Abstract. Introduction

Transcription

1 Abstract Introduction African American literature has engaged in a dialogue with American letters since the pre-civil War period. This dialogue has been frequently creative and more frequently contentious. It has produced a body of rich and expressive literature with insight into the American society of its time. From the 1970s until now, African American writers such as Toni Morrison have received acclaim for their works both abroad and at home in the United States. The present study analyses selected works of the three eminent African American authors on whom very little research work seems to have been undertaken through the angle of Black aesthetics. These three authors are Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. The work of the abovementioned writers is an effort to bring out the central theme of the Black American experience in an unjust society like America (for African Americans) and also to exhibit the prevailing style of contemporary criticism, representation, form, style and sentimentality. The present dissertation also is an attempt to bring out all these elements / factors from the selected writings of the three African-American writers chosen for this study. Chapter One Chapter One is an over-all discussion of aesthetics including Black aesthetics and the Black Arts Movement which produced writers like 1

2 Richard Wright, LeRoi Jones and others. In Chapter One, the concept of aesthetics as defined by several writers and philosophers is discussed. In the hierarchy of human values, aesthetic values hold a peculiar position. Their appeal is as broad as humanity itself. There is no age in human history which has not enjoyed and cherished aesthetic values. The role of aesthetic values has been so great that sometimes these values are assigned absolute or intrinsic values. With a suitable understanding of aesthetics from the White perspective, the discussion shall now to review it from the Black perspective could be continued. The present study is as in-depth a study as possible of social analysis of the condition of the Blacks in America and their direct confrontation with prejudices, stereotypes, and racial mythologies that allowed the Whites to ignore worse social conditions created by them for the Blacks till the last decades of the 19th century. A period of outstanding literary vigour and creativity took place in the 1920s, changing the character of literature created by Black Americans from quaint dialect works and conventional imitations of the White writers to sophisticated explorations of the Black life and culture that revealed and stimulated a new confidence and racial pride. Black aesthetics and art like their White counterparts must relate to the audience and the artist who created them. Though no one can say for sure that Black aesthetics was derived from the White, both Whites and Blacks have been influenced by it. What is certain is that the new Black writers have modelled their aesthetics somewhat on the White one, but have infused it with their own language, images and expressions. It is with this 2

3 attitude, that the writers whose works are being studied in this dissertation will be approached. Chapter One aims at discussing the concept of aesthetics and compare White aesthetics with Black aesthetics. The discussion could be begun with White aesthetics which has its source in Ancient Greece. As defined by White culture, aesthetics concerns human culture and experiences including both major and minor art forms that have their origins in prehistoric times and have developed in civilised societies. Furthermore, the Black aesthetics is about de-americanising the Negro American. Son, in Tar Baby, attempted to return Jadine to her African roots, and Roots, the great African novel by Alex Haley, addressed the issue of African identity. Faced with a failure in social integration with Whites, Blacks turned to their origin. Black Arts Movement began in the 1960s and eventually disintegrated. So Chapter One includes the Negro artistes responsibility towards both tradition and discipline in art and especially in literature. The Black critic needs to concern himself with the aesthetics and its objective of transforming the American Negro into a genuine Black man. Most of the literature by African American writers describes the erstwhile slaves and their culture, with regard to who they were and what the White people did to them. African American literature initially focused on the issue of slavery as presented by the popular subgenre of slave narrative. The history of African American people was the story of their journey, oppression, slavery and liberation. The story starts with African cultures 3

4 and the slave trade due to which many Africans lost their freedom. It is the story of their survival, of how they escaped from slavery and of how they suffered misery and trouble during this period. Black literature in America is the literature of reality and facts and everything written in the name of Black literature refers to the Black community in the States. Also Black literature is literature of protest against White racism in American society. According to Richard Wright: If White racism did not exist, then black literature would not exist, and he predicted the demise of the latter with the cessation of the former. 1 Chapter Two In Chapter Two, a discussion is made about the life and works of Richard Wright who has been called as the first Black novelist. Wright was accredited with the first Negro protest novel in his most famous work Native Son. James Baldwin, who shall be discussed in the next chapter, was Wright s protégé, but he labelled Native Son as a protest novel due to its attitude about and by the White characters and Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the novel. An in-depth analysis of Wright and his attitude as well as his work is given in this chapter. Wright also is known as the father of the Black American literature and also father of Black protest literature. His early life was filled with an experience of cruelty towards him. That probably has been a chief and serious 1 Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p

5 influence on his writings. Richard Wright, as a Negro writer, speaks about Negro history in America and their problems. Richard Wright was the first Negro writer in the United States to protest against the White prejudices against, hatred and persecution of Blacks. His tone is stark and foreboding, which must have prompted his analysis of Baldwin s works. Native Son revived 19 th Century African American literature. But it tended to avoid the moralising and political conservatism this style consisted of. Like many new White writers in the Northern US, Wright had to face the risk of extractions from his work to gain recognition of them. If the Club, the group reviewing any novel, required him to remove any scene from the book, he acquiesced. Remarkably, he was aware that class distinctions were very recent in America. These distinctions could alter the affairs in the commodities market or real estate. He also realised that the two sectors of society which he studied the dreamless poor and the cocksure rich were continuously and viciously interdependent in his new home, Chicago. In Native Son Richard Wright showed Americans how a Black youth rages against White oppression. With some slight and perchance negligible change in laws and attitudes in the United States, the Black writers and their protagonists changed somewhat too. John Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain and Leo Proudhammer In Tell Me How Long the Train s Been Gone are more urbanized with the exodus to the supposedly more liberal Northern States where they and their creators lived. They have dreams and objectives like their White counterparts. 5

6 Richard Wright, whom has been studied in Chapter Two herein, described the original Black literature as prim and decorous and confined to humble poetry and dramas. He continues to mention, with some chagrin, that White audiences or reviewers scarcely took note of these earlier writings and were even astonished that Blacks could write anything. Chapter Three This chapter discusses James Baldwin and his chosen novels. As with Chapter Two, the biographical data of the author precedes a discussion of his selected novels. For this chapter, the researcher has selected Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Tell Me How Long the Train s Been Gone (1960). In 1953 Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, testified anew to the sophisticated formal experimentation and piercing examination of African American consciousness of which the writers coming of age in the 1950s were capable. Go Tell It on the Mountain was based on the author's experiences as a teenage preacher in a small church. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin collected his essays and his work, Notes of a Native Son, which is a mix of autobiography and political commentary on race in America and it, gave Baldwin an identity as the new conscience of the nation on racial matters. The second novel, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone concerns the protagonist Leo Proudhammer s attempts to make a visible impression on the art of drama by becoming a prominent Negro actor and he very nearly succeeds. 6

7 Baldwin s link to the past could be seen in his attention to religion which was different in practice for the Blacks and the Whites. The type of religious experience related in Baldwin s Go Tell It on the Mountain is called Calvinism. It is described as brutal and graceless and a teaching of nothing more than punishment, revenge and submission. The past includes both the American Negro s experiences of religion and the personal experiences of Baldwin himself who was raised in a household similar to the one in which John Grimes lived and/or grew up. Like Wright, who was Baldwin s mentor in Black literature, Baldwin was sensitive to the unrest among his peers in the South. In his later work, Tell Me How Long the Train s Been Gone, besides further religious references, Baldwin refers to the unrest and the violence while depicting Leo s past. Baldwin wrote that, as children, Leo and his brother Caleb, were persecuted by the White police. This chapter is devoted to the discussion of selected novels of James Baldwin. It is worth mentioning, as has been done in the last chapter, that as time has changed and progressed, attitudes in the North of the USA have also changed along with the time. The expression of racism in the novels reflected this. The protagonists of these novels, as well as those in Chapter Four, no longer experienced the raw hatred and fear of Negros which Richard Wright described. Baldwin s protagonists reflected their own background. For example, John Grimes reflected the aspect of Baldwin s association with religion in Go Tell It on the Mountain. A more productive and more open time was reflected in Tell Me How Long the Train s Been Gone. The protagonist Leo Proudhammer conceives that 7

8 he can change the Black man s image by becoming a successful actor, rather than through violent protest. Chapter Three probes into the life and works of James Baldwin. Growing up with a strict stepfather and an equally strict religion, Baldwin could do little but to write about it. This has been the foundation of Go Tell It on the Mountain as has been written in this chapter. Although fiction is more imaginative than autobiography, there must be some amount of truth and (social) reality in it for the reader(s) to identity themselves with it. Even Baldwin s gay Black characters were representatives of Black people shaped by their culture, heritage and traditions, but they had to interact with a disinterested and frequently distrustful White American majority. Chapter Four The third and last author is Toni Morrison, who would be discussed in this chapter. Firstly, Toni Morrison is a female writer and so she approaches characters and plot in each of her novels from a feminine point of view. This approach is attached to the over-all sense of being a Negro. The plots and characters of each of Morrison s two novels studied here vary among themselves. The characters are, like their creator, Black and feminine. The heroines of each of her novels are unique among themselves too. Jadine In Tar Baby has lived a very different life in America from Pecola Breedlove. Pecola is a young girl growing up in a Northern city of the United States. She faces daunting problems such as homelessness, rape, incest, alienation, loss of standing in her own community, emotional 8

9 trauma and identity. It makes her want to become White. Contrarily, Jadine has already changed. She is urban, modern, and has adopted the sophistications of the Whites. As has been mentioned, she has studied abroad in France. She ignores traditional art for the European classics and enjoys the luxuries of Whites such as fine clothes and leather bags. Under this chapter elements of aesthetics in The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby will be thoroughly studied. The researcher will try to illustrate Toni Morrison's attempt to show beauty, ugliness and so on in her novels and its impact on the mind of the reader. Morrison s first novel, The Bluest Eye published in 1970, was a criticism of middle-class Black life. The Bluest Eye is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent Black girl who is obsessed by the White standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes. Morrison focused her first novel on the destructive effects of White ideals of beauty, symbolized in blue eyes, on a lonely Black girl's attempt to find a positive sense of identity in a loveless family and a community prone to scapegoating. The Bluest Eye s implicit endorsement of the Black is beautiful slogan of the 1970s, made it topical, but its attention to the psychology of oppression affecting a poor, small-town Black girl diverged from the norm of the Black Arts Movement featured male protagonists in conflict with the larger White society. Tar Baby, set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex. After Black women became more prominent in American society and began to write about their experiences, the life of American Black women became a topic for the African American women s novels. Other writers have discussed this topic, but no one is as prominent as Toni Morrison is. 9

10 In Chapter Four, it is discussed that Toni Morrison employed aesthetics to present Negro desolation in her novels. It may be said that authors rarely use aesthetics negatively or to produce a negative effect for the reader. Usually, aesthetics is used to show the beautiful, although the sublime and the ugly may also dealt with. The ugly is therefore shown as circumstances. There we have the burning of the Breedlove s house in The Bluest Eye. There is also the alienation of Pecola. But The Bluest Eye is noted for its critique of the White concept of beauty for which the child actress Shirley Temple is an epitome in Pecola s mind. This is highlighted by the fact that she thinks it enough to pray for it night and day. Morrsion s critique of aesthetics and beauty is further epitomised by the three prostitutes and the elaborate treatment they receive in the novel. Chapter Five Chapter Five, which is a concluding chapter, briefly compares aesthetics of the novels selected for detailed study in this thesis. A review the Black Arts Movement and Harlem Renaissance, both of which launched Black aesthetics, has been taken. The Black Arts Movement marked a vigorous period of creativity in Black literature. Chapter Five, in a way, is the summary of this thesis and it discusses the comparative aesthetics of the three selected writers. It may be said that there is more of contrast than of comparison among them because their styles and backgrounds, which determine their content, are very different. 10

11 The other objective of this chapter was to demonstrate for the reader the element of the Black aesthetics in each of the selected writer s works and analyse it in context. It has posed an in-depth examination of the works of these three authors in addition to their rendering of images, use of poetics and other tools of expression that evoke the truth of their individual experiences. This chapter brings the three writers together for comparing/contrasting their aesthetics. Actually, contrast can be emphasised because the differences in their narrative and content depend on the differences in social environment. Analysis of the chosen works is begun by taking into account reviews and criticisms related to the topic. Thus an attempt has been made to present the similarities and dissimilarities of the works selected and to analyse these works. Critic Emory Elliott has given the evaluation of all three writers chosen. He described Richard Wright as a social critic who wrote with an intense style. The readers can certainly perceive the intensity of Wright s storytelling through the fast and heated action of a character like Bigger Thomas. Concerning Baldwin and Morrison, Elliott credited Baldwin with a poetics of style and felt that it was more aesthetically satisfying. As mentioned in an independent chapter on Baldwin in this thesis (i.e. Chapter Three), Baldwin is seen as dealing with the universality of human experience and writing about Whites and Blacks both in the midst of that experience. Baldwin was at odds with the Wrightesque protest novel and obviously endeavoured to write differently. Morrison was less bitter than Wright and more aesthetical, like Baldwin. She studied both writers in college and obviously was 11

12 influenced by them equally. Elliott appreciated her creativity in changing narrative techniques and in her ability to create fiction which was both historical and close to human experience. Both Baldwin and Morrison desired no less than Richard Wright to make both Blacks and Whites aware of racial injustice. Wright attempted a more radical method by adopting Communism as an alternative. He may have preferred that to simply adopting White culture. But, as has been said earlier, his works are more obviously political than those of Baldwin or Morrison. The works of Morrison and Baldwin respond more to the established framework of literary aesthetics. As the styles and aesthetics of each author selected for this thesis differ, due to the environment and the ensuing attitudes towards life and writing (or literature), the researcher expects that the variability between the authors and their selected novels will be educative for the readers. 12