by bela
10/23/2008 10:30:00 PM
In 1903, Du Bois published (what would turn out to be more than an opening act in a long tradition of non-fictional narratives) a collection of thirteen essays and a short story, titled The Souls of Black Folk. As most of his subsequent work, the text exemplifies a fervent commitment to richness and ambiguity, transcending the geographical space of the U.S., and speaking for/to the world at the dawn of a new millennium. Perhaps in terms of dating, the new millennium has just begun, but I would argue that Du Bois’s cultural narrative marks the realization of the new era just around the corner. His simplistic observation, as an act of a magician skilled in his performance ritual, about “the problem of the Twentieth Century [being] the problem of the colorline” is more than an insightful sociological remark. It is a foundation upon which many have later built their Babylon Tower, without acknowledging (knowingly or unknowingly) its existence or its source.The main focus of my ongoing dilemma regarding Du Bois’s work does not only stem from the layout of the work itself, but it is largely attributed to the critical readings on it that I have insofar encountered in my readings. If we look at Houston Baker’s piece, we encounter an invigorating reading of Du Bois’s work that nonetheless refuses to allow the narrative an autobiographical classification. On page 58, Baker proposes: “Outside its intensely regional cast, Souls, is virtually unclassifiable. The work is certainly not an autobiography, nor is it merely a collection of random fugitive essays. In a sense, it could be labeled a spiritual meditation – a numinous passage through spiritual landscapes.” With this clear-cut dismissal of the autobiographical-ity of Du Bois’s work, Baker not only dismisses the possibility of an individual story (as given in/through selected fragments) to become a cultural narrative, but also robs the emerging genre of one of its most treasured artifacts. The reason for such a dismissal is evident in the nature of Baker’s approach to Souls, which, in turn, is evident in the next few lines following the dismissal. “But the word “meditation” suggests a passivity that is nowhere apparent in the work. I think the phrase “cultural performance” is perhaps a most apt classification.” (58) I cannot say that I disagree with this formulation of a truly alive narrative; what I find at odds in Baker’s observations is the critic’s inability to see that Du Bois’s “act of cultural triumph” is precisely that due to the author’s persona and personality acting as “arrangers” of this musical performance in prose. As if the label of “autobiography” may take away some (if not all) of the playful originality of Du Bois’s painfully beautiful text. Then, there is the Rampersad essay, from a collection titled Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. In his reading of Du Bois’s Souls, Rampersad establishes a dichotomy between this text and the autobiography of another prominent African-American leader, Booker T. Washington, titled Up from Slavery. The critic finds this juxtapositioning most relevant in his closer examination of the particulars of these texts, since he feels that “the crucial area of difference between them has not been adequately recognized.” (105) Rampersad locates this difference in the authors’ treatment of slavery in their respective works. In order to address a vast array of people as his audience (the men and women who had been born as slaves, as well as the vast majority of populis who were the immediate descendents of slaves), Du Bois, says Rampersad, cannot make use of the classical autobiography as a form, which has served the likes of Washington and Douglass perfectly. “Du Bois’s approach…is in part a revival of the earlier, antebellum spirit of black autobiography and the slave narrative, but in more significant part also differs from that earlier spirit.” (107) The critic then moves on to elaborate further this observation, noting that Du Bois’s focal point (his deeply rooted sense of writing for a specific audience), toppled by his attitude towards slavery, allows, or better demands from him to relinquish the old mode of autobiography and create the loose structure of the collection around two important elements, that of imagination and that of memory. These two concepts are the spiritus movens of Du Bois’s narrative, helping him shape the image of the Veil and the idea of the Black American “double consciousness”. Despite Rampersad’s insightful parallels between the works of Du Bois and Washington, positioned in such a way as to point towards his final argument (that only by exploring the painful reality of slavery can African-Americans begin to understand themselves and their culture), I was left with this lingering sensation of an open ending. I was hoping that Rampersad would explore the impact of the text not only on the audience that Du Bois had in mind, but also on the culture as a single entity. Is it only African-Americans that need to understand ‘their’ culture? Isn’t it as important for the rest of society who are not of African descent to grasp the impact of slavery on this nation as a whole? Are we to treat Du Bois’s experiential experiment as exclusive to African-American readers and appreciators? I would like to believe that Du Bois’s initial attempt at an autobiographical occasion is more than just an individual story of a sacred status in the African-American community within the greater U.S. culture. I am attempting to see the narrative in terms of its place as a link in the chain of the American national narrative, standing tall right next to the Declaration of Independence and the Unites States Constitution. Albert E. Stone writes in his essay “History and the Final Self”, “here, clearly is a deeply felt and long-lasting impulse to order time and history around the self, a desire which unites the diverse aspects of Du Bois’s multifaceted career as a historian, sociologist, NAACP official, and imaginative writer.” However, the self is also shaped by the impact of time and history, so the ordering of events and the emergence of the narrative self out of them is the imaginative writer’s ability to bring together personal memory and cultural experience for the purposes of continuity and self-preservation. This ability is Du Bois’s strongest weapon and the text’s timelessness, regardless of whether we vow it as autobiographical of simply non-fictional in mode.
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