2222 / GLORIA ANZALDUA HOUSTON A. BAKER JR.

/ 2223
this borderland between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. This land has top of the plates to keep them from being blown away by the wind. The paper
survived possession and ill-use by five countries: Spain, Mexico, the Republic plates keep the freeze away. Next day or the next, we remove the plates, bare
of Texas, the U.S., the Confederacy, and the U.S. again. It has survived the tiny green shoots to the elements. They survive and grow, give fruit
Anglo-Mexican blood feuds, lynchings, burnings, rapes, pillage. hundreds of times the size of the seed. We water them and hoe them. We
Today I see the Valley still struggling to survive. Whether it does or not, harvest them. The vines dry, rot, are plowed under. Growth, death, decay,
it will never be as I remember it. The borderlands depression that was set birth. The soil prepared again and again, impregnated, worked on. A constant
off by the 1982 peso devaluation in Mexico resulted in the closure of hun- changing of forms, renacimientos de latierra tnadre.
dreds of Valley businesses. Many people lost their homes, cars, land. Prior
to 1982, U.S. store owners thrived on retad sales to Mexicans who came This land was Mexican once
across the border for groceries and clothes and' appliances. While goods on was Indian always
the U.S. side have become 10, 100, 1000 times more expensive for lY1exican and is.
buyers, goods on the Mexican side have become 10, 100, 1000 till1es cheaper And will be again.
for Americans. Bec,ause the Valley is heavily dependent on agriculture and
Mexican retail trade, it has the highest unemplpyment rates along the entire 1987
border region; it is the Valley that has been hardest hit.9
, ,
'
"It's been a bad year for corn," my brother, Nune, says. As he talks, I
remember my father scanning the sky for a rain that would end the drought,
looking up into the sky, day after day, while the corn on its stalk.
My father has been dead for 29 years, having worked himsf'!lf to death. The
life span of a Mexican farm laborer is 56-he lived to be '38. It shocks me
thl(it I am older than he. I, too, search the sky for rain. Like the I
worship the rain god and the maize goddess, b!lt ,.mlikemy father I have
recovered their names. Now for rain (irrigation) offers qot a sacrifice of
blood, but of money. ' HOUSTON A. BAKER JR.
"Farming is in a bad way," my brother says. "Two to three thousand small
and big farmers went bankrupt in this country last year. Six years ago the h. 1943
price of corn was $8.00 per. hundred pounds," he go.es on. "This year it is
$3.90 per hundred And, t think myself, after taking inflation irtto Since the late 1960s, Houston A. Baker Jr. has been central to the increasing crit-
account, not planting puts you ahead. ical and scholarly attention paid to African American literature. Along with detailed
. 'roo criticism of many notable African American writers, Baker's work provides highly'
influential theoretical paradigms for the study of "vernacular" literatures. His deep
I walk oilt to the back yard, stare at los rosales de mama. She wants me to commitment to the specificity of Mrican American culture and the dignity of Mri-
help her prune the rose buspes, dig out the carpet grass that choking them. can American experience is combined with an adventurous willingness to col}:,.
Mamagrande Ramona tamhit!n tenia rosales. Here every' Mexican grows stantly reexamine his own critical stance toward that culture and experience. The'
flowers. If they don't have a piece of dirt, they use car tires, jars, cans, shoe result has been a body of work exemplary in its engagement with the material stud-
boxes. Roses are the Mexican's I think, how ied, with the shifting theoretical landscape, and with the pressing needs of black
Americans.
thorns and all. ' Baker was born in 1943 and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, when that city, like the
Yes, the Chicano and Chicana have always taken cine of growing things rest of the American South, practiced racial segregation. "During [my] youth," he
and the land. Again I see the four of kids getting off the school bus, writes. "the town was dangerously Southern for black ambitions and enterprise (like
changing into our work clothes, walking'into the field with Pap( and Mam!, walking down the street)." Baker attended an honors high school, where he was one
all six of us bending to the ground. Below our feet, under the eartP lie the of the few black students, then did his undergraduate work at historically black How-
watermelon seeds. We cover them with paper plates, putting terremotes on ard Cniversity in Washington, D.C. He received a Ph.D. in 1968 from the University
of California at Los Angeles, with a dissertation on Victorian poetry, but he quickly
left nineteenth-century British literature behind. Apart from some early essays, Baker
has focused on Mrican American literature. He has also published several volumes
9, Out of the 22 border counties in the four border in the nation as well as the largest home b"se
states, Hidalgo County (named for Father Hidalgo (along with Imperial in California) for migrant of his own poetry. Baker first found his voice and subject in his initial jobs as a
who was shot in 1810 after ii'lstlgating Mexico's farm-workers. It was here that I was born and professor-at Yale University and then the University of Virginia-when he became
revolt against Spain under the banner of la Virgen raised. I am amazed that 'both it and I have survived an early proponent and teacher of courses on black writers. Hired to direct the Afro-
de Guadalupe) Is the most poverty-stricken county [Anzaldua's note].
2224 / HOUSTON A. BAKER JR.
American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, he was named
the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations there in 1982. He joined the
faculty at Duke University in 1998. He has served as president of the Modern Lan-
guage Association, and holds honorary degrees from several universities.
In his work, Baker walks a fine line between validating Mrican American wntmg
for the mainstream, non black, academic tradition and insisting on the specific dif-
ferences that mark Mricart American writing as a distinct tradition of its own. He was
one of the first academic critics to argue that the standards of judgment used in
evaluating white writing were not suitable for judging black writing. His articulation
of appropriate standards explained the value of black literature to a indif-
ferent (at best) white academy. Similarly, in our selection as elsewhere 10 hIS work,
Baker's use of "high" theory-the invocation of concepts drawn from G. w. F. HEGEL,
KARL MARX, JACQUES DERRIDA, and FREDRIC JAMESON-has the effect of placing black
literature on a par with canonical masterpieces that are deemed worthy of sophisti-
cated analysis and prolonged, Intensive attention. His explicit use of theory to study
African American texts 'aligns him with HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. and against BARBARA
CHRISTIAN among contetbporary black literary critics, who have long debated the
relevance of European theory artd philosophy to black literary studies.
Baker wants to use theory to highlight "the distinctive, the culturally specific
aspects of Mro-American literature," not to assimilate black works to the existing
canon. His project mirrors the problem faced by black writers themselves: how to Use
the language of the dominant white culture to express the different realities of Mrican
American life. To complicate ,matters, Baker adopts the theoretical view that language
"speaks" the subject, rather than the other way around. Linguistic and literary forms
and meanings precede personal experience and its expression by any particular sub-
ject. The very experiences of subjects (including that of their own status as subjects)
are shaped and produced by those preexisting discursive forms. Within this theoretical
perspective, Mrican American literature can be unique only if it is created within a
distinctive culture that "speaks" subjects, constitutes experiences, and generates
expressions differently than does mainstream culture.
Baker's argument for this distinct African American culture employs He.gel con-
cept of negation," which posits that the definition or determmatlon of
identity occurs by excluding entities now understood as not part of the self. The
importance of this concept for Baker and for theorists of racial, ethnic, and
other sodal differences cannot he overstated. Mainstream culture achIeves Its self-
understanding and its coherence through defining itself as "not colored": white Amer-
ica achieves its iderttity by its negative relation to "colored" America. Given this act
of exclusion, black America inevitably had to form its own culture. Baker sees his
critical task as the description and analysis of that distinctive black culture.
But Baker does not want the concept of black culture that he delineates to be too
rigid or simplistic. His epigraph Ellison that
wholeness" is "always in cacophomc motion. For Baker, Afro-Amencan IS
a complex, reflexive enterprise which finds its proper figuration in blues C?nCeIVe? as
a matrix.... The matrix is a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of 1Oteractmg,
crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit." Note here the simultaneous
mitment to a single "Mro-American culture" and to dynamic, continually productIve
and transformative actions within that culture. The shift in terminology from "cul-
ture" to "matrix" highlights Baker's efforts to describe a unity, a single framework
within which all the singularities are held,. without suggesting conformity among the
parts. bl k d h't
Baker wartts to keep difference alive OR two levels-between ac an w 1 e cu -
ture and within black culture-while staying attuned to structuralist and semiotic
of powerful holistic cultural "codes" that produce individual events and
subjects according large-scale patterns. To do so, he relies primarily on the idea of
the "vernacular." The term itself derives from the special Latin vocabulary of slavery,
HOUSTON A. BAKER JR. / 2225
meaning a slave who was not bought by the slaveowner but was born into slavery on
the master's estate. More generally, it can refer to a nonstandard language or dialect
of a place or country. To study the vernacular, for Baker, is to study how a particular
. . language is used by just those speakers who have not been in the social position to
use or create the "standard" language. His emphasis on the black vernacular as the
dialect of the marginalized, the unheard, connects with similar concerns in contem-
porary feminist and postcolonial theory, as in the work of HOMI K. BHABHA. How do
those whose speech carries no authority and who are usually expected to be silent
use the master's language differently than the master himself does? How do they
make that language, so often employed to oppress them, serve their own purposes
and needs? What resources are to be found within those "nonstandard dialects" cre-
ated by speakers far from the centers of power?
Baker argues that "the blues" is the vernacular core of black America. In Blues,
Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984), he lyrically details the complex fea-
tures of this form and then connects particular literary works to its overarching
"matrix." For Baker, the vernacular is an expression of the popular as well as the local.
"High" art, like "standard" language, understands itself in contrast to "low" forms that
exist apart from authoritative institutions such as museums, libraries, and universi-
ties. Popular art, like a speech dialect, comes from below and is often anonymous.
(We need to distinguish here between "popular art" or "folk art" and the very different
"pop culture" produced by the mass media. By their very nature, such media-despite
their efforts to capitalize on dialects-cannot produce these localized variants, which
are limited to smaller groups.) Jokes, folktales, and traditional songs are good exam-
ples of anonymous, popular art forms. Baker wants to activate this popular and anon-
ymous element of the vernacular; he sees the "higher" instances of African American
poetry and prose fiction as springing from the fertile ground of an anonymously cre-
ated blues that serves as a shared vernacular for all Mrican Americans, regardless of
class, region, or gender.
What all Mrican Americans share, Baker insists, is the "obdurate 'economics of
, slavery,' " by which he means the ongoing, centuries-long material, symbolic, and
social deprivations suffered by blacks in American society. The blues is a central form
of expression created by Mrican Americans as a people in response to racism and its
concrete effects. Baker is anxious, however, not to reduce the blues to a simple expres-
sion of the experience of oppression. He stresses that any artistic expression, as well
as any act of criticism, is "inventive": the raw material of experience is worked on and
shaped into artistic form. In the simplest terms, experience doesn't come to us In
musical notes. So a translation from experience to art is always part of the process.
And because the art forms already exist when a particular artist goes a
particular blues song, the conventions of the blues to a certain extent shape the forms
of experience, rather than raw experience simply dictating its artistic expression.
Baker maintains an allegiance to the concept of "experience"; he does not believe
that we perceive only according to established forms. Rather, the meeting of such
forms and personal experience is precisely the moment of "invention." Indeed, the
artist at times creates new forms; thus Baker's definition of the blues matrix empha-
sizes the "reflexive." Experience and form mutually influence each other as individual
African American artists strive to "achieve a resonant, improvisational, expressive
dignity."
Baker's commitments to experience, individual expression, and the unity of African
American culture all place him at odds with certain more radical antihumanist ver-
sions of poststructuralism, although he invokes the work of such theorists. Like some
I feminist and postcolonial theorists, Baker retains a stake in the individual subject
situated among marginalized groups, a commitment that tempers the usual hostility
to the "bourgeois" or "Cartesian" subject found in much poststructuralist work. In
addition, Baker's desirc to locate a single African American cultural matrix runs
athwart work that stresses the nonintegrity of cultural formations. Certainly, his focus
 BLUES, IDEOLOGY. AND AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE / 2227
2226 I HOUSTON A. BAKER JR.
on the blues immediately calls to mind other distinctive Mrican American cultural
forms, such as the slave narrative, the oral tradition of black preaching, jazz, and Fro'fn Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A
"trash talk" within groups of black men. Are these forms of expression all variants of Vernacular Theory
the "blues matrix," or do we need to think of multiple strands of available forms within
a varied Mrican American tradition? And how should we think about borrowings Introduction
between white and black cultures, since the boundaries between the two are contin- Vernacular, adj.: Of a slave: That is born on his master's estate;
ually crossed? Baker's work since Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature has home-born
taken up some of these questions, as he has examined rap music and the interaction Of arts. or feat II res of tl,ese: Native or peculiar to a particular country
between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. or locality
During his career, Baker has attempted to negotiate a number of vexed issues, Other states indicate themselves in their deputies ... but the
ranging from the status of Mrican American studies in the university to the relation genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or
of African American literature to the wider experience, needs, and cultural resources legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or
of all African American people. In joining Hegel to the blues singer Robert Johnson, churches or parlors. nor even in its newspapers or Inventors ... but
and in celebrating the blues as an artistic form available to Mrican Americans both always most in the common people ... these ... are
as evidence of their unique cultural identity and as a means to express that identity, poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of It.
-Walt Whitman'
Baker is being, he tells us, inventive. He is working to create a new social position
for black Americans through a re-vision of their cultural achievements. If you see me coming. better open up your door,
If you see me coming. better open up your door,
I ain't no stranger, I been here before.
BIBLIOGRAPHY -Traditional Blues
Baker's critical books to date are Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature
I
Standing at the crossroads, tried to flag a ride,
and Culture (I 972), Singers of Daybreak: Studies in BlackAmerican Literature (I 974), Standing at the crossroads. tried to flag a ride,
A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee Cullen (1974), Paul Laurence Ain't nobody seem to know me, everybody passed me by.
Dunbar, an Evaluation (I 974), The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Crit- -Crossroad Blues'
) icism (1980), Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory In every case the result of an untrue mode of knowledge must not
(1984), Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), Afro-American Poetics: Revi-
sions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (I988), and Black Studies, Rap, and the
Academy (1993). He edited one of the first anthologies of Mrican American literature,
!
j
be allowed to run away into an empty nothing, but must necessarily
be grasped as the nothing of that from which it results-a result
which contains what was true in the preceding knowledge.
Black Literature in America (I 97 1), and is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of 1 -Hegel,' Phenomenology of Spirit
African American Literature (1996). He has also edited or co-edited many collections So perhaps we shy from confronting our cultural
of critical essays: Twentieth Century Interpretations of Native Son (I972); Reading it offers no easily recognizable points of rest, no faCIle certamtles
Black: Essays in the Criticism of African, Caribbean, and Black American Literature as to who, what. or where (culturally or historically) we are. Instead,
(1976); with Leslie Fiedler, English Literature: Opening Up the Canon (I 98 1); Three the whole is always in cacophonic motion.
-Ralph Ellison,' "The Little Man at the Chehaw Station"
American Literatures: Essays on Chicano, Native American, and Asian American Lit-
erature for Teachers of American Literature (1982); with Patricia Redmond, Afro- ... maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly
American Literary Studies in the 1990s (1989); with Patricia Redmond and Elizabeth what you are talking about. all these fantasy people. All these blues
Alexander, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing people.
-Amiri Baraka,' Dutchm.an
(1991); and with Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg, Black British Cultural
Studies (1996). Biographical information can be found in Contemporary Black Biog-
raphy, vol. 6 (I 994). FRO!\1 SYMBOL TO IDEOLOGY
Two interviews offer a convenient place to begin studying Baker's work: Jerry W.
In my book The lOHnley Bac1t: Issues in Blac1t Literature and Criticism
Ward Jr.'s "A Black and Crucial Enterprise: An Interview with Houston A. Baker, Jr.,"
(1980),6 I envisioned the "speaking subject" creating language (a code) be
Black American Literature Forum 16.2 (1982), and Michael Berube's "Hybridity in
the Center: An Interview with Houston A. Baker, Jr.," African American Review 26.4 deciphered by the present-day commentator. In my study, I
(1992). The range of critical responses to Baker's work includes Michael Awkward, language (the code) "speaking" the subject. The. IS dec entered. M)
"Race, Gender, and the Politics of Reading," Black American Literature Forum 22.1 quest during the past decade has been for the dIstmCtiVe, the spe-
(1988); Andrea Mueller-Hartmann, "Houston A. Baker, Jr.:The Development of a cific aspects of Afro-American literature and culture. I was I
Black Literary Critic," Literary Griot 1.2 (1989); Kwame Anthony Appiah, "The Con- had found such specificity in a peculiar subjectivity, but the objectiVIty of
servation of Race," Black American Literature Forum 23.1 (1989); Sandra Adell, "A
Function at the Junction," Diacritics 20 (1990); Jo-Anne Cornwell Giles, "Mro- I. American poet (1819-1892). From the 18SS 4. African American novelist (1914-1994); this
American Criticism and Western Consciousness: The Politics of Knowing," Black preface to Leaves of Grass. essay was published in 1978. .
1. By Mississippi Delta blues singer Robert John- S. African American poet and plaYWright (for-
American Literature Forum 24.1 (I990); Michael Berube, "Power Surge: Houston merly LeRoi Jones, h. 1934); the play Dutchman
son (ca. 1911-1938).
Baker's Vernacular Spectacular," Village Voice Literary Supplement 109 (October 3. (;EORG WILHELM FRIEDn.1CH HEGEL (1770- was published in 1964.
6. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980
1992); and Winston Napier, "From the Shadows: Houston Baker's Move toward a 1831). German philosopher; Phenomenology of
[Baker's note].
Postnationalist Appraisal of the Black Aesthetic," New Literary History 25 (I994). Spirit was published in 1807.
2228 / HOUSTON A. BAKER JR. BLUES, IDEOLOGY, AND AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE / 2229
economics and the sound lessons of poststructuralism arose to reorient my sense of deluded or deceived. 3 This symbolic orientation was simply one
thinking. I was also convinced that the symbolic, and quite specifically the moment in my experiencing of Afro-American moment super-
symbolically anthropological, offered avenues to the comprehension of Afro- seded now by a prospect that constitutes its determinate negation. 4 What
American expressive culture in its plenitude.? I discovered that the symbolic's was true in my prior framework remains so hi my current concern for the
antithesis-practical reason, or the material-is as necessary for understand- ideology of form. Certainly the mode of ideological investigation proposed
ing Afro-American discourse as the cultural-in-itself. by Jameson is an analysis that escapes all hints of "vulgar Marxism" through
My shift from a centered to a decentered subject, from an exclusively its studious attention to modern critiques of political economy, and also
symbolic to a more inclusively expressive perspective, was prompted by the through its shrewd incorporation of poststructuralist thought. 5
curious force of dialectical thought. My access to the study of such thought In chapters that follow, I too attempt to avoid a naive Marxism. 6 I do not
came from attentive readings of Fredric Jameson, Hayden White, Marshall believe, for example, that a fruitful correlation exists when one merely claims
Sahlins,8 and others. While profiting from observations by these scholars, I that certain black folk seculars are determinate results of agricultural gang
also began to attend meetings of a study group devoted to Hegel's Phenom- labor. Such attributions simply privilege the material as a substrate while
enology of Spirit. failing to provide detailed accounts of processes leading from an apparent
Having journeyed with the aid of symbolic anthropology to what appeared substrate to a peculiar expressive form. A faith of enormous magnitude is
to be the soundest possible observations on Afro-American art, I found required to accept such crude formulations as adequate explanations. The
myself confronted sUddenly by a figure-to-ground reversal. A fitting image "material" is shifty ground, and current critiques of political economy suggest
for the effect of my reorientation is the gestalt illustration of the Greek hydria that postulates based on this ground can be understood only in "semiotic"
(a water vase with curved handles) that transforms itself into two faces in terms. Hence, the employment of ideology as an analytical category begins
profile. John Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," with its familiar detailing of with the awareness that "production" as well as "modes of production" must
the economies of "art" and human emotion, can be considered one moment be grasped in terms of the sign. An example of a persuasive case for "political
in the shift. 9 Contrasting with Keat's romantic figurations'are the emergent economy" as a code existing in a relationship of identity with language can
faces of a venerable ancestry. The shift from Greek hydrias to ancestral faces be found in Jean Baudrillard's For a Critique of the Political Economy of the
is a shift from high art to vernacular expression. Sign. To read economics as a semiotic process leads to the realization that
The "vernacular" -in relation to human beings signals "a slave born on his ideological analyses may be as decidedly intertextual as, say, analyses of the
master's estate." In expressive terms, vernacular indicates "arts native or relationship between Afro-American vernacular expression and more sophis-
peculiar to a particular country or locale." The material conditions of slavery ticated forms of verbal art. If what is normally categorized as material (e.g.,
in the United States and the rhythms of Afro-American blues combined and "raw material," "consumer goods") can be interpreted semiotically, then any
emerged from my revised materialistic perspective as an ancestral matrix that collection of such entities and their defining interrelationships may be
has produced a forceful and indigenous American creativity. The moment of defined as a text.?
emergence of economic and vernacular concerns left me, as the French say, In the chapters in this book, however, I do not write about or interpret
entre les deux: 1 suspended somewhere between symbolic anthropology and the material in exclusively semiotic terms. Although I am fully aware of
analytical strategies that Fredric Jameson calls the "ideology of form."2 insights to be gained from semiotics, my analyses focus directly on the living
and laboring conditions of people deSignated as "the desperate class" by
IDEOLOGY, SEMIOTICS, AND THE MATERIAL

In acknowledging a concern for the ideology of form, however, I do not want 3. In The Journey Back, I define my project as fol- Books, 1977), and jean Baudrillard's Fora Critique
lows: "The phrase [,the anthropology of art'] of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972; St.
to imply that my symbolic-anthropological orientation was untrue, in the expresses for me the notion that art must be stud- Louis: Telos Press, 1981) and The Mirror of Pro-
ied with an attention to the methods and findings duction (1973; St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975). By
of disciplines which enable one to address such "poststructuralist" thought, I .have in mind the uni·
7. Though a great many sources were involved in theorist. concerns as the status of the artistic object, the verse of discourse constituted by deconstruction.
my reoriented cultural thinking, certainly the ter- 9. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819), by the Roman- relationship of art to other cu Itural systems, and jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (I 967; Balti-
minology employed in my discussion ,at this point tic poet Keats (1795-1821), contrasts the cold per- the nature and function of artistic creation and more: johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) is
derives from Marshall Sahlins's wonderfully lucid fection of timeless art with the pain experienced perception in a given society" (p. xvi). The project's perhaps the locus classicus of the deconstruction-
Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University by those who live in time. privileging of llsymbolic anthropology" and "art" ist project. One of the more helpful accounls of
of Chicago Press, 1976). Sahlins delineates two I. Between the two (French). under the sign interdisciplinary involved exclusions deconstruction is Christopher Norris's Deconstruc-
modes of thinking that have characterized anthro- 2. The "ideology of form" as a description ofJame- that were ironical and (I now realize) somewhat tion: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen,
pology from its inception. These two poles are son's project derives from the essay 'The Symbolic disabling where a full description of expressive cul- 1982). Of course, there is a certain collapsing of
usymbolic" and "functionalist." He resolves the Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological ture is sought [Baker's note]. poststructuralism and political economy in the
dichotomy suggested by these terms through the Critical Inquiry 4 (1978): 507-23. 4. The Hegelian epigraph that marks the begin- sources cited previously [Baker's note]. On the
middle term "cultural proposition," a phrase that Surely, though, Jameson's most recent study, The ning of these introductory remarks offers the best French philosophers ALTHUSSER (191 8-1990) and
he defines as a cultural mediating ground where Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Sym. definition I know of "determinate negation." The DERRIDA (b. 1930), and the French social critic
the material and symbolic, the useful and the inef· bolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, epigraph is taken from the Phenomenology of Spirit BAUDRILU\RD (b. 1929), see above.
fable, ceaselessly converge and depart [Baker's 1981), offers the fullest description of his views on fBaker's note]. "Determinate negation": the pro- 6. That is, a Marxism that sees cultural and politi-
note]. ways in which cultural texts formally Inscribe cess of defining an entity by indicating what it is cal phenomena as direct reflections of economic
8. American anthropologist (b. 1930). JAMESON material/historical conditions of their production, not. activities connected to material needs.
(b. 1934), American Marxist literary theorist. distribution, and consumption [Baker's note]. 5. I have in mind Louis Althusser and Etienne 7. See Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political
WHITE (b. 1928), American historian and narrative llalibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Economy of the Sign [Baker's note].
2230 / HOUSTON A. BAKER JR. BLUES, IDEOLOGY, AND AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE / 2231
James Weldon Johnson's8 narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored dol'S. mainroads, and way-stations of an extraordinary and elusive Mro-
Man. Such people constitute the vernacular in the United States. Their lives American cultural phenomenon.
have always been sharply conditioned by an "economics of slavery" as they
worked the agricultural rows, searing furnaces, rolling levees, bustling round- DEFINING BLUES
houses, and piney-woods logging camps of America. A sense of "production"
The task of adequately describing the blues is equivalent to the labor of
and "modes of production" that foregrounds such Afro-American labor seems
an appropriate inscription of the material. describing a world class athlete's awesome gymnastics. Adequate apprecia-
tion demands comprehensive attention. An investigator has to be there, to
follow a course recommended by one of the African writer Wole Soyinka's3
THE MATRIX AS BLUES
ironic narrators to a London landlord: "See for yourself."
The guiding presupposition of the chapters that follow is that Afro-American The elaborations of the blues may begin in an austere self-accusation;
culture is a complex, reflexive enterprise which finds its proper figuration in "l"ow this trouble I'm having. I brought it all on myself." But the accusation
blues conceived as a matrix. A matrix is a womb, a network, a fossil-bearing seamlessly fades into humorous acknowledgment of duplicity's always
rock, a rocky trace of a gemstone's removal, a principal metal in an alloy, a duplicitous triumph: "You know the woman that I love, I stoled her from my
mat or plate for reproducing print or phonograph records. The matrix is a best friend, / But you know that fool done got lucky and stole her back again."
point of ceaseless i'nI>ut and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing Simple provisos for the troubled mind are commonplace, and drear exactions
impulses always in productive transit. Afro-American blues constitute such of cl-ushing manual labor are objects of wry, in situ commentary. Numinous
a vibrant network. They are what Jacques Derrida might describe as the inyocation punctuates a guitar's resonant back beat with: "Lawd, Lawd, Lawd
"always already" of Afro-American culture. 9 They are the multiplex, enabling ... have mercy on me / Please send me someone, to end this misery," Exis-
script in which Afro-American cultural discourse is inscribed. tential declarations of lack combine with lustily macabre prophecies of the
First arranged, scored, and published for commercial distribution early in subject's demise. If a "matchbox" will hold his clothes, surely the roadside
the twentieth century when Hart Wand, Arthur "Baby" Seals, and W. C. of much-traveled highways will be his memorial plot: "You can bury my body
il1andyl released their first compositions, the blues defy narrow definition. down by the highway side / So myoid devil spirit can catch a Greyhound
For they exist, not as a function of formal inscription, but as a forceful con- bus and ride." Conative formulations of a brighter future (sun shining in the
dition of Afro-American inscription itself. They were for Handy a "found" back door some day, wind rising to blow the blues away) join with a slow-
folk signifier, awakening him from (perhaps) a dream of American form in moving askesis 4 of present, amorous imprisonment: "You leavin' now, baby,
Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. 2 At a railroad juncture deep in the southern but you hangin' crepe on my door," or "She got a mortgage on my body, and
night, Handy dozed restlessly as he awaited the arrival of a much-delayed a lien on my soul." Self-deprecating confession and slack-strumming growls
train. A guitar's bottleneck resonance suddenly jolted him to consciousness, of violent solutions combine: "My lead mule's cripple, you know my off
as a lean, loose-jointed, shabbily clad black man sang: mule's blind / You know I can't drive nobody / Bring me a loaded .39 (I'm
go'n pop him, pop that mule!)." The wish for a river of whiskey where if a
Goin' where the Southern cross the Dog.
man were a "divin' duck" he would submerge himself and never "come up':
Goin' where the Southern cross the Dog.
Goin' where the Southern cross the Dog. is a function of a world in which "when you lose yo' eyesight, yo' best friend's
gone / Sometimes yo' own dear people don't want to fool with you long."
This haunting invocation of railroad crossings in bottleneck tones left Handy Like a streamlined athlete's awesomely dazzling explosions of prowess, .
stupified and inspired. In 1914, he published his own Yellow Dog Blues. blues song erupts, creating a veritable playful festival of meaning. Rather
But the autobiographical account of the man who has been called the than a rigidly personalized form, the blues offer a phylogenetic 5 recapitula-
"Father of the Blues" offers only a simplistic detailing of a progress, describ- tion-a nonlinear, freely associative, nonsequential meditation-of species
ing, as it were, the elevation of a "primitive" folk ditty to the status of "art" experience. What emerges is not a filled subject, but an anonymous (name-
in America. Handy's rendering leaves unexamined, therefore, myriad corri- less) voice issuing from the black (w)hole. 6 The blues singer's signatory coda
is always atopic, placeless: "If anybody ask you who sang this song / Tell 'em
8. African American writer (1871-1938), best 2. The story appears in W. C. Handy, Fatl.erofthe
known for his fictive autobiography (published Blues, ed. Arna Bontemps (New York: Macmillan 3, Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer (b. 1934). per and Row, 1972), I want to claim that blues is
anonymously in 1912). Co., 1941), p. 78. Other defining sources of blues The quotation is from his poem "Telephone Con- like a discourse that comprises the "already said"
9. In Of Grammatology, Derrida defines a prob- include Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues (Lon- \"crsation," of Mro·America. Blues' governing statements and
lematic in which writing, conceived as an iterable don: Chilton, 1969); Samuel B. Charters, The 4. TI'aining, asceticism (Greek). sites are thus "astly more interesting in the process
differe(a)nce, is held to be always already instituted Country Blues (New York: Rinehart, 1959); Giles ::;. Henecting its evolutionary history. of cultural investigation than either a history of
(or, in motion) when a traditionally designated Oakley, The Devil's Music: A History of the Country 6. The description at this point is coextensive with ideas or a history of individual, subjective con-
Mati begins to speak. Hence, script is anterior to Blues (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the "dccentering" of the subject Inentioned at the sciousness blues. When I move to the "X"
speech, and absence and differe(a)nce displace 1976); Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in ou tset of Iny introduction. What I wish to effect by of the trace and the body as host, I am invoking
presence and identity (conceived as "Intention") in White America (New York: William E. Morrow, noting a "subject" who is not .filled is a Mark Taylor's formulations in a suggestive decon·
philosophical discourse [Baker's note]. 1963); Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New menl of the notion that knowledge. or "art, or It structive essay toward radical christology called
\. In 1912, within a few months of each other, York, McGraw-Hili Book Co., 1976); and William are manifestations of an ever more clearly liThe Text as Victim," in Decoustnfction and The-
Wand (a white band leader), Seall (a black vaude- Ferris, Blues from th. Ofllta (New York: Anchor defined Individual consciousness of fHall. In ology (New York, Crossroad, 1982), pp. 58-78
ville performer), and Handy (a black composer) Books, 1979) [Baker's notel. "",."ol'd with Michel Foucault's e,ploratlons In his [Baker's note]. On the French philosopher and hi.·
publilhed the first transcriptions of blues longs. :hd",co/Oll), of Knowledge (1969; New York: Har- torlan FOUCAULT (1926-1987), see above.
2232 / HOUSTON A. BAKER JR.
X done been here and gone." The "signature" is a space already "X"(ed), a
trace of the already "gone"-a fissure rejoined. Nevertheless, the "you" (audi-
ence) addressed is always free to invoke the X(ed) spot in the body's absence.
For the signature comprises a scripted authentication of "your" feelings. Its
mark is an invitation to energizing intersubjectivity. Its implied (in)junction
reads: Here is my body meant for (a phylogenetic ally conceived) you.
The blues are a synthesis (albeit one always synthesizing rather than one
already hypostatized). Combining work songs, group seculars, field hollers,
sacred harmonies, proverbialwisdom, folk philosophy, political commentary,
ribald humor, elegiac lament, and much more, they constitute an amalgam
that seems always to have been in motion in America-always becoming,
shaping, transforming, displacing the peculiar experiences of Africans in the
New World.
»LUES AS CODE AND FORCE
One way of describing the blues is to claim their amalgam as a code radically
conditioning Afro-America's cultural signifying. Such a description implies
a prospect in which any aspect of the blues-a guitar's growling vamp or a
stanza's sardonic boast of heroically back-breaking in
Umberto Eco's words, "for something else" in virtue of a systematic set of
conventional procedures.? The materiality of any blues manifestation, such
as a guitar's walking bass or a French harp's8 "whoop" of motion seen, is,
one might say, enciphered in ways that enable the material to escape into a
named or coded, blues Signification. The material, thus, slips into irreversible
difference. And as phenomena named and set in meaningful relation bya
blues code, both the harmonica's whoop and the guitar's bass can recapitu-
late vast dimensions of experience. For such discrete blues instances are
always intertextually related by the blues code as a whole. Moreover, they
are involved in the. code's manifold interconnections with other codes of
Afro-American culture.
A further characterizati9n of blues suggests that. they are equivalent to
Hegelian "force."9 In the Phenomenology, Hegel speaks of a flux in which
there is "only difference as a universal difference, or as a difference into
which the many antitheses have been resolved. This difference, as a universal
difference, is consequently the simple element in the play of Force itself and
what is true in it. It is the law of Force" (p. 90). Force is thus defined as a
relational matrix where difference is the law. Finally the blues, employed as
an image for the investigation of culture, represents aforce not unlike elec-
tricity. Hegel writes:
Of course, given positive electricity, negative too is given in principle;
for the positive is, only as related to a negative, or, the positive is in its
7. The definition of IIcode Jl is drawn from A Theory lectic are of primary importance to my current
of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University study, it is also true that the locus classicus of the
Press, 1976). All references to Eco refer to this dialectic, in and for itself, is the Phenomenology.
work and are hereafter marked by page numbers Marx may well have stood Hegel on his feet
in parentheses [Baker's note). Eco (b. 1932), ital- through a materialist ·Inversion of the 'phenome-
ian literary critic and' novelist. nology, but subsequent generations have always
8. Harmonica. looked at that uprlghted figure-Hegel himself-
9. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller as an authentic host [Baker's note). On the
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). While German social, political, lind economic theorist
it is true that the material dimensions of the. dia- KARL MARX (1818-1883), see above.
BLUES, IDEOLOGY, AND AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE / 2233
own self the difference from itself; and similarly with the negative. But
that electricity as such should divide itself in this way is not in itself a
necessity. Electricity, as simple Force, is indifferent to its law-to be
positive and negative; and if we call the former its Notion but the latter
its being, then its Notion is indifferent to its being. It merely has this
property, which just means that this property is not in itself necessary
to it ... It is only with law as law that we are to compare its Notions as
Notion, or its necessity. But in all these forms, necessity has shown itself
to be only an empty word. [po 93]
Metaphorically extending Hegel's formulation vis-a-vis electricity, one
might say that a traditional property of cultural study may well be the kind
of dichotomy inscribed in terms like "culture" and "practical reason." But
even if such dichotomies are raised to the status of law, they never constitute
the necessity or "determinant instances" of cultural study and explanation
conceived in terms of force-envisioned, that is, in the analytic notion of a
blues matrix as force. The blues, therefore, comprise a mediational site where
familiar antinomies are resolved (or dissolved) in the office of adequate cul-
tural understanding.
BLUES TRANSLATION AT THE JUNCTION
To suggest a trope for the blues as a forceful matrix in cultural understanding
is to summon an image of the black blues singer at the railway junction lustily
transforming experiences of a durative (unceasingly oppressive) landscape
into the energies of rhythmic song. The railway juncture is marked by tran-
sience. Its inhabitants are always travelers-a multifarious assembly in tran-
sit. The "X" of crossing roadbeds signals the multidirectionality of the
juncture and is simply a single instance in a boundless network that redou-
bles and circles, makes sidings and ladders, forms V's and branches over the
vastness of hundreds of thousands of American miles. Polymorphous and
multidirectional, scene of arrivals and departures, place betwixt and between
(ever entre les deux), the juncture is the way-station of the blues. .
The singer and his production are always at this intersection, this crossing,
codifying force, providing resonance for experience's multiplicities. Singer
and song never arrest transience-fix it in "transcendent form." Instel'itl they
provide expressive equivalence for the juncture's ceaseless flux. Hence, they
may be conceived as translators. l
Like translators of written texts, blues and its sundry performers offer
interpretations of the experiencing of experience. To experience the junc-
ture's ever-changing..scenes, like successive readings of ever-varying texts by
conventional translators, is to produce vibrantly polyvalent interpretations
encoded as blues. The singer's product, like the railway juncture itself (or a
J. Having heard John Felstiner in H session at the is always in a transliterationa) motion, moving from
] 982 Modern Language Association Convention one alphabet to another, always renewing and
present a masterful paper defining I<translation" as being re-netl.1ed in the process. Translation fore-
a process of preserving Ifsomething of value" by stalls fixity. It calls attention always to the trans-
keeping it in motion, I decided that the blues were lated's excess-to its complex multivalence
apt translators of experience. FcIstiner, it seemed [Baker's note). Marcel Mauss (1872-1950),
to me, sought to demonstrate that translation was French anthropologist; in The Gift (1925), he out-
a process equivalent to gift-giving in Mauss's clas- lines gift-exl:hange as a continual exchange of
sic delJnition of that activity. The value of the gift goods kept in motion hy the obligation created to
of translation is never fixed because, say, the poem, give something in return after one receives a gift.
2234 / HOUSTON A. BAKER JR.
successful translator's original), constitutes a lively scene, a robust matrix,
where endless antinomies are mediated and understanding and explanation
find conditions of possibility.
The durative-transliterated as lyrical statements of injustice, despair,
loss, absence, denial, and so forth-is complemented in blues performance
by an instrumental energy (guitar, harmonica, fiddle, gut-bucket bass, molas-
ses jug, washboard) that employs locomotive rhythms, train bells, and whis-
tles as onomatopoeic In A Theory of Semiotics, Eco writes: head. the singer draws into his repertoire hollers, cries, whoops, and moans
Music presents, on the one hand, the problem of a semiotic system
without a semantic level (or a content plane): on the other hand, how-
ever, there are musical "signs" (or syntagms)3 with an explicit denotative
value (trumpet signals in the army) and there are syntagms or entire
"texts" possessing pre-culturalized connotative value ("pastoral" or
"thrilling" music, etc.). [po 111]
The absence of a content plane noted by Bco implies what is commonly
referred to as the "abstractness" of instrumental music. The "musical sign,"
on the other hand, suggests cultural signals that function onomatopoeically
by calling to mind "natural" sounds or sounds "naturally" associated With
common human situations. Surely, though, it would be a mistake to claim
that onomatopoeia is in any sense "natural," for different cultures encode
,even the "same" natural sounds in varying ways. (A rooster onomatopoeically
\sounded in Puerto Rican Spanish is phonically unrecognizable in United
States English, as a classic Puerto Rican short story" makes hilariously clear.)
If onomatopoeia is taken as cultural mimesis, however, it is possible to
apply the semiotician's observations to blues by pointing out that the domi-
nant blues syntagm in America is an instrumental imitation of train-wheels-
over-track-junctures. This sound is the "sign," as it were, of the blues, and it
combines an intriguing melange of phonics: rattling gondolas,5 clattering
flatbeds, quilling whistles, clanging bells, rumbling boxcars, and other rail-
road sounds. A blues text may thus announce itself by the onomatopoeia of
the train's whistle sounded on the indrawn breath of a harmonica or a train's
bell tinkled on the high keys of an upright piano. The blues stanzas may then
roll through an extended meditative repertoire with a steady train-wheels-
over-track-junctures guitar back beat as a traditional, syntagmatic comple-
ment. If desire and absence are driving conditions of blues performance, the
amelioration of such conditions is implied by the onomatopoeic training of
blues voice and instrument. Only a trained voice can sing the blues. 6
At the junctures, the intersections of experience where roads cross and
diverge, the blues singer and his performance serve as codifiers, absorbing
and transforming discontinuous experience into formal expressive instances
that bear only the trace of origins, refusing to be pinned down to any final,
dualistic significance. Even as they speak of paralyzing absence and inerad-
icable desire, their instrumental rhythms suggest change, mOVement, action,
continuance, unlimited and unending possibility. Like signification itself,
2. Words that refer to an object by imitating the 5. Railroad cars with fixed sides and no top.
sounds that object makes. 6. One of the most inspiring and intriguing
3. Meaningful arrangements or combinations of descriptions of the relationship between blues
smaller expressive units. voice and the sounds of the railroad is Albert Mur-
4. "Peyo Mercl!: English Teacher," by Abelardo ray's lyrical exposition in Stomping tM Blues
Dfaz Altaro (1917-1999). [Baker's note].
BLUES, IDEOLOGY, AND AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE / 2235
blues are always nomadic ally \vandering. Like the freight-hopping hobo, they
are ever on the move. ceaselessly summing novel experience.
ANTINO:\lIES AND BLUES MEDIATION
The blues performance is further suggestive if economic conditions of Afro-
American existence are brought to mind. Standing at the juncture, or rail-
of black men and women working in fields without recompense. The perfor-
mance can be cryptically conceived, therefore, in terms suggested by the
bluesman Booker White, v\7ho said, "The foundation of the blues is working
behind a mule way back in slavery time."7 As a force, the blues matrix defines
itself as a network mediating poverty and abundance in much the same man-
ncr that it reconciles durative and kinetic. Many instances of the blues per-
formance contain lyrical inscriptions of both lack and commercial possibility.
The performance that sings of abysmal poverty and deprivation may be rec-
ompensed by sumptuous food and stimulating beverage at a country picnic,
amorous favors from an attentive listener, enhanced Afro-American com-
munality, or Yankee dollars from representatives of record companies trav-
eling the South in search of blues as commodifiable entertainment. The
I performance, therefore. mediates one of the most prevalent of all antimonies
! in cultural investigation-creativity and commerce.
As driving force, the blues matrix thus avoids simple dualities. It perpet-
ually achieves its effects as a fluid and multivalent network. It is only when
"understanding"-the analytical work of a translator who translates the infi-
nite changes of the blues-converges with such blues "force," however, that
adequate explanatory perception (and half-creation) occurs. The matrix
effectively functions toward cultural understanding, that is, only when an
investigator brings an inventive attention to bear.
THE INVESTIGATOR. RELATIVITY, AND BLUES EFFECT
The blues matrix is a "cultural invention": a "negative symbol" that generates
(or obliges one to invent) its own referents. s As an inventive trope, this matrix
provides for my following chapters the type of image or model that is always
present in accounts of culture and cultural products. If the analyses thatr'l
provide are successful, the blues matrix will have ta/ten effect (and affect)
through me.
To "take effect," of course, is not identical with to "come into existence"
or to "demonstrate seniceability for the first time." Because what I have
defined as a blues matrix is so demonstrably anterior to any single instance
of its cultural-explanatory employment, my predecessors as effectors are
ob\'iously legion. "Take effect." therefore, does not signify discovery in the
traditional sense of that word. Rather, it signals the tropological nature 9 of
my uses of an already extant matrix.
Ordinarily. accounts of art, literature. and culture fail to acknowledge their
Quoted in Oakley. TI,e Devil's Music, p. 7 from Roy Wagner's TIre I"vention ojC.. ltt<re (Chi-
[Baker's note]. Booker T. Washington (also called cago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. xvi
"Bukka") White (1906-197 I), blues guitarist and [Baker'. note].
harmonica player. 9. Figurative extension.
h. I have appropriated the term "negative symbol"
 2236 / HOUSTON A. BAKER JR. BLUES, IDEOLOGY, AND AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE / 2237
governing theories; further, they invariably conceal the inventive character lessly compelled to forgo manifold variables in order to apply intensive energy
of such theories. Nevertheless, all accounts of art, expressive culture, or to a selected array.
culture in general are indisputably functions of their creators' tropological Continuing the metaphor, one might say that if the investigator's efforts
energies. When such creators talk of "art," for example, they are never deal- are sufficiently charged with blues energy,S he is almost certain to remodel
ing with existential givens. they are summoning objects, processes, elements and events appearing in traditional, Anglo-American space-time in
or events defined by a model that they have created (by and for themselves) ways that make them "jump" several rings toward blackness and the vernac-
as a picture of art. Such models, or tropes, are continually i'nvoked to con- ular. The blues-oriented observer (the trained critic) necessarily "heats up"
stitute and explain phenomena inaccessible to the senses. Any single model, the observational space by his or her very presence. 6
or any complementary set of inventive tropes, therefore, will offer only a An inventive, tropological, investigative model such as that proposed by
selective account of experience-a partial reading, as it were, of the world. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature entails not only awareness of
While the single account temporarily reduces chaos to ordered plan, all such the metaphorical nature of the blues matrix, but also a willingness on my
accounts are eternally troubled by "remainders." own part to do. more than merely hear, read, or see the blues. I must also
Where literary art' is concerned, for example, a single, ordering, investi- play (with and on) them. Since the explanatory possibilities of a blues
gative model or trope will necessarily exClude phenomena that an alternative matrix-like analytical possibilities of a delimited set of forces in unified field
model or trope privileges as a definitive artistic instance. Recognizing the theory-are hypothetically unbounded, the blues challenge investigative
determinacy of "jnvention" in cultural explanation entails the acknowledge- understanding to an unlimited play.
ment of what might be called a normative relativity. To acknowledge relativity
in our post-Heisenbetgian universe I is, of course, far from original. Neither, BLUES AND VERNACULAR EXPRESSION IN AMERICA
however, is it an occasion for the skeptics or the conservatives to heroically The blues should be privileged in the study of American culture to precisely
assume the critical stage. the extent that inventive understanding successfully converges with blues
. The assumption of normative relativity, far from being a call to abandon- force to yield accounts that persuasively and playfully refigure expressive
ment or retrenchment in the critical arena, constitutes an invitation to spec- geographies in the United States. My own ludic uses of the blues are various,
ulative explorations that are aware both of their own partiality and their and each figuration implies the valorization of vernacular facets of American
heuristic transitions from suggestive (sometimes dramatic) images to culture. The Mro-American writer James Alan McPherson is, I think, the
inscribed concepts. The openness implied by relativity enab,Ies, say, the lit- commentator who most brilliantly and encouragingly coalesces blues, ver-
erary critic to re-cognize his endeavors, presupposing from 'the outset that nacular, and cultural geographies of the United States in his introduction to
such labors are not directed toward independent, phe- Railroad: Trains and Train People in American Culture. 7
nomena but rather toward processes, objects, and events that he or she half- Having described a fiduciary reaction to the steam locomotive by
creates (and privileges as "art") through his or her own speculative, inventive nineteenth-century financiers and an adverse artistic response by such tra-
energies and interests'. ditional American writers as Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau,8 McPherson
One axiological 2 extrapolation from these observations on invention and details the reaction of another sector of the United States population to the
relativity is that no objeot, process, or single element possesses intrinsic aes- railroad: .
thetic value. The "art object" as well as its value are selective constructions
of the critic's tropes and models. A radicalizing uncertainty may thus be said To a third group of people, those not bound by the assumptions of either
to mark cultural explanation. This uncertainty is similar in kind to the always business or classical traditions in art, the shrill whistle might have.-ltjJo-
selective endeavors of, say, the particle physicist. 3 ken of new possibilities. These were the backwoodsmen and Africans
The physicist is always compelled to choose between velocity and posi- and recent immigrants-the people who comprised the vernacular level
tion. 4 Similarly, an investigator of Afro-American expressive culture is cease- of American society. To them the machine might have been loud and
frightening, but its whistle and its wheels promised movement. And
I. That is, a universe governed by the Uuncertainty Physics (New York, William E. Morrow, 1979) since a commitme_nt to both freedom and movement was the basic prom-
principle" articulated in 1927 by Werner Heisen- [Baker's notel.
berg (1901-1976), a Nobel Prize-winning 4. Zukav, ibid., writes: to the uncer-
German physicist: it states that one cannot pre- tainty principle, we cannot measure accurately, at
the same time, both the position and the momen- the particle from its position (which is one of the observer effect in the mapping of experience
cisely determine both the position and momentum
of atomic particles at anyone moment. The exact tum of a moving rarticle. The more precisely we aspects of its existence that one attempts to deter- [Baker's note].
mine) when we take our measurement. Indeter- 7. New York, Random House, 1976, All citations
calculations of classical mechanics are thus determine one 0 these properties, the less we
know about the other. If we precisely determine minacy thus becomes normative [Baker's notc]. refer to this edition and are hereafter marked by
replaced with statements of probability in quan-
the -position of the particle, then, strange as it 5. The I'hlues force JJ is my translationa1 equivalent page numbers in parentheses [Raker's note 1.
tum mechanics.
2. Pertaining to the branch of philosophy dealing sounds, there is nothing that we can know about in investigative "energy" for the investigative McPherson (b. 1943), novelist and short story
with values. its momentum. If we precisely determine the energy dcHncated by Heisenberg's formulations writer.
3. My references to a upos t -Heisenbergian uni- momentum of the. particle, there is no way to deter- [l3aker's notel. 8. All canonical authors of micl-ninctcenth-
verse" and to the uparticle physicist" were made mine its position" (p. 11 I). Briefly, if we bring to 6, Eco (A Theory of Semiotics, p, 29) employs the century American literature: Herman Melville
metaphor of lie co logical variation" in his discussion (1819-1891), Nathaniel Hawthorne
possible by a joyful reading of Gary Zukav's The bear enough energy actually to "see" the imagined
of the semiotic investigations of culture to describe 1864), and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).
Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New "particle," that energy has always already ttwved

2238 I HOUSTON A. BAKER JR.
ise of democracy, it was probable that such people would view the
locomotive as a challenge to the integrative powers of their imaginations.
[p.6]
Afro-Americans-at the bottom even of the vernacular ladder in Amer-
ica-responded to the railroad as a "meaningful symbol offering both eco-
nomic progress and the possibility of aesthetic expression" (p. 9). This
possibility came from the locomotive's drive and thrust, its promise of unre-
strained mobility and unlimited freedom. The blues musician at the crossing,
as I have already suggested, became an expert at reproducing or translating
these locomotive energies. With the birth of the blues, the vernacular realm
of American culture acquired a music that had "wide appeal because it
expressed a toughness of spirit and resilience, a willingness to transcend
difficulties which was strikingly familiar to those whites who remembered
their own history" (p. 16). The signal expressive achievement of blues, then,
lay in their translation of technological innovativeness, unsettling demo-
graphic fluidity, and boundless frontier energy into expression which
attracted avid interest from the American masses. By the 1920s, American
financiers had become aware of commercial possibilities not only of railroads
but also of black music deriving from them.
A "race record" market flourished during the twenties. Major companies
issued blues releases under labels such as Columbia, Vocalion, Okeh, Gen-
";pett, and Victor. Sometimes as many as ten blues releases appeared in a
single week; their sales (aided byradio's dissemination of the music) climbed
to hundreds of thousands. The onset of the Great Depression ended this
phenomenal boom. During their heyday, however, the blues unequivocally
signified a ludic predominance of the vernacular with that sassy, growling,
moaning, whooping confidence that marks their finest performances.
McPherson's assessment seems fully justified. It serves, in fact, as a sug-
gestive play in the project of refiguring American expressive geogra-
phies. Resonantly complementing the insights of such astute commentators
as Albert Murray, Paul Oliver, Samuel Charters, Amiri Baraka, and others,
McPherson's judgments highlight the value of a blues matrix for cultural
analysis in the United States.
In harmony with other brilliant commentators on the blues already noted,
Ralph Ellison selects the railroad way-station (the "Chehaw Station") as his
topos for the American "little man."9 In "The Little Man at the Chehaw
Station,"· he autobiographically details his own confirmation of his Tuskegee
music teacher's observation that in the United States
You must always play your best, even if it's only in the waiting room at
Chehaw Station, because in this country there'll always be a little man
hidden behind the stove ... and he'll know the music, and the tradition,
and the standards of musicianship required for. whatever you set out to
perform. [po 25]
When Hazel Harrison made this statement to the young Ellison, he felt
that she was joking. But as he matured and moved through a diversity of
9. The Chehaw Station Is a whistle-stop near Tus- 1. American Scholar 47 (1978): 24-48. All cita-
tions refer to this version and are hereafter marked
kegee. Alabama. It was a feature of the landscape
of Tuskegee Institute, where Ellison studied music by page numbers in parentheses [Baker's note).
(and much else) [Baker's note).
l,
BLUES, IDEOLOGY, AND AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE I 2239
American scenes, Ellison realized that the inhabitahts of the "drab, utilitar-
ian structure" of the American vernacular do far more than respond in
expressive ways to "blues-echoing, train-whistle rhapsodies blared by fast
express trains as they thundered past" the jUl1ction. At the vernacular level,
according to Ellison, people possess a taste" that asserts its
"authority out of obscurity" (p. 26). The "little man" finally comes to repre-
sent, therefore, "that unknown quality which renders the American audience
far more than a receptive instrument that Play be dominated through a skill-
ful exercise of the sheerly 'rhetorical' elements-the flash and filigree-of
the artist's craft" (p. 26).
From Ellison's opening gambit and wonderfully illustrative succeeding
examples, I infer that the vernacular (in its exp,ressive adequacy and adept
critical facility) always absorbs "classical" elements of American life and art.
I ndeed, Ellison seems to imply that expressive performers in America who
ignore the judgments of the vernacular are desti'ned to failure.
Although his injunctions are intended pril1cip.!'llly to advocate a traditional
"melting pot" ideal in American "high art," Ellison's observations ultimately
yalorize a comprehensive, vernacular expressiveness in America. Though he
seldom loses sight of the possibilities of a classically "transcendeht" Ameri-
can high art, he derives his most forceful from the vernacular:
Blues seem implicitly to comprise the of American
BLUES MOMENTS IN AFRO-AMERICAN EXPRESSION
In the chapters that follow, I attempt to provide suggestive accounts of
lTl.oments in Afro-American discourse when personae, protagonists, autobio-
graphical narrators, or literary critics successfully negotiate an obdurate
"economics of slavery" and achieve a resonant, improvisational, expressive
dignity. Such moments and successful analyses of them provide cogent
examples of the blues matrix at work.
The expressive instances that I have in mind occur in passages such as
the conclusion of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. 2 Stand-
ing at a Nantucket convention, riffing (in the "break" suddenly confront-
ing him) on the personal troubles he has seen and successfully negotiated
in a "prisonhouse of American bondage," Douglass achieves a profoundly
dignified blues voice. Zora Neale Hurston's3 protagonist Janie in the novel
T/1eir Eyes Were Watc11il1g God-as she lyrically and idiomatically relates
a tale of personal suffering and triumph that begins in the sexual exploi-
tations of slavery-is a blues artist par excellence. Her wisdom might well
be joined to that of Amiri Baraka's Walker Vessels 4 (a "locomotive con-
tainer" of blues?), chameleon code-switching from academic phi-
losophy to blues insight makes him a veritable incarnation of the
absorptively vernacular. The narrator of Richard Wright's 5 Black Boy
inscribes a black blues life's lean desire (as I shall demonstrate in chapter
3) and suggests yet a further instance of the blues matrix's expressive
energies. Ellison's invisible man and Baraka's narrator in The System of
2. The 1845 autobiography of the African Arneri-
ing God was pUblished in 1937.
nll1 antislavery activist and writer (1818-1895).
4. A character in Barake's pley The Slal'e (1962).
3. African American novelist and anthropologist 5. African Arnericannovelist (1908-1960); Black
(I B91-1960; see above); 77.eir Eyes lI'ere H atch- Boy, an autobiography, was published in 1945.
2240 / TERRY EAGLETON
Dante's He1l 6 (whose bluesi book produces dance.} provide additional
examples. Finally, Toni Morrison's7. Milkman Dead 'hi Song ofSoZomon
discovers through "Sugarman's" song that· an' awesomely expressive blues
response· may well consist of improvisational ·andserendipitous surrender
to the air: "As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheelad toward Guitar
and it did not matter which one of them. would give up· his ghost in the
killing arms of his brother, For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you
surrendered to the air; you could ride it."B . that texts actively produce ideology rather than merely reflect it.
Such blues moments are but random instances of the blues matrix at work
in Mro-American cultural expression. In my study as a whole, I attempt
persuasively to demonstrate that a blues matrix (as a vernacular. trope,for
American cultural <,;xplanation in· general) possesses enormous force for the
study·of literature, criticism,·:and culture. I know that I have appropriated
the vastness of the vernacular in the United States to a single matrix. But 1
trust that my necessary selectivity will be interpreted, not as a sign of myopic
exclusiveness, but as an inVitation inventive play. The success of my efforts
would be effectively signaled in the following chapters, I think, by the ttans-
formation of my "I" into a juncture where readers could freely improvise
their own distinctive tropes for cultural explanation. A closing that in :fact
opened on such inventive possibilities (like the close of these introductory
remarks) would be appropriately marked by the crossing sign's inviting /IX!'
6 . A 1965 novel. The novellnvlllltZ. Mlln (1952) (b. 1931). . . . ..
I, Ell/ion'. best·known work. .. B. Song oj Solomon (New YQrk: Alfred A. Knopf,
1; Nobel Prlze"'wlttnlrigAfrlcan Anlerlcah novelist 1977), p. 337 [Baker's hotel.:
, :
TERRY EAGLETON
h. 1943
Satirically paraphrasing MATIHEW ARNOLD'S influential view of theerinoblihg power
of literature and culture, Terry Eagleton writes: "If the masses· are not thrown a few
novels, they may' react by throwing up·a few barricades." In.Culture and Anarchy
(I 869), Arnold claims that art, literature, and culture confer "greatness !lnd a noble
spirit" on th<?se who appreciate them, and furthermore are the means to· avoid anar-
chy. In "The Rise of English" (1983), Eagleton argues that literature concerns not
simply beauty and spiritual uplift, but the social control of the middle and working
classes. Answering a perennial question in literary theory about the. role of literature
in society, Eagleton bluntly asserts that the discipline of literature, like formal reli-
gion, is deeply involved in the reproduction of the dominant sodal order.
A student of the Marxist literary and cultural critic RAYMOND WILLIAMS, Eagleton
has been the foremost Marxist commentator on literary theory in England since the
1980s, as well as a literary journalist, novelist, and playwright. Born in a working-
class community in Salford, England, he attended Cambridge University on a schol-
arship, receiving his B.A. in 1964 and his Ph.D. in 1968. He taught at Cambridge
for a year, but since 1969 he has held various. appointments at Oxford University,
becoming Thomas Warton Professor of English and LiJerature in 1992. During the
politically vibrant late 1960s, Eagleton was active in the Catholic Left-among other
TERRY EAGLETON / 2241
things, he helped found a journal, Slant-and he published three books before he
was thirty. It was not until the mid-1970s, however, that he established himself as a
leading expositor of Marxism within the emerging field of contemporary literary the-
ory, most notably with Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory
(1976). Extending LOUIS ALTHUSSER's theory of ideology to literature, it propounds a
Marxist theory of the text. Against traditional, aestheticist views that literature pri-
marily produces beauty and pleasure, as well as the conventional Marxist view,
espoused by LEON TROTSKY, that texts directly reflect social reality, Eagleton argues
While his later work frequently returns to questions of aesthetics and ideology,
Eagleton subsequently turned away from the pursuit of an overarching theoretical
model, or what the American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) termed
"Grand Theory." As he remarked in a 1990 interview, "I think that back in the sev-
enties we used to suffer from a certain fetishism of method; we used to think that
we have to get a certain kind of systematic method right, and this would be the way
of proceeding. I think some of my early work, certainly Criticism and Ideology,
would fall within that general approach." Rather than dispensing with Marxism,
however, he distinguishes between theoretical methods and political goals: "[AJ
Marxist has to define certain urgent political goals and allow, as it were, those to
determine questions of method rather than the other way around." In eschewing
large-scale theoretical models, Eagleton resembles the twentieth-century neoprag-
matists Richard Rorty, STANLEY FISH, AND STEVEN KNAPP AND WALTER BENN
MICHAELS, who insist that method cannot be determined in advance but derives
from practice; But whereas they argue that literary studies are politically ineffec-
1984 tual, Eagleton advocates a political focus.
Another element of Eagleton's turn from Grand Theory is his style, which is lively,
witty, clear, and frequently opinionated, ·combhting :theory and literary journalism.
.. Eagleton unabashedly states his opinions-'-often in audacious' one-liners, such as
"deconstruction is the death drive at the level of theory'l.o.,-and injects· humor'into his
writing. For instance, he concludes his collection of essays, Against the Grain, Essays
1975-1985 (1986), with a comic song:
Chaucer was a class traitor
Shakespeare hated the
Donne sold out a later..
Sidney was a nob ...
There are only three names
To be plucked from this dismal set
Milton Blake and Shelley
Will smash the ruling class yet.
However whimsical, Eagleton's song memorably reinforces his argument for the class
orientation of literature, valuing the socially revolutionary rather than the purely aes-
thetic.
In his Function of Criticism: From the "Spectator" to Post-Structuralism (1984),
Eagleton declares that contemporary criticism has lost its social purpose and become
marginalized through the technocratic fetishizing of Grand Theory. Drawing on the
twentieth-century German philosopher JORGEN HABERMAS'S concept of the public
sphere, he notes that modern criticism arose in the eighteenth century in opposition
to the absolutist state, and he calls for the renewed oppositional role of criticism in
the public sphere. To that end, Eagleton became known as the foremost popularizer
of contemporary literary theory in the 1980s. His Literary Theory: An Introduction
(1983; 2d ed., 1996), from which "The Rise of English" is drawn, was an academic
bestseller and probably the most influential introduction to contemporary theory for
students and curious readers. It conducts a knowledgeable but fast-paced, readable,