For each day of blogging I will set up a post, and you will write your commentary (1-2 developed paragraphs, ideally tied closely to the text--try to discuss specific language and specific scenes) in the comments section. Click on the link below.
You are free to write on whatever strikes you as interesting, intriguing, or inexplicable in the section we will be discussing. For example, you might want to think about how knowing that this text is a novel and not an autobiography reshapes our conception of its purpose. You might also think about how Johnson's text nods to slave narratives. What kind of social and cultural critiques does the novel offer? And why does it do so through irony?
Let me know if you have any questions!
When do you want our James Wheldon Johnson comments?
ReplyDeleteI signed up for the Thursday blog, so I guess this can count as my blog for the 28? I wanted to discuss the parents of the Narrator. I think that they lay out the scope of the races for the entire text.
ReplyDeleteThe Narrator's black mother is kind and beautiful. She loves the narrator and cares for him greatly. She is full of music, a VERY important thing to our Narrator. Yet, she passes away when the Narrator is only a young man. This makes her, and the rest of the black race because of her, unreliable in the Narrator's life. She may have been nurturing and loving, but she succumbed to the ills and trials of the world. She left too early.
The Narrator's father is a much more complicated figure, as is the Narrator's relationship with the white race. The father only deigns to see the Narrator and his mother sparingly and erratically. The Narrator must perform and serve the father if he is to receive affection or support. Then, once the mother has passed away, the father severs his connection soon after. It is as if the white race as a whole is only distractedly interested in what is going on with their lessers, or what the white race perceives as their lessers. When that interest wanes, they lose touch with the objects of that interest entirely. They cannot be counted upon for much in the Narrator's eyes either.
By viewing the relationships the Narrator has with his parents from the scope of racial affectations and perceptions, the reader may gather what is the heart of the text--the conflict the Narrator has between both of the races and how he fits into nor can count on either. The Narrator is always stuck somewhere in the gulf between the two and is left with highly varied feelings about both. This leaves him incapable to form meaningful relationships with people of either race, which drives him to his transience throughout the text. This is the conflict of the novel.
I haven't had a chance to introduce myself yet, so here it goes. My name is Jessica Wood, you can call me Jess or Jessica, I don't care either way. I'm a senior double majoring in Criminal Justice and Sociology. I'm taking this class because somewhere along the last 3 1/2 years I missed an elective...lucky for me, this class was available, saving me from an "Intro to..." class.
ReplyDeleteSo far I'm really enjoying "Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man." Like most people, I generally hate assigned reading. So, like most people, I viewed this book as a chore. Not only that, but I was hesitant about reading this novel because it was written almost 100 years ago. I was worried it'd be a difficult read given how our language has changed in the last century. But...my opinion changed. By the end of the first chapter, I found myself unable to put it down. Not only was this book an easy read (as far as the language was concerned) but it's interesting, which is always a plus when doing assigned reading!
The more I read, the more I feel our Narrator has something he is either compensating for...it's like he has something he has to prove to everyone. I say this because on one hand our Narrator comes off as very egotistical and self-involved (ex: bragging about getting away little things and his teachers blaming other people) but at the same time, he is still very niave as to how the world around him works (ex: leaving his money unattended in his trunk).
I guess the way I see it is if he were as great as he tries to come off, he would have gone and explained his situation to the head of the university in Atlanta he was going to attend. Instead he decides that it's too embarassing and winds up working in the cigar factory and keeps finding excuses not to go back to school. It seems to me that he doesn't think he can succeed in college and therefore finds every excuse not to go back.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the novel, Auto-Ex has exhibited a great fascination with language. He learns to speak the language of music, the Spanish language, and then the French language. When he visits London, what impressed him the most “was not St. Paul’s nor the British Museum nor Westminster Abbey. It was nothing more or less than the simple phrase “Thank you…” (pg 139).
ReplyDeleteAuto-Ex seems drawn to the power of words and the idea of expressing himself. He begins piano because of his mother, and then immediately reaches for more—to master the classics. Then, when he is taught rag-time he translates classical music into ragtime and desires to do the same with the old slave songs. When he learns Spanish, he learns to speak it so well that he becomes “the best.” And when he learns how to speak French, he immediately offers a lesson to his readers on how to best learn a language.
Now, he is writing his secrets: mastering the expression of the pen. He fixes his thoughts and experiences in black letters upon a white page. Auto-Ex is the embodiment of the race question, black and white within one body—double-consciousness made literal. It seems to me that his thirst to understand others and desire to express himself is driven by his need to be understood so that he might, one day, be able to understand himself.
Whitney G.
I find it interesting that when something traumatic or significant happens that pertains to our being we begin to question our ancestry and race and what it means to be of those things, to classify ourselves and everyone around us.
ReplyDeleteOur narrator puts himself and others through such questioning after it is discovered (in his class at school, of all places) that he isn't what he always believed himself to be, white. It's interesting that when he thought himself white, he didn't question himself or begin to see certain things/people negatively. For example, after school that day, he rushes home and begins to examine his face. However, he sees himself as beautiful, just like his mother's acquaintenances have always seen him. When he rushes downstairs to question his mother he looks into her face and begins looking for "defects" and sees that her skin is more brown and her hair isn't as soft, yet he still considers her to be the most beautiful woman of all the ones he has seen.
Not only did this event in school cause him to look for "defects" in his mother, but it also caused him to ponder his father for the first time. She says, "No, I am not white, but you--your father is one of the greatest men in the country--the best blood of the South is in you--" The narrator says, "this suddenly opened up in my heart a fresh chasm of misgiving and fear..." And, "from that time [he] looked out through other eyes, [his] thoughts were colored, [his] words were dictated...[a colored man] is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the view point of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man."
After all of this, he begins to classify himself as something other than how he naturally developed up to the point of humiliation. That humiliation led to the discovery that he has black blood, which completely stamped out his physical whiteness and changed his psychology of his own being. He could have passed as white in a place outside his hometown, but that wouldn't be truthful. Our narrator seems to be earnestly striving for and living the truth. One moment completely changed his psychology of being.
-Rachel Hancock
As the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man unfolds itself, it takes the typical themes from the slave narrative. One such theme is the mirroring of bible stories in the lives of the slaves whom are liberated by God. So at first, as the novel opens, the narrator is in a state of innocence, not acted upon by the evil in the world. Everything is perfect, like the Garden of Eden before the loss of paradise. However, knowledge of the outside world and what would become part of his world made him begin his fall from paradise.
ReplyDeleteThis helps in answering the question of the narrator being racist or not. His depiction of "Shiny" is from a purely empirical point of view, as a description of Jim by Huck Finn in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When he leaves his small northern community to attend university in the south, he takes his naivety with him. His trust in the unknowns of human morals is a prime example of this. He was trusting enough to leave all of his worldly possessions in the hands of a few people whom he did not know. Which, as part of his coming of age/learning the ways of the world, teaches him of the unkindness of others, more so than the harmless tauntings of school boys.
Max
I find the most intriguing concept presented by the Narrator thus far is his classification of blacks in Southern communities. What caught my attention immediately was the criteria for the placement of blacks into these categories. The Narrator begins by clarifying that these classes were based upon a black man's relationship with whites and not within his own race.
ReplyDeleteThis is not a system of classification created by a white man, but by our Narrator. Perhaps this concept is a testament to his brute honesty, yet it still holds an air of discrimination by our Narrator. He, a black man, cannot find an alternative analysis of black communities in the South without it being directly proportional to whites and their outlook on the black race. This notion of class would be labeled as racist today. And though it could be argued as racist then, it appears that the Narrator is only tapping into the beginnings of the struggle for equality. The Narrator is clearly objecting to the idea that equality will lead to frictionless relationships between blacks and whites. As depicted by the third class of blacks, the further away they get from the bonds of their past and the closer they get to economical and social equality with the whites, the wider "the gulf" between the two races.
Michael
There are lines in every novel that make a reader pause and wish they could reread them every day with as much impacting magnitude as the first time their eyes soak them up. For me, one of these lines falls on page 20.
ReplyDelete"In the life of everyone there is a limited number of unhappy experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life."
I love the way Johnson creates sentences at the right moment that make a reader shudder and feel the intensity of his life. The way Johnson can stamp upon a reader an impressionable feeling of relating. I feel like in that line he isn't speaking to any type of person, he's speaking to humanity. Throughout the entirety of this novel, he often represents a double conscious of both black and whites in America, and in lines like this, he represents both with truth.
This line does not necessarily have any real relation to the whole idea of racism and all the issues that arise in this text but I just wanted to touch on it because I've enjoyed going back and rereading it over and over again. I love his diction and the feeling inside of those words that relate to anyone at any time. Johnson does an immaculate job of being a double person with a double identity and he proves it through lines like this one on Page 20.
This is the second time I'm reading this novel and I'm enjoying it more than the first I believe.
Lindsey Hall
For me, the most interesting aspect of the Autobiography was its emphasis -- likely adopted from Dubois's impressive sociological study of American race relations -- on "doubleness." So far as I can tell, the import of this notion, which I believe to be fundamentally correct, is that all self-consciousness -- not Descartes's intellectual notion of a hermetic and self-sufficient entity, but the more simple, quotidian notion of feeling 'self-conscious' -- is mediated by Others; more accurately, self-consciousness is mediated by how we imagine others (imagining us). Whether or not a particular, pre-conceived idea of the Other aligns with others-in-reality is beside the point. What matters is the often ignored fact that humans take place and can only take place, qua human, within an often ambiguous and largely phantasmatic social matrix. For a black man embedded in the cultural milieu of America at the dawn of the 20th century, his consciousness-refracting idea of the White Other was, almost unfailingly, an accurate psycho-social representation "...this person sees me as inferior, not fully human, dangerous, one of the God-cursed sons of Ham, etc., etc."
ReplyDeleteI feel quite certain that Dubois's articulation of black America's psychological double-bind is strongly informed by Hegel, whose dialectical "science" aimed at re-forging the pieces of the modern, shattered psyche into a complete and rational unity; to put it less poetically, Hegel saw the true telos of the psyche as authentic self-consciousness, a fulfilled frame of mind that would preclude the un-freedom of 'feeling self-conscious.' Dubois and Johnson suggest that, as minorities in America, whenever black people enter public space they are surrounded by white people that more or less, on a certain level, make them 'feel self-conscious' -- their self-image is constantly being usurped and sublated by the White Other. Even when alone, the public often accompanies us into our reflections and self-representations. (Slightly off topic, but this is why Engels was able to claim that the proletariat was under the spell of "false consciousness.") Thus, Dubois stresses that the souls of black folk have not achieved true self-consciousness.
In various strands of German philosophy (I'm thinking here primarily of Heidegger... haven't gotten anywhere near the finale of Phenomenology of Spirit) the end-point of true 'self-consciousness' is a detached lack of concern over the perceptions of others and a satisfying absorption in one's personal life-project. To speak of the hateful power of black stereotypes is another way of saying that the self-image received by black people through public mediation (self-consciousness) was manufactured by white people within a racist tradition that sought the disenfranchisement of newly-freed blacks. It would be necessary, in this situation, to allow black people to create their own self-image, one no longer in thrall to political and existential belittlement. Obviously, that's why the first black colleges and the meeting places of the more socially aware and uplift-minded black people (we see this in the Autobiography) always have the equivalent of shrines composed of the faces of those who have achieved a certain, improbable level of success in American culture. To keep these racial exemplars in mind would counteract the received, racist self-image foisted upon them.
Justin Crowley
Another possibility of intervening in this ugly and entangled struggle for racial identity would be to engage in some form of irony. Irony, in its purest sense, is inherently critical; however, it refuses to denounce in earnest but, instead, smuggles in its criticisms by exemplifying what it seeks to negate in a somewhat irritating tradition that stretches from Socrates to Stephen Colbert. While Auto-X seems to hint at the opening of the book that his life story is really a kind of irony in practice, a devilish prank pulled on an ignorant society and which we are called upon to witness as giddy co-conspirators, he is much too earnest throughout the rest of the book for this suggestion to be taken seriously. Perhaps the opening paragraph of the book is best read as the irony of Johnson himself. After all, the Autobiography is an ironic prank that calls American race (and class) relations into question and problematizes them to the point where they no longer seem tenable. He presents a narrator who convincingly works out the "race question" for himself, but shows how Auto-X ends in a rather alienated and miserable state -- thus he negates the narrator's methods and mindset in approaching the race question. Johnson achieves this in the same way Colbert tries to show up the empty-headedness of populist conservatism, or how Kierkegaard impugns the aesthetic lifestyle.
ReplyDeleteJustin
As the narrator discusses the different experiences he encounters throughout his life I noticed that in general he was most satisfied by the activities he took part in with the white community. When we think of the narrators experiences with the black community we can recall his misfortune in having his valuables stolen and his initiation into the world of gambling. Both of which can be seen as negative experiences. When we think about his adventures with his white friends we relate it to his astonishing trip to France and the luxuary in which he was introduced.We also remember the way he described the widow as beautiful and luxurious. From this experience we can draw another example of negativity from the black race when remember how the widow was killed by her black lover leaving a painful mark in the narrators mind.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the author trying to show us through these examples? Is he trying to gain sympathy for the black race by showing us that due to their lack of acceptance and inability to advance they are forced into places of unlawful activity? Is he trying to create resentment toward the white race because while the African Americans continue to struggle white people are able to live lives of luxury? Are his negative experiences among the black community explained in a way which will allow the reader to sterotype African Americans?
Regardless of his intentions one thing
seems clear, the narrator has more positive experiences with his white aquaintances than he does with his African American aquaintances.
Ashley
Alright, first post of a foreigner on the blog!
ReplyDeleteSo what I wanted to talk about is the time he spent in Europe. I find it interesting that the whole beginning of the text is kind of perpetually reminding us of the differences between blacks and whites; except when he is in Europe. I BELIEVE there were less blacks in Europe than in the United States at this time (or at least in France) since we kept most of our slaves in the colonies, and when slavery was abolished they didn't move to the continent. The Ex-Colored man doesn't mention anything about that though. He talks about how much he liked Paris, London, Amsterdam etc but he drifts away from the racial "conflict", as if it only happened in the United-States. The moment when the social differences between blacks and whites are brought back is when he tells his millionaire that he wants to go back to the United-states. Europe was a place where he could "Rest" and quit being a colored man; now he is going back to the US and back to being a black man again.
I don't really know what to add, I just thought I would mention that as it is something I noticed, and I am glad I got to notice something.
Ben B.
I think that the narrator’s struggle with identity is rather obsessive. It seems as though whenever he gets bored or something doesn’t go how he wants, he just switches identities. Towards the end of the book on page 190 he states, “I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a moustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead.” At first I thought he was finally going to be content with his identity and accept himself as both races. By the end of the sentence, he just seems like a little kid giving up and trying to make a very juvenile point. I also thought it was ironic that he didn’t want a label of inferiority, but it seems like he’s trying to label himself as better than others just because he is no longer categorizing himself but letting others do it for him.
ReplyDeleteCorrie
Just as Ben B., I am very interested in our narrator's time spent in Europe. It is insightful to think of the lack of African presence felt in AutoEx's European excursion. It is as though the whole journey, introduced and pursued by his white-society-icon of a friend, is our narrators physical and psychological exploration of the white world he has found himself in. He knows that his racial identity is scued between white and black, and he wants to fully discover for himself what each entity of his identity mean to him. He describes exploring all the nooks and crannies of Paris in his free time, a symbolic image of AutoEx's soul search, if you will. It is also VERY interesting to think about our narrators abrupt acknowledgment that for him to be able to identify himself with his African descent, he must return to the American South. I think Johnson here is turning the reader's attention to something violent, and unknown, and never before seen as far as a racial struggle is concerned.
ReplyDeletetyler sudderth
When I finished reading Johnson’s novel, I reread the opening paragraph and couldn’t help but laugh at myself a little. I had fallen for Auto-Ex’s joke!
ReplyDeleteI realize now that as I read the novel, I kept hoping for a grand triumph. As if I needed our narrator to explode into some kind of brilliant, showy action that answered at least one of questions surrounding the “race question” in a dense cloud. But, he never did. Auto-Ex remained completely ordinary.
In my opinion, many of those that write an autobiography do so because they have done something in their lifetime that merits especial attention. Even in novels, it seems that the protagonist always answers some life question or changes in such a way as to be a different person than when the novel began. With those assumptions in mind, I read this novel. Only to feel cheated at the end.
Auto-Ex does grow, does change but he remains, as many in this life seem to, human. Worse than that, he remains a fallible human whose life experiences leave the reader with more questions than answers. This, it seems to me, is his joke. Our narrator has no answers for us but leads us to the conclusion of the novel hoping the whole way that he does.
Whitney G.