Literature and Culture of the Chicago Renaissance

Postmodern and Postcolonial Development

Yoshinobu Hakutani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000008616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Chicago Renaissance has long been considered a less important literary movement than the Harlem Renaissance. While the Harlem Renaissance began and flourished during the 1920s, but faded during the 1930s, the Chicago Renaissance originated between 1890 and 1910, gathered momentum in the 1930s, and paved the way for the postmodern and postcolonial developments in American Literature. To portray Chicago as a modern, spacious, cosmopolitan city, the writers of the Chicago Renaissance developed a new style of writing based on a distinct cultural aesthetic that reflected ethnically diverse sentiments and aspirations. Whereas the Harlem Renaissance was dominated by African American writers, the Chicago Renaissance originated from the interactions between African and European American writers. Much like modern jazz, writings in the movement became a hybrid, cross-cultural product of black and white Americans. The second period of the movement developed at two stages. In the first stage, the older generation of African American writers continued to deal with racial issues. In the second stage, African American writers sought solutions to racism by comparing American culture with other cultures. The younger generation of African American writers, such as Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and Colson Whitehead, followed their predecessors and explored Confucianism, Buddhist Ontology, and Zen.

This volume features essays by both veteran African Americanists and upcoming young critics. It is highlighted by essays from scholars located around the globe, such as Toru Kiuchi of Japan, Yupei Zhou of China, Mamoun Alzoubi of Jordan, and Babacar M'Baye of Senegal. It will be invaluable reading for students of Americanists at all levels.

PART I

Interactions of African and European American Writers

1

THE CHICAGO RENAISSANCE, DREISER, AND WRIGHT’S SPATIAL NARRATIVE

Yoshinobu Hakutani

1.

As African Americans found the rural South a living hell and dreamed of escaping racial prejudice and exclusion and of living in northern cities, African American writers were at the pains of conveying the sufferings and hopes of the African American people. The mode of their writing was diametrically opposed to that of nineteenth-century American novelists who often described the mood of pastoral idyll inspired by a longing for simpler agrarian society. This type of fiction was written largely as a reaction to the disharmony and friction that occurred among rugged individualists, strong willed white men living in urban society. The new kind of white man was not only able to live in harmony with nature, he would also find a bosom friend in the stranger, a dark-skinned man from whom he learned the values of life he had not known. Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s leather-stocking novels strikes up friendship with Chingachgook and Hard-Heart, noble savages of the wilderness. Ishmael in Moby-Dick is ritualistically wedded to Queequeg, a pagan from the South Seas. Huck Finn discovers a father figure in Jim, a runaway slave.

In twentieth-century American literature, however, a substantial reversal of the anti-urban sentiment is found in both European American and African American writings, a new literary tradition often critical of the values expressed in earlier American literature. In Jennie Gerhardt, for example, Dreiser described the city as a site of freedom and individualism. A realistic modernist like Dreiser, who intimately knew the squalor and corruption city life brought on, used the urban environment as a space in which to dramatize individual liberty and pursuit of happiness. For both men and women, the city was envisioned as a site of confluence between the individual and society, a space which was fluid and wide enough to enable citizens and workers to interact with an industrialized culture.

Much of the important African American literature that has emerged since the Depression has also been largely urban in character. Although never hesitant to criticize the negative aspects of city life, it has only rarely suggested that pastoral alternatives to the city exist for African Americans. This large and significant body of literature, moreover, contains some surprising celebrations of city life. One way to explain this positive image of the city is to examine the historical experience of African Americans. From the very onset, African Americans were denied imaginative access to a pre-urban homeland in Africa because the institution of slavery did everything possible to stamp out the memory of that world.¹ And the actual experience of slaves in America did not permit them the luxury of romantically imagining the non-urban settings which are so mythically prominent in nineteenth-century American fiction by such writers as Cooper, Melville, and Twain. As Huck Finn and Jim sadly discovered, the territories ahead could be truly liberating only for European Americans. In the era following the literal end of slavery, new strategies for re-enslavement were devised in the South where codes of segregation and the practice of sharecropping were to make it impossible for African Americans to establish a positive image of rural life which could serve as a counterbalance to the pull of urban life.

For Richard Wright, Chicago was split between wonder and terror, but it was always preferable to the southern environment he had so categorically rejected. What is remarkable about his impression of Chicago was its dichotomous vision:

Then there was the fabulous city in which Bigger lived, an indescribable city, huge, roaring, dirty, noisy, raw, stark, brutal; a city of extremes: torrid summers and sub-zero winters, white people and black people, the English language and strange tongues, foreign born and native born, scabby poverty and gaudy luxury, high idealism and hard cynicism! A city so young that, in thinking of its short history, one’s mind, as it travels backward in time, is stopped abruptly by the barren stretches of wind-swept prairie! But a city old enough to have caught within the homes of its long, straight streets the symbols and images of man’s age-old destiny, of truths as old as the mountains and seas, of dramas as abiding as the soul of man itself!

(“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” xxv)

Not only did Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s present itself as the center of a powerful industrialized economy, but it was also a striking representation of a modern civilization buttressed by multiculturalism. Small wonder Chicago produced, besides Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and a host of American writers whose cultural legacies were other than Anglo-Saxon and mostly ethnic, such as Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren, and Saul Bellow.²

Farrell was one of the earliest American writers who championed Wright’s narrative for an unusual intermixture of realism and lyricism. He wrote in Partisan Review that Uncle Tom’s Children serves as an exemplary refutation for those who wished to write “such fancy nonsense about fables and allegories.” In response to such reviewers as Granville Hicks and Alan Calmer, who wanted Wright to pace more steadily in his narrative and delve more deeply into his material, Farrell argued that Wright effectively uses simple dialogue “as a means of carrying on his narrative, as a medium for poetic and lyrical effects, and as an instrument of characterization” (“Lynch Patterns” 57). By contrast, as if in return for Wright’s unfavorable review of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston categorized Uncle Tom’s Children as a chronicle of hatred with no act of understanding and sympathy. As did some other critics, she opposed Wright’s politics, arguing that his stories fail to touch the fundamental truths of African American life (“Stories of Conflict” 32).

For Wright, however, what enabled his narrative to convey the truth about African American experience was not an application of literary naturalism but a creation of perspective. Almost a decade earlier than James Baldwin’s review of Native Son, Wright had posited a theory of African American narrative in “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” published in New Challenge in 1935. This narrative, whether in fiction or in nonfiction, as he argued, must be based on fact and history and cannot be motivated by politics or idealism. African American writing, then, does not assume the role of protest: “even if Negro writers found themselves through some ‘ism,’” he asks, “how would that influence their writing? Are they being called upon to ‘preach’? To be ‘salesmen’? To ‘prostitute’ their writing? Must they ‘sully’ themselves? Must they write ‘propaganda’?” The inquiry is “a question of awareness, of consciousness; it is, above all, a question of perspective.” This perspective, Wright defines, is “that part of a poem, novel, or play which a writer never puts directly upon paper. It is that fixed point in intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people.”³

Substantiating perspective with “intellectual space,” Wright further posits that perspective must not be allied with “world movements” and must be established by the self. Because perspective is “something which he wins through his living,” it is “the most difficult of achievement” (“Blueprint” 45–46). This intellectual space comprises, on the one hand, a writer’s complex consciousness deeply involved in African American experience and, on the other, a detachment from it. By a detachment Wright means a reflection accomplished in isolation, in a space where neither those afflicted nor those sympathetic to their plight, such as Marxists, are allowed to enter. “The conditions under which I had to work,” Wright recalls in American Hunger, “were what baffled them [members of the Communist party in Chicago]. Writing had to be done in loneliness” (123).

His attempt to establish perspective and provide it with intellectual space accounts for his lifelong commitment to a narrative by which he is able to convey the truths of African American life from an impersonal, objective point of view. His entire work has shown that he was a remarkably resilient thinker and writer. At the outset of his career his writing was deeply influenced by Marxism, but later, as he came to establish his own point of view, he used only the doctrine of Marxist theory on class struggle, which made sense to African American life, but rejected much of the practice, which suppressed freedom and individualism.

Although some critics have regarded Wright’s work as a product influenced by the earlier American and European literary movements, he never considered himself belonging to any of them. In 1941 he told Edwin Seaver:

Dreiser could get his sociology from a Spencer and get his notion of realism from a Zola, but Negro writers can’t go to those sources for background…. In fact, I think in many cases it is good for a Negro writer to get out on his own and get his stuff first hand rather than get it through the regular educational channels.

(Conversations 46)

Whatever philosophy Wright had earlier come across, he adamantly adhered to his own theory of narrative. Whether he was interested in Marxism, Zolaesque naturalism, or French existentialism, none of them taught him how to attain his perspective and intellectual space. The Marxist doctrines of class struggle against capitalism proved less relevant to African American life than they did to American life in general. Literary naturalism, based on the concepts of heredity and social environment, would not have applied to African American narrative, for such concepts had less to do with African Americans than they did with European Americans. Racism alone, ever present in American society, made the social environment of African Americans vastly differ from that of European Americans. By the same token, existentialism, as originally conceived for European society, would not have provided Wright’s narrative with the perspective and intellectual space it required.

Not only did “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” published in 1935, give a clear definition, but Wright also provided a remarkable illustration for his theory. Perspective, he wrote,

means that a Negro writer must learn to view the life of a Negro living in New York’s Harlem or Chicago’s South Side with the consciousness that one-sixth of the earth surface belongs to the working class. It means that a Negro writer must create in his readers’ minds a relationship between a Negro woman hoeing cotton in the South and the men who loll in swivel chairs in Wall Street and take the fruits of her toil.

(“Bluprint” 46)

Focusing on the relationship between African American women workers in the South and European American businessmen in the North, Wright sounded as though he were giving a demonstration of American racial problems. But the perspective he urged the African American writer to achieve does not merely apply to African Americans, it signifies “the hopes and struggles of minority peoples everywhere that the cold facts have begun to tell them something” (“Blueprint” 46).

2.

Conversations with Richard Wright confirms that he paid his utmost attention to such influential American novelists in the twentieth century as Dreiser, Faulkner, and Hemingway.⁴ Of the three, Wright was least inspired by Hemingway. In a radio discussion of the New York Federal Writers’ Project broadcast in 1938, he said: “I like the work of Hemingway, of course. Who does not? But the two writers whose work I like most today are André Malraux and William Faulkner. I think both of them in their respective fields are saying important things” (Conversations 10). Despite Hemingway’s reputation, established by such novels as The Sun Also Rises, Wright realized that a Hemingway novel makes a great impression on the reader’s mind not for establishing perspective but for creating style. Wright also realized that a Hemingway novel thrives on action, a technique lacking in French novelists like Sartre and Camus.⁵ In the 1930s, Wright felt that he belonged to the latest literary generation, which included both Hemingway and Faulkner. He paid a greater tribute to Faulkner because he thought Faulkner’s fiction conveys a judicious point of view. In particular, he recognized Faulkner’s importance in developing the American novel, in which the “unhappiness” of the American people was realistically described (Conversations 109).

Among all the writers in English, Dreiser had the strongest influence on Wright’s mode of understanding American history and culture. “The first great American novelist I came across,” Wright said in retrospect shortly before his death, “was Theodore Dreiser. Thanks to him, I discovered a very different world in America” (Conversations 214). As early as 1941, Wright said, “I never could get into Dickens … He reeks with sentimentality. Theodore Dreiser … is the greatest writer this country has ever produced. His Jennie Gerhardt is the greatest novel” (Conversations 38). Toward the end of Black Boy he wrote:⁶

I read Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie and they revived in me a vivid sense of my mother’s suffering; I was overwhelmed. I grew silent, wondering about the life around me. It would have been imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Interactions of African and European American Writers
• PART II: African American Writers and Race Issues
• PART III: Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Postmodernism and Postcolonialism
• Index