The Art and Life of Clarence Major

FIVE: The Machinery of Postmodernism

[ c h a p t e r f i v e The Machinery of Postmodernism Having established his credentials as a “certified” academic and as an internationally recognized poet, Major set about the work of entering fully what might be called the Avant-Garde Establishment. He brought together his nonfiction into The Dark and Feeling. He took up his position at Colorado, primarily in the creative writing program and became part of the staff there of American Book Review, a journal established by Ronald Sukenick to discuss literary works outside the commercial mainstream. He had two novels published by the Fiction Collective and became an active member of that group. He also spent more time with painting, including works that are incorporated into Emergency Exit (1979). He largely turned away from poetry during this period, preferring perhaps to belong more to the fiction community in which he found himself artistically. the dark and feeling For the publication of his first collection of nonfiction prose, Major turned once again to a little-known house. The Third Press was established by Joseph Okpaku, a Nigerian-born businessman who earned advanced degrees in structural engineering and dramatic literature from Stanford University. He started the press in 1970 in New York initially as a means of bringing African writing to the United States. To this end, he published 90 ] chapter five work by Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. His list also included Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, and Ruby Dee. Interestingly, he solicited and published the official biography of Gerald Ford and published his own study of the Chicago Eight trial in 1970. Thus, Third Press, while clearly racial in its mission, was not particularly narrow in its focus. It was also the case that Okpaku was clearly entrepreneurial in his approach; he was the ceo of Telecom Africa International Corporation and a consultant to the United Nations. He made Third Press into one of the most successful black publishers in the United States during the mid-1970s, and it continued until 1986. It may well have been Okpaku’s business sense that attracted the man who had subtitled his little magazine “A Clarence Major Venture.” The Dark and Feeling: Reflections on Black American Writers and Their Works (1974) includes interviews, book reviews, and commentaries on individual writers as well as more general observations about black writing. Of the nineteen pieces, seven originally appeared in Essence, where Sharyn was poetry editor. The first part focuses on the nature of black writing, in both fiction and poetry. Major continues his effort to define a position that both recognizes the “racial” character of literature and claims the validity of an individual aesthetic. In the first piece, “The Tribal Terrain and the Technological Beast,” he uses his experience at Cazenovia College in 1969 as an example of the bind black writers find themselves in. The title of the seminar was Black Excellence in American Literature; he asked the participants how that differed from Excellence in Black American Literature. The problem, as he describes it, is that no one understood the difference. His argument here, and elsewhere in the book, is that art and ethnicity have been made inseparable for readers, teachers, critics, and the artists themselves. The “technological beast” of the title is the process by which language is turned into marketable product. He condemns what he calls the Black Literary– Political Establishment, which serves as judge of what counts as black literature . He notes, for example, the tendency of black critics to read Ralph Ellison out of the race because of his refusal to serve a social-realist ideology (Dark and Feeling, 19). It is important to understand that Major is not, at this point, making the claim for “art for art’s sake.” He is perfectly willing to accept fiction that engages social problems and moral dilemmas , as seen in his review of George Cain’s Blueschild Baby. The issue is the commitment of the writer to an artistic rendering of material: “I wanted to suggest to the Cazenovia participants that black writers were whole people the machinery of postmodernism [ 91 who, when they were lucky, produced whole books, works with a rounded sense of humanity” (15). Thus, one can speak out of what he calls the “inner tribal terrain,” the space where social constructions such as race are personally experienced, and can speak to whatever audience is willing...