Charles Mingus Splits, or, All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother

Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canad1enne d'etudes americames Volume 27, Number 2, 1997, pp. 45-70 Charles Mingus Splits, or, All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother Kevin McNeilly "Yeah, there are certain things in this life that nobody likes to talk about. Nobody white, that is." (Mingus [1971] 1991, 323) Talking Trash 45 Charles Mingus's fictionalized autobiography, Beneath the Underdog (first published in 1971), is generally regarded, if at all, as a confusing and pretentious piece of kitsch, of interest only to jazz aficionados and-for its explicit sexual episodes-to the occasional pornography enthusiast. The text tends to embrace its own second-hand trashiness, revelling in the conflict between its contrived dirtiness and its highbrow literary pretensions, a conflict which appears most forcefully as a spilt in the actual subject of the text, Mingus himself. From the outset, Mingus envisions his speaking consciousness, his persona, as divided, as he plays into the schizoid existence he associates with being a black male in the 1950s. His reminiscences are established using a psychoanalytic frame; he begins with an ostensibly private question-andanswer segment between himself and his therapist, and the rest of the text proceeds as a largely heterogenous and often nonlinear set of confessions and 46 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d' etudes americames divisions of self. But to Mingus, psychoanalysis offers no real "cure" for his problematic, racially marked existence, for his lack of "integration." He plays out the often derivative and over-simplified clashes in popular culture between madness and sanity-a binarism which hinges on institutionalized "white" discourses, which he names "Freud," and what he was to call, following his institutionalization at Bellevue in the early sixties, "Nazi U.S.A." The "black" appears to be outside, verbose, crazy, while the white is acceptable, normal, complete; both discourses inhabit Mingus's language in a sometimes tense, uneasy standoff, as his need to be someone recognizable pulls against his need not to be what the white dominant tells him he should be. Instead of pursuing any sort of amelioration or cure for this divided self through his frenetic, copious confessions, Mingus turns the whole notion of a coherent identity, a cured and whitened subjectivity, on its head. Black discourse, in Mingus's text, is derivative, subversive, and schizoid. Rather than heal his split subjectivity, the text in fact emerges from that split and engages in a concerted attempt to reduce the sacred monochromes of American society to a multiplicitous and colourful debris. Mingus's discourse functions as a hybrid, at once mimicking the established conventions of coherent selfhood and dismantling that discursive hegemony through a smartmouthed embrace of the plural and the diverse which disallows any easy discriminations of self and centre. Mingus's contingent, half-improvised word-jazz throws his talking cure deliberately off-kilter, and enables him to come to terms with his made-up black selves in a powerful split subjectivity, one which depends for its creative energies on its own fractured and impure drift. Jazz Autobiography: Blackness, Two-ness Beneath the Underdog situates itself in a tradition of African-American autobiography, a genre which has drawn extensive commentary from a wide variety of critical perspectives which survey a canon that extends through the narratives of Briton Hammon, Frederick Douglass, Josiah Henson, Booker T. Washington. W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X, among many others. (As even this brief list suggests, this KevinMcNeilly I 47 tradition has been unfairly understood as predominantly male-a perception which meshes well with the overt machismo of Mingus's text-but recent critical efforts have also been directed at the recovery of a "tradition within a tradition" of writing by African-American women [see Braxton 1989; Dudley 1991].) While admitting a certain diversity of form and approach in this canon, commentators have nonetheless tended to return to key preoccupations , which David L. Dudley describes as "the desire to live their lives as they choose, not as the dominant white environment dictates" and "a criticism, overt or implicit, of the society that has from its beginning sought to limit the...