Tragic Aspects of the Blues

Abstract

T HE DUALITY OF American mythology a dream of social success and perfection on one hand and the fear of failure so strong as to produce on the otheris the conflict essential to our indigenous tragedy. The reality of this conflict is seen at every level of our experience. The process of such conflict produces a double image of reality which we might call, in the language of Oscar Mandel, the tragic facts' of experience. Death, of the individual or of some positive value (communal, ethical, or natural), with its inevitable victory over effort, is the first fact. The second fact is a socio-psychological one: the simple reality of life in the society of others brings with unavoidably, inevitably failure, friction, hate, despair. The purpose is the impulse, born of desire and need, to live among one's kind. In a naked and awesome way, the one American figure who embodies the encounter of the dream of success and knowledge of guilt is the bluesman.2 From the collective lyric of blues singers3 there emerges a single, articulate, self-conscious, struggling, yet ultimately resilient character whose endless song of woe echoes the gloom and splendor of classic tragedy's finest creations. The bluesman as a character is especially interesting because, unlike all other figures, he is self-created. He exists not in a self-contained, well-organized dramatic structure, but in the unpredictable and unjoined works of several authors, most of whom themselves lived lives of extreme implications. To speak of the bluesman as a figure, then, will be necessary to understand the blues' tragic sense of for is precisely this sense, transmitted in the combined lyrics of the blues singers, that makes of the bluesman a recognizable, single character. The sense provokes the elemental question from which all else begins and besides which nothing else truly matters: What does life, being itself, truly mean? In Richard B. Sewall's words, it recalls the original terror, harking back to a world that antedates the conceptions of philosophy, the consolations of religions, and whatever constructions the human mind has devised to persuade itself that its universe is secure.4 It recalls, then, the pre-rational terror of the unknown. The