A Sure Attention to Voice

Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature by Gayl Jones

Review by: Cheryl A. Wall
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 1993), pp. 223-225
Published by: Duke University Press
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A Sure Attention to Voice
GAYL
JONES, Liberating
Voices: Oral Tradition in
African
American
Literature
(Cambridge:
Harvard
University Press, 1991),
pp.
228, $27.95.
When I was half
way through Liberating
Voices,
I
thought
with some amusement that it
would be
singular
in the field of African American
literary
studies if it did not cite the
work of
Henry
Louis
Gates.
In
fact,
his name does
appear
in the
postscript,
where
Gayl
Jones
reveals that her
manuscript
was
completed
in 1982. Had it been
published
then,
it
would
certainly
have been seen as a
precursor
to Gates's vernacular
theory,
set forth
most
completely
in The
Signifying Monkey. Anticipating
one of the most
revelatory
mo-
ments in Gates's
study-the
discussion of free indirect discourse in Their
Eyes
Were
Watching God-Jones
analyzes
Zora Neale Hurston's use of "indirect
dialogue
to break
into the
integuments
of narrative"
(135). Without recourse to a
complex
theoretical
ap-
paratus,
Jones
explicates
the
ways
in which Hurston fashions a narrative voice out of
language (imagery, vocabulary, rhythms,
and sentence
structure)
that her
protagonist
Janie
might
have used.
Jones's
analysis
intends to demonstrate what is now a critical
commonplace:
African
American literature draws both on
European
and
European
American
literary
models
and on what Richard
Wright
called "the forms of
things
unknown,"
the distinctive oral
and aural
forms-including spirituals,
sermons, blues,
and
folktales--created by
African Americans.
Liberating
Voices aims to
explore
the "technical effects" of these tra-
ditions and to demonstrate the claim that when black writers in the United States
"began
to trust the
literary possibilities
of their own verbal and musical creations and to
employ self-inspired techniques, they began
to transform (their
literary
models) and to
gain greater
artistic
sovereignty"
(1).
Jones's
work
appears
in the wake of studies
by
Gates,
Houston
Baker,
Stephen
Henderson,
and Valerie
Smith,
among
others,
scholars who have established the
impor-
tant influence of oral traditions on African American literature.
Liberating
Voices illumi-
nates how
differently
that
importance registers
for a writer who traces these influences
not to formulate a critical theoretical
paradigm,
but to examine how other writers incor-
porate
"folk" voices that
Jones
herself wishes to record and extend. When she com-
mends novelist Ernest
Gaines
for his "sure attention to
voice,"
she
might
well be
speak-
ing
of herself.
Gayl Jones
rose to
prominence
on the wave of black women whose
writings
have re-
vivified the
contemporary literary
scene. Her
stunning
first
novel,
Corregidora, published
in 1975 and written in a
spare,
blues-inflected
prose, depicts
the
struggle
of the
singer/protagonist
to uncover and confront a
history
of
slavery,
sexual
subjugation,
and
survival that is accessible
only through memory
and oral lore. Toni
Morrison,
who
edited the novel at Random
House,
commented afterward that the novel took a
large
idea and
brought
it "down small" and "at home." The result was "a
universality
and a
particularity"
that made it
"extraordinary."
In the next two
years, Jones published
a sec-
ond novel, Eva's Man, and a collection of short stories, White Rat, in which she continued
to
explore themes of
sexuality, violence, and madness.
Only through speech
do her
characters transcend the
psychic
dislocation which is in
large
measure a
legacy
of the
history represented
in
Corregidora.
Those who do not are often
literally imprisoned
and
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224
NovEL
I WINTER 1993
always figuratively caged by
their silence.
Concluding
what had been an
impressively
productive period,
Jones
published
three volumes of
poems
in the
early eighties.
In a 1975 interview with her
mentor,
the
poet
Michael
Harper, Gayl
Jones
reflected "I
used to
say
that I learned to write
by listening
to
people
talk. I still feel that the best of
my writing
comes from
having
heard rather than
having
read."
Enumerating
the influ-
ences on her
work,
she listed first the stories her mother wrote and told. She then cited a
range
of
texts--from
The
Canterbury
Tales to Don
Quixote
to
Finnegan's
Wake to contem-
p6rary
novels
by
Latin
Americans,
Native
Americans,
and African
Americans;
she
per-
ceived them all to be rooted in oral traditions. Even as she
appreciated
the
insights
she
was
learning
then as a
graduate
student at Brown
University,
the self-described
story-
teller
averred,
"I still don't like to stand
away
from the
traditions,
talking
about them.
You
ought
to be able to talk about them
standing right
inside of them."
In
Liberating
Voices: Oral Tradition in
African
American Literature,
Gayl Jones
succeeds
both in
promulgating
a
scholarly
thesis and in
standing right
inside of the traditions she
explicates.
She does the latter not as a member of a
particular speech community,
but
as a writer whose ear is
professionally
attuned to the various tones and
rhythms
of black
southern
speech.
Not
surprisingly,
the critics whose
insights
Jones
finds most useful are
also
storytellers
and
poets,
in
particular Sterling
Brown,
Carlos
Fuentes, John
Edgar
Wideman,
and
Sherley
Anne Williams.
Divided into three
sections,
Liberating
Voices traces the
liberating impact
of oral forms
on
poetry,
the short
story
and the novel. This
proves
too much
ground
to cover.
Poetry,
the
genre
on which the
impact
of oral traditions has been most
thoroughly
studied,
gets
short shrift here. Three
pages
are devoted to
Langston Hughes.
Still, Jones
has
provoca-
tive,
if
sketchily developed,
ideas about
Williams'
"Someone Sweet
Angel
Chile,"
a
cy-
cle of
poems inspired by
Bessie
Smith,
and
Harper's "Uplift
From a Dark Tower." She
suggests,
for
example,
how Williams anchors her
poem
in the 12-bar
blues,
then con-
structs an
open-ended
form that
synthesizes
diverse voices and histories.
Though
she
asserts rather than demonstrates the
shaping
influence of
jazz
on
Harper's poem,
Jones
finds in
jazz
an
apt metaphor
for the
speaker's ability
to move
through
time and
space.
Turning
to
fiction, Jones
rehearses the
inhibiting impact
of
minstrelsy
on the devel-
opment
of
language
and character. To chart the
way
black writers broke out of
dialect,
she chooses two
rarely interpreted
stories,
Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The
Lynching
of
Jube
Benson" and Hurston's "The Gilded Six-Bits." If Dunbar draws black characters
within a frame controlled
by
a white
narrator,
Hurston cracks the frame and
begins
to
let her characters tell their own stories. Later writers transcribe vernacular
speech
in
ways
that are less
dependent
on
orthographical changes
and that
correspond
more to
the
ways regional
dialects are inscribed in
European
American
writing.
Jones's
choices of illustrative texts blend the familiar and the
unexpected.
She exam-
ines Jean Toomer's "Karintha," Loyle Hairston's 'The Winds of Change" (a story
in ur-
ban
slang),
Ann
Petry's
"Solo on the Drums," Ralph
Ellison's
"Flying Home," and Amiri
Baraka's "The Screamers."
Among
the novels she reads are Invisible Man (Ellison), The
Third
Life of Grange Copeland
(Alice Walker), The
Autobiography of
Miss
Jane
Pittman
(Ernest
Gaines),
and
Song of
Solomon (Toni Morrison).
As the book
proceeds, Jones extends and clarifies the discussion of
techniques
bor-
rowed from music to include
repetition (ballad), "worrying
the line" (blues), and
impro-
vised variations
(jazz).
While it is not
surprising
that she can discern the last in Baraka's
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REVIEW I A SURE ATENTIONTO VOICE 225
fiction,
I did not
expect
the
approach
to be
applicable
to
Petry's.
Few critics have
paid
attention to the form of
Petry's
fictions;
most label The Street (1945) naturalistic and
move on.
Jones
does not. She is concerned with
exploring
the
array
of
resources,
linguis-
tic and
musical,
on which black writers have drawn.
This concern can result in discussions that
impress
more for their breadth than
depth
of
analysis.
In
establishing
the context for 'The
Screamers,"
for
example,
Jones
refers to Eliot's "The
Wasteland,"
Hesse's
Steppenwolf, Fitzgerald
and the
Jazz
Age,
Sandburg's
"Jazz Fantasia,"
Camus's The
Rebel,
The
Beats,
and a host of African
American texts. Too little
space
is left to
develop
the
argument
that Baraka
"choreographs"
the
language
in his
story. Perhaps
the fullest treatment is
given
The
Autobiography of
Miss
Jane
Pittman, which,
for
Jones,
achieves the
potential
of voice that
was
suggested by
Their
Eyes
Were
Watching
God. The unmediated first
person
narrative
produces
a chorus of
voices,
belonging
to black and white
characters,
with each voice
distinct and
unpredictable.
In current
criticism,
African Americanists are
reevaluating
the
emphasis
on the ver-
nacular. Some are concerned that the
decade-long
focus on it has
produced
a too nar-
rowly
defined
canon;
others
worry
about the
ideological implications
of
privileging
tex-
tual
representations
of rural southern blacks.
Liberating
Voices serves as a useful touch-
stone in these reconsiderations
by reminding
us,
that for the
writer,
linguistic
issues are
key.
It
might
lead scholars to read African American
literature,
as
Gayl Jones does,
plac-
ing
texts in a broad
comparative
context without
losing sight
of the
culturally specific.
At
the
least,
it should
inspire
some to reread
Jones's
fiction and
poetry
in the context of her
criticism.
CHERYL A.
WALL,
Rutgers University
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