Irony and Subversion in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
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Notes
1. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), p. 188. Subsequent references to the text appear parenthetically.
2. Through a careful study of Johnson's own autobiography, Along This Way, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., has proposed that the novel's narrator is a composite character based on Johnson and an alter ego, his childhood friend "D." Duality, Skerrett maintains, is a major theme in the text, culminating in Johnson's own relationship with the narrator. See Skerrett, "Irony and Symbolic Action in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man," AQ, 32 (1980), 540-48.
3. The actions of the narrator during this period, his intense physical self-examination and close observation of other blacks, illustrate the "crisis experience" defined by Judith Berzon as typical of mulatto characters. See Berzon, Neither Black Nor White: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 122-25. The narrator writes of his "crisis experience" that "like my first spanking, it is one of the few incidences in my life that I can remember clearly" (p. 20). This is an interesting equation to propose, since spanking, and punishment in general, can be avoided with the proper behavior. The study of other blacks could be a way for the narrator to learn to behave "properly" and avoid further pain, embarrassment, or punishment.
4. Maurice J. O'Sullivan, Jr., "Of Souls and Pottage: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man," CLAJ, 23 (1979), 60-70.
5. Eugenia Collier has written on the theme of psychological and physical journeying in the narrative. See Collier, "The Endless Journey of an Ex-Coloured Man," Phylon, 32 (1971), 365-73. Both Collier and Simone Vauthier have also commented upon the text's criticism of American society and values. See Vauthier, "The Interplay of Narrative Modes in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man," Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 18 (1973), 173-81.
6. Many critics, including Houston A. Baker, Jr., Judith Berzon, and Richard Kostelanetz, read the novel as a story of "passing." See Baker, Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature (Washington: Howard Univ. Press, 1974); Berzon, Neither Black Nor White; and Kostelanetz, "The Politics of Passing: The Fiction of James Weldon Johnson," Negro American Literary Forum, 3 (1969), 22-24, 29. Along the same thematic lines, Ladell Payne explores the parallels between Johnson's narrator and other mulatto characters, such as William Faulkner's Joe Christmas and Charles Bon, and characters in the fiction of Charles Chesnutt and Robert Penn Warren. See Payne, "Themes and Cadences: James Weldon Johnson's Novel," SLJ, 11 (Spring 1979), 43-55. Sterling Brown and Stephen H. Bronz both find the text to be a fairly straightforward (and fairly inartistic) account of black life in America. See Brown, "A Century of Negro Portraiture in American Life," MR, 7 (1966), 73-96; and Bronz, Roots of Negro Consciousness (New York: Libra, 1964).
7. O'Sullivan, p. 61.
8. Robert E. Fleming, "Irony as Key to Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man," AL, 43 (1971), 83-96. Fleming also examines Johnson's novel in his essay "Contemporary Themes in Johnson's The Autobiography of an ExColoured Man," Negro American Literary Forum, 4 (1970), 120-24, 141; and in his book James Weldon Johnson (Boston: Twayne, 1987). Other critics who find irony directed toward the narrator in the novel include Bernard W. Bell, in The Afro-American Novel and Its Traditions (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1987); Howard Faulkner, in "James Weldon Johnson's Portrait of the Artist as an Invisible Man," BALF, 19 (1985), 147-51; and Marvin P. Garrett, in "Early Recollections and Structural Irony in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man," Crit, 2 (1971), 5-14. Also see Skerrett, who writes that Johnson reveals an "almost hermetically sealed structural irony" in his relation with the narrator (Skerrett, p. 551).
9. Stephen M. Ross, "Audience and Irony in Johnson's...
