Print, Prosthesis, (Im)Personation: Morrison's Jazz and the Limits of Literary History

[W]riting is handicapped.

Daniel Moadel, Duke University undergraduate

For 30 years now, since Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto's groundbreaking Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1978), much talk and a great deal more text have been devoted to the recovery and theorizing of a discrete black literary tradition more than two centuries old. Anticipated by the early work of Houston Baker's 1969 Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture, a work composed in the light of the New Critical orthodoxy then prevailing at Yale where Baker was teaching,¹ Fisher and Stepto's Afro-American Literature, a critical anthology evolving out of a 1977 MLA/NEH seminar on African-American literature, laid the very foundations for the scholarly popularization of African-American literary studies, inside of which two generations of black critics were, unlike most before us, formally trained (Fisher and Stepto vii).² To be sure, Fisher and Stepto's volume was path-breaking. In its dedication to the project of reconstructing what Stepto criticized as the "lockstep of stale critical and pedagogical ideas, . . . tattered hand-me-downs from [other] disciplines," Afro-American Literature recovered African-American literature from its realist utility to historians and social scientists to more intentionally pursue "what is literary (as opposed to sociological, ideological, etc) in Afro-American written art" (1). In his chapter, "Teaching Afro-American Literature: Survey or Tradition," Stepto bemoaned the state of African-American literary criticism in the 1970s, charging that while African-American literature had been widely put to teaching history and the social sciences, in the aftermath of the social movements of the previous two decades, African-American literary studies had gotten by with precious little attention paid to "Afro-American language, literature and,"—let me emphasize—"literacy" (9).

Literacy, of course, is not just one of the crucial historic achievements of black people in the US, realized as it was (to the extent that it was) in defiance of its legislated proscriptions; it is, as Stepto and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have demonstrated most famously, one of the signal tropes of our tradition. According to Gates,

Literacy, the very literacy of the printed book, stood as the ultimate parameter by which to measure the humanity of authors struggling to define an African self in Western letters. It was to establish a collective black voice through the sublime example of an individual text, and thereby to register a black presence in letters, that most clearly motivated black writers, from the Augustan Age to the Harlem Renaissance. Voice and presence, silence and absence, then, have been the resonating terms of a four-part homology in our literary tradition for well over two hundred years.

(Signifying 131)

Those of us trained in the black literary tradition since Stepto and Gates have generally accepted the fundamental importance of "the very literacy of the printed book." We take that literacy to have had a defining and sustained historical function for distinguishing a canonical African-American literary heritage. It is the starting point for our discrete pedagogy, the inspirational sine qua non of our tradition's critical development. In Frederick Douglass's learning to "cipher," in particular—that is, in his learning to read and manually reproduce the printed word—we have imagined a creation myth for ourselves. The primacy of print, then, has been very nearly obligatory to imagining the virtual life and actual meaning of African-American literature, taking for granted that the historical urgency of black people "to represent themselves as 'speaking subjects'" was not only achieved but was even possible (Gates, Signifying 129).³ If Plato was right, writing may well create the image or aura of voice, may impart, like a painting, "the attitude of life," but it cannot speak. If you ask of it a question, as Plato's Socrates explains to Phaedrus, the written word offers in return only "a solemn silence."⁴ In Gates, to return to a more modern moment, this is "the curious tension between black vernacular and the literate white text, between the...