Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text

by W. Lawrence Hogue

Overview

The central thesis of Lawrence Hogue's book is that criticism of Afro-American literature has left out of account the way in which ideological pressures dictate the canon. This fresh approach to the study of the social, ideological, and political dynamics of the Afro-American literary text in the twentieth century, based on the Foucauldian concept of literature as social institution, examines the universalization that power effects, how literary texts are appropriated to meet ideological concerns and needs, and the continued oppression of dissenting voices.

Hogue presents an illuminating discussion of the publication and review history of "major" and neglected texts. He illustrates the acceptance of texts as exotica, as sociological documents, or as carriers of sufficient literary conventions to receive approbation. Although the sixties movement allowed the text to move to the periphery of the dominant ideology, providing some new myths about the Afro-American historical past, this marginal position was subsequently sabotaged, co-opted, or appropriated (Afros became a fad; presidents gave the soul handshake; the hip-talking black was dressing one style and talking another.)

This study includes extended discussion of four works; Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Albert Murray's Train Whistle Guitar, and Toni Morrison's Sula. Hogue assesses the informing worldviews of each and the extent and nature of their acceptance by the dominant American cultural apparatus.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822382898
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/25/1986
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	205
Lexile:	1500L (what's this?)
File size:	281 KB

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Discourse and the Other

The Production of the Afro-American Text

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By W. Lawrence Hogue

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1986 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-0676-4

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CHAPTER 1

Literary Production: A Silence in Afro-American Critical Practice

Recent advances in modern linguistics, along with developments in semiotics and Michel Foucault's concept of discursive formations, have eroded many of the assumptions and presuppositions traditionally associated with literature and criticism. This erosion has proven fundamental. Literary modes and categories inherited from the past no longer accommodate the concerns and questions posed by a new generation of literary scholars and intellectuals. The traditional concept of realism has been proven inadequate. The proposition that the writer is the "creator" of something "original" has come under serious attack. The unquestioned assumption of the text's literariness—that is, that the text possesses certain qualities that place it above the matrices of historical conditions—has been undermined profoundly. Definitions of artistic beauty, greatness in literary texts, and literary worth and value have been deemed subjective and ideological. The conjecture that the writer writes to tell the "truth" has been denounced vehemently. Last, the once acceptable assumptions that critical practice is an innocent activity and that the literary text is inextricably owned by and exclusively associated with the discipline of "literature" have been quelled almost completely.

Developments in semiotics and Foucault's concept of discursive formations produce the theoretical space that allows the literary critic to shift criticism's concerns and focus from a juridical to a theoretical status. In traditional or normative critical practices, the text is subordinated to what Pierre Macherey calls an "external principle of legality," an "aesthetic legality [that] has a juridical rather than a theoretical status; ... its rules merely restrain the writer's activity. Because it is powerless to examine the work on its own terms ..., [normative] criticism resorts to a corroding resentment." In its theoretical status, critical practice is a certain "form of knowledge" which has a particular condition for its existence.

Further, these developments allow the formation of critical practices that shift criticism's focus from the world of creation, the scene of charismatic authorship, to a specific productive process, a set of operations that transform a given language into something new. The literary text becomes not a tangible object that can be held in hand, but a textual system that transposes one or more systems of sign into another. This textual system is composed of a dispersion of its statements and its gaps and silences. The fact that the text permits and excludes certain statements exposes its exclusionary judgments and shows how it functions as a cultural object with social impact that can be calculated politically.

These advancements and developments have produced the critical and theoretical options for Afro-American and other minority texts, and for self-conscious and avant-garde texts—texts whose formations are different from or exist outside established definitions of the literary experience—to be assessed and explained. They give this new generation of literary critics and scholars the theoretical option to ask new questions of the literary text, to examine its mode of production. They also give the critical option to reexamine and reassess those American texts that have been deemed "great" by institutions such as review journals and magazines, English departments, editors, and granting and awarding agencies within the ruling cultural apparatus.

In any literate society there exist a number of distinct modes of literary production that Terry Eagleton defines as "a unity of certain forces and social relations of literary production." Most literary productions belong to the dominant formation's cultural apparatus, which includes the specific institutions of literary production and distribution—editors, publishing houses, bookstores, and libraries. The cultural apparatus also encompasses a range of secondary supporting institutions—among them literary academies, English departments, literary criticism, the concept of literature, granting and awarding agencies—whose function is more directly ideological. These secondary supportive institutions are concerned with the definition and dissemination of certain codified literary standards, conventions, stereotypes, and assumptions.

The concept of literature, produced historically and ideologically, generates these established literary conventions, stereotypes, and assumptions. The current definition of literature began taking shape during the latter half of the eighteenth century. With a Latin root, littera, literature was, in effect, a condition of reading: of being able to read and of having read. It was close to the modern sense of literacy.

In its modern form, however, literature has come to mean, as Raymond Williams notes, "taste," "sensibility," and "discrimination." These terms become the unifying concepts of modern literature. They comprise a practice that produces the organization into which forms of imaginative writing are compressed. These forms reflect a historically and ideologically produced way of viewing literary texts. In short, literature becomes a construction "fashioned by particular people for particular reasons."

Editors, publishers, critics, and reviewers function as a kind of conduit for many of the established cultural, ideological, and intellectual preferences. They are instrumental in keeping certain ideas, social habits, myths, moral conventions, and stereotypes alive in the public's mind—usually under the pretext of not wanting to upset the status quo or offend the public. These editors and critics seek their own definitions of the literary experience in all texts that come to their attention. They evaluate texts by pointing out their contribution to "knowledge" and by explaining how they reproduce certain values, conventions, stereotypes, and perspectives. They certify those literary texts that speak the discourse better, that conform to the established literary standards and criteria. They exclude those texts that do not conform in subject or perspective, on the grounds that they are inferior aesthetically—thereby effecting certain silences in the discourse of literature.

My intention is not to put forth the simplistic argument that the only literary texts published are those that reproduce mainstream literary conventions, values, and stereotypes. English departments, literary journals and magazines, editors, and publishers often espouse values and meanings that are antithetical to those of mainstream society. But these antithetical values and meanings are compatible with specific forms of discourse that allow them to be appropriated. They either speak a particular language or accept a particular form that will not permit certain meanings and positions to be articulated.

Publishers, in particular, play a crucial role in reproducing established literary conventions and stereotypes by catering to the normative, hypothesized reader. In The Sociology of Literature, Robert Escarpit contends that with the rise of the middle class in eighteenth-century England, literature ceased to be the privilege of men of letters. It shifted its focus and concerns from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie who demanded a literature that suited their own concerns, that reproduced their values.

With this large middle-class audience the publisher found himself, and still does, caught between the writer's desire and the public's demands. To accommodate, the publisher influences his writer in the interest of the public by giving advances for the production of particular kinds of books. He influences the public through censoring and advertising in the interest of the writer. In short, the publisher induces a compatible writer-public relationship. But, as Maria Corti explains, the publisher fails to make a distinction between the "effective, virtual reader" and the "hypothesized reader."

A consequence of the publisher's appeal to the mass "hypothesized reader" is that marginal and "other" groups are not seen as constituting a real audience. This oversight contributes to the weeding out or exclusion of certain literary texts. This induced writer-public relationship also coerces some writers with nonconformist perspectives and values into writing for the "hypothesized reader." When a writer is forced to write for an alien reader, Robert Escarpit points out, a "sort of detachment results which may allow the author to have an ideology different from that of his readers and to have to decide on the meaning not only of his own work, but of literature itself."

Criticism as practiced by editors, publishers, reviewers, and critics, then, is not scientific; it is a preeminently political exercise that works upon and mediates the reception of literary texts. It is an active and ongoing part of literature and the cultural apparatus as they produce objects whose "effects" function to reproduce a particular literary experience, or particular literary conventions and stereotypes. As a series of interventions within the uses to which so-called literary texts are to be put, critical practice sends out signals as to the worth and value of literary texts. Those literary texts that reproduce particular literary "experiences" are promoted and certified. Those that do not reproduce certain "experiences" or ideological effects are repressed or subordinated.

Perhaps a discussion of Michel Foucault's concepts of discourse and discursive formations can facilitate an understanding of how critical practice and the concept of literature exclude certain forms of literature, and how critical practice's assumptions, represented as value judgments or as "natural" criteria, actually operate within a network of discursive regulations that finally include the broadest ideological constraints and practices.

For Michel Foucault, a discourse is any group of statements that exists under the positive condition of a complex group of relations. He calls this group of relations discursive. The regularity that binds the object's relations he calls discursive formation. A discursive formation does not connect concepts or words with one another. Instead, it offers concepts the objects of which they can speak. It determines the group of relations that a discourse must establish before it can speak of a particular object. These relations characterize not the language used by discourse but discourse itself as a practice. The conditions to which the group of relations are subjected Foucault calls the rules of formation.

Within a discourse exist relations of mutual delimitation. The whole group of relations forms a principle of determination that permits and excludes a certain number of statements. This means that a discourse does not occupy all the possible space that is open to it by the mere nature of its system of formation. It is essentially incomplete. The incompleteness is manifested in gaps, silences, discontinuities, and limitations.

But discourse conceals its incompleteness, its mode of formation. It naturalizes itself by inscribing its discursive practice in its method of category selection. For Foucault, the archaeologist's function is to demask this process of naturalization, to expose the various ways in which discourse, or any form of representation, deludes. In inserting this signifying process into the social process, we can see not just how literary texts, canons, standards, myths, and conventions are produced, but also how culture, as well, is produced or invented, rather than being "natural," absolute, or eternal.

Without demasking this process of naturalization, a "natural" or mainstream definition of the literary "experience" will continue to universalize the ideological and historical forces that produced it. Its agents will continue to assume that literature reflects or mirrors the social reality rather than being a production of it. They will continue to assume that "universal" standards exist to measure the literary text's value and worth, rather than seeing its worth as determined within a cultural or ideological context.

For almost a century, Afro-American critics and writers have been aware of the ways in which ideological pressures have dictated the canon of American literature. They also have been aware of the exclusion of certain Afro-American literary texts, images, and conventions from that canon. If we read the letters and fiction of the nineteenth-century writer Charles Chesnutt, which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, we can discern clearly his awareness that certain literary images, stereotypes, and conventions are sanctioned and promoted by editors, publishers, and critics, and that other Afro-American images and stereotypes are repressed or subordinated. If we read the essays of Zora Neale Hurston almost fifty years later, we again can discern that she too was quite aware of the pressures by ruling literary institutions to prohibit certain Afro-American images and texts. Recently, Mary Helen Washington in Black-Eyed Susans, Barbara Smith in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology and in Some of Us Are Brave, and others have continued to document the exclusion of blacks and women from the established literary practices in America.

But Chesnutt, Hurston, Washington, Smith, and Afro-American critics of the twentieth century have not examined conceptually the discursive nature of exclusion either in American literature, or in Afro-American and women's literatures. Most Afro-American critical practices, which are my concern here, do not engage their own productive process. They universalize the ideological and historical forces that produce them. They are also silent on the production of Afro-American texts. These critical practices ignore the various literary and ideological forces that actually cause certain Afro-American texts to be published, promoted, and certified and others to be subordinated and/or excluded. They ignore the historically and ideologically established way of viewing literary texts and how this established way affects the production of Afro-American literary texts.

In an article entitled "Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro-American Literature," Houston A. Baker, Jr., delineates three dominant critical practices that have defined Afro-American literature in the past forty years. Baker argues that "poetics of integration" defined Afro-American literature during the 1940s and 1950s. The assumptions and criteria for this practice, for defining Afro-American literature, were established by Arthur P. Davis and reached their maturity with Richard Wright. In the introduction to The Negro Caravan (1941), Davis writes:

The editors ... do not believe that the expression "Negro Literature" is an accurate one, and in spite of its convenient brevity, they have avoided using it. "Negro Literature" has no application if it means structural peculiarity, or a Negro school of writing. The Negro writes in the forms evolved in English and American literature.... The editors consider Negro writers to be American writers, and literature by American Negroes to be a segment of American literature.

Davis reiterates this integrationist critical practice in his essay, "Integration and Race Literature," which, as Baker informs us, he presented to the first conference on Afro-American writers sponsored by the American society of African Culture in 1959. Here Davis explains, "The integration controversy is another crisis, and from it we hope that the Negro will move permanently into full participation of American life—social, economic, political, and literary."

In his essay "The Literature of the Negro in the United States," published in 1957, Richard Wright viewed the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education as the beginning of the end of racial discrimination in the United States. Wright believed that Afro-American literature would become indistinguishable from the literature of the dominant American society: "At the present moment there is no one dominant note in Negro literary expression. As the Negro merges into the mainstream of American life, there might result actually a disappearance of Negro as such." In the 1950s this "poetics of integration" operated within a network of discursive regulations that included the broadest ideological constraints and practices. It was a part of a dominant assimilationist ideological base—in many instances sanctioned by the dominant American cultural apparatus—whose practices were reproduced in Afro-American cultural, political, and literary arenas.

As major Afro-American writers and critics in the 1940s and 1950s, Wright and Davis were able, through their anthologies, reviews, criticisms, and status within the literary world, to establish a tradition and promote a body of Afro-American literature that reflected the values, conventions, and stereotypes of their integrationist perspective on literary texts. For example, during the 1940s and 1950s when Gwendolyn Brooks was writing "mainstream" poetry, Wright was instrumental in getting her work published by Harper and Row.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Discourse and the Other by W. Lawrence Hogue. Copyright © 1986 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. Literary Production: A Silence in Afro-American Critical Practice
Chapter 2. The Dominant American Literary Establishment and the Production of the Afro-American Text
Chapter 3. Sixties' Social Movements, the Literary Establishment, and the Production of the Afro-American Text
Chapter 4. History, the Black Nationalist Discourse, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Chapter 5. History, the Feminist Discourse, and The Third Life of Grange Copeland
Chapter 6. History, the Blues Idiom Style, and Train Whistle Guitar
Chapter 7. The Song of Morrison's Sula: History, Mythical Thought, and the Production of the Afro-American Historical Past
Chapter 8. The Post-Sixties, the Ideological Apparatus, and the Afro-American Text
Notes
Bibliography