If we can't hear the cries far down in our own forests of dark veins, we can look in the real novels, and there listen in. Not listen to the didactic statements of the author, but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny.
—D. H. Lawrence, “The Novel and the Feelings”
Jamaican novelist Roger Mais, although he arrived in London not long after Lamming, Mittelholzer, and Selvon, took a rather different path toward metropolitan literary success. Comparatively isolated from the eastern Caribbean cultural scene, and evidently disliked by Cedric and Gladys Lindo, the Jamaica-based editorial gatekeepers for Caribbean Voices, Mais was already well established as a journalist, writer, painter, dramatist, and cultural commentator on his home island before he left for Britain.1 With two subscription-based short story collections—Face, and Other Stories, along with And Most of All Man—under his belt and a long list of stories, poems, and articles published in Jamaica's establishment newspaper, the Daily Gleaner, and Norman Manley's nationalist organ, Public Opinion, Mais departed for London only after securing a contract for the publication of his first novel by Jonathan Cape in the summer of 1952. This novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together, appeared in 1953 and was followed in quick succession by two more, Brother Man and Black Lightning, a prolific and promising beginning that was cut short by Mais's untimely death in 1955. Despite the brevity of his overseas publishing career, Mais captured a fair amount of attention in the British literary scene, sitting for an interview for John O'London's Weekly in 1953 and garnering a prominent obituary in the London Times (as well as a letter to the editor from his publisher in response to the obituary, ruing the loss and reminding people of the recent publication of Black Lightning).2 In the Anglophone Caribbean critical tradition, Mais has generally been grouped with Selvon as something of a populist-oriented, vernacular writer, albeit one with more overtly nationalist credentials. However, in Britain Mais's novels were initially received as experimental literature, helping him achieve some measure of fame.
Critical discussion of Mais has tended to cluster around the categories of the political and the literary. Mais's deep involvement in nationalist politics—he was an early and active figure in Norman Manley's People's National Movement—has often led to the characterizing of his work as politically driven “social protest” literature. Manley himself helped establish this view in his introduction to Sangster's 1966 reissue of Mais's three novels in a single volume, praising Mais for his realistic, anticolonial portrayal of “raw humanity and how it suffers in the framework of hardship and in the face of authority” (viii).3 In this short introduction, Manley claims the national independence movement as the very essence of Mais's aesthetic, asserting that “Roger was a product of that moment of history and drew from it the direction and power and purpose which his writings reveal” (“Introduction,” vi). L. E. (Kamau) Brathwaite, one of the most prolific and sensitively attuned critics of Mais's work, has been a formidable force in establishing Mais's critical reputation as a primarily political author. Although Brathwaite treats Mais's aesthetic complexity with careful attention, his readings are unerringly intent on redeeming the novels’ diasporic African credentials, displaying deep discomfort with Mais's “remarkably conservative” Eurocentric aesthetic tendencies (“Unborn Body,” 14) and casting suspicion on Black Lightning for its move away from an overt commitment to community. Overall, his ingenious readings of Mais affirm only those qualities—unevenly present in the novels, as even Brathwaite acknowledges—that he considers politically appropriate to authentic Caribbean literature. For example, despite his intricately observed delineation of Brother Man’s jazz stylings in “Jazz and the West Indian Novel,” Brathwaite can only account for the climactic moment of the novel—the vicious beating the protagonist suffers at the hands of the community—in terms of aesthetic failure, since it undermines the valorization of community Brathwaite sees as the novel's primary achievement.4 Brathwaite, along with other important critics like Sylvia Wynter and Jean D'Costa, has helped establish a strong critical tradition that sees Mais as a nationalist author with a predominantly political orientation.
Alternatively, other foundational Mais critics—notably Bill Carr and Kenneth Ramchand—have consciously steered attention away from the political content of Mais's work, emphasizing instead its literary craftsmanship.5 Carr, for example, baldly states his interpretive agenda near the beginning of “Roger Mais: Design from a Legend”: “Mais was not a political novelist; his significance cannot be understood in terms of the impressively original social content of his two published Kingston novels (original, that is, on first appearance); and finally he is not to be ultimately associated with something known as 1938 and the movement for independence” (5). Ramchand, although considerably more nuanced in his approach, nevertheless expresses discomfort with ideological readings of Mais. He seizes on the lyrical aspects of The Hills Were Joyful Together to insist that the book is “something more than Jamaican social protest” and lauds Mais's third novel for finally escaping the dread trap of localized race and politics, enthusing that Mais “had learnt that to be truly native is to be truly universal” (“Black Lightning”). A more recent commentator, Evelyn Hawthorne, has joined in questioning the understanding of Mais as a purely nationalist writer in The Writer in Transition: Roger Mais and the Decolonization of Caribbean Culture. In this book, Hawthorne delineates what she describes as Mais's “Romantic” qualities—which to her, on their very face, are incompatible with nationalist consciousness—and ultimately advances a generational argument, suggesting that Mais (born in 1905) was caught between old (Romantic) and new (nationalist) values.6 Thus, although Hawthorne's book usefully complicates an understanding of Mais's work, its structuring antithesis nevertheless reinforces the traditional opposition between the literary and the political that characterizes Mais criticism.
The contemporaneous British reviews of Mais display a similarly bifurcated structure, albeit from markedly different ideological ground. The seamy social realism of The Hills Were Joyful Together certainly caught the attention of British reviewers, who duly reiterated the familiar exotic stereotypes of the Caribbean. R. D. Charques's review in the Spectator is typical in this regard, stressing how the novel's characters and setting “pullulate with sex, animal high spirits and poverty.” Similarly, Hugh Skies Davies employs the book to demarcate a careful line between British and Caribbean life, observing that the latter is “in itself, more primitive than our own, and the books it makes are bound to assault our tamer minds, as this one does, with uncomfortable primitive violence.”7 With a bit more adjectival gusto, Andrew Dakers likewise emphasizes the primitiveness of the book's Jamaican characters: “naïve and savage, generous and cunning, sensitive and gross, violent and tender victims of their muddled bloods, they move through the story high-spirited and gay, singing and dancing, loving and lusting, with outbreaks of primitive barbarity that evoke pity and terror” (“Novelist from Jamaica”). Left at this level, Mais's stated purpose in writing the novel—“to give the world a true picture of the real Jamaica, and the dreadful conditions of the working classes” (Dakers, “Novelist from Jamaica”)—would appear to be a rather dubious political achievement, allowing as it does for a distinct disidentification between “civilized” British critic and “savage” Caribbean subject.
Many British reviewers of Mais's first novel, however, also registered its more plainly aesthetic aims, thus modulating a matter-of-fact acceptance of the book's naturalistic portrayals. The reviewer for the Sussex Daily News (identified only as W.J.C.), for example, pays admiring attention to Mais's “impressionist technique,” which is characterized as an artful alternation of the lyrical and the realist.8 In the Manchester Guardian, Paul Bloomfield is unequivocal in his praise of the novel, naming it as “among the strongest and best new novels” of the last few years because of its display of technical virtuosity—“the masterly touch of a writer who knows how to present, significantly, any amount of vice, misery, disease, and madness” (review). While acknowledging that The Hills Were Joyful Together is in one sense an attempt to portray the brute realities of unromanticized island poverty, the Manchester Evening News also enthuses over the artistry of the novel, exclaiming that “at times the writing is sheer poetry, with all the singing and gold that marks the highest in mankind.”9 Walter Allen's short notice in the New Statesman expresses reservations about the novel's overarching structural coherence but nevertheless sees vague promise in the author: “one will be glad to read more of Mr. Mais, for in addition to his skill in rendering colour and violence he has a feeling for human dignity” (review). Even Charques, while also critical of the book's uneven structure, discerns an aesthetic value beyond the immediate flaws, noting that Mais “has his moments of illumination and pathos” even if the novel does not quite manage to “achieve the emotional force it was evidently meant to carry” (review). Charques's perception of an attempt at “emotional force” is perhaps the most apposite formulation of what these critics sensed in Mais's first novel: a lyrical effort, however vaguely defined, to get beyond the simple mimetic presentation of sordid sociological facts.
These perceptions of Mais's first novel are echoed in reviews of Brother Man. The London Times, for example, though sanguinely observing that in the West Indies “the turns of phrase of local speech are full of natural poetry,” takes pains to underscore Mais's achieved aesthetic skill.10 After remarking on the Caribbean's naturally picturesque linguistic bounty, the reviewer goes on to praise Mais's conscious utilization of it: “Mr. Mais knows how to use these gifts to advantage. He uses words unusually well, maintaining a proper balance between the native idiom and the varying style of his own commentary.” This description approvingly presents Mais, not as a naturally talented primitive genius (as Selvon was often seen), but as a writer in full control of his medium, up to and including his “varying style.” The reviewer finds Brother Man a somewhat artificially allegorical figure but largely accepts the novel as “very good indeed” and commends Mais for seeing “with the eye of an artist.” The significance of such praise in terms of Mais's perceived aesthetic allegiances is crystallized in the Times Literary Supplement’s review of the novel. Here, the then-anonymous reviewer, David Tylden-Wright, begins by evoking the apparent duality of Mais's artistic practice, describing him as “both poet and moralist.” Tylden-Wright then mentions Brother Man’s most well-known feature, the choral sections that precede each of its five chapters, describing them as “very reminiscent of Dylan Thomas's method of poetic description” (“Irreconcilable Worlds”). With the BBC's first production of Thomas's multivoiced play Under Milk Wood only six months gone, the comparison with Mais's own quasi-dramatic, dialogic choral passages seems both apt and timely. However, the invocation of Thomas also has implications within the postwar literary debate between the writers of the Movement and their “Mandarin” rivals, as Thomas was a bête noir of the up-and-coming writers, convenient shorthand (similar to Woolf) for the type of allegedly pretentious, consciously artsy writing that the Movement found so distasteful. Certainly, Tylden-Wright writes approvingly of Mais's resemblance to Thomas, and by the end of the review, he has abandoned the initial duality of Brother Man with which he began, content to position Mais squarely within an aesthetic of unique artistry (apparently autonomous from politics). Summing up the novel, he observes, “Mr. Mais's drawings, as well as his dialogue, take some time to get used to, but finally blend satisfactorily into his highly individual vision.”11 Less than a year later, the London Times obituary for Mais reiterates, almost word for word, the TLS comparison with Thomas, using it as an example of the author's “very great advance in technique” and solidifying the sense that Mais was welcomed in London as a poetic, experimental novelist.
The obituary, of course, appeared before Black Lightning, which, despite its editors’ letter to the Times, seems to have gone largely unremarked by the British literary establishment. There is no way of knowing precisely why the novel was so unacclaimed, but its distinct stylistic departure—away from lyrical exuberance into a spare, tightly controlled dramatic form—could be considered part of the equation.12 Intriguingly, the fault line between the more contemporary critical focus on the literary and the political in Mais's work lies in the perceived difference between the author's first two novels and his third. The social critique implicit in Mais's portrayal of poor Kingstonians in The Hills Were Joyful Together and Brother Man fits easily into the notion of Mais as a political writer; Black Lightning, a much more personal, less sociological consideration of the nature of art and the artist, does not. An example of this disjunction is D'Costa's monograph on Mais, which, in its attempts to claim Mais as a bona fide Jamaican nationalist artist, simply leaves aside any consideration of his third novel. The title of this work, Roger Mais: “The Hills Were Joyful Together” and “Brother Man,” succinctly conveys the scope and focus of its critical prerogatives.13 On the other side, critics like Carr and Ramchand heap praise on Black Lightning as Mais's culminating aesthetic achievement. In their view, Mais's first two novels are apprentice work, marred by undignified political polemics, and it is only in his final novel that Mais realizes his true artistic potential. Ramchand, for example, contends that “it is in Black Lightning that Mais's art and understanding are in greatest harmony, and that it is upon this his last published novel that his reputation must rest” (West Indian Novel, 179). For one group of scholars, then, Black Lightning is a puzzling anomaly, difficult to reconcile with a reading of Mais as political firebrand; for another, the novel is the apogee of his literary development, confirmation that Mais had moved beyond mere social concerns into the more rarefied air of true artistry.
This large fissure in Mais's small oeuvre seems primarily the result of critical inclinations to segregate “universal” literariness and local political topicality into opposing, impermeable categories. Sydney Singh's discussion of Mais rightly finds fault with this tendency, asserting that “a concern only with the universal applicability of the theme of the novel is as critically limited an approach to the work as an exclusive concentration on its immediate social relevance” (“Hills Were Joyful Together,” 111). If Mais's work is read through the prism of its modernist self-reflexivity, however, a much more unified critical narrative can emerge. Mais's British reviewers were initially attracted to his experimental, incantatory style, which seemed aimed at unlocking a transformative, transporting power of language. In this, Mais finds a lineage not only in Thomas's poetry but perhaps even more so in the prose of D. H. Lawrence, whose experiments in style similarly longed to spark an all but indescribable, redemptive transcendence via an appeal to the emotional register. Mais's early, unpublished book on fiction writing, Form and Substance in Fiction, persistently employs Lawrence as example and guide, testifying to their shared interest in experimenting with the suprarational transformative powers of language.14 This interest in affective language is quite different from the ideological critique that Lamming attempts in his writing—indeed, Lamming himself observes of Mais that “his relation to language and the concerns which that language served were so different from mine” (“Tribute to a Tragic Jamaican,” 243). Nevertheless, the reformative impulse of Mais's concern with language cannot, strictly speaking, be labeled apolitical. Indeed, in many ways, Mais's novels strive to transcend any easy aesthetic-political dichotomy, self-consciously taking up Lawrence's exhortation to write effectively affective “real novels” with real political consequence. Although their progression reveals an increasing dissatisfaction with the efficacy of this practice, Mais's novels nevertheless take shape as a Caribbean variation on modernism's bedeviled attempts to match the consciousness-changing potential of high aesthetic production with political ends.
At the beginning of Form and Substance in Fiction, Mais plainly states his own sense of the writer's political responsibility, asserting that the “real purpose of fiction” is “to make humanity articulate, to make a mouth of every single wound, to give voice to every single human hope and hunger, and aspiration and fear” (1). The bodily imagery employed in this declaration of social duty intimates Mais's close adherence to Lawrence's attempts, as one critic has it, “to use language in ways that would touch the reader's somatic modes of experiencing and responding” (Burack, D. H. Lawrence's Language, 2).15 Indeed, Mais's treatise on fiction refuses to separate intellect and emotion, invoking a passage from Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover as illustration of how novels should function (28). The well-known passage gives a clear sense of Lawrence's (and, via its prominent citation, Mais's) aesthetic philosophy:
It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. (117–18)
This holistic, transformative sense of the novel's proper domain—a complexly aligned phenomenological and epistemological space—emerges in Lawrence's essays as well. For example, in “Why the Novel Matters,” Lawrence asserts the body as the foundational instrument of knowing, enthusing, “my body, me alive, knows, and knows intensely” (194). Accordingly, he claims, the novel is superior to other methods of imparting knowledge: “the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man-alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science or any other book-tremulation can do” (195). Likewise, in “The Novel and the Feelings” (from which this chapter's epigraph is taken), Lawrence complains that “we have no language for the feelings” (203) and proposes the novel as the remedy, “a slow and strange process, that has to be undertaken seriously” (204) in order for human life to be properly redeemed. As Form and Substance in Fiction indicates, Mais's thinking followed markedly similar lines, embracing writing as a mechanism for summoning in his readers a complex, embodied consciousness that would, in turn, lead to awareness of the need for deep social and political reform.
Mais's most famous piece of journalism—“Now We Know,” published in Public Opinion in 1944—demonstrates his belief that the tones and rhythms of highly wrought language could serve important political ends. A response to the wartime British government's refusal to publish the new draft of Jamaica's constitution, the article became grounds for Mais's prosecution for sedition and a six-month prison sentence.16 A rhetorical exercise in high dudgeon, the article's solemn, incantatory style is used to deliver a fiercely anticolonial message. The article begins with a simple declarative sentence: “Now we know why the draft of the New Constitution has not been published before.” This clear statement of discovery is followed—and implicitly contrasted with—three scathingly sarcastic paragraphs delineating the hypocritical, obfuscatory language of British officialdom. Mais pointedly observes that the “real official policy” does not inhere in the suppressed document but is instead “implicit in statements made by the Prime Minister from time to time.” Excoriating “that man of brave speeches,” the article suggests the slipperiness of his language, maintaining that the government's true intentions, though “avowed in open parliament,” have only emerged “in so many words,” rather than in definite declarations of intent.
The article then embarks on an anaphoric tour de force delineating precisely what has been revealed about the causes for which the British government is asking Jamaica to sacrifice in World War II, beginning with the following: “That the sun may never set upon aggression and inequality and human degradation.” Emphasizing the paradoxical British desire somehow to fight tyranny (in the form of fascism and Nazism) while preserving its own tyrannical empire, Mais lists a succession of condemnatory descriptions of colonial rule, all beginning with the phrase “that the sun may never set” and later intermingling another phrase, “for such things as these,” to sustain the piece's rhythmic, incantatory tone. Only at the very end does the anaphora finally relent, with a stark repetition of the article's original words: “For such things as these we are fighting side by side with others in the good cause…. Now we know.” The literariness of this polemic seems obvious enough, but it is employed against something to which it bears some resemblance: the deceptive cant of hypocritical politicians. The implications of this opposition—slippery, self-serving rhetoric versus a grander, somehow more honest literary kind—are intriguing, suggesting as they do not a simple dismissal of fine phrasing, but a more finely grained understanding of the potency of verbal expression and the ends to which it can be put. While “Now We Know” clearly believes it has truth and justice on its side, its formal pyrotechnics betray much more interest in summoning the emotive force of words to bring its point home. Mais's novels take up a similar interest in the way aesthetics operate affectively.
The most obvious experimental aspect of The Hills Were Joyful Together—sections D'Costa describes as “choric, poetic meditations of the omniscient author” (Roger Mais, 13–14)—are strikingly similar in style to “Now We Know.” Anaphoric and solemnly rhythmic (and thus bearing resemblances to Mittelholzer's subsequent leitmotiv style) these passages emerge about a quarter of the way through the novel, irregularly interrupting narrative events with lyrical, enigmatic reflections on chance, time, human struggle, life, and death.17 Critics typically treat these sections as ancillary to the novel's “real” subject. For Ramchand, at different times, they represent either a discomfiting (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt “to remove the [novel's] issues from a deadly sociological plane” (“Black Lightning”) or an inartistic authorial intrusion that interjects a view of cosmic indifference at odds with much of the book's narrative events (West Indian Novel, 180). For more sympathetic critics, the sections function largely as a type of cosmic context abstractly conveying a sense that “within and behind this human underworld lies beauty and pattern” (Creary, “Prophet Armed,” 53). Both viewpoints have their merits: the lyrical passages are not necessarily successful or consistent with the narrative action, and Mais is clearly gesturing toward a wider, more empathetic understanding of his characters’ tragically imprisoning circumstances. However, in parallel with “Now We Know,” these odd poetic interludes appear to be something more than nonnarrative excess or cosmic mood music. Indeed, they should be read as integral to the enactment of Mais's particular sense of aesthetic purpose.
A key element of the novel's lyrical passages is when they begin: shortly after the critical fish fry scene. This scene, as has been noted by numerous critics, appears to be the apogee of joy and togetherness in the novel, an almost miraculous moment of communal sustenance in a book otherwise strongly characterized by misery, oppression, and violence.18 It is initiated by an event—the mysterious appearance of hundreds of fish washed up on the beach—that is itself colored by overtones of divine grace and charity. It begins when Ras, “prodigal with the sense of miracle that invested this phenomenon…decided he would take the rest of the fish up to the yard and everybody would have one hell of a feed” (39). Both the less ethereal phrasing at the end of this description and the narrator's careful scientific explanation of why the fish appeared (38), however, maintain the event's focus on the material plane: the true miracle occurs after everyone has eaten their fill and sits around joking, sleeping, and talking for a while.
At this redemptive moment, the novel portrays a dramatized, call-and-response version of a song Mais renders as “Ribber Ben Come Down,” comprised of short descriptive passages punctuated by choral verse sections.19 The effect of the scene's role play—the leader singing a verse and acting out a difficult journey across a river, the crowd clapping and singing and dancing in response—is a brief but deeply mutual happiness. Ras is depicted with “his bearded face split in a grin,” just before Euphemia “stood up, smiling, and went across with Zephyr in time to join in with the responses” (50). At one point, Rema is seen to “let out a shriek of laughter” (51), and even Shag has “a little turned-in smile” (50), though he, notably, does not join in either the singing or the dancing. It is not just the occupants of the yard who react either: “Some people passing on the sidewalk stopped, hearing the singing, looked in through the broken fence, grinning to see the people inside merrying-up themselves, and some even clapped their hands too and joined in the responses” (49). The scene's emphasis on communal happiness is pronounced, and it is closely associated with rhythm: the steady alternation of description and chorus mimics the mutual exchange of the participants, who “clapped their hands and swayed their bodies in rhythm” (49), until they ultimately merge their actions with the leader, as they, “acting the spirit of the adventure, teetered with him in a dance movement, patterned, rhythmic, explicit” (50). This group harmony builds to a moving finale, at which time “they all laughed, and bright tears stood in the eyes of some, to witness that they still understood the meaning of miracles” (52). This shared secular miracle is a product of what the novel names, intriguingly, a “simulated and real excitement” (52, emphasis added): it represents the actual transfiguration (however brief) of a dismal reality by an act of creative cooperation and performance. Its importance in the novel is difficult to overemphasize, and it is this moment of grace—achieved via an ineffable combination of words, music, imaginative sympathy, and fellow feeling—that suggests the ambitious aims of the novel's subsequent lyrical passages: to enchant the reader into a similar state of attentive, sympathetic consciousness.
The title of the novel is taken from a passage of Psalm 98, which urges the world to sing a joyful song in praise of God. Critics have typically read this ironically, given the suffering that predominates the novel as well as the fact that Rema's madness manifests in delusions of the hills surrounding Kingston clapping and dancing (169) and, eventually, in a fear that they will trample her to death (207). However, this scene suggests an alternative reading, in which the clapping of hands and dancing here is the truly spiritual, joyful activity the title describes (in contrast to the arid, nonparticipatory worship led by the Sisters of Charity, via which the novel actually transcribes the song [272]). Certainly, the subsequent poetic passages, with their patterned repetitions and rich imagery, formally recall the almost mystical moment created in the yard by the performance of “Ribber Ben Come Down,” as if longing to recapture a similar inspiriting effect. The first such passage, appearing soon after the fish fry, begins with the line “the sea is an old man babbling his dreams,” which is repeated with minor alterations at the end of each of the three paragraphs. It also asks a series of questions, answered by succeeding lines, so that the question-and-answer form echoes the call-and-response pattern of the song, an association that some (but not all) of the subsequent passages also reinforce. This first episode of lyricism, moreover, evokes the spiritual sung at the fish fry, asking “who are they that passed along the weary beachheads and sang their songs before us” (63), suggesting the timeless, mythic nature of the yard's moment of inspired group performance. In all, the tonal progression of this and subsequent poetic passages—from dark trouble to glimpses of hope to clear-eyed wisdom—echoes that performance's general story of tribulation (temporarily) overcome through struggle, establishing a more teleological narrative parallel. Read this way, the apparently digressive lyrical passages of The Hills Were Joyful Together resonate importantly with the novel's key scene of joyous creativity, gesturing evocatively back to the transfiguring power of art that occurred there.
The general reference of the passages, while never explicit, seems to track the narrative development of Surjue, who ultimately emerges as the novel's main protagonist and largely sympathetic martyr. Although halting and uneven, Surjue's progression toward a kind of enlightenment is explicitly linked to the effects of both the redemptive spiritual at the fish fry and its subsequent echoes in the novel's own lyrical passages. The chapter immediately following the end of the fish fry celebration, apparently taking place later on the same night, marks some notable changes in Surjue.20 Although the jauntiness he feels is hardly an alteration from his previous cocky persona, Surjue's first action is uncharacteristically generous. Approached by a small boy begging for money, he immediately puts his hand in his pocket, “and though he remembered with an inward wince that he was pretty nearly broke his hand came up with a flourish and he gave the boy sixpence” (56). Even the fact that Surjue is going out to discuss a business proposition (albeit an illegal one), rather than indolently sitting around the house with Flitters dreaming of making money by gambling, suggests a slight, if ambiguous change for the better in Surjue. Indeed, Mais juxtaposes Surjue's companions explicitly in the chapter, describing Surjue shaking off unpleasant thoughts of Flitters on his way to the meeting: “He was meeting Buju and Crawfish at a place in a lane off the street to discuss a business proposition, and it wasn't a matter of racing tips tonight. Racing tips made him think of Flitters, and he frowned” (56). At this point, an incipient moral awakening in Surjue is identified.
This change is explicitly marked at the end of the chapter as Surjue returns home and is startled by an onrush of desire for his wife, Rema. Although his desire is tinctured with animal lust and the suggestion of violence (generally reserved for negative characters in Mais's writing), this is modulated by Surjue's careful actions and self-examination: “he could have touched her by reaching out his hand, but he didn't; he sat there and thought for a while” (62). Compared to his earlier depiction as somebody so shallow as to be “tricked” by the sunlight on a teapot, “so that he winked back at it without knowing that he did” (26), his thoughtfulness here marks quite a shift, as he contemplates his own feelings of desire by listening intently “to the horned music singing inside him, and underneath it the beating of drums” (62). Significantly, Mais employs the figure of music to portray Surjue's newly awakened sensitivity, representing his character's transformation as attentiveness to a natural harmony and rhythm somehow related to his own thoughts and desires. Immediately after this scene, the first lyrical passage appears, suggesting the novel's own investment in musicality and rhythm. As these passages roughly track Surjue's burgeoning attunement to the world, they simultaneously ask the reader to develop a similar awareness.
The tone in the next few lyrical passages is unquestionably dark, evoking a sense of despair and misery; the corresponding events in Surjue's narrative comprise the least hopeful moments of his imprisonment after his arrest. The second lyrical passage, immediately after Bedosa's grisly death on the railroad tracks, is a stark assertion of the anonymizing inescapability of human mortality, closing with lines expressing an overwhelming fatalism: “death speaks with a thousand whispers, but a single voice” (132). The next such passage continues in similarly gloomy tones, opening with an intimation that “the dark shadows beyond our ken crowd in upon us and stand and wait unseen…they wait in silence and drink us up in darkness” (150), while going on to suggest that vaguely malevolent forces of destruction “are always in waiting somewhere against the wall” that encircles human endeavor (150). The imagery constructs a sense of dreary imprisonment, and the two lyrical episodes coincide with the first stages of Surjue's actual imprisonment, in which he is mercilessly beaten by the police and then, afflicted with dysentery, winds up in the grim, overcrowded prison hospital.21 At this point, although there are hints of grace in his befriending the veteran prisoner Cubano, Surjue is simply bitter, swearing to get revenge on Flitters for betraying him to the police. The hopeless nature of Surjue's initial prison experience mirrors the poetic passages’ evocations of grief, fear, and misery.
The next few lyrical interludes suggest a gradual lightening of mood and experience, accompanied by Surjue's slow advance toward self-understanding. If the lyrical passage beginning chapter 4 of book 2 evinces fatalism, it nevertheless moves away from the grim imagery of darkness and destruction of its predecessors. Instead of the unrelenting darkness of night, “the young moon in crescent comes to the gate under the duppy tree” (165), and there is some space “between the wall and the wall” (164) in which the wind blows and admits the possibility of intellectual interrogation: “within the ruin of walls we question the wind and it makes answer unto us” (165). Although answers are not easily forthcoming, there is still at least a suggestion of meaning—and even circumscribed enjoyment in and understanding of human limitations—within the passage. These ambiguous glimmers are echoed in Surjue's experience in prison, in which his seizing of a gun in a struggle with the overbearing and spiteful prison warder Nickoll leads to a nearly fatal standoff against the prison authority. As Mais makes plain, Surjue is redeemed from this situation first by taking sole responsibility for the situation—he wisely orders the other prisoners on the parade ground not to get involved—and then by his cautious extension of trust to the prison's superintendent. This latter gesture, wholly unthinkable to both prisoners and guards in the novel, courageously establishes a mutual respect that allows the incident to end without further violence. Mais emphasizes the calculated but risky nature of Surjue's decision to rely on the superintendent's word of honor by employing the language of gambling, as Surjue compares the negotiations to a card game: “I know what I've got, Super. An’ I'm not throwin’ it away. I'm playin’ this hand meself, see?” (175). When he finally agrees to the proffered deal, Surjue observes, “I'm takin’ a hell of a gamble on this” (176). The contrast with Surjue's earlier impulsive, underinformed gambling on horses is plainly made, and the fact that it is a contract of trust with another person is also a noteworthy difference: in this way Mais underscores Surjue's increasingly thoughtful attitude toward his own life and its relation to others.
Shortly after this scene, the next lyrical interlude reinforces the slight, hopeful shift in tone. Although again asserting a fatalist vision of human life and its inevitable suffering, the interlude's final thoughts indicate a value in humanity's involvement in the process of living. Describing a representative man, the passage gravely concludes: “his separate death matters nothing…it matters all, that he has turned his back upon life” (184). This assessment, while starkly observing the cosmic unimportance of individuals, also asserts the absolute importance of an active engagement with life. Surjue, by this time, has begun to do just that—to think actively about the world and his role in it. The scene immediately following the lyrical passage centers on an elderly prisoner who is scheduled to receive a flogging. Almost literally pissing himself with fear, the old man attempts to engage the sympathy of Surjue and a few fellow prisoners: “His eyes searched their faces for some sign—some least prop on which to pin his hope. But their faces were blank, and gave nothing; of pity, or anything, there was not the least shred” (185). Immediately after, however, their joking attempts to discuss the matter subside into embarrassed silence: “They curiously avoided each other's gaze, as though they were secretly ashamed about something” (186). Newly sensitized, Surjue chokes down his impatience and eventually helps the incontinent old man back to bed. Unable to sleep himself, Surjue reflects, for what seems like the first time, on the morality of punishment: “They treat prisoners worse'n animals, he thought…. Hell, you wouldn't do that to an old mule” (189). Then, in concert with the moonlight, the prison chaplain's words of empathetic humility enter his head—“All of us are guilty…equally guilty” (189)—and the chapter ends with Surjue's questioning thought: “Why were there people like him and Cubano and that stupid, blubbering, bladder-weary old man in the world” (190). Both the language and the philosophical disposition of the question resonate deeply with the lyrical passages that have preceded it, again linking the novel's poetic outpourings with Surjue's new, more contemplative disposition toward the world.
This link is solidified after the next lyrical passage, which, in terms of imagery, is the book's most hopeful and optimistic. Rife with positive images of young love, laughter, and the sense that “things turn back to their beginnings again” (200), the passage ends by asserting the possibility of human redemption: “Somewhere in the world something to redeem them…resolve their doubts, blot out their deeds…resides something…like love trembles on a young girl's lips, unspoken…waits laughter to lighten, now, and right them…redeem them, resolve them…redress them…somewhere in the world” (201, original ellipses). The insistent optimism evoked in these words can be connected to numerous adjacent episodes in the novel (Surjue's hopes for a parole to see Rema, Wilfie's sympathy for Manny, Manny's newfound tenderness, the gentle generosity of Mass Mose’ toward Rema), but the interlude is closely followed by a remarkable moment in the text—the full integration of the novel's lyricism with a depiction of Surjue's thoughts. In this instance, rather than beginning the chapter, the poetic passage comes after a short description of Surjue feeling ill and heading off for some water. The style and imagery of the three-paragraph outpouring are unmistakably similar to the other poetic interludes, beginning, “Walls, walls, and all that passed between them…a man un-manned, un-countenanced, given over to the naked stare of self pity…society, and the cankering, unyielding sore” (208). Yet the end of this meditative reverie is signaled by another description of Surjue, as he washes his mouth out with water, clearly signaling that it is his, not the narrator's, thoughts being recorded. The straightforward narration continues briefly, delineating Surjue's memory of a murder in the prison, and it is followed by another, shorter poetic vision of “the teeming thousands of lost men who had been processed between these walls” (210). Narrated in the same elliptical, image-laden prose, this passage is even more clearly marked as Surjue's inner vision, confirming that his own thought process has now taken on the characteristics of the novel's poetic lyricism. Although his terrifying vision of the degradation of prison contrasts sharply with the most recent lyrical passage—the lesson of Surjue's vision occurs when “a voice whispered in his ear, ‘They make animals without hope of the men who pass through here’” (211)—the formal characteristics Mais employs to depict it suggest the completion of Surjue's initiation into social and historical consciousness. He recognizes himself among “the generations of lost men that were brought here damned to insensible negation out of sight of the world” (209), and the passage emphasizes that he is, finally, able truly to see where he is and what his situation means. Bringing this point baldly home, Mais marks the end of Surjue's illuminating reverie with the phrase, “Suddenly his eyes went wide” (211).22 Although the content of Surjue's poetic vision is about the relentless dehumanization of prison life, the fact that he is having it suggests the full humanization of Surjue himself: Mais intimates that Surjue's newfound sensitivity to the nature of his surroundings allows him a clear new vision of the world and his place in it.
This vision, of course, is hardly an aesthetically or ethically pleasing one—indeed, the graphic degradation and violence of prison life are if anything increased from this point of the novel forward. However, it is in Surjue's newly gained awareness—the product, Mais indicates, of a kind of aesthetic awakening—that the novel's hope seems to lie. Surjue, no longer a callow, boastful, happy-go-lucky youth content to try his luck, has gone through a (resolutely nonreligious) spiritual transformation, allowing him to emerge as the novel's hero. Through his transformation, Surjue has gained understanding of what is truly of value to him—his relationship with Rema—and it is this understanding that redemptively structures the rest of Surjue's actions in the novel. Although ultimately seen to be of little individual use, the assiduous, clear-eyed, and thoughtful resolve that Surjue discovers in prison is affirmed by the novel as the only meaningful human response to the overwhelming destructive power of the Jamaican social system (and the blunt impassivity of the universe).
To this end, Mais goes out of his way to parallel Surjue's two most concrete misfortunes: Surjue's imprisonment results from his being abandoned on the roof by his burglary partner, Flitters, while his death likewise occurs after a climb, as Surjue is shot just as he reaches the top of the prison wall. The contrast, however, is more salient. Surjue's partnership with Flitters is based largely on bravado and ignorance—Surjue ignores Rema's warnings about his partner and blunders blindly into his unfortunate imprisonment. In contrast, Surjue has recently witnessed the brutal punishment meted out to prisoners intent on escaping, and his partner in the escape, Cubano, has proven himself a wise, reliable, and diligent friend. The plans of the escape, too, are carefully laid over a long period of time, and they are the product of purposeful thought. As the escape begins, Surjue notices his own flustered agitation: “He realized it was the excitement before the race. Like a horse jumping off before the flying of the tape. He felt better. Cubano was all right. He was betting on Cubano. He had to” (269). This bet (similar to the one Surjue makes earlier on the superintendent's promise of fairness) is a considered one, unlike the unreasoning nature of Surjue's earlier relation to horseracing. Similarly, Surjue here relates himself to a horse about to race—as a participant in the actual race, rather than a casual observer hoping to get lucky. This distinction is suggestive: Surjue's ill-fated escape attempt can only be dignified, in contrast with his ill-fated burglary attempt, because he is participating fully and knowingly in the action, aware of his choices, the nature of his partner, and the long odds against him. Thus, a very subtle difference—the sensitive awareness that has been summoned in him over the course of the novel—is seen to transform Surjue from farcical clown to martyred hero.
These moments of attentiveness and awareness in Surjue (which find parallels in other residents of the yard, including Zephyr, Lennie, Wilfie, Rema, Mas Mose’, and Ras) seem decisive to the novel, and they embody the definition of true thinking Mais provides in Form and Substance in Fiction: “a man in his wholeness wholly attending” (34) (a line that originally comes from a Lawrence poem, “Thought”). Mais's high valuation of this holistic Lawrentian thinking helps explain why the remaining lyrical passages appear to convey some optimism and wisdom despite the multiple deaths alongside which they appear. The poetic musing in Jamaican creole, in particular, with its calm, airy confidence that one will “see de livin’ clouds o’ witness standin’ in de sky” (253), is hard to read as even remotely nihilistic, while the final lyrical evocation of an old fisherman sitting by the sea “content, scratching himself, untroubled by any dreams” (262), suggests an amplitude of earthy wisdom gained through experience (the itching is the product of a “shark-tooth scar”) and focuses not on darkness but on the light cast by a rising moon. The palm trees, too, evoke some sort of liberation, as they “lean over the water's edge beyond the wall” (262). The positive tenor of the final lyrical passages, even as Surjue, Rema, Shag, and Euphemia meet their doom, suggests that the awakening of Surjue's responsiveness—crystallized when his thinking takes on the lyrical attributes of those passages—is the slight gleam of redemption that can be extracted from the novel's overwhelming carnage. Mais asserts in Form and Substance in Fiction that literature should be judged by its effect on readers: it is successful only when it is “calling forth into responsiveness those same attributes of observation, sympathy, and imagination” that an author employs in writing (22). In The Hills Were Joyful Together, Surjue serves as the model of just such a successful summoning into responsiveness, and the novel's form urges its readers toward a similar transfiguration. Gesturing back to the artistic miracle wrought in the fish fry scene, the novel's lyricism plies its readers to follow Surjue and awaken their own sympathy and sensitivity in protest at the indignities visited upon their fellow creatures, both fictional and actual.
While there is room to doubt how successful the novel is in finally meeting this ambition, the book provides enough evidence to suggest that Mais is certainly aiming to achieve what the Spectator reviewer identifies as an “emotional force” (Charques, review). Various later commentators identify a similarly affective aim in the novel, such as Singh, who enthuses that “very few West Indian novels can equal The Hills Were Joyful Together in emotional appeal” (“Hills Were Joyful Together,” 119).23 Emotionally charged words, certainly, are at the center of the novel's project, and it reveals little patience for words that lack this elusive, oracular quality. The prison chaplain, for example, brandishes a copy of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in his argument with the superintendent. Although clearly in agreement with the sentiments it expresses—he approvingly reads part of Article 22—he is disappointed in its worldly ineffectiveness, bemoaning that “already it has come to mean nothing to us but more words in a book” (238). The aesthetic stance conveyed in The Hills Were Joyful Together requires words, somehow, to go beyond simply existing dully in a book, and its own efforts at lyricism suggest an attempt to employ words in exactly such a mysterious way, activating emotions in the reader in order to reenchant a lost, disenchanted world. In this way, the formal experimentation of Mais's first novel embodies an aesthetic philosophy (quite Lawrentian in nature) that functions, at its base, as broad sociopolitical critique.
In a 1952 article for Public Opinion, Mais professes a strong belief in an intangible quality in art, something that arises from, but cannot be identified in, the material elements employed. The article, “The Critics Criticised II,” is a defense of the Jamaican painter Albert Huie, laying out the reasons Mais thinks the painter's critics are mistaken. Ultimately faulting Huie's critics for failing to appreciate the works on their own terms, Mais summons the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson as his final defense: “Criticism is an art when it does not stop at the words of the poet but looks at the order of his thoughts and the essential quality of his mind…’Tis a question not of talents but of tone; and not particular merits, but the mood of mind into which one and another can bring us.” The assertion Mais adopts from Emerson presents problems of analysis, to be sure, in its reliance on a vague, general terminology of tone and mood. However, its emphasis on the affective force of art is typical of Mais's aesthetic views, foretelling some of the difficulties he will be obliged to address in his later novels. For a writer, certainly, the inarticulability Mais sees at the core of successful art poses something of a problem: “mere” words are not enough, though it is only through words that the novelist works. John Hearne's personal memoir of Mais reflects something of this difficulty, proposing that in Mais's case it was in fact painting that “came to almost dominate his life,” since it “seemed to fulfil so many of the demands he made of art” (“Roger Mais,” 148). F. E. F. Fraser, also a contemporary of Mais, goes even further, advancing his view that Mais's “books are not novels at all—merely sheets of paper pinch-hitting for lengths of canvas.” Despite the exaggeration, Fraser's characterization contains a grain of truth about the uncertainty Mais's novels reveal about the reliability of their very medium—language. If The Hills Were Joyful Together depends on a (potentially facile) faith in the emotional power of words, Mais's subsequent novels uneasily confront the tensions inherent in an aesthetic that seeks communal salvation in the achievements of an artist acting as a high priest evoking an affective response.
Some of Mais's early stories surely express a suspicion of language. A prominent example is the title story from Face, and Other Stories, the climax of which incorporates an insistence that the face the little girl makes after getting off the bus is more eloquent than words, a perfect encapsulation of the unspoken feelings of everyone on the bus.24 The Hills Were Joyful Together betrays a different, more ominous uneasiness about the power of words through the character of Shag. Cuckolded by Euphemia, Shag eventually goes mad and returns to murder her late in the novel. His lack of sanity manifests itself in his thoughts, characterized by Mais as a sinister, self-deluded poetic fluency: “Words flowed and took forms and made into images in his mind…and in his hands he held the tokens of them and he sent them forth and they did his bidding and returned like doves to his hand…. the words themselves were a shibboleth, and were without meaning other than that which he endowed them with, so that they became the most beautiful, whole, perfect, sheer, excellent words in the world, like the secret names of God” (113). Very little distinguishes Shag's verbal madness from the lyrical flights in the novel discussed above, except perhaps for his focus on personal control and secrecy. At one point he thinks: “some people didn't understand about words. They did not know the meaning that went with the sound. The meaning of the sound of a word like vulnerable was like a great anaconda snake coiled around the base of a woman-tree” (180). Although this reverie, in light of the novel's advocacy of aesthetic sensitivity, could be seen as a moment of redemptive verbal creativity, Mais makes clear that Shag's poetic inclinations are horribly flawed. In his final murderous confrontation with Euphemia, Shag continues in a similar vein, fixating on the word “vulnerable” and speaking incomprehensibly to Euphemia about her resemblance to a tree. With this final scene Mais confirms the danger of Shag's way with words—their terrible solipsism. With all its ingenuity and imagistic leaps of thought, without the modulating injunction that it be communally comprehensible, Shag's verbal dexterity descends to idiolect, the ravings of a mad, murderous man. Mais's later writing continues to explore these linguistic difficulties, caught between a fervent desire to capture truth in language and an anxiety that language's emotive power might actually impede the separation of truth from self-serving falsehood.
The choruses of Brother Man, in their distinction from the lyrical passages of The Hills Were Joyful Together, reveal Mais's concern to ensure the communal intelligibility of poetic language. Specifically labeled as “Chorus of People in the Lane,” these sections appear in a much more ordered regularity—at the beginning of each of the book's five large divisions. While there is clearly a narrative consciousness at work in their descriptive parts, a substantial portion of each chorus is also made up of snippets of conversation of the people living in Brother Man's neighborhood, emphasizing the chorus as a mutual creation. In the book's first chorus the narrator asserts that “all, all are involved in the same chapter of consequences, all are caught up between the covers of the same book of living” (8), underscoring an insistence on (literary) meaning as a shared phenomenon. Although the language of ensnarement can be read as somewhat fatalistic, the notion of consequences moderates this with a suggestion of human agency. The end of the chorus reinforces this latter sense, asserting that the people's tongues “carry their burden of the tale of man's woes” but that in fact “it is their own story over that they tell” (9), implying, despite the graphic parallel of dogs “licking their own ancient scrofulous sores” (9), that the community is ultimately responsible for its own narration. Instead of the haphazard, occasional lyrical outpourings of an unseen and unknowable narrator, the chorus sections of Brother Man strive to discipline themselves into predictably periodic, communal communication.
The counterexample of ideal language use in the novel is Papacita, the book's least disciplined, most self-centered character. His smoothly manipulative rhetorical bonhomie is made plain as the narrative opens, when he is attempting to soothe his girlfriend Girlie's anger after he has stayed out all night. The softly coercive style of his blandishments is emphasized in this scene, describing how Papacita encourages Girlie to join him on the bed “softly, throwing the words at her as he might a cushion or one of those big soft indiarubber balls” (11). Momentarily put out by Girlie's resistance a bit later, Papacita's face reveals a trace of frustration, but “then he came all contrite, all treacle and melting butter again” (12). Continuing on his campaign, Papacita again urges Girlie to sit on the bed “in a tone that was like warm butterscotch” (17). The scene's figuration of Papacita's self-serving relationship to Girlie—“like a cat watching a mouse” (22)—makes it clear that his slick rhetorical suasion is functioning as a decorative distraction from his underlying ill intentions. Indeed, when the relation of physical and emotional power is reversed at the end of the novel, as Girlie murders her former lover for his betrayal, the characters’ rhetorical characteristics are also reversed. Just before she brutally stabs him to death, Girlie confronts Papacita with similarly deceptive panache, “looking at him sloe-eyed” (187) and speaking “in that soft, silky voice” (188), revealing the terrible menace the novel identifies at the core of its characters’ sweet speechmaking.
Another of Papacita's most pronounced traits—his love of riddles—also reveals Brother Man’s anxieties about the potential misuses of language. Papacita is depicted telling riddles on three different occasions, and the novel expresses a marked uneasiness with their effects. In the first riddle scene, he challenges Girlie with a riddle, the answer to which—“nothin’” (77)—itself suggests the emptiness of Papacita's facility for verbal cleverness. Mais emphasizes the alienating effect the riddle has on Girlie, describing how she “laughed with him in spite of herself” (77). Papacita's next riddle, told in a club for the benefit of Minette, whom he is trying to seduce away from Brother Man, reinforces the unpleasant exclusivity that motivates Papacita's riddling proclivities. The answer to this riddle, “Jonah in de belly of de whale” (93), is a clear figure of separation from society, and the narrator notes how, in telling the answer, Papacita “laughed more than anyone; he always managed to get the best of his jokes, both ways” (93). Evoking both double dealing and double talk, the characterization of his opportunistic cleverness continues the suggestion that for Papacita, riddles are an aggressive way of asserting verbal and social mastery. The third and final riddle Papacita tells, to his partner in a counterfeit money scheme, likewise displays the antisocial tendencies at work in the practice, while also suggesting, via its answer of “needle an’ thread, sewin’ cloth” (148), the way Papacita employs riddles to cover over his own social inadequacies. In this instance, after telling the answer, Papacita laughs loudly but then “stopped laughing suddenly [and] seemed to take notice for the first time he alone was enjoying the joke” (148). Although it hints at the emergence of some self-awareness on Papacita's part, the passage is most concerned with reconfirming the self-serving nature of Papacita's enjoyment of riddles. Instead of being used for enlightenment or even simply a socially binding light humor, the opacity of language characteristic of riddles is, in Papacita's hands, seen as a mechanism for asserting his own private, superior understanding.
Mais holds Brother Man up as an obvious contrast to Papacita, yet the novel's eponymous hero maintains a remarkably similar relationship to language as its antihero. Most strikingly, Brother Man's words are curiously dependent on tone and gesture to guarantee their efficacy, a trait that Mais's book emphasizes in its holy Rastafarian protagonist from the outset.25 The first description of Brother Man, after a fleeting glance at his unremarkable “medium height, medium build” (22) and his long hair and beard, devotes itself not to his eyes, but to his gaze itself: “he had a far-away, searching look, as though the intensity of his being came to focus in his eyes. Many looked away and were embarrassed before the quiet intensity of that gaze” (22). The indirectness of this examination—relying on vague simile and the general reported reaction of others—is conspicuous, as the book struggles to articulate the precise nature of how its hero (transitively, rather than intransitively) looks. The book struggles, too, to convey the precise nature of its hero's words. Just after Brother Man's first spoken words in the novel—a response to Minette's question about the nature of love—the narrator starkly admits to an inability to do justice to their affective and semantic significance. Brother Man's speech contains something ineffably related, yet crucial, to its sense: “somehow the words didn't sound banal, coming from him. He spoke with such simple directness that it seemed to give a new import to everything he said. It was as though the common words of everyday usage meant something more, coming from his lips, than they did in the casual giving and taking of change in conversation, the way it was with other folks” (23–24). The anxious imprecision of this description, rather surprisingly, calls attention to the novel's own descriptive incapacity, simultaneously locating an enigmatic fluency, beyond the reach of words, in its protagonist.
The extra-linguistic qualities of Brother Man's rhetorical persuasion are consistently raised by the novel as it portrays his attempts to instill righteousness in his neighbors. In an early conversation with Minette, whom Brother Man has selflessly saved from a life of prostitution, simply the tone of his voice is instrumental in defusing the fraught question she implicitly raises: “she felt the gentle rebuke of his words, the subtle rebuke in the very gentleness of his tone, and was suddenly abashed” (40). A bit later it is Brother Man's earnest gaze that makes Minette feel guilty for flirting with Papacita in the street: “His gaze gave nothing away; all the same she had a funny sort of feeling way down. She wondered if he had seen anything through the window” (63). This power is not simply a product of the couple's increasingly intimate relations, either (though that, too, takes the form of silent communication, “something that went without words” [137]), as revealed by Brother Man's ministrations to other members of the community. Mais suggests that Cordy's fever begins to dissipate when Brother Man tells her he is praying for her, “and there was that good wholesome smile on his face, and deep conviction in his voice” (65). When Cordy brings her sick child, Tad, to Brother Man for help, his physical movements actually call forth a voice in her head: “She saw him lift [Tad] up in his hands off the bed, and put aside the clothes she had wrapped him in. And something moved inside her—yes, moved. And it was as though a voice was saying to her, ‘Woman, be not afraid.’”(65). The identification of “something” that moves inside her is noticeably vague, defying description, while the power of Brother Man's presence interestingly circles back to the figure of a voice speaking, again indicating the anxiety over words and truth that permeates the novel. Elsewhere in the novel, Jesmina is reassured in her fear by the tone of Brother Man's voice: “There was a gentle, soothing quality about his voice that stilled her” (127). Earlier, in fact, frustrated with her sister, Jesmina has summoned his kindly intonations herself, and she is described “as though she could hear Bra’ Man's voice, calm and soothing, telling her to be more patient” (95). With this emphasis on gesture and tone, Mais suggests that it is as much in the delivery of his message as in the contents of the message itself that Brother Man's evangelizing is effective.
The implicit parallel between the rhetorical aptitude of Brother Man and that of Papacita reveals the novel's apparent anxiety about the controllability of communication. Mais does make some distinction between these two figures: if Papacita's riddles reinforce an alienated individuality and self-interest, Brother Man's parables are seen to aim at the maintenance of social cohesion. Mais dramatizes the use of parables only once in the novel, describing in detail how Brother Man settles a dispute between a man and his sweetheart, who has given birth to someone else's child while he was away in prison. In making his explicitly Solomon-like decision, Brother Man tells the man to bring three paving stones and stack them one on top of the other. After asking the man—twice, for dramatic emphasis and confirmation—whether he could remove the middle stone without disturbing the others, Brother Man renders his judgment that the man must care for the illegitimate child, if he wishes to stay with his sweetheart. As he explains: “these stones are as yourself and the woman and the child. You on top, the child in the middle, the woman at the bottom” (122–23). This judgment, unlike Papacita's riddles, is grasped immediately by everyone, and the gathered crowd's reaction is revealingly full of good cheer and fellowship: “they laughed richly, and clapped the man who thought he had been wronged on the back, and made loud talk, and laughed, and the man himself started laughing” (123). The repetition of so much laughing, in contrast to the solitary levity of Papacita, conveys Mais's commendation of Brother Man's socially valuable communication. The evaluative distinction between Brother Man's message of selflessness and Papacita's philosophy that “every man had to scuffle for himself” (43) is thus plainly established. However, their creative, implicitly literary method of communication remains similar, and the novel elsewhere suggests that the crowd's almost magical comprehension of Brother Man's allegorical explanation in this scene cannot easily be counted on to repeat itself.
Indeed, linguistic circulation and reception within Brother Man are both unpredictable and mysterious, and the narrative trajectory of the novel ultimately suggests a rather bleak forecast for the possibility of communally gratifying, socially productive communication (and thus casts doubt on the viability of its own function as a novel). The progression of the five choruses in the book charts the narrative's teleology of a crestfallen reining-in of hope. The language of the choral sections—seemingly because, rather than in spite, of its communal makeup—emerges as a capricious, disruptive force. The novel's (which is also the chorus's) first sentence evokes the unpleasant din of people's talk: “The tongues in the lane clack-clack almost continuously, going up and down the full scale of human emotions” (7). The onomatopoeic “clack-clack” does not convey approval and is soon related to socially malignant gossip: “slander lurks in ambush to take the weakest and the hindmost, and the tongues clack upon every chance” (8). By the second chorus, the verbal assault has lessened, with the talk taking on the milder form of “casual gossip” (60), while in the succeeding one “people lapse into even more relaxed postures” (106). Their talk seems to parallel their posture: “The intermittent patter of conversation, soliloquy, small-talk, carries on, desultory, rich with raillery, repartee, sometimes—sometimes humourless, turgid, dry” (106). The ambivalent nature of this conversation prevails, but it has receded into a much less insistent, more humane register, and the third chorus ends with the whole lane singing a hymn inspired by Brother Man's rise to holy stature.26 By the fourth chorus, “there is a feeling of excitement in the air” and more singing of hymns. The people “speak about different things, and after a bit the speech turns upon the ordinary topics of gossip, but the voices are a little less sharp, there is less of that vicious underlining both in tone and content” (138). The language here registers the solid sense of optimism and hope at the beginning of this chapter, and the chorus ends once again with song: “Somebody starts the tune. They lift their voices, all, and sing” (140). In the final chorus, however, after Brother Man's unjust arrest, things take an ominous turn, and the people in the lane “are unquiet, somewhat ill at ease” (172). Their talk reflects their return to uncertainty and suspicion: “They fall into the usual conversational postures, but shift them continually. They speak as though they are afraid their tongues might trip them, and their words discover them in a fault” (172). In marking the rise and undeserved fall of Brother Man in the lane's esteem, the choruses reveal that the success of Brother Man's rhetoric of hope is exceedingly fragile—quickly and fatally vulnerable to the gossipy whims and self-reinforcing chatter of his neighbors in the lane.
The dangerously contingent efficacy of rhetoric is emphasized in the book's brutal climax as well, when a crowd of people mercilessly beats Brother Man. Following a vicious crime by an anonymous bearded man, the people of Kingston become enflamed by media sensationalism, as the “leading newspapers played up the angle that a community of bearded men in their midst, formed together into a secret cult, was a menace to public safety” (173). This misleading “angle,” as Mais disapprovingly makes clear, manipulates people into an anger that “was carefully fanned to a nice conflagration” (174). It is an unreasoning anger in which the novel's innocent hero is caught up. In the description of the mob's violent assault, loudly emotional language easily overcomes Brother Man's quiet attempts to reason with the crowd. As the “clamour and shouting behind grew louder, coarser, shriller,” Brother Man attempts to speak, “but his voice was drowned in the shrieks and curses of the mob” (185).27 These scenes mark the brutally enforced end of Brother Man's time as hero to the people, betraying a sharp fear of the ability of popular discourse to inspire extreme emotion and brutality.
Nevertheless, Mais's second novel still maintains some of the belief in the transformative power of aesthetically rendered words so prevalent in The Hills Were Joyful Together. This belief is particularly exemplified in Minette's ecstatic reading of the Bible. This relatively early scene in the novel underscores how her reading about David is positively enchanting: “the unfolding of the story enthralled her” (47), such that she does not notice the passing of time. Minette's enthrallment is related to the intense empathetic feelings she develops from the story: “she became absorbed in the tale, so that she could not have put down the book if she wanted to. For these people, and their lusts and their hates, had become very real to her. They were just as real as the people who lived in the lane” (46). This response—a transcending of the everyday that paradoxically leads back to the everyday—is a plainly redemptive aesthetic moment in the novel and hearkens back to Surjue's transformation in Mais's first novel. Similarly, Minette's magical response to Brother Man's given name, which she discovers written on the flyleaf of his Bible, also suggests Mais's continued investment in the possibilities of linguistic enchantment. Repeating his first name, John, to herself later, “a pleasant warm sensation went clear through her, as though the single syllable set up a mysterious vibration in her being” (147). Elsewhere, however, Minette's responses to language take on more ominous overtones, such as when Brother Man reads the Bible at her bedside: “His voice intoned the lines, deep and sonorous, so that when he stopped reading, she said automatically after him, ‘Praise the Lord’” (99). Minette's response expresses both piety and unthinking habit. This latter characteristic is expressly denounced in almost all of Mais's writing, and its appearance (in Brother Man's preeminent “convert,” no less) lays bare the crux of the novel's difficulty: how to judge and control the effects inspired by affective language.28
Brother Man does not offer a particularly confident answer to this problem. Its title character's (and by implication the novel's) message is ultimately ignored and drowned out by the vast majority of its intended audience, while Brother Man is left with only a few “disciples” (Minette, Jesmina, and Nathaniel), the most important of whom is the woman who shares his bed. Brathwaite suggests that Brother Man's social downfall can be traced to his own failure to subordinate his message to the “collective sound.” He explains: “Mais's choruses have this communal function and when Brother Man, subtly tempted by pride of individuation (pp. 174–5) loses beat with this, the chorus becomes «tuneless» (p. 183) and he is struck down by the multitude/ensemble” (Roots, 186–87).29 What Brathwaite sees as pride of individuation, however, seems hard to square with the scene he cites. This scene, in which Brother Man meditates on his abandonment by the people, primarily emphasizes his sorrow that “his service to his people would be at an end” (174). Moreover, the novel's depiction of the multitude—rife with animal imagery, bloodlust, and relish for scatological debasement—is difficult to hold up as a worthy object of adulation. Indeed, the novel goes out of its way to emphasize people's dangerous susceptibility to rhetoric, whether in the form of enflaming journalistic accounts, the mercenary obeahman Bra’ Ambo's scare tactics, or the accusatory exhortations to violence by the mob itself; even Brother Man's initial (and ultimately unstable) acclaim is in part based on the spread of rumors about his meeting with the ghost of Old Mag in the street. Contrary to Brathwaite's claim, it is the fact that the people themselves finally refuse to listen to Brother Man's message of peace and love that appears to form the core of the novel's tragic events. In the scene of “proud individuation” to which Brathwaite points, Brother Man delineates the failure of his life's mission: “He had tried to bring a ray of hope into their lives, to make each man aware, somewhere, somehow, of his own innate dignity as a man” (174). Intriguingly, these words echo the prologue of And Most of All Man, in which the goal of the work is suggested to be precisely this: teaching humans to understand their own dignity and divinity.30 This, in turn, offers Brother Man as a stand-in for Mais the author (and Brother Man, of course, does become a writer, composing a personal testament), an author who has been unable to convey his message successfully to more than a very few, especially receptive people.
The novel itself does not seem able, finally, to articulate in words its own concluding, hopeful gesture toward the future. The book ends in a noticeably private, enigmatic moment, as Minette helps the injured Brother Man to the window, where “he saw all things that lay before him in a vision of certitude, and he was alone no longer” (191). He then asks Minette, “You see it, out there, too?” She looks “up above the rooftops where that great light glowed across the sky” and answers, “Yes, John, I have seen it” (191), and proceeds to lead him away from the window. Some readings of this denouement readily come to mind—especially the sense that Minette has now been “converted” into a spiritual prophet herself, in close partnership with Brother Man—but the “certitude” of Brother Man's vision, referred to only in the inexact pronominal “it,” is markedly enigmatic. Indeed, possible readings, promoted by the ambiguity surrounding “that great light” at which the characters are actually looking, proliferate, ranging from naturalistic beauty to religious illumination. Brother Man's certitude, as the novel ends, is communicable only to his closest companion, relegating all others, including the novel's audience, to a complementary lack of certitude. In his dissatisfied reading of the ending, Ramchand observes that the “only certitude here, however, is that Bra’ Man and Minette love each other” (West Indian Novel, 185). However hopeful and suggestive the novel's ending wishes to be, its diminishment to an ambiguous connotative status (in a peculiarly intimate moment) reveals a profound shift from the linguistic exuberance of The Hills Were Joyful Together. Much chastened, Brother Man casts grave doubt on the efficacy of its own verbal medium, almost literally gesturing to a more plentitudinous meaning beyond the reach of mere language.
Black Lightning, Mais's third and final published novel, carries this suspicion of language (and art more generally) yet further, casting doubt on the direct social value of any artistic pursuit and locating true communication in a material, mundane realm that is not contained within the boundaries of human language. The book announces its views most eloquently in its choice of form, eschewing the lyric flights of its predecessors for a stark, laconic style and emphatically relying on simple dialogue and action. Ramchand's review, “Black Lightning,” emphasizes the tightly controlled dramatic nature of the novel: “The narrative persuasion of the omniscient author is drastically reduced. Everything depends upon speech and actions…. There is skilful use of off-stage sounds, the wind, the sound of an axe, a woman yoo-hooing in the distance. The characters make entries and exits like the characters in a play.” Read alongside of The Hills Were Joyful Together and Brother Man, Mais's third novel is remarkable for its pared-down language and the straightforward transcription of its narrative events, suggesting a desire to communicate as immediately as possible, in the most simple language and imagery. This tendency is identified by D'Costa in her introduction to the novel, which she sees as having “something of the frozen energy of pictorial art which conveys emotion directly; it strives to appeal to us in ways beyond the reach of words” (7–8). Ramchand, too, remarks the book's paradoxical relation to language, in which “it becomes apparent that abundant dialogue testifies to an articulate inarticulateness. The failure of words is the triumph of intense feeling” (“Black Lightning”). The oddly self-canceling message of Black Lightning—implicit in the title itself—emerges as the culmination of Mais's self-reflexive meditation on the strict limits of literary language.
The novel's examination of aesthetic production centers on the protagonist Jake's carving of a Samson sculpture, and the sculpture's creation and subsequent utility thus reflect Mais's notions of literature, as well as artistic practice more broadly. Significantly, Jake's secretive woodworking is catalyzed by what he feels as a lack in the communicative ability of language. In an interesting reversal of Minette's captivating and redemptive relationship to the Bible in Brother Man, Jake finds the biblical account of Samson and Delilah too simple to relate to as a realistic human story. Having read the story many times and meditated on its possible meanings, Jake finds himself wondering about Samson and “what must have gone on under the surface between himself and Delilah. Things that the Bible never mentioned at all. Things other than, and more complex, and in a way more disturbing than what was discovered in the bald account” (60). Explicitly addressing the perceived failings of the biblical tale's rendering, Jake's sculpture is his attempt to convey the story's hidden significance, “what must have secretly lain underneath, and had gone before, that the Bible never gave any clue of at all” (60). The painful irony of Jake's effort at clarification is revealed in the dramatic scene when Jake shows the sculpture to Amos, his hunchbacked counterpart and fellow social outsider. Their discussion of the statue, marked by Amos's befuddlement and Jake's repeated failure to apprehend the words of Amos, discloses a deep pessimism regarding art's ability to impart meaning. Jake's attempt to render the biblical Samson more expressively is a resolute failure, as, despite his attempts to assert its meaning as the embodiment of all human suffering, the final meaning of that representation is unsatisfactorily absent. Mais figures this interpretive lacuna in Samson's pointing finger, which Jake, in frustration, cannot account for: “But to what end, Amos? Where does the finger point? Down what blind road…through what blank wall…to what?” (110). The inexpressive locations Jake names emphasize his dawning recognition that the statue's meaning remains infinitely nebulous, and he is forced to acknowledge the sculpture's failure to elicit any ultimate significance: “And it will not come. Something else, but not that” (110). Amos, as well, is unable to account for this absence of meaning, as his stammered response reveals—“I—I can't figure it out either, Jake” (110)—and he reinforces this overwhelming sense of semantic disconnect as the scene comes to a close. Acknowledging Jake's vague feeling that the statue is no longer of Samson, Amos again reaches an interpretive impasse and bluntly rejects Jake's hope that he can name what Jake's statue now represents, saying, “No. I can't, either” (112). This scene's damning depiction of artistic stillbirth is then brought home with mythic force by Mais: just after Amos fearfully flees the attic workshop, Jake is struck by lightning and blinded. Jake thereby takes on the role of the failed, hubristic artist symbolically disciplined by the heavens. It is on this scene that the narrative turns—the chiasmatic structure of Jake's fall and Amos's rise becomes visible from this moment—dramatically marking the novel's distrust in the potential for the coherent, collective comprehension of its emblematic object of art.
As in Brother Man, the nervousness about aesthetic production in Black Lightning hinges on the way art functions in social space. After his blinding, Jake expresses his fears of art's troublingly willful autonomy, describing how “at last it takes its own end into its own hands, in a manner of speaking, and becomes what it wants to be, declaring its own form and meaning” (122). The analogy Jake then proffers between the contingencies of art's meaning and human free will suggests the novel's view of the unruly and unpredictable role that art plays once it has gone into the world. Indeed, throughout the novel, nearly all the valuable scenes involving aesthetic production occur in private, the work's beneficent effects limited to its own practitioners. Amos, an accordion player, is moved to self-realization through his own music several times, but always alone in the forest. The most significant such scene, in which Amos at last recognizes his own value as a friend to Jake and others, occurs in pointed solitude, just after he has met with Bess and Miriam:
When they were out of sight he took his accordion in his hands and started to play.
He played softly, to himself, a tune that came out of his head. (151)
The emphasis on the privacy of his artistic communion is unmistakable.31 When Amos plays for Jake near the end of the novel, Amos attempts to play “something to lift that cloud of despondency that had settled upon Jake” (191). The novel describes how Amos creates the song—“it went with his thoughts as they thronged through his mind” (191)—and details their optimistic insistence that “the storm is past, and all is smiling in the world again” (191). However, the novel again suggests that this is a purely private communication: the chapter concludes with the elliptical petering out of Amos's musically expressed thoughts, never registering any response on Jake's part. Jake's suicide shortly thereafter makes clear that Amos's performance, however privately expressive, failed to connect with its intended audience.
Brathwaite has faulted Black Lightning for “moving towards individuation and away from the folk/urban expression of his first two published novels” (Roots, 187), yet the novel's critique of art takes aim specifically at the unproductive individuality of high aesthetic production. Jake, the artist figure who proclaims his Samson sculpture “All mine!” (83) in a moment of deranged bliss, is in fact overtly criticized in the novel for his insistence on self-sufficiency and total control of his surroundings. Thus, far from supporting individuality at the expense of community, Black Lightning reproves art precisely because of its lack of reliable connection to the people. Discussing the novel's main characters, Jake and Amos, Mais notes the general thrust of the narrative: “It is the story of a strong man's struggle to find self-sufficiency, and how he failed in the least of things and lost all; and of another who grew from weakness to strength, because he found the one thing that the other lacked” (quoted in Carr, “Roger Mais,” 25). The strength that Amos discovers is clearly revealed as the ability to help others, or, in Jake's estranged wife Estella's words, “the stuff that human friendship is made of” (217). Jake, in turn, is haunted by his reliance on others, which Estella also makes clear in her conversation with Amos as the novel ends. Certainly, the most important moments of connection in the novel do not arise from art, but from something more properly thought of as artful everyday communication. The novel abounds, like Brother Man, with instances of momentous meaning conveyed not by words alone, but by touch, glance, gesture, and tone. The most illustrative instance of this phenomenon occurs after Jake irritably tells Amos to stop cursing:
Amos looked at him.
“I'm sorry, Jake,” was all he said.
But it was like a man speaking a parable, it sounded many notes together in the hearer's mind. (70)
Here, it is Amos's mundane but genuine apology that triggers the effects that The Hills Were Joyful Together sought via heightened, oracular prose. Mundane actions and words are also decisive in confirming the long-deferred young love between Glen and Miriam (something Mais considered a crucial antidote to the tragic sadness of Jake's suicide).32 After uncertainly sniping with each other throughout the novel, these characters at last come together due simply to Glen's sudden, spontaneous concern for Miriam's wound (209); their union is reinforced on the novel's last page by their commonplace talk of the changing seasons and bird migrations and the simple gesture of Glen's drawing Miriam “back into the protective circle of his arm” (222).
Another instance of this more earthbound sense of everyday redemption occurs when George, a character who has undergone a radical (and partially inexplicable) transformation into a compassionate, nature-loving boy, enjoys an exultant communion with Beauty, the horse he has been longing to ride: “it seemed nothing could disrupt that perfect fusion between the boy and the mare” (206). Here, again, Mais appears to locate ethical value in something he conceives of as elemental human experiences, devoid of artifice or even self-conscious presentation. The more pragmatic art of the blacksmith—Jake's profession—is also strongly contrasted with his alienated activities as a sculptor, further underscoring the novel's investment in the value of the everyday. Mais describes the blacksmith shop's activity in a way that emphasizes the magic of its quotidian communicative harmony: “The hammers beat out a rhythmic pattern made up of quick and slow strokes, and the leader by the pattern and measure of the tattoo he beat could communicate to his assistant when he should withhold his own hammer strokes” (178). Moreover, the social value of Jake's work as a blacksmith is described by Jake himself, as he defends his refusal to leave his home village and employ his education and talents elsewhere: “I might have found other things to do that I liked better, that would bring in more money, perhaps; but nothing that would have served the needs of a greater number of people” (101). Ironically, then, Black Lightning, itself a work of literary art, ultimately points to art's general lack of social utility—indeed, Jake's sculpture is useful in the end only as firewood. Suspicious of the miscommunication enabled by highly wrought (in more than one sense) artistic practice, the novel asserts common, everyday practice as the only trustworthy basis for intersubjective understanding.
Read together, then, Mais's three published novels delineate a steady shift in attitude toward the appropriate means of art. If the elevated flights of imagistic verse of The Hills Were Joyful Together first garnered Mais recognition as a “literary” writer, the progression of his subsequent novels suggests his increasing distrust of the reliability (and by implication the social applicability) of such writing. Contrary to the division between literary and political that characterizes much critical discussion of Mais, his writing, from the outset, displays a pronounced interest in how those two categories intersect and interact.33 Starting from a Lawrence-inspired philosophy of literature as a sensually transfigurative mechanism for eliciting social change, Mais's novels self-reflexively examine their own medium of (artistic) language, ultimately investing less and less value in the literary and finding moral foundation, somewhat paradoxically, in the everyday and the palpable. It is tempting in this light to figure Mais's authorial trajectory with simplified imagery, from the brash, confident writer who concluded Form and Substance in Fiction with a triumphant image of writers and artists ushering in a golden age to Carr's description of Mais in his final days, too frail even for dictation, content to complete “a half dozen small pastels” (“Roger Mais,” 15) in quiet solitude.34 However, Carr's description of these pastels as works that “concentrate the eye upon an intense vividness of colour, texture and particulars” (15) suggests something more than Mais as the chastened writer reduced to a contrite, gestural silence of painting. Indeed, the vitality and sensual particularity Carr observes in these late pastels are at the root of Mais's authorial aesthetic in all of his published novels. If these novels do seem increasingly less confident in the foreseeable effects of language, and more and more insistent on locating a guaranteed meaningfulness in something beyond the reach of their own verbal medium, their various experimental forms all nevertheless relentlessly signal their belief in the redemptive possibilities of human consciousness and communication. While Mais may have become disenchanted by the unpredictability of what he considered to be literature's most crucial characteristic—“imaginative persuasion” (Form and Substance, 228)—his novels never ceased striving to awaken his readers into a sense of enchantment with the complex beauty and possibility of the world around them.
Taken in this way, Mais seems an appropriate figure with which to conclude the discussion of West Indian modernism in London at midcentury. Brathwaite notes that Mais's papers reveal an incredibly prolific writer who attempted publication in many places. Letters to and from Mais's agent in the United States (before the publication of his first novel in Great Britain) suggest he was well aware of the necessity of altering his style to fit the tastes of different audiences, including popular or middlebrow ones. Consistent themes and attitudes do appear throughout his writing, but his initial adoption as an experimental “literary” writer points as much to the contingencies of the British publishing market as it does to his own conscious principles of composition. This should not be taken to devalue Mais's achievement as an artist in any way. However, it does point up how the social and historical embeddedness of literature must always be taken into account. Mais was an extremely strong-willed and opinionated artist, long before the composition, let alone the publication, of The Hills Were Joyful Together, and the politicized impulses of his aesthetic views can hardly be put into question. Nevertheless, his explicitly Lawrentian aesthetic leanings also fit nicely with the prerogatives of (one part of) the postwar London literary field, such that the systematic openness to experimental writing first catalyzed by Mittelholzer (itself capitalizing on cultural currents stretching back to before World War II) clearly had some role in making Mais's emergence as a published West Indian novelist possible. In such a light, Mais's enchantment—and then disenchantment—with the political utility of literary expression might serve to highlight the shifting contexts within which aesthetic practices always take shape. However one might perceive the ideological investments and lineage of modernist forms, at this crucial moment in West Indian literature a confluence of individual and structural forces made such forms both attractive and powerful not only to Mais but to his most immediate predecessors in print, Lamming, Mittelholzer, and Selvon. Mais's death in 1955 certainly does not mark the end of Windrush literary output—indeed, the boom would certainly reverberate into the next decade, in however attenuated a manner. However, Mais's work's increasing consciousness of the unpredictable and ultimately ungovernable meanings attached to that output helps to highlight the contingent, perhaps necessarily unsettled nature of his generation's engagement with British modernism.35 Certainly, Mais's brief publishing career in Britain suggests that regardless of how deep-seated the political and aesthetic principles of the Windrush writers were, their literary emergence was also fundamentally facilitated by a particular alignment of social, cultural, and historical forces. If the variable nature of such forces subsequently obliged a shift in tactics, outlook, and allegiance on the part of later authors (not to mention critics) of Caribbean literature, this shift should not overwrite the strategic and intellectual lessons of their predecessors’ initial, enabling embrace of modernist practice.