As you read to the end of Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, think about your overall evaluation of our nameless narrator. What do you applaud about him? What do you critique? What message about race, class, and gender in American do you think Johnson seeks to leave you with? And why do you he tells us this story through the genre of autobiography?
Looking forward to our discussion tomorrow--please come in ready to debate and discuss this provocative text!
There is some sense of Ishamel--the long abhorred narrator of Moby Dick-- in AutoX. In both is the maniacal, Linnaen need to name and classify the environment, from people to experiences to abstract ideas. Remember the exhaustive, encyclopaedic chapter of Moby Dick in which we are brow beaten with an exegesis of whale species? In a sense, Ishmael was attempting to approach the unknowable, represented by Moby Dick himself, by naming, categorizing, and classifying that which approached the uknowable. In a similiar sense AutoX names, categorizes, and classifies people because, in negotiating his identity, he is liminal: he hasn't crossed a marked threshold, so to speak. I admire that AutoX attempts some attempt to understand this unknowable "thing," by which I mean the concept of "race." His negotiations never resolve completely, right up to the end he is fearful that he has traded it all in for "pottage." It's the human condition that we all experience: have we made the right choices based on our efforts to understand our world? It's unknowable because experience is relative, just as each character's concept of the race question is different.
ReplyDeleteHow is the nature and form of autobiography relevant? Johnson's ironic handling of the form challenges concepts of authority, which a every reader (and person. period) must constantly negotiate. We may never know the truth and, while fiction may boldly wear its fiction on its sleeve, autobiography is the intersect of fact and fiction and how the human psyche rewrites history and imposes narrative.
As much as race, Autobiography of An Ex-Coloured Man is a treatise on how to unpack the notion of humanity, and how one man must contend with the added gravity of huge abstractions like race to make his way through what is, essentially, an existential crisis.
As I have stated before in class, this novel bothers me in many ways. Reading it a second time hasn't really changed my opinion of the book, but it made me realize that it isn't an autobiography and I can't blame Johnson for the mistakes the main character makes because it isn't really him. Throughout the novel, the main character seems to enjoy the luxuries of a white man. He refers to the Negro race as "them" and "they", not "we" and "us". He doesn't claim the race but he enjoys dipping his toes in, testing the waters, to see what it is like to be "colored". He jumps from different jobs and class ranks searching for where he best fits. The answer is honestly no where. He is too unpredictable and, as we would say today, ADD to be classified to one group, one class, one race. And the whole time he complains that he has no where to belong...
ReplyDeleteI feel overall there was a message trying to be sent by Johnson through this book. You can't judge a race by its color. Just because a white man is rich and has many friends doesn't mean he is happy, nor does it mean he has a better life than a black man working in a cigar shop who is content with his life. Also, I feel like another message he was trying to convay is that we can't classify everyone. Just because someone is black doesn't mean they go in a certain box and that they are like every other black person. And just because someone is European doesn't mean they are like every European. Through this ironic character, I feel like, Johnson was trying to show us this. We are all different but deserve to be treated the same.
-Anne-Elise Hawkins
Anonymous and the Black Crayon
ReplyDeleteIn examining the slave narratives of Harriet Ann Jacobs, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, one of the first, real, agonizing, whip-across-the-back degradations that the reader is exposed to from the antebellum institution of slavery is the sexual victimization of the female chattel. From the duplicate, white fathers of Washington and Douglass to the rapist of Jacob’s maternal grandmother, Weldon Johnson creates a fictional, crossbred, hybrid character conceive out of the “varicolored glass bottles stuck in the ground neck down”, rag-timed, Jim Crow South to combat the stereotypes - and hypocrisy - of white America.
In using all the metaphors so apparent in the text, Weldon Johnson was presented a challenge that he addresses in “the Dilemma of the Negro Author” (1928); It is the dilemma of the “double audience” and, more to the point, writing a character with the intention of passing as white that some may say is a traitor to his race. But, in 1912, how do you define an African-American who is intelligent and literate, confident and gifted who is not “stenciled” as “simple, indolent, improvident peasant”. You go outside the black template, and much like an innocent, anonymous child with a crayon and a big, blank piece of paper, have at it; portrayed, you have a sfumato blending (It still works) of black and white that, as Sidonia Smith and Julia Watson in "Reading Autobiography"(p. 162) aesthetically and critically define as “multiple approaches to life narrative [that] coexist in a productive ferment”.
Pretty ironic, isn’t it?
This book presents itself with a sort of plebian frankness typical of American literature from the period. The observations made by the narrator throughout the novel, the many tangents and digresses touching on the struggles of mankind, his place in the world, etc. but always at the same time revolving around the "race question," are no accident. Johnson said roughly, that everything the negro has done, all of his accomplishments and failures, flow through a narrow channel inhibited by the very fact that he is "coloured," and by the same fact kept from flowing into the currents of common existence. I find this to be one of the revealing moments in the novel, at least as far as my interpretation goes. Through the entirety of the book, all the plot devices and whatnot, there is this pervading sense that the author can never escape from this funnel, but is destined to perpetually fall back in, through no fault of his own, to the realization that black is all he could ever be. This fact interferes with every single aspect of his life.
ReplyDeleteI think that Johnson chose autobiography as a formula for his truth because he's trying to present to an ignorant population a person just as full of angst, raw passion and frank power as any American writer, and attempting to shatter that boundary between the races of the time. Many of his themes are utterly human in their tragedy, and though the novel is run through the thin color line, it pours out into the rest of human existence, into the rest of time; its mere survival can attest to this. I find the narrator to be ultimately relatable in some way to a good majority of people, and it is this fact alone which gives it meaning.
The notion proposed in class discussion that the narrator might be considered an “ethnologist” is a tenuous one. Certainly, he makes categorical remarks upon people of all colors and walks of life, but the central conflict throughout the book is that he cannot truly identify with any of them, and his classifications cannot be trusted. For example, in his assessments of the various “forms” of African American, he touches upon the Uncle-Tom-esque, blackface-minstrel tendencies of the lower echelons. He feels this “happy-go-lucky, laughing, shuffling, banjo-picking being” is better off this way, lest he “go the way of the Indian,” which I can only suppose to mean the more aggressive and isolating way. Were the narrator really a creditable source, he might have delved deeper into this question, and perhaps drawn more complicated conclusions on what Cornell West has called the “tragicomic hope” of African Americans. In the same vein, the narrator only plays at white American archetypes (a category of literary character that in and of itself should always promote a healthy degree of skepticism).
ReplyDeleteBut this error in judgment is saved, at least in part, by the autobiographical form of the novel. That is to say, it saves Johnson from judgment. As with any novel, the reader can glean thought-provoking insights or infuriating generalizations; you may choose to agree with Johnson, and applaud his bold, double-agent foray in a tumultuous time, or you may think he may be just as confused as his character. But in any case, the blame will lie with the narrator, who is crafted to be reflexive and myopic. Johnson could not defer culpability in such a way if he had written from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. I do not mean to imply that Johnson was ignoble or evasive in forming his book in this way; on the contrary, while the reader may disagree with the narrator, because he is complete fiction the reader is really left to argue with himself, which is, I like to think, the most any writer can hope for.
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ReplyDelete(reposting - fixed some errors)
ReplyDeleteI applaud the author's incredible skill in making characters that are of so multi-dimensional and changing a nature that many folks would suspect that the main character, for instance, is actually multiple people posing as one character or dissociative. Neither assertion would necessarily be right or wrong.
The author's methods have helped to expand people's ability to see greater spectrums of complexity not only in issues concerning racial identity, but also in human nature and personal identity. It is not often we see such hypocrisy in overt form in our daily lives, nor such dynamic change in personality so quickly as is illustrated by the author.
This work has prepared people for a greater grasping of the complexities of identity in sentient beings. For this I deeply respect and appreciate the author and this work.