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Langston Hughes's Poetic Vision of the American Dream: a Complex

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Langston Hughes's Poetic Vision of the American Dream: a Complex Angles New Perspectives on the Anglophone World 7 | 2018 Digital Subjectivities Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language Christine Dualé Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/920 DOI: 10.4000/angles.920 ISSN: 2274-2042 Publisher Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur Electronic reference Christine Dualé, « Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language », Angles [Online], 7 | 2018, Online since 01 November 2018, connection on 10 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/angles/920 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ angles.920 This text was automatically generated on 10 December 2020. Angles est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative... 1 Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language Christine Dualé 1 In his collection of poems entitled Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Langston Hughes observed and gave a particularly original restitution of the historic evolution of African-American culture.1 Montage was, indeed, largely shaped by the impact of the transformation of Black music as well as the hopes and dreams of African Americans. The poems, like be-bop and jazz, are marked by conflicting changes, sudden interjections, broken rhythms and are “punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks and distortions of the music of a community in transition.” (Rampersad 387) Hughes’s musical poetry was revolutionary both in its form and ideology. He repeated his experiment with Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz in 1961, inspired by free-jazz and where Black music constitutes the thematic unity that holds the poems together. 2 Hughes gained his reputation as a “jazz poet” during the jazz era or Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.2 By applying the jazz and blues techniques to his writing, Hughes originally portrayed ordinary Black life; it also allowed him to revive this type of music which he considered the very expression of Black soul.3 Though Hughes was not the first one to use Black music in his writing, he was the first and only to make jazz the principle of his writing and to apply the blues technique to translate the same emotion and sensitivity of ordinary Black people. After his musical and experimental phase in the 1920s and 1930s, Hughes turned to other forms of experimentations in his poetry like manifestos or letters. His poetic evolution followed the evolution of history, of Black-American history, but also the evolution of all forms of art, and of music in particular. Montage, which was published in 1951, is the description of the life of the African-American community of Harlem through 87 poems all inspired by be-bop. Hughes experimented free-jazz in his writing and radically changed the way his work was perceived. His resistance to a form of polished art implied an ideology and culture different from his fellow writers and poets. “White self-interest under the guise of Angles, 7 | 2018 Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative... 2 patronage often detours Black people from self-knowledge and self-awareness. Black voices of the 1920s [like Langston Hughes] demonstrate the complexities that result from that displacement.” (Archer-Straw 177) As Petrine Archer-Straw also states in her study of avant-garde Paris and Black culture in the 1920s: Many black intellects were disquieted by the white vogue for blackness. They recognized how frivolous and temporal it was, and the extent to which their culture was being admired for all the ‘primitive’ qualities from which they wished to be distanced. A troubled Langston Hughes expressed his concern in The Big Sea, and noted how distortions in black artistic practice were developing because of blacks’ interaction with whites. […] The problem for artists like McKay, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson was how to cross over into mainstream artistic circles while maintaining their integrity and commitment to the black cause. (Archer-Straw 175) 3 As a matter of fact, Hughes maintained his commitment to the Black cause all along his career and succeeded in navigating the two worlds of Black and White intelligentsia and in maintaining his cultural posturing at a time when Black positive cultural images were promoted and when his representation of humble Black people was resented. 4 The theme of the American Dream and the possibilities for the Black man to reach and to accomplish this dream are recurrent in Hughes’s poetry. Montage was largely shaped by the impact of the transformation of Black music as well as the hope and dreams of African Americans. The tension between the realities of the Black experience and the unrealized dream provided the dynamic of Hughes’s writing. W. Jason Miller (2015) argues Martin Luther King’s dream owes to Hughes’s poetry and vision as both men articulated the dream of better lives for the oppressed and marginalized. Throughout his career, Hughes observed and gave an original restitution of the historic evolution of the African-American dream and culture. With his musical aesthetics, his rhetorical innovation uncovered the various interpretations and assessment of the dreams of African Americans. His poetic technique also served important cultural and narrative functions. Through his poems, the reader is asked to be permanently active and is urged to decipher the different layers of meanings to be able to rebuild African- American history and to listen to the different forms of Black music. As we shall see, the reader is caught in a process of “collective fiction” typical of “minority writing”, as argued by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille Plateaux (1980). Such process participates in the construction or the definition of a people being at the margin (or “minoritarians” in Deleuzian philosophy), and in the creative process of a poet writing from the margin: A minority is not defined by the paucity of its numbers but by its capacity to become or, in its subjective geography, to draw for itself lines of fluctuation that open up a gap and separate it from the axiom constituting a redundant majority. (Parr 167) 5 It is important, here, to clarify Deleuze's “minority” concept since it is an English translation of the French mistranslation of Kafka’s German “kleine Literatur”. To understand the writings of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari wondered how best to approach his work. They used the concept of “rhizome” to show the many entrances and interpretations of Kafka’s work, which led to discuss the notion of “minor literature”: “ Kafka does not consider the problem of expression in an abstract or universal manner. He considers it in connection with minor literatures — the Jewish literature of Warsaw or Prague, for example”. (Deleuze 1996:16) Therefore, the American-English word “ minority” designates something very different from what Deleuze and Kafka meant when they wrote on “minorité” and “kleine”. Angles, 7 | 2018 Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative... 3 A minor literature is not the literature of a minor language but the literature a minority makes in a major language. But the primary characteristic of a minor literature involves all the ways in which the language is affected by a strong coefficient of deterritorialization. […] The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political. In “great” literatures, on the contrary, the question of the individual (familial, conjugal, etc.) tends to be connected to other, no less individual questions, and the social milieu serves as environment and background. (Deleuze 1996:16) 6 By considering the poetic description of the living conditions of African Americans, my intent is to offer an analysis of some of Montage’s powerful poems through the poet’s social lens. Thus, I will analyze Hughes’s vision of the American Dream for his people and how he addressed some of the most pressing social issues of his time which reverberate in contemporary America. My essay also asserts that through this particular technique, Hughes’s writing is constantly on the edge of musical and written forms; an hypotext which bonds his poems to minority writing and minor literature as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. The subterranean, encoded language Hughes displays in his poetry is typical of “minor literature”. I will therefore argue that Hughes “encoded” the mainstream language to adapt it to his specific needs and to express differently what the mainstream language could not translate. Hughes’s rhetoric of the dream 7 The theme of the dream is a central motif of Langston Hughes’s poetry that established the continuity between the depictions of simple African Americans and their “deferred” expectations. Hughes made poetic use of the African-American folklore to bond individuals into a community sharing the same oral tradition. He thus created an art form vested in the African-American experience: Dreams have always figured prominently in the works of Langston Hughes. Hughes’s work is devoted to outlining, celebrating, and agitating on behalf of the dreams of oppressed and marginalized peoples worldwide, with particular focus on the dreams of African Americans. (Tracy 223) 8 As early as 1932, in The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, Hughes wrote poems about his people and for his people on hopes, dreams, aspirations, life and love. In this first collection of poems, Hughes’s message was universal and he wrote about the expectations of Black people. Hughes’s poems in The Dream Keeper did not translate the bitterness and disillusions of the 1940s and 1950s as it appeared in Montage.
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