The symposium section in this issue of Phylon, which I have had the opportunity of reading in manuscript, seems to signal the emergence of a long-awaited stage in Negro cultural development. For these eight essays analyzing our literary output and its implications mark a considerable step forward toward objective self-criticism. This is a necessary and welcome sign of cultural maturity. It was predicated twenty-five years ago as one of the objectives of the so-called Negro Renaissance, along with the companion aim of objective self-expression, but unfortunately such criticism was not forthcoming in any large volume. Its lack was unquestionably indicative of a certain lingering immaturity, the reasons for which it will be interesting to assess a little later on. For the moment it may be noted that the conditions which delayed it may also have been considerably responsible for the admitted shortcomings of our literary and artistic output in the Nineteen-twenties, thirties, and forties. Indeed this seems to be the present consensus of the new criticism which is so significantly emerging.
It is now obvious in retrospect, as many of these articles point out, that for many generations Negro creative expression was inevitably imitative and marked with a double provincialism of cultural immaturity and a racial sense of subordination. It ran a one-dimensional gamut from self-pity through sentimental appeal to hortatory moralizing and rhetorical threat—a child’s gamut of tears, sobs, sulks and passionate protest. All of us probably expected too much of the Negro Renaissance, but its new vitality of independence, pride and self-respect, its scoff and defiance of prejudice and limitations were so welcome and heartening.
Like the adolescence it was, the New Negro era was gawky and pimply, indiscreet and over-confident, vainglorious and irresponsible; but its testy dynamic gave the Negro new spiritual stature and an added dimension of self-reliance. As several of the critics point out, adolescence was mistaken for manhood, so there was in the creative expression of the Twenties and Thirties pride without poise, vision without true perspective, self-esteem without the necessary tempering of full self-understanding.
Beginning with the broader social identifications of Native Son, and the social discoveries of common-denominator human universals between Negro situations and others, these critics rightly claim, artistic expression with Negroes has become increasingly sounder, more objective and less racialistic—in the limiting sense of chauvinism—but withal even more racial in the better sense of being more deeply felt and projected. This third dimension of objective universality, they feel, is the ultimate desideratum for a literature that seeks universal appeal and acceptance. I agree. In fact, have always agreed, though this is neither the time nor place for self-justifying quotations.
Suffice it to say that even in 1925, some original proponents of the “Negro Renaissance” forecast the position which seems to be the new consensus of the “new criticism.” That is, that when the racial themes are imposed upon the Negro author either from within or without, they become an intolerable and limiting artistic ghetto, but that accepted by choice, either on the ground of best known material or preferred opportunity, they stake off a cultural bonanza. Mr. Gloster, for example, does well to inveigh against the triple snares of “race defense, protest and glorification,” but it still remains that Negro life and experience contain one of the unworked mines of American dramatic and fictional material, overworked and shabby as their superficial exploitation has been. For both the white and the Negro author in this area, the era of pan-mining is about over or should be; the promising techniques are now deep-mining and better artistic smelting of the crude ore. In provincial and chauvinistic rendering, of which we have been offered far too much, especially from Negro authors, as Messrs. Redding and Reddick bravely point out, Negro materials pan out shallow, brittle and unrefined. But in objective, thoroughly humanized treatment they still promise artistic gold fit for universal currency. The necessary alchemy is, of course, universalized rendering, for in universalized particularity there has always resided the world’s greatest and most enduring art.
Though rare, this quality has appeared sporadically in Negro writing. Mr. Chandler is right in giving us the proper historical perspective, however, by reminding us how long it took American literature itself to achieve this dimension of universalized power and insight. Perhaps it would be invidious to be too specific for the current generation, though I think all would agree that the first two chapters of Native Son had such quality, not to mention how and why the book as a whole lost these virtues as it became more and more involved in propagandist formulae. I am personally surprised that no one referred to the phenomenal early appearance of such “universal particularity” in Jean Toomer’s Cane in 1923. Here was something admirably removed from what Mr. Chandler calls very aptly “promotional literature,” but it is Negro through and through as well as deeply and movingly human. It was also exempt from any limitation of provincialism although it gave local color convincingly. To wish for more of this is to ask for the transmuting quality of expert craftsmanship combined with broad perspective or intuitive insight, one or the other. For we must remember the two ways in which Russian literature achieved its great era; through the cosmopolitan way of Turgenev, Tolstoi and Chekov and the nativist way of Dostoievski, Gogol and Gorgki, each of which produced great writing and universal understanding for Russian experience.
Our problem now seems to be how to translate this new insight into creative action. So far as a body of sound criticism can point the way, we have in this group of critical essays the beginnings of a new objective criticism, and henceforth can have little excuse if a considerable part of our creative expression does not follow its lead and guidance. At least we have within our artistic grasp the final resolution of the old dilemma of the proper attitude of the Negro writer toward race materials. Agreeing that this should be, to quote Mr. Gloster, “to consider all life as his proper milieu, yet treat race (when he chooses) from the universal point of view, shunning the cultural isolation that results from racial preoccupation and Jim-Crow esthetics,” we have as a net result, however, the mandate: Give us Negro life and experience in all the arts but with a third dimension of universalized common-denominator humanity.
A final word or so of constructive criticism may be in order. Let us start with the shameful fact that out of the whole range of Negro experience, the very areas on which the Negro author has almost monopolistic control, there has been little else than strange silence. On this matter, Mr. Reddick hints provocatively. I will venture to speak even more plainly on my own responsibility. Three tabus that seal doors that must be broken through to release greatly original and moving revelations about Negro life and experience remain unbroken, partly through convention-ridden cowardice, partly through misconceived protective strategy. If William March and Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith and William Faulkner can boldly break with the tribal tabus of the White South to release the full potentials of Southern drama and fiction, so in turn must the Negro author boldly break the seals of analogous Negro conventionality. Of course, easier said than done! The Negro intellectual is still largely in psychological bondage not only, as Reddick puts it, “to the laws and customs of the local (Southern) culture,” but to the fear of breaking the tabus of Puritanism, Philistinism and falsely conceived conventions of “race respectability.” Consciously and subconsciously, these repressions work great artistic harm, especially the fear of being accused of group disloyalty and “misrepresentation” in portraying the full gamut of Negro type, character and thinking. We are still in the throes of counter-stereotypes.
The releasing formula is to realize that in all human things we are basically and inevitably human, and that even the special racial complexities and overtones are only interesting variants. Why, then, this protective silence about the ambivalences of the Negro upper classes, about the dilemmas of intra-group prejudice and rivalry, about the dramatic inner paradoxes of mixed heritage, both biological and cultural, or the tragic breach between the Negro elite and the Negro masses, or the conflict between integration and vested-interest separatism in the present-day life of the Negro? These, among others, are the great themes, but they moulder in closed closets like family skeletons rather than shine brightly as the Aladdin’s lamps that they really are.
To break such tabus is the crucial artistic question of the moment, the wrath of the Negro Rotarians, preachers, college presidents and journalists notwithstanding. It is this inner tyranny that must next be conquered, now that the outer tyrannies of prejudice and intellectual ostracism are being so suddenly relaxed. I am far from suggesting that even a considerable part of this revelation will be morally risqué or socially explosive; some of it will be, of course. But I do sense a strange and widely diffused feeling that many of these situations are Masonic secrets—things to be talked about, but not written or officially disclosed. Maybe, now that a few Negro authors have demonstrated the possibility of financial independence and success as writers, some of our younger talents can shake free of the white-collar servitudes of job dependency on the one hand and conventional “race loyalty” on the other. If so, we may confidently anticipate an era of fuller and more objective presentation by Negro authors of their versions of contemporary living in general and Negro life and experience in particular.