Signifying and Bad Taste

GRAAT On-Line issue #12 June 2012 Signifying and bad taste Claude Julien Université François-Rabelais de Tours « The black phallus is a dominant symbol in [Invisible Man’s] formal pattern of behavior, as its manifold recurrences attest.” (Baker, Jr. 181) African American fiction, when embraced globally, shows little inclination to laughter. Protest usually follows other modes resting on the dignity of model characters. Born from the consciousness of a minority status, it pursues accommodation while resisting mainstream hegemony. The “bad taste” we are going to deal with here has roots in the 1930s and 1950s but flowered in the 1960s and 1970s, a short-lived spate of burlesque literature based on the most hardy of racist stereotypes, to wit black sexuality. Indeed, persistent clichés go back to the colonial period when white imaginations extolled the black woman’s eagerness for and expertise at luscious sex. A piece of 18th century anonymous doggerel published in a Southern paper will serve here as an illustration of that state of mind: Next comes a warmer race, from sable sprung, To love each thought, to lust each nerve is strung; The Samboe dark, and the Mulattoe brown, The Mestize fair, the well-limb’d Quaderoon, And jetty Afric, from no spurious sire, Warm as her soil, and as her sun—on fire. 35 These sooty dames, well vers’d in Venus’ school, Make love an art, and boast they kiss by rule. (Jordan 150) Conversely, the fear of black-white miscegenation turned black males into oversexed bucks whose hunger for white ladies must be restrained. These fables are multiform. For instance, they resurfaced under a supposedly friendlier garb during the 1920s when return-to-nature whites celebrated the Harlem “hot nights”. Early black novelists countered these rampant stereotypes through the creation of exemplary characters. Just refer to Charles Chesnutt’s melodrama The House Behind the Cedars (1900) with pure Rena who resists mutual love in an interracial union while her more adventurous brother who broke the taboo is punished by his wife’s early death in child birth. Such positive heroes became part and parcel of a fictional code representing loving and faithful couples who conform to socially approved behavior—“good taste”. The question the conference title leads to is the fracturing of that code, i.e. the when and how parody and burlesque of white racist fabulations came into print. The call for papers mentions the intention to shock. That fiction went beyond the intention to shock white readers is arguable: settling an old account also belongs in the vengeful laughter studied below where three main stages will come under consideration. Black No More (1931), George S. Schuyler’s unique story that ridicules both white racism and the “New Negro” will open the field. The 1950s will follow with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), a most provocative story deriding the national sexual mythology. Ellison’s masterpiece remained fairly isolated as the Civil Rights campaign was rising, but, with the blues for an ideological backbone, it is widely considered as a precursor that jazzed up racist stereotypes and prepared the ground for Chester Himes’s spirited detective series that may be regarded as part and parcel of the rambunctious “bad taste” of the 1965-1975 period when the Black Arts Movement flowered. Black “bad taste” never lapses into graphic pornography. The odd isolated instance of Clarence Major’s All Night Visitors, disfigured as it was under the cover of Ophelia Press, does not make a trend. Black “bad taste” is rooted in “signifying”, a culturally specific form of irony which consists in portraying characters so gifted 36 they are able to carry out such sexual prowess as even white racism did not imagine. Signifying is a long standing practice where irony, exaggeration and double meaning come together to undermine the hurt of being dominated through laughter. Let us illustrate this briefly through Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1901): the Hamiltons are happy servants living a good life until the husband is falsely accused of theft. He is sentenced to prison, and his wife and family are thrown into exile in New York where the children fall into sin, gambling dens for the son, and, worst of all, dancing for the daughter. Hamilton’s innocence is uncovered and he is granted his former position back. Husband and wife return to their modest house by the estate’s gate. Taken at face value, the book seems to vindicate the while southern doxa of the time: that the northern Babylon spells ruin for black people, that happiness and justice prevail in the rural South and that blacks have no cause to migrate: they should rather “cast [their] bucket[s] where [they] are” (Grant 196), as Booker T. Washington argued in Atlanta in 1905, about one year before the massacre there. However, the title leads to a different reading: the “gods” amusing themselves are white, masters toying with the lives of their servants, and the whole book “signifies” by debunking white received ideas. Signifying is the sap of black life and literature. It irrigates Chesnutt’s “A Deep Sleeper”, McKay’s so-called nostalgia in “Home Thoughts” which both share the spirit lighting Etheridge Knight’s “I Sing of Shine”. The concept was taken over by H. L. Gates in The Signifying Monkey (1988) when he built a theory in which signifying appears either as an intertextual revision or as a critical revision of established ideas. The “bad taste” studied below belongs in that perspective as it corners the white obsession with lusting and super sexed blacks, male and female, into satirical situations. Opting for a chronological presentation will, it is hoped, show that “bad taste” increasingly called upon black culture and grew more sexually explicit. The irony of it is that the more conservative blacks think that, as does Brother Wrestrum the white leader of the Brotherhood when advising the Invisible Man, that all racist stereotypes “cause confusion” and are best “kept out of sight” (Ellison, 1965, 321). Bad taste, or all-round irreverence? The case of Schuyler’s Black No More 37 Harlem Renaissance novelists became more flexible where the earlier code is concerned. Shining examples are Langston Hughes, Rudolph Fisher and Zora Neale Hurston whose stories do not shy away from everyday urban and rural life. However, the comic bad taste we are concerned with here found its way most prominently in one exceptional instance, Schuyler’s Black No More1 dedicated to “all Caucasians in the great republic who can trace their ancestry back ten generations and confidently assert there are no black leaves, twigs, limbs or branches on their family trees.” So-called black primitivism is lampooned as the story opens with Max Disher and his friend Bunny (a nickname that conjures up Brother Rabbit the trickster) bragging about their female conquests—mostly words as actual successes are yet to occur. Their lives change when Dr. Junius Crookman invents a process altering skin pigmentation. An ever enterprising rascal, Max is among the first to join the wave and the miracle occurs: his skin turns pink pork colored and his hair blond. He changes his name to Matthew Fisher and heads South where he wins the hand of a woman of his dreams, a “titian blond” (Schuyler 79) who is none other than the daughter of the Grand Exalted Giraw of the Knights of Nordica. Max quickly rises in the Klan hierarchy as he wages a vigorous campaign against “those damn white niggers” (Schuyler 78). Pandemonium breaks loose, especially in Dixieland because there was no way of “telling a real Caucasian from an imitation one” (Schuyler 118). A jet-black singer posturing as a plantation owner launches a pastiche of the blues that bemoans the departure and loss of his Mammy.2 Sun tans become fashionable when it is discovered the sun has no effect on fake white skin, and the country becomes most moral as girls shy away from sex because imitation whiteness does not affect the genes. Precisely, Matthew and Helen become parents. Matthew is so white- looking that Helen who is madly in love with her husband persuades herself she is the one with a tainted ancestry because she is a genuine southerner. She forgets she ever was a racist, but the situation becomes urgent when the press spread the news the Giraw has mulatto grandchildren. They all flee to Brazil where they live comfortably off the money that was picked from their followers, and the book ends on a doting grandfather making sand pies on a beach. 38 While the book must have shocked racially right-minded whites for its transgressing a taboo, Max’s infatuation with Helen also signified on the early code of black fiction that frowned upon interracial unions. Black No More caused quite a stir among intellectuals as the spirit of the black Renaissance was waning. Everything the black pride movement of the 1920s stood for was attacked. No one is spared among the ridiculed main political and cultural actors of the movement. W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey become Santop Licorice and Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard; the NAACP is renamed the “National Social Equality League”, its periodical The Crisis has a new name: “Dilemma”. Schuyler’s novel is still as disturbing today as is was in 1931. In the epilogue titled “And so on and so on”, Dr. Crookman has become Surgeon General. An announcement that new Caucasians are actually lighter-skinned than the old ones (who were never white in the first place) staggers the country and puts an end to the veneration of whiteness.

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