Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature

4. The New Negro Ulysses: Classicism in African American Literature as a Return from the Black (W)hole

For African American authors, the use of classical motifs or emblems of Western heritage has always had attendant political consequences. Since Phillis Wheatley first showed “an inclination for the Latin tongue” in 1773, black American authors who dabble in the classics have consistently met a peculiar set of responses.1 Wheatley’s reception among critics is emblematic of the reaction to black classicism historically. The reactions, moreover , have fallen along racial lines. For white critics, African American classicism has either been a proof of the educability of the black mind or of its hopeless mediocrity, depending on the political orientation of the analyst. Needless to say, many black critics would rather begin from the starting point of an entirely new esthetics. In this chapter, I offer a close reading of Countee Cullen’s Medea and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. When not rejecting a black classicist text 83  4  The New Negro Ulysses Classicism in African American Literature as a Return from the Black (W)hole clarke: I hope Mr. Hill can be brief with this exaggeration of the role of Ralph Ellison who has spent so much time in the last ten years in flight from his own people and has not even answered most mail addressed to him by his fellow black writers and has said positively that art and literature are not radical. hill: Let me say that I do not see how any intelligent person not committed to a previous bias can read Invisible Man and affirm that Mr. Ellison stands aside from the struggle for racial justice in the United States. —john henrik clarke and herbert hill, Negro Writers Conference, 1961. Excerpts from Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual as somehow washed-out, critics have read such works, under which rubric I am placing these texts of Cullen and Morrison, as somehow directly subversive —as expressly calling upon the classics only to reject them. The literary process, I believe, is more complicated than this. My reading of Cullen and Morrison draws from Houston A. Baker’s concept of the black (w)hole, a trope for reading black literature, as a way of talking about a possible return from the readings of these texts that take into account race and little else. The reader will note that while I use reception, and particularly the reception of Phillis Wheatley’s corpus, as a way of framing this chapter , I do not spend much time on the eighteenth-century poet. Instead, I focus on two specific works of twentieth-century fiction because Wheatley has already undergone substantial scrutiny in this area.2 The controversy surrounding Phillis Wheatley’s classicism has been well documented.3 The letter “To The Publik” that appeared in her volume signaled the need, on the part of Wheatley’s master, to authenticate the body of poetry, suggesting that her primarily white audience would not otherwise credit the erudite verses of a black woman, who was formerly a slave.4 The atmosphere surrounding the phenomenon of black literacy in general, and classicism more specifically, is perhaps best characterized in Thomas Jefferson’s comment that Wheatley’s poetry was “beneath the dignity of criticism.”5 Alternately, Wheatley’s poetry, similar to the slave narratives that would emerge by the early nineteenth century as standard abolitionist reading, would help to build an argument against slavery and the unjust treatment of blacks.6 But this would not occur without the significant personal expenditure of the poet, who died in poverty in 1784.7 Nor would there be safe harbor for the black classicist among African Americans. The perception of classics as a hegemonic discourse would prevent black authors from being taken at face value as artists attempting to master their craft, whether that of lyric poetry, drama, or the novel, while at the same time being social and political persons, being “forced radicals,” to borrow Alain Locke’s notion from The New Negro. The black author who indulges in classical forms, as the reception would attest, must either be using them in outright protest, or that author has “sold out” to market forces. The dilemma is best summarized in Robert Kendrick’s essay on Wheatley: Wheatley’s critics are divided into two camps—those who contend that Wheatley critiques white oppression through the skillful use of biblical and 84 From Eurocentrism to Black Classicism classical references, and...