A Literary Milestone : For Black American Literature, an Anthology--and New Standing

Bomb the canon. Expand the canon. Leave the canon just where it is.

In academe and in literary journals, it is clear that some are circling the canon with wagons, protecting--politically conservative academics say--Western civilization from the barbarous hordes who want to remove ethnic and women’s studies from the realm of marginality and teach African philosophy with Plato’s “Republic,” Virginia Woolf beside “Beowulf,” Chippewa poems as well as Milton’s, and James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain” as a companion piece to the Bible.

Into this raging war has stepped Henry Louis Gates, winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s so-called genius award in 1981; W. E. B. DuBois professor of Literature at Cornell University; eminent literary historian and critic; and editor of, among other things, “The Schomburg Library of 19th-Century Black Women Writers,” its 30 volumes published by Oxford University press this year.

Now Gates is general editor of W. W. Norton & Co.’s forthcoming anthology of Afro-American literature. In that capacity, he told a recent symposium on black culture and criticism, he knew many had come to “bury the canon, not to praise it.” But his is the task of canon formation, validating for a wider audience the tradition of Afro-American literature.

The Norton anthology will not be released until 1990 but already it is considered a “landmark event,” a major contribution to expanding the American literary canon. And with the imprimatur of Norton--the most prestigious publisher of literary anthologies in America--the new collection will reinforce a process begun in earnest 20 years before: the demarginalizing of Afro-American literature.

“Once our anthology is published, no one will ever again be able to use the unavailability of black texts as an excuse not to teach our literature,” Gates said at the conference, sponsored by the Humanities Institute at Scripps College in Claremont.

“A well-marketed anthology functions in the academy to create a tradition, as well as to define and preserve it,” said the oratorically flamboyant Gates, known as Skip to his friends and colleagues.

Stanley Fish--a Renaissance literary scholar and chairman of Duke University’s English Department, where canon busting, revision and expansion has a firm record--concurred.

“The Norton anthology, simply by the name Norton itself will be an event,” as was its anthology of women’s literature, he said. “Rather than just being a publishing venture, which one must market then wait to see how it takes, this is already an event. It’s already regarded as a landmark even before it’s seen.”

Unlike any previous anthology, “we shall offer a cassette tape,” said Gates because of the “strong oral and vernacular base,” of so much of black literature. And because the “vernacular has a canon of its own, one which has always in its turn informed the written works of the tradition.”

Imagine, Gates said, having Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday singing the blues, Langston Hughes reading “I Have Known Rivers,” Sterling Brown on “Ma Rainey,” James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation” in the air as well as printed page, “The Sermon of the Dry Bones,” by C. L. Franklin (Aretha Franklin’s father) given audible life, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking “I Have a Dream,” Sonia Sanchez performing “Talking in Tongues.”

The possibilities are endless, an exhilarated Gates told the Scripps audience. “We will change fundamentally not only the way that our literature is taught, but the way in which any literary tradition is even conceived--simply by incorporating performance and the black and human voice into our anthology.”

Duke’s Fish said the pressure such an anthology puts on the curriculum “is very great. Not in the sense of the (publishers) issuing pressure,” but the fact of its existence will “weigh on departments that don’t yet have any strong recognition of this literature.”

The canon originally referred to the ecclesiastical laws of the Roman Catholic Church approved by the Pope. In academia, it came to mean the great writers and works of Western civilization: the Bible, Homer, Plato, Milton, Chaucer and Shakespeare, even though the great bard’s inclusion at the expense of some of the classics also was once viewed as radical.

But when this canon was forming, no one knew it was a canon. In the history of Euro-America, it represented a narrow consensus on Matthew Arnold’s oft-excavated definition of culture--the “best that has been thought and said.” But the slim parameters of that agreement were defined by white men, critics say.

Literature tends to become canonized when prevailing notions of “the best” are challenged--the old is sacrosanct, the new, faddish. The changing demographics of the country, increasingly reflected at universities, means women, blacks, Asians, Latinos and American Indians are demanding representation in the curriculum--not just because they exist, rather because of their cultural contributions to America and the world.

While there has been much fodder for canonical arguments in the past few years, the intellectual bomb dropped last spring when Stanford University replaced its undergraduate Western Culture course with one called Cultures, Ideas and Values.

The new course, actually a set of courses, includes books on non-European cultures, books by women, minorities and persons of color and at least one work each quarter explicitly addressing issues of “race, gender and class.”

There Are Critics

The most outspoken conservative critics of the Stanford curriculum change and attacks on the traditional canon have been William Bennett, former secretary of education, and Alan Bloom, a University of Chicago professor and author of “The Closing of the American Mind.”

They decry what they see as a lowering of academic standards to cater to political demands of leftist students and professors who want to institute affirmative action for ideas. They claim this debases and politically taints what should be the disinterested study of literature and the humanities.

Or to reduce the arguments to the nitty-gritty: “The barbarians are in our midst. We need to fight them for a good long time,” University of Pennsylvania Prof. Alan C. Kors said last weekend at a conference of the National Assn. of Scholars, a group of conservative intellectuals formed 1 1/2 years ago to combat what conference keynote speaker, former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick called, “outrages of the fascist left.”

Gates told his Scripps audience that conservative critics, especially Bennett and Bloom, are “symbols of the nostalgic return to what I think of as the ‘antebellum aesthetic position,’ when men were men, and men were white, when scholar-critics were white men, and when women and persons of color were voiceless, faceless servants and laborers, pouring tea and filling brandy snifters in the board rooms of old boys’ clubs.”

Bennett, who says his heroes are James Madison, Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., found Gates’ comments “personally offensive and hopelessly ignorant” when told of them in a recent phone interview.

Though he attacked the revised Stanford curriculum in a much publicized speech at the university last spring, he said his full views on the subject were never reported.

He said he had no objection to expanding the canon. “The problem was that I thought it was slightly specious to argue that this was expansion when one started removing. As I said that night, ‘If you want to add, add. But you don’t add by subtracting.’ If, in addition to the course on Western civilization, what you have is a course on Eastern civilization or other cultures of the Third World, that would be fine.” But the debate at Stanford--”at least one significant strand--was an attack on Western Civilization.”

Stanford’s assistant dean for the Humanities and Sciences said that the “misperception” on the part of Bennett and other critics has been that the university has abandoned the teaching of Western Civilization.

“What happened this year,” said Charles Junkerman, the assistant dean, “was that the core list was eliminated, and in its place, the faculty will get together in the spring and decide on six authors or texts they will teach in common the following year. This year, they decided to teach the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Marx.”

But those aren’t the only books students will read, Junkerman said. Students have 40 required texts over three semesters. Some of the remaining 34 works will be traditional canonical texts, such as “Shakespeare, Dante and others. Some will be texts that haven’t appeared before--Confucius and Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Richard Wright.”

An Energized Comparison

The philosophy of this, he said, is to have a “kind of energized comparison, to teach Aristotle’s ethics and then to teach Confucius . . . and ask what are the cultural assumptions in these two societies that make these two ethical systems so divergent?”

But Bennett continues to assert that the fundamental problem at Stanford was political coercion by leftist students and faculty. Any change in the curriculum should be based on “argument and discussion,” he said. Universities should not be politicized. “I want them to be arbiters of the truth,” he said.

“That’s nonsense,” said Fish of Duke, echoing the sentiments of numerous English department chairs at universities nationwide. “What must be understood is that any canon is put into place by particular sets of interests and concerns. And this is not to diminish or disparage a canon. It’s simply the case that there is no possibility of a literature or of any other tradition of discourse speaking from no point of view at all.

“The question is not whether political concerns will be reflected . . . rather which political concerns will be?”

Gates, who received his doctorate from Cambridge University, said he was trained in a conservative intellectual tradition. But “I am a race man,” he told the Scripps College audience. And he likened himself to the Talmudic scholar who is dedicated to the study and preservation of his own culture.

It was Gates who, in 1982, discovered the author of the first novel by an Afro-American published in the United States. The book is “Our Nig,” and for years the author was assumed to have been white.

After painstaking research, Gates discovered the author was a black woman, Harriet E. Wilson. Until Gates’ work, it was thought that the first novel by a black man was published after the Civil War and the first one by a woman published in 1892. His discovery adds 33 years to the history of Afro-American writers.

Gates has said that he believes the book was ignored because the novel explores themes that abolitionists and the black movement could not afford to have publicized: interracial marriage, racism in the North and a black man posing as a fugitive slave.

This work is the type of treasure expected to be found in the Norton collection.

Nothing Set in Stone

Gates has gathered 10 editors, each responsible for a literary epoch between 1745 and the present. Everything is at a preliminary stage, the editors warn, nothing is set in stone.

But there are authors whose works are essential to the Afro-American literary tradition: Phillis Wheatley, the 18th-Century poet and literary scholar; Frederick Douglass, the reknowned journalist, abolitionist and statesman; Zora Neale Hurston, considered one of the most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance and literary mother of Alice Walker, in particular, and the current crop of prominent black women writers, in general; Langston Hughes, perhaps the most famous Afro-American writer; Countee Cullen, the youngest and one of the most important poets, novelists, playwrights and journalists of the Harlem Renaissance; and Jean Toomer, a uniquely gifted black writer who passed for white most of his life but wrote a classic of Afro-American literature “Cane,” a 1923 novel interspersed with poetry, his own delicate line drawings and a novelette constructed like a play.

While Wheatley, (1753?-1784) is generally thought to be the earliest known Afro-American writer, she was, in fact, preceded by Lucy Terry who wrote the poem “Bars Fight” in 1746, said Frances Foster, professor of Afro-American literature at UC San Diego and a co-editor of the Norton anthology.

The poem is about the 14-year-old Terry’s observation of a battle between whites and Indians in Massachusetts. Foster came across Terry’s name in a history of Western Massachusetts, she said, adding that Terry was recognized in her community as an artist, and her life “tells us much of what it was like to be a Colonial slave.”

Among more contemporary writers sure to be included are: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones); Frank Yerby; Alice Walker; Margaret Walker; and Toni Morrison.

Arnold Rampersad--professor of English at Rutgers University and author of a critically acclaimed two-volume biography of Langston Hughes--is an anthology editor for the period between 1919 and 1940. Among the lesser-known writers from this epoch are Rudolph Fisher and Ann Spencer.

‘Urban Realist Fiction’

“Fisher wrote particularly vibrant, urban realist fiction,” Rampersad said. “He died young and was a doctor, too, so he was not able to give all his time to fiction. But his work is brilliant.” Spencer was a poet, and “though she did not publish a great deal, her works are really quite significant and deserve to be given some prominence.”

With any anthology, there is always the risk of excluding somebody who should be included or including somebody of ephemeral importance, said Rampersad, adding: “If we can at least settle on some important authors up to, say 1945, we will have done a good part of our work. Unquestionably, if we go by past experience mistakes will be made with contemporary authors, bad mistakes in some instances.”

He cites the case of Herman Melville: “American literature ignored Melville for more than 50 years after the publication of ‘Moby Dick.’ But those are the kinds of mistakes that we hope to avoid because Skip (Gates) has cast a net very wide, you have a lot of people advising in this enterprise, so we should make fewer mistakes.”

Even when the anthology is available, there are those who may still consider Afro-American literature--like any ethnic or women’s literature, marginal--not central to the tradition of American literature.

“I have never considered Afro-American literature marginal,” Rampersad said. “I have a deep love for American literature as a whole. I teach both black and white literature and if anything is clear to me it is the interconnectedness” of the two.

In the case of Langston Hughes, “he is the best-known Afro-American poet, and perhaps the most representative. But it does not take any kind of literary student to see the ways in which he is related to people like Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman . . . and Mark Twain.”

Junkerman, Stanford’s assistant dean, said he, too, considers Afro-American literature central to the nation’s cultural tradition: “. . . People have regularly said that the tradition of liberal education is to read the great books. I think it’s more appropriate to say the tradition of liberal education is to ask the great questions. . . .

“Some of the questions we are asking ourselves today are: How can we sustain a successful pluralistic population? What kind of unique benefits do we have living in a pluralistic society that other countries don’t have?”