Beyond the Sound Barrier

The Jazz Controversy in Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Kristin K Henson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136726804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Beyond the Sound Barrier examines twentieth-century fictional representations of popular music-particularly jazz-in the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison. Kristin K. Henson argues that an analysis of musical tropes in the work of these four authors suggests that cultural "mixing" constitutes one of the central preoccupations of modernist literature. Valuable for any reader interested in the intersections between American literature and the history of American popular music, Henson situates the literary use of popular music as a culturally amalgamated, boundary-crossing form of expression that reflects and defines modern American identities.

CHAPTER ONE

“A sympathetic, singing instrument”

Musical Tropes and Cultural Fusion in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

Recounting the story of his life, the narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man depicts his early development as a musician in terms of his proficiency with written forms and his skill as an improviser. By the age of seven, he can play by ear, and he knows all the notes in both clefs, but he “prefer[s] not to be hampered by notes” (9). He takes lessons and later studies “the theory of music” (40), but his childhood music teacher has “no small difficulty at first in pinning [him] down to the notes” (9). He listens to his mother play Episcopal hymns “from the book” (7) and old spirituals “by ear” (8). She sings, and he interrupts “by chiming in with strange harmonies” (8).

As a child prodigy, the ex-coloured man distinguishes himself not just with technique but also with the emotional impact of his interpretations. He writes:

Very early I acquired that knack of using the pedals, which makes the piano a sympathetic, singing instrument, quite a different thing from the source of hard or blurred sounds it so generally is. I think this was due not entirely to natural artistic temperament, but largely to the fact that I did not begin to learn the piano by counting out exercises, but by trying to reproduce the quaint songs which my mother used to sing, with all their pathetic turns and cadences. (27)

This passage suggests that the ex-coloured man evokes a distinctive expressive and vocal sound from the piano, a sound influenced by African-derived cadences of his mother’s “quaint songs.” He develops his own style, not by playing written music as “counting out exercises” but by the methods of oral tradition. He uses the “pathetic turns and cadences” of the music he hears his mother sing to transform a traditional European instrument from a “source of hard or blurred sounds” into “a sympathetic, singing instrument.”

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man often raises questions about how its protagonist can fuse the elements of his multivalent cultural identity. Music serves as a trope in the novel for a kind of fusion or coherence that allows contradictions to coexist. The ex-coloured man’s musical style, like his cultural background and his parentage, fuses “black” and “white.” The beauty of his musical style-his transformation of something “hard or blurred” into something “sympathetic, singing”–highlights the tragedy of the novel. According to the rules of the racially divided society in which he lives, the ex-coloured man is denied the option of fusion; he must stay within one boundary or the other. He must limit his identity to “white” or “black” only. In the face of the social realities, the ex-coloured man’s expertise in two musical traditions illustrates the actual fluidity of boundaries that are conventionally represented as rigid and immutable.

In terms that parallel the portrayal of the ex-coloured man’s approach to musical expertise, Ralph Ellison once described his own youthful musical ambitions. Ellison asserts that

there wasn’t always this division between the ambitions of jazz musicians and the standards of classical music; the idea was to master both traditions. In school the classics were pushed at us on all sides, and if you danced, if you shared any of the social life of the young people, jazz was inescapable; it was all around you. And if you were a musician you were challenged by its sounds and by the techniques required to produce them…Such men as [trumpeter Icky] Lawrence and [bassist Walter] Page–and there were several others-had conservatory training as well as a rich jazz experience and thus felt no need to draw a line between the two traditions. Following them, our ideal was to master both. (9–10)

Johnson’s ex-coloured man enacts the principle of “master[ing] both traditions,” by fusing them to create a stylized coherence from his dual cultural heritage. The ex-coloured man’s pivotal encounter with ragtime music seems as if it presents the opportunity to merge his expertise with oral and written forms and with improvisational and standardized approaches. Faced with the brutality of a white lynch mob whose murderous impulses are legally sanctioned, however, the ex-coloured man acquiesces to the binarism of a society divided by racial categorization, and he renounces his youthful ambitions.

Initially published anonymously in 1912, The Autobiography stands as the first novel to use jazz–specifically ragtime as an early and a particular facet of the blues-jazz matrix-as an integral trope.¹ The narrator’s musical inclinations serve as the earliest introduction we receive to his most salient characteristic–his tendency to move across boundaries and to resist definition according to conventional binary categories. Although we know from the beginning that he eventually chooses “white” as his self-defining category, the title also indicates that he is an “ex-coloured” man, a term that mocks the impossibility of any such category in a society racially delineated according to the “one-drop” rule and legally segregated.²

Despite rigid social categorizations based on “race,” according to the ex-coloured man’s “true” account we must concede that he is simultaneously “white” and “black.”³ Much of what readers might consider separate and even oppositional the narrator proves to be contained within his complex and seemingly contradictory identity. Most often, Johnson engages the trope of music to convey this idea of accommodating contradictions without reducing them to dichotomous oversimplifications. In the novel, ragtime music epitomizes the concept of boundary crossing and elaborates upon the notion of “passing” in a way that heightens our understanding of both the distinctiveness of African American culture and the artificiality of categories of “race.”

Ragtime can be understood as central to the novel, because, as a historical study of the music reveals, it crossed boundaries of race and class in ways that symbolize the complex “crossings” in which the narrator engages. Consequently, this chapter begins with an analysis of ragtime’s history. Four sections organize the chapter, and each addresses a particular facet of the musical tropes in Johnson’s novel. The first section examines the historical background of ragtime as a musical form and as the subject of academic inquiry and compares these versions of the music with Johnson’s portrait of it. The second section analyzes the relationship between ragtime and classical European concert music within the early twentieth-century discourse on the binary nature of “high” and “low” culture and considers how Johnson’s novel responds to and participates in this discourse. Section three evaluates how ragtime, as a facet of African American oral traditions, fits into Johnson’s artistic objective to historically document African American expressive cultural practices and the impact of those practices on “mainstream” America.⁴ In section three, the challenges of “transcription” are addressed in relation to the music and to Johnson’s writing. The fourth and final section explores Johnson’s international perspective and considers the connections between his writing and certain formal innovations in music and literature that followed his work.

NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF RAGTIME

Ragtime music, which the narrator first encounters in New York-the urban American center of cultural amalgamation–has a history that parallels and contributes to the development of the novel’s boundary crossing themes. Ragtime is a musical art, like the ex-coloured man himself, liminally situated within divergent cultural traditions and crossed lines of descent, mocking artificially constructed categories that strive to contain its overdetermined identity within neatly demarcated lines of “purity.” In ways that also parallel the experiences of the ex-coloured man, the music’s history reveals the alienating loss of cultural identity that can accompany wholesale incorporation and assimilation into the “mainstream” and can be part of the achievement of “legitimacy.” A closer look at the history of ragtime in the United States reveals the ways that Johnson uses the music to symbolize the triumphs and the hazards of class and racial boundary crossing in early twentieth-century America.

Ragtime is considered by most commentators to be a culturally amalgamated art. As Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis note in their study of ragtime, “With this music the wires of dark and white America crossed and the vital currents were flowing back and forth” (13).⁵ In his influential history of jazz, Marshall Stearns describes ragtime as a music that, because it was heavily influenced by European styles, was able to break new cultural ground and introduce other Americans to African American musical styles. According to Stearns:

Ragtime developed a wider and more influential fusion of European and African musical elements than ever before. It began with such a large component of formal European characteristics that (although it absorbed more and more of the African rhythmic complexity during its twenty year popularity) it was never able to go the rest of the way and incorporate the bittersweet mood of the blues. Ragtime remained cheerful, pianistic in concept, and predominantly European. But just because of this, ragtime spread farther–and thinner–than any preceding wave of Afro-American music, carrying with it an elementary but basic introduction to new rhythms. (148–49)

Ben Sidran argues, in a similar fashion, that the “watered-down rhythmic aspect of [ragtime] was perhaps the core of its appeal to whites” (27). Amiri Baraka also sees ragtime as a kind of “basic introduction” that was superseded in musical importance by the cultural separatism of blues musicians and their audiences. For Baraka, ragtime, unlike blues, represents “a premature attempt at the socio-cultural merger that later produced jazz” (148).

Baraka finds in ragtime the crossing of cultural “wires” similar to those described by Blesh and Janis: “Ragtime was a Negro music, resulting from the Negro’s appropriation of white piano techniques used in show music. Popularized ragtime, which flooded the country with songsheets in the first decade of the century, was a dilution of Negro style … [illustrating the] hopelessly interwoven fabric of American life where blacks and whites pass so quickly as to become only grays!” (110–11). Like Baraka, musicologist Edward A. Berlin associates the rise of ragtime with musical theater (what Baraka calls “show music”). Berlin points out that “among ragtime’s sources and early settings were the minstrel-show and vaudeville stages” (Reflections, 24).

Johnson himself along with his brother Rosamond and their partner Bob Cole began their artistic careers in musical theater, and they knew first hand the influences of ragtime music in this business. Johnson’s ragtime tropes in The Autobiography, however, do not condemn the “interwoven fabric of American life” to which Baraka refers. Instead, Johnson’s incorporation of music into the novel allows him to use signs of cultural amalgamation for his own purposes. Johnson’s portrayal of music in The Autobiography is not a naïve paean to an idealistic vision of cultural “unity in diversity” in early twentieth-century America. The novel explores and enacts the ways that the negotiation of boundaries in American culture can provide material for artistic creations that are not simply ornamental but that may inspire change on individual and social levels.

Stylistically, one of the most unconventional aspects of the novel is its flaunting of generic boundaries between written and oral / language and music that Johnson takes up again in his formalistically innovative God’s Trombones. As Eric Sundquist points out:

The establishment of an African American cultural poetics had to demonstrate the continued presence in America of an African culture where speech and song more closely approached each other on the continuum of cultural sound, where the vocalized “talk” of drums and rhythmic instruments was paramount and where nommo, the power of the word in its oral dimension, governed human interaction to a far greater degree than in the Western tradition. (To Wake, 385)

Johnson’s writing, particularly in the way it uses musical tropes to negotiate the modern Western boundaries between oral and written, is a crucial part of the development of the African American cultural poetics that Sundquist describes.

In his extended analysis of The Autobiography, Sundquist calls our attention to the language of the text as it constructs this African American cultural poetics. He notes the convoluted complexity of “the seemingly simplest prose of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, in which fictive autobiographical narrative, cultural essay, historical allegory, and signifying parody are intertwined” (Hammers, 4). Sundquist describes the quality of Johnson’s language as “brittle” and “chameleonlike,” noting that it assumes these characteristics as it deftly combines “fiction and cultural analysis” (6). Sundquist’s adjectives are excellent descriptions of Johnson’s prose. Johnson’s language seems brittle because it is stretched to its breaking point with a self-conscious awareness of its immutability and its silence in print. It is also like a chameleon in its resistance to both “color” hierarchies and the static medium of print-changing colors, resisting full self-exposure, camouflaging its intent to dissolve boundaries considered to be sacred. The language of Johnson’s novel often pretends to be straightforwardly simple in keeping with Johnson’s decision to first publish the book anonymously so that it would seem “true.” The musical themes undermine the seeming simplicity of the language and clue us to its multivalence.

Consider, for example, the differences between the description of the event that inaugurates the ex-coloured man’s decision to “pass” as a white man-his witnessing of a white mob burning a black man alive-and the descriptions of the sermons and spirituals at “big meeting” (173), which immediately precede the murder scene. At “big meeting,” a religious and social function, we are introduced to the preacher, John Brown, who delivers his sermons as “tone pictures” (176) in which meaning never supersedes sound. John Brown’s performance convinces the ex-coloured man that “eloquence consists more in the manner of saying than in what is said” (176). Another person who greatly impresses the ex-coloured man is Singing Johnson, who acts as “a leader of singing, a maker of songs, a man who could improvise at the moment lines to fit the occasion” (178). With his depiction of Singing Johnson and the music he improvisationally composes by relying on his “memory and ingenuity” (180), Johnson attempts to render “that elusive undertone, the note in music which is not heard with the ears” (181). Through language and characterization Johnson works to capture the emotional impact of music–its power, as he asserts in another context, as “the touchstone … the magic thing … that by which the Negro can bridge all chasms.”⁶

Yet these lovely descriptions of the music, the sermons, and the people who create them are immediately followed by the narrator’s detached account of brutal mob violence arising from racial hatred and legally sanctioned murder. The “chasm” it is necessary to bridge in this case seems to be an insurmountable obstacle. The tone of the narrator’s description of the murder is reportorial, or, to recall Sundquist’s term, “brittle”:

Fuel was brought from everywhere, oil, the torch; the flames crouched for an instant as though to gather strength, then leaped up as high as their victim’s head. He squirmed, he writhed, strained at his chains, then gave out cries and groans I shall always hear. The cries and groans were choked off by the fire and smoke; but his eyes, bulging from their sockets, rolled from side to side, appealing in vain for help… Before I could make myself believe that what I saw was really happening, I was looking at a scorched post, a smouldering fire, blackened bones, charred fragments sifting down through coils of chain; and the smell of burnt flesh-human flesh-was in my nostrils. (187)

The first phrases are abruptly clipped (“oil, the torch;”). The verbs sound as harsh and contorted as their meaning implies, almost in onomatopoetic fashion (“squirm,” “writhe,” “strain,” “bulge”). The last sentence is the longest, suggesting the lingering impression of witnessing such a sight and covering the last sensory response-internalization of the murdered man into the bodies of all present through the scent of his burned body.

In addition to its “brittle” language and alternating phrasing, the impact of the passage results in part from its juxtaposition with the music and “tone picture” sermons that precede it. One of Johnson’s most famous assertions is that “[t]he final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.”⁷ By juxtaposing “the arts and tricks of oratory” (175) and the “elusive undertone” (181) of music with the brutal violence that leads to the question, “Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings into savage beasts?” (186), Johnson suggests the costs of an unjust and hypocritical society. We are shown art that establishes “the greatness of a people,” then we witness the arbitrary yet legal murder of a man who, though unnamed and unknown, could have been any member of the big meeting or even Singing Johnson himself. The narrator is astounded that America, “the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive” (188). The novel implies that while the narrator’s decision to become an ex-coloured man is cowardly and morally weak, it is not inexplicable in the face of such brutal conditions.

The tragedy of the novel becomes the fact that the narrator cannot find a way to merge his emotional response to the music of Singing Johnson with his response to witnessing the murder. He cannot historically and experientially contextualize his own music in such a way th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE “A sympathetic, singing instrument”
• CHAPTER TWO “A big sensation”
• CHAPTER THREE Musical Range
• CHAPTER FOUR “Only in the head of a musician”
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX