C.L.R. James, Vanity Fair and the Audience

Abstract

Abstract This essay considers what we can learn about the role of the audience or the reader from the work of C.L.R. James. Beginning with a brief consideration of James' theorisation of audiences, it moves on to discuss his own reading practice and, in particular, his relationship to Thackeray's Vanity Fair. It L· argued that in important ways James' love of Thackeray reflects and informs the construction of his own novel, Minty Alley, as well as the critical populism of his politics more generally. Keywords C.L.R. James, William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Minty Alley, Audience, Marxism In 1948 C.L.R. James delivered a report to the national conference of the Socialist Workers' Party in America, entitled 'The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA. The report, which was published under a pseudonym in Fourth International later that year, is widely seen as the culmination of James' decade-long grappling with the experience and history of racism in America, and with the question of the relationship between the politics of black resistance and class struggle.1 In his peroration James appealed, as he did often in his writings and speeches, to a kind of ethnographic evidence. The 'awakening passions'2 which simmer among the black population in America, he says, are there to be recognised by anyone who takes the time to get to know that population and its history 'intimately'. And for James, it becomes clear, such intimacy begins with a willingness to watch that population as it gathers, not only in the overtly political contexts of public rallies and marches, but also in those social spaces given over to expressive and creative activity. Learn to watch this community, James suggests to his comrades, 'at their own theatres [...] at their dances [...] in their churches'.3 Anyone reasonably familiar with James' work will no doubt recognise this move on his part. For all of the close critical attention that James always paid to the action up on the screen, or to the texts in front of him, he spent just as much time glancing sidelong at his fellow watchers and readers. Repeatedly in his cultural criticism he steps back from the events or texts at hand in order to watch those who bring themselves and their longings to these things. When, to give a famous example, at the start of Beyond a Boundary* James remembers the shot making of the local 'ne'er-do-well' Matthew Bondman, it is a memory secured by the 'long, low Ah!' [which] came from many a spectator'5 as those shots were played. Indeed, in a sense, it is the memory of that 'ah', that James records. Although Bondman is the one who makes his shots, it is the 'ah' of the crowd which makes something of them. And it is that response, therefore, which raises for James all of his subsequent questions regarding the true definition of art, and the relationship between popular culture and politics.6 Later on in Beyond a Boundary James admits that his critical, historicising approach to understanding sport is unlikely to be common practice among the crowds who attend sporting events.7 Nevertheless, James arrives at his own historical interpretation of sport, and of other forms of culture, precisely through an attentiveness to the attitudes of such crowds. That intimacy with the audiences of cultural production which he called for in 1948 was not a pretentious populist gesture. Rather, it was something like a statement of practice, and repeatedly the conclusions of James' cultural analyses are informed by the judgements or responses of those around him, by the vernacular criticisms which he overhears on the terraces during a dull day's play at the Dover cricket festival,8 for example, or by the communication of energy between band and dancers which he recognised excitedly as he spent an afternoon watching the audience in Harlem's Apollo theatre.9 In other words, as Neil Lazarus has argued, 10 an emphasis on the role played by the audience is a pivotal and pioneering part of the way in which James went about analysing the colonial and postcolonial politics of culture. …