in this issue). And in both Hughes and Hayden, despite their quite different stylistic commitments, the issue is not just what you say, but how you say and who this you is-this I-who is speaking.

The speaking subject is not confined to literary art. How many of the images that Michael Harris presented are figural, or, as in the case of his own soft sculptures, not pure abstraction, but instead are based on the highly and humanly significant practice of quilt making? As Barry Gaither put it, while the official art world was declaring through abstraction the death of the subject, black artists were attempting to paint their own subjectivity into the picture. He also pointed out that for European cubists, the encounter with African art may have provided a means of formal liberation, but for black artists it provided a means of reclaiming their humanity, seen in the uses to which they put it in portraiture and types. As he stated, these African-American artists employed cubism to construct, not deconstruct. We might also think of Duke Ellington's music, especially the longer works, being for many years pejoratively called "program music," which is to say not pure, not abstract enough. But, in fact, the work would be described less invidiously as speaking to us. The speaking subject is also implied in Richard Long's striking observation that much of African-American art may be usefully described as "sermonic."

In many, although by no means all, of the artists we have looked at, we find this willing- ness, even need, to declare the presence of a speaking subject or to create one, and in a century in which the death of the subject has been declared not only by theorists but by artistic practices. We have also sometimes found a speaking subject in narratives, often Diasporic ones, in genres that are often regarded as nonnarrative at a time when, as Paul Gilroy (1993, 42) observes, European theorists are declaring the collapse of all grand narratives. Finally, we also find a speaking subject in the many forms of spirituality we have encountered- whether of Christian, Muslim, syncretist, African, or other origin-at a time when the contemporary critical mantra of Race, Class, and Gender leaves the spiritual out of account except as superstructure or as a form of cultural production.

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20 Lenox Avenue

In the work I am talking about, the preferred trope for the construction of this speaking subject-often in the interest of personal, cultural, or national identity-is that of expressiveness itself. Many groups of artists in other times and places have self-consciously taken on the issue of expressiveness in both the matter and manner of their art and sometimes in the interest of personal and national identity making. But the prevalence of it in African-Ameri- can art is so widespread as to constitute a qualitative difference. Further, the centrality of expressiveness itself in much African-American art also often tends toward an integration of the arts either thematically or, more often, technically.

Louis Armstrong's "Hear Me Talkin' to Ya," recorded in 1928, makes the point simply and eloquently. He kicks off the performance with the growled injunction of the title: "Hear me talking to you," and then neither speaks another word nor sings a note for the remain- der of the performance. A master at transferring speech-like song to his instrument and, conversely, of transferring instrument-like qualities to his speech and his singing, Armstrong quite straightforwardly asserts the underlying unity of speech, song, and music and inte- grates them in the "voice" of his trumpet through which he "talks." The effect is not to "tell his story," as the cliche goes, but to establish the "me"-the speaking subject-who is heard within the multivalent expressiveness of the virtuoso performance.

Two things should be said immediately. First, that identity-making is central to African- American art is not news. Yet that is no reason not to pay it renewed attention in the context of integrated studies and the issue of expressiveness itself. Second, the speaking subject that is the medium of this identity making is rarely a simple assertion of essence, of a substantial self. When Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that the black artist's assertion of difference would one day be subsumed by universalism, Frantz Fanon (1967, 135) replied: "Black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not the potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is."

This complicated assertion of completeness within difference, immanence as against universality, in short, a history out of which one speaks, is what we often find in the work I am talking about. Expressiveness itself is often the preferred trope for this complicated "subjectivity-in-the-making," as Lawrence Kramer called it, a trope that simultaneously and non- dialectically bodies forth the achievement of subjectivity and identity and their denial.

Etheridge Knight's short poem "The Warden Said to Me the Other Day" (Knight [1968] 1972, 277) makes the point with surprising economy:

The Warden Said to Me the Other Day

The warden said to me the other day (innocently, I think), "Say, etheridge, why come the black boys don't run off like the white boys do?" I lowered myjaw and scratched my head and said (innocently, I think), "Well, suh, I ain't for sure, but I reckon it's cause we ain't go no wheres to run to."



Integrative Studies and the Speaking Subject in Some African-American Art 21

On first reading, the poem seems to have the structure of a simple joke, clinched by the speaker's sly punch line and rendered poignant by the conventional evocation of America as a vast prison house. But when we look more closely, we begin to see that the poem is about saying and who we become when we speak to each other. The warden's utterance is rendered in a caricature of white Southern speech and idiom, especially the "why come." The speaker of the poem replies in equally stylized terms, putting on the mask of servility to make his subversive point at the warden's, perhaps unwitting, expense.

On the other hand, both the speaker and the warden are locked into their roles of keeper and kept by social arrangements that are expressed in how they speak. That is why, ironically, their utterances are said to be made "innocently." The real prison house here is not only the society but the prison house of language itself within which, however, the speaker is able to assert if not his freedom, at least his selfhood, by expressing himself within the confines of these preexisting speech codes and social roles.

Langston Hughes' earlier and much less edgy "I Too" presents a far more confident speaking subject whose expressiveness is the basis on which he lays claim not to his identity as an American but to his identity, Whitman-like, as America itself. Echoing Whitman, he moves from the first line "I, too, sing America," through sixteen intervening lines to the sud- den and surprising expansion of the -concluding line: "I, too, am America" (Hughes [1925] 1997, 1258). Just as Whitman's pantheistic dispersion of himself into all American nature and culture in Leaves of Grass renders him indistinguishable from America, the absorption of Whitman in "I Too" achieves a similar identification for Hughes, although far more econom- ically. "Singing"-expressiveness itself-is for Whitman as well as for Hughes the means to such identity.

But for Hughes, identity with Whitman and America does not preclude difference. The character in "I Too," who laughs and eats well despite being relegated to the kitchen, has the same easy confidence of the "Walt" in Leaves of Grass who "wears his hat indoors and out." But although he admired Whitman, Hughes eschews the long loping lines, the exten- sive catalogs, and all the other epic devices used by Whitman to make his poem as sprawling as the country itself. Instead, Hughes employs a stripped-down, direct poetic diction that through its understatement, in conjunction with grand Whitmanesque themes, nevertheless achieves an earned and powerful grandeur of its own.

From Hughes' concluding "I am," I want to turn to Ralph Ellison's initial "I am," which begins Invisible Man, his monumental working of the issue of identity and expressiveness (Ellison [1952] 1997, 1518). The rest of that memorable opening sentence, however, under- cuts the opening assertiveness: "I am an invisible man"-an "I" that, in the course of the Pro- logue and indeed the entire novel, is progressively and paradoxically imbued with an almost overpowering sense of identity through the exhaustive delineation of its invisibility.

Ellison's underground man-nameless, invisible, inverting grand Melvillian themes of whiteness in the dream-vision sequence on "The Blackness of Blackness"-spends much of his time listening to Louis Armstrong, particularly Armstrong's electrifying recording of 1929, "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?" Writes the narrator: "Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible" (Ellison [1952] 1997, 1521).



22 Lenox Avenue

In fact, the progressively deeper meditations of the sequence, although brought on by some marijuana he has unwittingly smoked, are not only guided by the music, but the music contains the meditations: the spirituals, the auction block, the call-and-response sermon on "The Blackness of Blackness," a dialogue on freedom and love, and the menace of Ras the Destroyer. Writes the narrator (Ellison [1952] 1997, 1523):

Then somehow I came out of it, ascending hastily from this underworld of sound to hear Louis Armstrong innocently asking: What did I do To be so black And blue?

Of his life in his hole, illuminated by 1,369 light bulbs with power stolen from Monopo- lated Light & Power, he writes: "I've illuminated the blackness of invisibility-and vice versa. And so I play the invisible music of my isolation.... You hear this music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians. Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?" (Ellison [1952] 1997, 1524).

The narrator explicitly connects music, his own blackness that shows up against the brightly lit background of his hole, and the "black and white" of writing, the figure and ground of black letters on the white page. And we are told at several points in the narrative that this is not merely a free-floating, first-person narration but something that has been written. "So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down?" he asks near the conclusion of the book. He also refers to himself as a "disembodied voice," a description that fits a narrator embodied only in print as well as a recorded singer of music that is "heard and seldom seen.

After making those connections, the narrator concludes his Prologue by rhetorically asking half of Armstrong's question: "But what did I do to be so blue?" In the course of the hundreds of pages that follow, the answer is given in a narrative that is variously naturalistic, expressionistic, and surrealistic. Like many of the great modernist novelists, Ellison mar- shaled the full expressive range and possibilities of the genre to provide multiple perspec- tives on this multilayered tale. At its conclusion, he reverts once again to Armstrong. After having "tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certain- ties"-that is, after having written this novel, with its deployment of virtually all the stylistic resources in the history of the genre-the narrator is ready to emerge from his hole, but he is still ambivalent:

With Louis Armstrong one half of me says, "Open the win- dow and let the foul air out," while the other says, "It was good green corn before the harvest." Of course Louis was kidding, he wouldn't have thrown old Bad Air out, because it would have broken up the music and the dance, when it was the good music that came from the bell of old Bad Air's horn that counted. Old Bad Air is still around with his music and his dancing and his diversity, and I'll be up and around with mine." (Ellison [1952] 1997, 1540)



Integrative Studies and the Speaking Subject in Some African-American Art 23

Just as he did in the "Blackness of Blackness" vision in the prologue, Ellison is once again ascending here with Armstrong. But this is not an assertion made merely explicitly or even metaphorically. Ellison enacts it in the concluding words of the book, integrating prose, poetry, and the music of Armstrong in a closing passage that not only echoes phrases from "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?" but also picks up on the rhythm of the song. To appreciate it fully, it is necessary to play Armstrong's recording of the song and then ex- amine the closing words of Invisible Man (Ellison [1952] 1997, 1540). The narrator writes: "'Ah,' I can hear you say, 'so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave."' And here is the narrator's response (1540), which I have lineated to make my point:

But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

In the Prologue, the narrator has said that Armstrong makes poetry out of invisibility. Here, the narrator has made poetry out of Armstrong, integrating in this one bravura passage the arts of music, song, poetry, and prose in the interests of an identity that has moved from the "I" of the first word of the book to the "you" of the last word, the "you" for whom the narrator, in the book's final ironic inversion of identity and invisibility, now fears that he speaks. And he has also moved from the "invisible music" of the Prologue, music that is "heard but seldom seen," to a visible music. Armstrong is not only heard in the rhythmic echoes and similar rhymes but is seen through the subtle integration of song and music into a polysemous printed text that establishes, through such integrative expressiveness, the speaking subject's always-under-construction identity.

There is, finally, perhaps a nonessentialist unity to be found in the trope of expressiveness in such work. On one hand, the trope's tendency to integrate arts in the interest of an overriding concern with the construction of subjectivity gives the unitary its due without, however, essentializing expressiveness. Simultaneously, the working out of the trope in any given work issues in a dense contingency that gives multiplicity its due without falling into a radical nominalism. It is a trope that might also help explain why integrative studies, at least with regard to this work, seem simultaneously to be a plausible pursuit and a chimera.

References

Ellison, Ralph. [1952] 1997. Invisible man. In The Norton anthology of African American literature, edited by Henry Louis GatesJr. and Nellie Y McKay, 1518-1540. New York: W. W. Norton.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black skin, white masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press.



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Gilroy, Paul. 1993. Small acts: Thoughts on the politics of black cultures. London: Ser- pent's Tail.

Hughes, Langston. [1925] 1997. I too. In The Norton anthology of African American literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y McKay, 1258. New York: W. W. Norton.

Knight, Etheridge. [1968] 1972. The warden said to me the other day. In New black voices: An anthology of contemporary Afro-American literature, edited by Abraham Chapman, 277. New York: New American Library.



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Integrative Studies and the Speaking Subject in Some African-American Art