Public and Private Discourses and the Black Female Subject: Gayl Jones' Eva's Man

In the past two decades at least, we have witnessed an increasing politicization of literature in the academy. The text has been dislocated from the fixed and autonomous position it occupied in New Critical theory and made to participate in the larger machinery of cultural production. Such a move may, in general, have the effect of liberating the text from narrowly defined limits, but such critical maneuvers may generate an entirely different set of meanings in different cultural configurations. For example, unlike New Criticism which examined “literature for literature’s sake,” critical discourses concerning themselves with African-American literature often did not treat it as literature. African-American literature was treated as political statement. Thus the move to politicize literary texts cannot have the same consequences in the African-American literary and critical tradition as it has had on literary studies in general.

In the introductory chapters of The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates outlines some of the issues that concerned the African-American critical establishment in the early twentieth century. One of the major concerns then had been the question “How Shall the Negro be Portrayed?” and the discourses around this question resulted in what Gates calls “the ideology of mimesis” (179). Gates invokes the African-American critical tradition to make his point that the overwhelming emphasis in this tradition has been on content over form. This opposition between content and form generates, in different contexts, oppositions between politics and aesthetics, between materialist and formalist analyses, between ideology and ontology. Such oppositions are still firmly entrenched in the study of African-American literature today, and as a result, particular texts have received only a limited reading.

Before going on to consider the critical reception of a specific text, Gayl Jones’ Eva’s Man, we may observe some of the broader implications of such oppositions. Ideological analysis, to be sure, serves many important purposes; for example, it brings to our attention seriously neglected aspects of the text, such as the material conditions of its existence. And to that end, such analyses must be as rigorous as the best of them have been. Yet ideological analysis of race and gender in black women’s fiction often restricts itself from asking questions about the very possibilities of representation and being. The result, in short, is that ideology is dislocated from ontology.

The analysis of race and gender, and of history and ideology itself, is, of course, not limited. The analysis depends on the way we construct these categories. These different constructions can be traced in the fluctuating meanings that have been assigned historically to the word “ideology” itself. At one level, ideology is understood as equivalent to politics, and in this limited sense, it concerns itself with the social, the political, and the economic. The disjunction between ideology and ontology is rigorous. Addressing the issue of a narrowly conceived form of multiculturalism, often predicated on an ideology that is restricted as a category, Gates observes that “under the sign of multiculturalism, literary readings are often guided by the desire to elicit, first and foremost, indices of ethnic particularity” (“Beyond” 8). Ethnic particularity may certainly be foregrounded productively, but when it becomes the “first and foremost,” and sometimes the only index of value, literary readings are compromised. Because African-American writers have been forced to respond to a racist literary establishment, we have, in the past, seen discourses—historically necessary and necessarily compromised—surrounding “racial uplift,” the “Negro problem,” and the protest novel in general. More specifically, the necessity for explicit political statement has manifested itself in, for example, Wright’s criticism of Hurston’s Their Eyes.

As suggested earlier, this sort of criticism is still pervasive today and is usually aimed at texts that explore issues that the African-American critical community is, perhaps with good reason, extremely sensitive about. One of the most flagrant irruptions of such criticism is perhaps Joyce Joyce’s charge that Gates and Baker, in using post-structuralist theories, have betrayed the race. Similarly, Toni Morrison’s novels have repeatedly been subjected to a type of sociological...