A Stereotyped Archetype: E. E. Cummings’ Jean Le Nègre

A STEREOTYPED ARCHETYPE: E.E. CUMMINGS’JEAN LE NEGRE James F. Smith, Jr.* The complexity that characterized American culture and society immediately following World War I manifested itself in such unlikely contemporaries as the Eighteenth Amendment and the Jazz Age, the quiet life of Middletown and the bohemianism of Greenwich Village. The escapades of Warner Fabian’s “flaming youth” shared the lime­ light with the old-time heroics of Zane Grey’s westerns. Young intel­ lectual rebels sought new systems of philosophical values while Negro Americans tried to make pragmatic inroads into the democ­ racy for which they had fought in France. Writers of the Lost Gener­ ation and those of the Harlem Renaissance began to write from the perspectives of exiles and attemped to create new artistic identities for themselves. Protest and anti-war novels were popular and some alienated white authors began to realize that the position of the Negro in the impersonal mainstream of culture and society was anal­ ogous to their own. E.E. Cummings emerged as a member of the Lost Generation, an anti-war novelist, and one of the earliest authors to portray the predicament of modem man in terms of a Negro character. Jean Le Negre, no matter how stereotyped he appears, is one of the most fascinating inmates of The Enormous Room, and as a member of that motley group of social outcasts, Jean stands out as an archetype of humanity confronting the inhumanity of a govern­ ment suffering from acute war-hysteria. When Boni and Liveright published The Enormous Room in 1922, critics greeted the book with either praise or damnation-few review­ ers could be ambivalent toward the novel.1 Unfavorable critics were disturbed by Cummings’ elaborate descriptions of the filth produced by crowded living in a room with no indoor plumbing. Moreover, many of them objected to Cummings’ unconventional style and his approach to such unusual subject matter: they felt that he did not maintain proper authorial “distance” from his material, and they pointed out that his narrative did not follow traditional lines of or­ ganization.2 On the other hand, a few people, such as John Dos Passos, praised the book as a unique achievement in modern litera­ ture and lauded Cummings for not concerning himself with what ♦James F. Smith, Jr., is an Assistant Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, Ogontz. Studies in American Fiction 25 critics or censors would say.3 Cummings had to be prodded by his father to write the book, but what he finally created was uniquely his own. Although accusations of filth, gushy sentimentality, and unre­ lieved bitterness may have some justification, Cummings did attempt to make his narrative as honest, accurate, and compelling as he could; and, for his part, he was quite unwilling to let anyone else dictate his form of composition or choice of suitable material.4 The Enormous Room is indeed a shocking book, but not primarily because of its “excremental” or sexual passages. Cummings pro­ poses an extraordinary thesis: the only people in whom he could find genuine humanity were outcasts of society, the prisoners of La Ferté Mace. The fact that the author could have avoided the whole un­ pleasant experience of being detained simply by telling “Monsieur le Ministre de Süreté de Noyon” that he hated Germans is signifi­ cant. Cummings deliberately answers his interrrogation in such a way as to insure that he will accompany his friend “B.” (William Slater Brown, who was indeed guilty of writing letters critical of the French government) to the detention center. He feels oppressed by society and so he accepts the role of a “great criminal” to find his in­ dividuality again. What under any other circumstances would be horrifying becomes pleasant in its own way. Cummings takes great pains to sketch the poles of humanity versus inhumanity, usually in terms of the individual versus society. For example, once he arrives at La Ferté Macé and becomes accus­ tomed to the daily routine there, he focuses his attention upon repre­ sentatives of the “human” inmates and the “inhuman” administra­ tors. Even though his classifying approaches the typing of a moral­ ity play, when his attention shifts...