Notes on a Marxist Interpretation of Black American Literature

Abstract

As its title Notes on Interpretation of Black American Literature indicates, this paper is tentative and suggestive. It aims to present some initial thoughts about subject, raise some relevant issues, and chart some possible directions that criticism of black could take. Perhaps first question to be confronted is this: What does phrase a interpretation of black American literature mean? As obvious as answer may at first appear to be, it is not. Even though Marx and Engels left large body of commentary about art, they did not devise an original, formal, Marxist aesthetic system. Therefore, as one writer has put it, the history of aesthetics has been history of unfolding of possible applications of ideas and categories to arts and to theory of art. This yields many approaches and critical possibilities. However, at base of them all is belief that writer and work are dialectical products of particular historical moment, conditioned by economic-class realities. With this conception of as starting point, one can move in many directions (tracing correspondences between art and class, arguing revolutionary function of art, demystifying existing artists and works, and so on) or adopt methodology of any number of critics (Georg Lukacs, Ernest Fischer, or Herbert Marcuse, to name only three). For general, introductory purposes of this paper, a interpretation of black American literature can be taken simply to mean looking at body of black American from perspective of Marxism to see what relationships exist between two. This would involve examining elements in literature, as well as critiquing from point of view. Specifically, investigation could encompass at least five different tasks: (1) compiling bibliography; (2) studying authors and their works; (3) studying works of non-Marxist authors which contain elements; (4) discussing according to categories of realism, modernism, and socialist realism; and (5) comparing critical tenets with literature. Undoubtedly, most basic service that scholar could provide would be making list of works which would be necessary and helpful to interpretation of black literature. While Baxandall bibliography, Marxism and Aesthetics, contains section on black writers, reference that goes beyond this is needed. 2 The bibliography should list black writers and works, secondary criticism of them and their productions, and other sources which provide historical, sociological, and literary background (for example, James 0. Young's Black Writers of Thirties and Harold Cruse's The Crisis of Negro Intellectual). Al works which concern blacks and Marxism-communism-even those which are not focused on writers and literature-would be valuable. The bibliography should also be annotated to provide maximum guidance and assistance, especially to beginning students. Many of books and articles included in it would have an anti-Marxist, anti-communist bias. (Notation would indicate this as well as identify strongly partisan works.) Consequently, critic could see opposing view (which bibliography would also supply) and/or study raw materials and basic documents personally in order to form his or her own conclusions. An obvious beginning approach to per se could certainly be study of black writers and their works. Looking at writer as whole would necessitate paying attention to both his Marxistoriented and non-Marxist-oriented works, but former would be of greater interest. Furthermore, many black authors were for only period of their careers, and when they ceased subscribing to philosophy, they usually stopped overtly presenting that world view in their writings. The list is impressive: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Amiri Baraka, to name some of them. The nature of criticism given these writers would, of course, vary according to volume and quality of their works, their general stature, and degree to which they express philosophy. Richard Wright, for instance, has been accorded great deal of this type of critical attention. One of poems which he wrote in first eager flush of enthusiasm, I Have Seen Black Hands, is fairly well-known, anthologized, and commented upon in terms of its political origin. The same thing can be said of two of stories in Uncle Tom's Children