Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (91 page)

In the United States we have already seen what the Harlem Renaissance had accomplished in the 1920s. The career of Richard Wright spanned the war, his two most important books appearing at either end of the conflict,
Native Son
in 1940, and
Black Boy
in 1945. Beautifully written, Wright’s books agonisingly describe what was then a slowly changing world. A protégé of Wright’s found this even harder to take.

Ralph Ellison had wanted to be a musician since he was eight years old, when his mother had bought him a cornet. But he ‘blundered into writing’ after attending Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in 1933 and discovering in the library there T. S. Eliot’s
Waste Land.
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Inspired jointly by his friendship with Wright and by Hemingway’s reports from the Spanish Civil War in the
New York Times,
Edison eventually produced
Invisible Man
in 1952. In this large book, the hero (unnamed) passes through all the stages of modern American black history: ‘a Deep South childhood; a Negro college supported by northern philanthropy; factory work in the North; exposure to the frenzy of sophisticated Negro city life in Harlem; a “back-to-Africa” movement; a Communist-type outfit known as “The Brotherhood”; and even a “hipster” episode.’
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Yet each of these regurgitates him: the invisible man fits in nowhere. Edison, despite his earlier criticism of Gunnar Myrdal, had little positive to offer beyond this bleak criticism of all the possibilities that face the black man. And he himself fed strangely silent after this novel, becoming not a little invisible himself. It was left to the third of the American Negro writers to ready get under the skin of the whites, and he only did it when he was thrown by force of circumstance into the fire.

Born in 1924, one of ten children, James Arthur Jones grew up in crushing poverty and never knew his father. He took his stepfather’s name when his mother married David Baldwin some years later. That stepfather was a preacher of ‘incendiary’ sermons, with an ‘ingrained’ hatred of whites, so that by the time he was fourteen James Baldwin had acquired both characteristics.
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But his preaching and his moralising had revealed him to have a talent for writing, and he had been introduced to the
New Leader
(where C. Wright Mills got his break) by Philip Rahv. Because he was homosexual as well as black, Baldwin took a leaf out of Richard Wright’s book and became an exile in Paris, where he wrote his first works. These were firmly in the tradition of American pragmatic realism, influenced by Henry James and John Dos Passos. Baldwin defined his role then as being ‘white America’s inside-eye on the closed families and locked churches of Harlem, the discreet observer of homosexual scenes in Paris, above all the sensitive recorder of the human heart in conflict with itself.’
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He made a name for himself with
Go Tell It on the Mountain
(1953) and
Giovanni’s Room
(1956), but it was with the emergence of the civil rights movement in the later 1950s that his life took on new and more urgent dimensions. Returning to the United States from France in July 1957, in September he was commissioned by
Harper’s
magazine to cover the struggle for integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Charlotte, North Carolina. On 5 September that year, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas had attempted to prevent the admission of black pupils to a school in Little Rock, whereupon President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to enforce integration and protect the children.

The experience changed Baldwin: ‘From being a black writer carving out a career in a white world, Baldwin was becoming black.’
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No longer a mere observer, he conquered his fear of the South (as he himself put it) in the pages of
Harper’s,
his anger and his honesty laid bare for the white readers to accept or reject. The message he conveyed, in painful, raw language, was this: ‘They [the students in the sit-ins and freedom marches] are not the first Negroes to face mobs: they are merely the first Negroes to frighten the mob more than the mob frightens them.’
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Two of Baldwin’s essays were reprinted as a book,
The Fire Next Time,
which attracted a great deal of attention as he eloquently discovered a language for the Negro experience and explained to whites the virulent anger inside blacks. ‘For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language…. I realised what tremendous things were happening and that I did have a role to play. I can’t be happy here, but I can work here.’
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The anger of the blacks was out of the bag and could never be put back.

Elsewhere, black writing was also making advances, though in Britain the novels of Colin Maclnnes (
Absolute Beginners,
1959, and
Mr Love and Mr Justice, 1
960) were more astute observations on the way of life of West Indians in London, who had been arriving since 1948 to work in the capital’s transport system, than arguments with any direct social or political point.
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In France, the concept of
négritude
had been coined before World War II but had only entered general usage since 1945. Its main theme was a glorification of the
African past, often stressing black emotion and intuition as opposed to Hellenic reason and logic. Its main exponents were Léopold Senghor, president of Senegal, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon. Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who worked in Algeria, is considered in chapter 30 (page 526).
Négritude
was a somewhat precious word that made the process it described sound safer than it did in the hands of, say, Baldwin or Edison. But its central message, like theirs, was that black culture, black life, was every bit as rich, as meaningful, and yes, as satisfying as any other, that art that was original, moving, and worth sharing, could be made out of the black experience.

In fact,
négritude
was a European label for something that was happening in francophone Africa.
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And what was happening was much tougher and more profound than the word made it appear. This process – decolonisation – was an inevitable by-product of World War II. Not only were the colonial powers now too enfeebled to maintain their hold on their possessions, having relied on colonial manpower to help them fight their wars, they were under strong moral pressure to relinquish their political hold. These developments were naturally accompanied by parallel intellectual changes.

The first modern realistic novel to be published in West Africa was Cyprian Ekwensi’s
People of the City
(1954), although it was the publication in 1951 of Amos Tutuola’s
Palm-Wine Drinkard
that made the Western metropolitan countries aware of the new literary developments occurring in Africa.
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Above ad, however, Chinua Achebe’s novel
Things Fall Apart,
published in 1958, was the archetypal African novel. It described a situation – the falling apart of a traditional African society as a result of the arrival of the white man – in vivid terms that contained beautiful English. It was recognisably sophisticated yet set in an unmistakable non-Western landscape – non-Western emotionally and non-Western geographically. And it was all woven into a superb tragedy.
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Achebe’s mother tongue was Ibo, but he learned English as a boy and in 1953 became one of the first students to graduate, in English literature, from University College, Ibadan. Besides Achebe’s profound sympathy for the imperfections of his characters, the beauty of his approach is his realisation – revealed in his title – that all societies, all civilisations, contain the seeds of their destruction, so that the arrival of the white man in his story is not so much the cause as the catalyst to speed along what was happening anyway. Okonkwo, the hero of the novel, a member of the Igbo culture, is a respected elder of his vidage, a macho man, a successful farmer and wrestler, but at odds with his son, a far gentler soul.
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The reader is drawn into the rhythms of the vidage, Umofia, so successfully that even the Western reader accepts that the ‘barbaric’ customs of the society have good reason. Indeed, we are given a crystal-clear picture of a society that is stable, rich, ‘complex, and fundamentally humane’ – that is
thought out.
When Okonkwo breaks the rules of the vidage, we accept that this must mean seven years in exile. When the hostage he has raised in his family – whose existence and love for Okonkwo we have come to accept – is murdered, and when Okonkwo himself delivers one of the blows, we accept even this, in itself a remarkable achievement of Achebe’s. And when the white man arrives, we too are as baffled by his behaviour as are the villagers of Umofia.
But Achebe, much as he loathed colonialism, was not intent on merely white-man-bashing. He drew attention to the shortcomings of Umofia society – its stasis, its inability to change, the ways in which its own outcasts or misfits might well be drawn to Christianity (Okonkwo is himself unchanged, which is part of his tragedy).
Things Fall Apart
is a profoundly affecting work, beautifully constructed.
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In Onkokwo and Umofia, Achebe created a character and a society of universal significance.

A second Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, a poet and playwright, published his first work,
The Lion and the Jewel
, a year after Achebe’s, in 1958. This was a play in verse, a comedy, also set in an African village, which enjoyed a great success. Soyinka was a more ‘anthropological’ writer than Achebe, using Yoruba myths to great effect (he even made an academic study of them). Anthropology was itself one of several academic disciplines that helped reshape what was regarded as ‘culture,’ and here Claude Lévi-Strauss was the most influential figure, with two works published in 1955. Born in Belgium in 1908, Lévi-Strauss grew up near Versailles and became a student at the University of Paris. After graduating, he did fieldwork in Brazil while he was professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo. Further fieldwork followed, in Cuba, but Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 for military service. In 1941 he arrived as a refugee at the New School for Social Research in New York, and after the war he was French cultural attaché to the United States. Eventually, he would be appointed to the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, in 1959, but by then he had begun his remarkable series of publications. These fell into three kinds. There were his studies in kinship, examining the way familial relationships were understood among many different (but mainly Amerindian) tribes; there were his studies of mythologies, exploring what they reveal about the way people very different on the surface think about things; and third, there was a sort of autobiographical/philosophical/travelogue,
Tristes Tropiques,
published in 1955.
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Lévi-Strauss’s theories were very complex and not helped by his own style, which was far from easy and on more than one occasion defeated his translators. He is, therefore, an author very difficult to do justice to in a book of this kind. Nevertheless we may say that, his studies of kinship apart, Lévi-Strauss’s work has two main elements. In his paper ‘The Structural Study of Myth,’ published in the
Journal of American Folklore
in 1955, the same year as
Tristes Tropiques
appeared, and later developed in his four-volume
Mythologiques,
Lévi-Strauss examined hundreds of myths around the world. Though trained in anthropology, he came to this work, he said, with ‘three mistresses’ – geology, Marx, and Freud.
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The Freudian element in his work is much more obvious than the Marxian, or the geology, but what he appears to have meant is that, like Marx and Freud, he was seeking to find the universal structures that underlie human experience; like the historians of the
Annales
school (chapter 31), he saw the broad sweeps of history as more important than more proximate events.
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All mythologies, Lévi-Strauss said, share a universal, inbuilt logic. Any corpus of mythological tales, he observed, contains a recurrent harping on elementary themes – incest, fratricide, patricide, cannibalism. Myth was ‘a kind of collective
dream,’ an ‘instrument of darkness’ capable of being decoded.
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In all, in what became four volumes, he examined 813 different stories with an extraordinary ingenuity that many, especially his Anglo-Saxon critics such as Edmund Leach, have refused to accept. He observes for instance that across the world, where figures from myth are born of the earth rather than from woman, they are given either very unusual names or some deformity such as a clubfoot to signify the fact.
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At other times myths concern themselves with ‘overrated’ kin relationships (incest) or ‘underrated’ relationships (fratricide/parricide). Other myths concern themselves with the preparation of food (cooked/raw), whether there is sound or silence, whether people are dressed or undressed. It was Lévi-Strauss’s claim, essentially, that if myth could be understood, it would explain how early man first came to decipher the world and would therefore represent the fundamental, unconscious structure of the mind. His approach, which came as a revelation for many people, also had one important secondary effect. He himself said explicitly that on the basis of his inquiries, there is really no difference between the ‘primitive’ mind and the ‘developed’ mind, that so-called savages are just as sophisticated in their storytelling, just as removed from the truly primitive, as we are ourselves.
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Earlier in the century, as we have seen, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict’s work had been important in showing how different peoples around the world differ in various aspects of their behaviour (such as sex).
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Conversely, the thrust of Lévi-Strauss’s work was to show how, at root, myths reveal the essential similarity, the basic concordance, of human nature and beliefs right across the globe. This was an immensely influential view in the second half of the twentieth century, not only helping to undermine the validity of evolved high culture put forward by Eliot, Trilling,
et alia,
but promoting the idea of ‘local knowledge,’ the notion that cultural expression is valid even though it applies only to specific locations, whose reading of that expression may be much more diverse and complex – richer – than is evident to outsiders. In this, Lévi-Strauss and Chinua Achebe were saying the same thing.