The Vernacular Matters of American Literature

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10.1057/9780230101944 - The Vernacular Matters of American Literature, Sieglinde Lemke

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Vernacular Matters of American Literature



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Sieglinde Lemke




the vernacular matters of american literature Copyright © Sieglinde Lemke, 2009.

First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-62093-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lemke, Sieglinde. The vernacular matters of American literature / Sieglinde Lemke. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-230-62093-3 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction—History and criticism. 2. United States—In literature. 3. Literature and society—United States. 4. National characteristics, American, in literature. 5. Cultural pluralism in literature. 6. Social history in literature. 7. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 8. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their eyes were watching God. 9. Castillo, Ana. So far from God. I. Title. PS374.U5L46 2010 813'.00935873—dc22

2009014127

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



Für meine Tochter Nilsa




Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Vernacular Adventures

1

1

Vernacular Scholarship

11

2

Vernacular Voices

53

3

Vernacular Values

93

Conclusion: Transformative Comparisons

127

Notes

135

Works Cited

161

Publications by the Author

181

Index

183



Contents




Just as the theory of this book has emerged from disparate cultural contexts and time periods, so too is Vernacular Matters indebted to a handful of exceptional people and organizations who have helped at various stages of this long process. First, there is Winfried Fluck, who has truly earned the title Doktorvater, having overseen my academic career from its earliest days to the present; he is an enduring role model. The initial idea for this book was conceived and nurtured in the company of the Berliner Sieben, a home-grown self-help network for up-and-coming professors. I wrote the first draft during a one-year research stay at the University of California at Irvine made possible by a generous grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Over the years countless conversations with students, friends, and colleagues have propelled my insights into the vernacular. I am especially grateful for the inspiration offered to me by Homi Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ulla Haselstein, Heinz Ickstadt, Leo Marx, Robert O’Meally, Don Pease, John Rowe, and Susanne Rohr. For their help in transforming this manuscript into a speakerly text, I would like to thank Andreas Starck and Christopher Young-Kramaric. And special thanks go to Emily Lundin, who has diligently helped in the revision of this work. Above all, I want to thank Dr. Felicitas Hentschke for continuously listening to my thoughts on the vernacular and responding with the devastatingly productive feedback that has enabled me to write this book.



Acknowledgments




Vernacular Adventures And in the process of becoming more and more aware of ourselves we will recognize that one of the functions of the vernacular culture is that of preparing for the emergence of the unexpected, whether it takes the form of the disastrous or the marvelous. —Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory

“The importance of the vernacular,” observed Ralph Ellison more than half a century ago, “lies in the ongoing task of naming, defining, and creating a consciousness of who and what we have come to be” (143). He also articulates literature’s vital role in the search for who and what we are, while his use of “we” implicitly rejects prevalent Euro-American or mono-cultural self-definitions. This first person pronoun asserts a shared, uncharted identity and bridges chasmic political divides (of race, class, and region) that persist in American culture even today. This book uses Ellison as its point of departure. The goal of Vernacular Matters is to construct a critical paradigm that moves beyond notions of “difference” to investigate overlaps and similarities between literary texts of differing origins. Recognizing the dynamic nature of identity, Vernacular Matters endorses Ellison’s passionate plea that “there is no way for any one group to discover by itself the intrinsic form of our democratic culture. This has to be a cooperative effort, and it is achieved through contact and communication across our divisions of race, class, religion, and region” (142). What sounded idealistic at the time took its inspiration from the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution and more recently found a voice in Barack Obama’s “faith in the American people,” where he claimed, “that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union” (NYT, March 18, 2008). If we were to apply Ellison’s and Obama’s grand visions to the humanities— at least to a smaller section thereof, American literary studies—a question could emerge: What would it mean to work together to move beyond old



INTRODUCTION


divisions? In many ways, interdisciplinary and transnational approaches attempted to do just that—by bridging old divides. At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, border crossings, contact zones, the transnational and postcolonial condition, as well as the dynamics of translation have been at the center of scholarly attention. While Ellison’s call for communication across divides is compatible with current developments in American literary studies, his vision of a democratic vernacular culture exceeds the contemporary concern for cultural difference. This desire for one utopian (colored) family could be dismissed as naïve, but it might very well prove prophetic. It certainly shares a conviction with recent scholarly attempts to revise and politicize established understandings of humanism with the aim of reflecting experiences relevant to all human beings rather than merely a privileged few. Paul Gilroy’s “planetary humanism” seeks to replace Euro-centered definitions of the human subject as well as to expand enlightened notions by attending to issues of race.1 One could argue that, from the margins, he has done for humanism what Ellison did for nationalism. This study deliberately concentrates on a single nation—America— and on a single form of writing—prose fiction. From its focus on a previously ignored literary tradition, Vernacular Matters reconfigures the map of American literature. Many readers recognize the voice of the seminal vernacular narrator that begins Twain’s most famous story with the words: “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter,” however, few are acquainted with other vernacular manifestations in modern and postmodern literary texts. To trace the vernacular tradition in American literature, I closely analyze three novels: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God. The juxtapositions in Vernacular Matters create a dialogue between novels that are set in different times and cultural contexts and that are usually discussed in either African American Studies, Chicano Studies, or English or American literature departments. Vernacular Matters explores a critical space beyond the separatist logic characteristic of departmental demarcations as well as beyond the (unacknowledged) separatism of multicultural discourses of the 1980s and 1990s.2 To this end, I have intentionally organized the chapters of this book around issues of style and theme, as opposed to ethnicity. To arrive at an understanding of the currency of this term in modern scholarship, the first chapter examines the roles of the vernacular in Chicano, African American, and American



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studies. This cross-cultural approach to a concept previously discussed in separate disciplines directly responds to the unanswered call to practice a genuinely comparative approach to American studies.3 Instead of a shallow celebration of cultural difference and literary diversity, Vernacular Matters concentrates on overlaps between novels that at first may seem worlds apart. This study closely analyzes the considerable formal and political parallels and distinctions among Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and So Far from God. In doing so, it finds that they are part and parcel of the previously unexplored genre of vernacular literature. To better understand this genre, we should first try to answer the question, What is vernacular? The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines it as an adjective for “one’s native country; not of foreign origin.” In this sense, the vernacular distinguishes itself by being typical of a particular region or culture and, as such, it determines what is unique to a collective identity. For the dictionary to attribute such a formative role to the term “vernacular” is surprising, given that it also defines the vernacular as “non- or sub-standard.” This subsidiary role can refer to linguistic, cultural, or literary standards. Thus, vernacular language is often conceived of as subordinate to the linguistic standard. When Dante wrote Literature in the Vernacular, he wrote it in the vernacular (Italian), which was a substandard form of Latin. If applied to linguistic standards today, it is helpful to distinguish between regional dialects and sociolects. For example, in my mother tongue, German, we distinguish Hochdeutsch (standard or “high” German) from (regional) vernacular languages such as Plattdeutsch (a northern dialect) as well as from ethnic substandards, such as the socalled Kanak Sprak (code switching between Turkish and German)4. As a term of cultural criticism, “vernacular” is antonymic to hegemonic expressions, as well as those of an educated elite, and is thereby associated with expressions of culturally excluded peoples: those belonging to “lower” classes. Considered as a cultural substandard, it designates any subordinate group and therefore is synonymous with the postcolonial concept of the subaltern. Likewise, it is often understood as being synonymous with “popular.” As shown above, vernacular culture is defined not only by its distance from “high” culture but also by its cultural particularity. In an era of globalization, the use of “vernacular culture” should not be limited to local, regional, or indigenous expressions: it should rather be understood as presenting an insider’s view of a group that lacks cultural prestige. With regards to class, vernacular is seen as coming from “common people.” When used in relation to “race,” it often refers to ethnically marginalized groups. Despite these differences, in any and every case, it signals a lack of cultural capital.



Vernacular Adventures


Applied to literature, “vernacular” refers to literary expressions in need of the recognition that canonical texts enjoy. Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn therefore fits this description because it comes out of the local color tradition and uses substandard languages to portray common people and social outcasts along the Mississippi River. Nevertheless, this novel is far from marginalized, undoubtedly belonging to the canon of American literature and recently facing criticism for being hypercanonized.5 It is quintessential to American literary history. Therefore, any hierarchical or binary understanding of the vernacular has its limits because what was once substandard (e.g., romance languages or Twain’s novel) can, and often does, move from a subordinate or marginal position to one both central and privileged. Since neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor any standard literary dictionary is able to capture the exact nature of the concept of the vernacular, an overview of its usage in the humanities should help to clarify this slippery term.6 In the past, “vernacular” has been applied haphazardly as an adjective to a hodgepodge of various objects, regions, languages, and texts—everything including African American hiphop (Potter), New England colonial farmhouses (Bushman), Californian roadside architecture (Heimann), African-Arabic slave narratives (Judy), the Himalayas (Pruscha), the Bible (Sugirtharajah), the Internet (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett), and the body (Fissell) have been labeled as vernacular.7 Used as a noun in these various fields of reference, “vernacular” is an inherently cross-cultural concept. In either case—used as a noun or an adjective—it brings with it a stamp of authenticity. This suggestive and diffused discourse on authenticity is so elusive that it has both energized and mystified the concept.8 At the end of Chapter 1, I will track the heightened scholarly attention paid to incarnations of the vernacular in the 1990s. Many spotted it in the performance arts, music, critical theory, fiction, and visual arts. Among recent studies that have used the term explicitly in their title are Politics in the Vernacular by Will Kymlicka, and Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, edited by Kobena Mercer. Whereas Politics in the Vernacular focuses on the political processes of ethnocultural relations in Western democracies, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures explores examples of pop art in postcolonial contexts (in India, Brazil, South Africa, China, and North America). Kymlicka uses the term to negotiate concerns for American nationalism, globalization, multiculturalism, and democratic citizenship. Mercer uses the term to transcend European definitions of pop art and modernism. Beyond merely acknowledging the existence of multiple modernisms to celebrate a global pluralism in the arts, Mercer grapples



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with the question, How does pop art translate across cultures? His volume exceeds the border and postcolonial paradigm because it explores “the porous spaces of the vernacular as a heterogeneous site of aesthetic invention” (Mercer 7–9). “Vernacular art,” thus defined, allows Mercer to rethink (compartmentalized) postcolonial approaches to global art and simultaneously redraw the map of modernism. By redefining modernism and postmodernism from the margins, he deconstructs received critical accounts—much in the same way that pop art has successfully blurred the line between “high” and “low” in the West. Indiscriminately applied across disciplinary fields toward various ends, this polysemy appears in regional, national, and even global contexts. These (and other) usages are inconsistent and incongruous, multivalent and multifunctional. In fact, vernacular lacks a precise meaning. A comprehensive account of the vernacular as a unity seems impossible, even misdirected and misleading—no wonder critics have given up on the attempt to affix a closed set of characteristics.9 Given these wild inconsistencies, my study spotlights the form and content of three exemplars of vernacular American literature without claiming to offer an exhaustive account of the vernacular tradition. To examine vernacular expressions in American fiction is to acknowledge that they bring language closer to lived and spoken language, to words spoken from bodies in specific places. In its rhythm, the natural pauses and elisions of speech, common speech, breathe. Questions about identity arise inevitably through vernacular language while drawing attention to the pressing issue of marginality. The aesthetic innovations of vernacular literature are inseparable from their political message. And the reverse holds true as well: the politics of class, place, and race speak through the vernacular’s formal innovations and multifaceted, alluring particularities. Thoroughly entrenched in the culturally particular, vernacular literature is consistently antihierarchical and antiexclusionary. Informality in language and composition defines its aesthetics. Formal innovations are bound inexorably to their political counterparts. Both hold fast to one another to build a larger body that is the literary work itself. In short, vernacular literature renders aesthetics and politics partners in crime. Vernacular Matters seeks further understanding of this renegade form through a survey of secondary literature. This begins with Leo Marx’s groundbreaking account of the vernacular features in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.10 Marx shares Henry Nash Smith’s clear interest in the democratic ethics and aesthetics of Huckleberry Finn’s vernacular.11 These pioneers of American studies triggered a discourse in the 1950s that was subsequently forgotten for many years and seems outdated by today’s





standards. Curiously, interest in the vernacular has not subsided; the concept continued to exert a pertinent yet unnoticed presence in American studies, reemerging thirty years later in a different guise. In the 1980s, African American scholars Houston A. Baker and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. shifted the focus to the black vernacular tradition with the aim of reclaiming African American literature. Baker locates the origins of the black vernacular in the blues and in the South; he uses a poststructuralist approach to draw attention to blues expressions. Gates lays out the contours of the black American literary tradition by relating the vernacular to the African American rhetorical tradition of signifying as well as to the West African mythological figure of Esu-Elegbara. At the time Baker and Gates were primarily concerned with integrating African American literature into the American canon, both showing little interest in the established discourse on the vernacular and American literature. Baker and Gates never mention the work of Marx or Smith, but they share Marx’s view that vernacular literature is inherently political. In the 1990s José David Saldívar situated Chicano vernacular in his theoretical formulation of a “border theory.” In Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, he describes the vernacular as a political concept primarily committed to a politics of cultural difference. Saldívar’s exclusion of Marx’s as well as Baker’s work on the vernacular reflects the reality of stark disciplinary divides—even within recent attempts to remap American studies. Cultural difference has played a key role in American and Cultural Studies over the last twenty years, inspiring an array of rich and compelling articles. The editors of The Next Wave American Studies Reader (Davidson and Hatcher) demanded “no more separate spheres,” their motto for the future of this expanding critical discourse. By including compelling transnational narratives, American studies scholars both within and beyond the borders of the United States have highlighted new facets of American literature and culture. If there is a consensus in American studies at the turn of this century, it manifests itself in a common fascination with cultural diversity. This popular fascination has of course inspired its critique, perhaps the most articulate being The Trouble with Diversity. Author Walter Benn Michaels takes issue with the neglect of class-related forms of inequality and a general ignorance toward the economic divide. His critique of multiculturalism and its obsession with identity is well taken, but a renewed interest in class should not lead scholars to neglect the existing diversity that complicates such discussions. Simply put, the complex dynamics of race and class should not be cast in a logic of either/ or. From the perspective of a European American studies scholar it is



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precisely the nation’s rich diversity that makes it distinctive and endlessly worthy of study. On a self-reflexive note, it should be added that the predilection for a comparative approach might derive from teaching American studies in Europe. Being outsiders to the culture scrutinized, non-U.S.-based (and non-American) Americanists, willingly or not, bring their own perspectives to bear on the study of America’s literature, history, and culture. In so doing, America is read through a bifocal comparative lens. On the institutional level, this bifocus enables programs such as that offered at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin, a program that would not be possible in the United States.12 On a cultural level, Europeans are far removed from American culture wars and the high stakes of identity politics, thus making cross-cultural research a lesscontested terrain.13 I would also like to take this opportunity to add a note regarding the title of this book. Vernacular Matters is one among many critical studies that play with the homophone “matters” to signal the heterogeneity of its subject matter as well as to emphasize its significance. When Toni Morrison entitled the first section of her path-breaking study Playing in the Dark “Black Matters,” she was among the first to draw attention to the impact that blackness has had on the making of American literature. A year later, the Anglo-American feminist Ruth Frankenberg published White Women, Race Matters examining the social construction of whiteness. A collection of essays by Cornel West, succinctly labeled Race Matters, became a national bestseller. This focus on African American cultures, whiteness, and blackness was then exceeded in Saldívar’s Border Matters, which aimed at nothing less than remapping American cultural studies from the vantage point of the borderlands. Harrison and Huntington’s Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress shifts the focus to the conflict between rich and poor. Among those recent studies that cast the term in a rhetorical question is, for example, Farrell’s Why Does Literature Matter?, which reconsiders the function of fictional texts. Last but not least, Aldama’s Why the Humanities Matter addresses the role of academic research on the human condition while acknowledging its diversity. Vernacular Matters proposes new ways of reading ethnically diverse literature. It finds that the rhetorical question posed by the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo points in a propitious direction: “Can one move from notions of homogeneity as the basis of consensus to something more like a weave whose strength and solidarity resides in a combination of overlap and difference?” (252). Rosaldo insists further that “difference need not entail inequality; sameness need not be the condition of equality.





Difference can promote solidarity” (240), reminding us that a productive engagement with diversity might even inspire solidarity. While I agree that recognizing cultural, religious, linguistic, and literary diversity should not be the be-all and end-all of research, a concern for similarity and solidarity does not easily translate to the study of literature. Vernacular Matters meets this challenge by contending that because of its openness and malleability, the concept of the vernacular might guide the way. As such, I have chosen conceptual foci from which I intend to examine and compare literatures of different cultural backgrounds and traditions. Juxtaposing three realizations of the vernacular in Chicano, African American, and American studies, I locate points of connection between the vertical alignment of hegemonic and subaltern literatures as well as the horizontal alignments by focusing on commonalities among the novels discussed. In doing so, Vernacular Matters puts conventionally inwardlooking scholarly fields in conversation. My study, therefore, derives a methodology of the vernacular from this search for similarities. The first chapter, “Vernacular Scholarship,” explores the function— rather than the exact definition—of the vernacular as used by writers and scholars. It traces the varied claims that suggest that the vernacular uses aesthetics and politics to valorize a particular culture and its literary traditions. Instead of dismissing Marx’s mono-cultural account, Vernacular Matters treats his article as the first step toward synthesizing a more complex, polycultural understanding of the vernacular tradition in American literature. The second chapter, “Vernacular Voices,” engages three exemplary novels of the American vernacular literary tradition. United through their informal colloquial style, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Castillo’s So Far from God articulate vibrant vernacular voices and vivid narrative rhythms. One of the most striking shared features in all three texts is their ability to capture the sound of spoken language on the printed page. Another commonality between these novels written from the margins (i.e., from the perspective of cultural insiders) relates to their explicit and implicit politics. The third chapter, “Vernacular Values,” reveals that all three novels renounce the suppression of their culture by the dominant (white, often middle- to upper-middle-class) culture, while at the same time remaining consistently critical of the shortcomings in their own ethnic communities: Huckleberry Finn opposes elitist genteel values; Their Eyes Were Watching God critiques racism and ignorance; So Far from God engages in struggles for environmental justice and the elimination of gender and class inequalities. Moreover, all three novels imagine spaces for self-determined democratic ways of being in the world. They create spaces of vibrant cultural



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specificity and invite the reader to become immersed within them. Meticulously crafted and aesthetically appealing, these imaginary spaces create the impression of the real or authentic and thereby close the distance between the reader and the vernacular text. The forms and sounds of vernacular literature are as varied as its political ends. To do justice to the concept of the vernacular and the particular novels one chooses to interpret, it seems wise not to overextend the inclusive range of texts and, by extension, the literary traditions. With regard to my project, this meant moving beyond the received two-culture (dominant-subaltern) model while resisting the temptation to present a multicultural potpourri of difference. The adage “less is more” holds true here: the limitation breaks new ground and prepares for new findings. A limited scope engenders close, textually based analyses of specific novels and thereby reveals changes in vernacular styles in light of shifting contexts. Instead of an abstract, concept-driven account of vernacular literature, this inductive approach acknowledges features across ethnic divides while discovering parallels and overlaps among them. Of course, this method can be applied to novels of any kind, not only to vernacular literature written in other languages, but also to more formal, epic, or “refined” literary texts. While Vernacular Matters limits its scope to three texts that represent three ethnic communities, three regions, and three historical periods, novels of various other ethnic or racial literary traditions can—and should— be similarly read through this method of the vernacular. A subsequent study could investigate the Chinese-American vernacular in, for example, Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club and compare it to Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior. Another recent masterpiece of vernacular literature is set in India. The main character of Aravind Adiga’s novel White Tiger is a lower-caste servant, later entrepreneur, who addresses his reader in a swiftly colloquial, sardonic style ranting on about corruption and poverty in contemporary India. It would be fascinating to juxtapose the Native American vernacular in Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals with the Jewish American rendering in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Imagine a comparison between Sapphire’s novel Push about the illiterate Harlemite and Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, whose teenager protagonist takes his readers, among other places, home to the part of the family living in the Dominican Republic. Or one might consider Rotten English, a literary anthology that features writing in the vernacular from British, American, Canadian, Caribbean, and African authors.14 Such work would stimulate a comparativist assessment of the vernacular styles and political practices across the globe.





While this study limits its scope to a select range of vernacular texts, it invites colleagues to apply this method to examining Asian American, Indian American, Native American, Arab American, and queer vernaculars— the list of possible participants is endless and contains countless subdivisions (e.g., Filipino American, Navaho, Lakota Sioux, Italian American, etc.). As long as the pursuant cross-cultural approach displays sensitivity toward ethnically coded literature—to its orality, its social and political criticism, and its use of irony—I invite vernacular criticism of many colors and kinds. In its attempt to trace similarities and overlaps between critical treatments of the vernacular as well as between these three novels, Vernacular Matters builds on received theories of difference. It moves beyond the (departmental) separatist logic that has admittedly birthed even the most compelling works in the fields of postcolonial, border, ethnic, race, and American studies. Ultimately, this study aims to blur and dissolve extant orders to create space for new bonds. The vernacular, then, resists T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” in which things fall apart. Instead, Vernacular Matters propels an overdue movement, one that constructs a center. Through a series of close readings, Vernacular Matters arrives at groundbreaking intersections that register a new mode of critical discourse. Such an expedition transports readers and critics beyond disciplinary and cultural boundaries to open up the search for what is shared. Again, Vernacular Matters neither deconstructs nor dismantles the notion of a distinctly American literary tradition. Rather, it reconstructs it around a center at once steady and open, yet strong enough to demystify exceptionalist notions of the vernacular. Vernacular Matters affirms the effort to pioneer a methodology through this search for shared aesthetic and political values among three works of American Literature produced in disparate times by writers of differing classes, races, and ethnicities. Envisioning a “democratic culture” from the vantage point of the margins (as Ellison did in Going to the Territory) or even “a more perfect union” (as Obama did by way of the Founding Fathers), takes us into unexplored territory. Whether this territory is, to quote Ellison, one of disaster or marvel, remains to be seen. However, visible on the horizon is a vernacular humanism within the borders of American literature, our destination.



10

Vernacular Scholarship In that postwar period [the vernacular] functioned among the founding premises for the institutionalization of literary American Studies —Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time Vernacular is, no less than the styles associated with aristocracy, a gesture toward perfection. Which is to suggest that although the perfection toward which it moves is democratic rather than aristocratic, there is no necessary contradiction between our vernacular style and the pursuit of excellence. —Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory

The 1950s On April 25, 1957, a young professor from the University of Minnesota presented his lecture “The Vernacular Tradition in American Literature” at the University of Mainz, Germany. Leo Marx began his talk with a humble gesture. Thanking his European colleagues for “not allowing [him] to forget that American literature is different,” he pondered, “What is different, after all, about American literature?”1 Marx singled out Mark Twain. In Huckleberry Finn he saw evidence of the fundamental difference between English and American literature, that is to say, “a vernacular mode or, if you will, a national style” (Pilot and the Passenger 4). Using the terms “vernacular” and “national” synonymously, he argued that Twain epitomized a distinctly American literary style that merges vernacular form with vernacular content. In its perspective, Huckleberry Finn’s narrative arises from a first-person “vernacular narrator” in a speech that is “nearer to the spoken language of Americans” (Pilot and the Passenger 6). Because of that spoken sound, vernacular texts evoke a strong sense of immediacy, what Marx terms “immense vitality” (Pilot



CHAPTER 1


and the Passenger 7). Vernacular texts avoid the over-laden poetic imagery characteristic of what Marx labels “shopworn” literary styles (which he sees in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s work, for example). Marx’s distancing is not coincidental. He sought to wedge a critical distance between the conventional British style and the modern vernacular American style. In terms of content, the vernacular is exquisitely distinguished by the progressiveness of “the egalitarian community [Huck] and Jim have established aboard the raft” (Pilot and the Passenger 16). Marx uses the raft scene to highlight the essence of vernacularity.2 “Here [aboard the raft] is the core of the American vernacular. It is not simply a style, but a style with a politics in view. The style is a vehicle for the affirmation of an egalitarian faith so radical that we can scarcely credit it today. It sweeps aside received notions of class and status—and of literature” (8). The novel’s political agenda is multifaceted: it critiques slavery and calls for egalitarianism. “The political ideal is freedom, freedom from the oppression of society, and freedom to establish the egalitarian community” (120). In other words, vernacular politics opt for solidarity with one’s fellow citizens as well as with one’s environment. It aspires for social and environmental justice. As such, it urges, explicitly or implicitly, for social and political change, and is propelled by a subversive thrust. Hence Marx concludes, “Defiance is often what animates the vernacular style” (120). In his explication of this scene, Marx reads Huck’s loyalty to a runaway slave as overtly political. In its defiant and fundamentally political nature, the vernacular affirms an egalitarianism “so radical that we can scarcely credit it today.”3 Huck’s subversive politics, Marx asserts, work toward a specific ideal: to eliminate inequality. Conveniently ignoring the existent power dynamics present between Huck and Jim (i.e., the fact that the teenager seems to be an equal to a man who could be his father), Marx insists that the “vernacular ideal of the raft turns upon human solidarity.” To Marx, this “solidarity” manifests itself in “the relation between men (it is in a sense political),” and in the “relation between man and nature (it is religious or, if you will, metaphysical)” (120). Yet the politics of the vernacular is more elusive, indeterminate, and mythical than the concrete policy or agenda one might deduce from arguably political content. When he comments on Huck’s enthusiastic avowal, “It is lovely to live on a raft,” Marx offers a rather broad connection between ethics, politics, and nature: “In such passages Mark Twain manages to convey a feeling of belonging to the physical universe comparable to the feeling of community aboard the raft. That is, he suggests a grand analogy between the political and metaphysical relations within the novel. The vernacular thereby receives its final sanction from nature



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itself. It is a fitting sanction for a literary style developed in a new society in a prehistoric landscape” (112). If the vernacular represents not only “a style with a politics in view” and a “national style,” as Marx put it, but also a style sanctioned by nature, the concept takes on a very broad and almost all-inclusive meaning. Marx’s broad association—which links the vernacular to such abstract concepts as human solidarity, egalitarianism, metaphysics, and environmental consciousness—gives us a rather suggestive and inconclusive characterization of its politics. Likewise, Marx’s characterization of vernacular style is itself rife with opaque abstractions: “My point has been from the beginning that the vernacular was more than a literary technique—it was a view of experience. When the style first emerged it was nourished by an egalitarian faith that we can scarcely imagine nowadays. Since that time the history of the vernacular has been a history of its fragmentation. The technique has been separated from the belief it originally was designed to affirm. But that is another story” (122). It is a story Marx refuses to tell. Neither does he specify when, or why, the vernacular tradition evolved into a larger literary trend that eventually abandoned the belief in egalitarianism in favor of matters of narrative technique. Nor are we told what this “view of experience” amounted to or why it was impossible to imagine the egalitarian faith inherent in earlier vernacular literature. Has the vernacular ever been unfragmented? What about the boldly claimed history of the vernacular’s fragmentation? Marx never bothers to resolve these fundamental questions, which makes his elaborations disingenuous. Thus, it is necessary to read between the lines in an effort to distill the main premises that girdle the body of his analysis. Firstly, Marx feels that America’s national identity expresses itself through a distinct literary style. Insisting that “the vernacular style is a distinctive achievement of American culture” (121), he presumes that the vernacular mode of writing expresses quintessentially American qualities. By subverting received (British) literary models, it constitutes a genuinely “American” aesthetic. By opposing elitist, aristocratic, and pretentious notions, the vernacular—at least as it manifests itself in Huckleberry Finn—epitomizes the American ideal of a democratic society. When defining its political (rather than its national) dimensions, Marx again touches on a cluster of abstract concepts including “experience,” “egalitarianism,” and “human solidarity.” Secondly, Marx suggests that the formal dimension of the vernacular—that is, its informal style—is inseparable from its content (broadly defined by this wide range of abstract terms). Thirdly, he highlights that the vernacular opposes or defies the norm. One might infer that the vernacular diverges both from the literary norm as well as from political or cultural standards.





What Marx takes from Huckleberry Finn can be applied to vernacular literature in general. Vernacular literature, as defined in this study, cannot be reduced to folk, dialect, or regional literature. It may well represent a distinct national style, but in every case it links a colloquial form to specific content or a message. It is informal, colloquial literature with a politics in view, but its politics are often shifting and ambiguous. Furthermore, vernacular literature often comes across as seemingly authentic. Given its inherently oppositional nature as a substandard that is set against the standard, it presupposes a binary logic. Its many facets, multiple usages, and vague definitions, however, make it an open and even malleable term that is compatible with texts of different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, it is not only a descriptive term but also a valuable concept for reading literature born out of different cultural traditions. Thus, it meets today’s call to develop a transcultural or intersectional approach to literary studies. In the 1950s, Marx became interested in the vernacular because it helped him to critique the political climate of the time. The claim that a portrayal of interracial friendship is crucial to the “American” vernacular was a political statement, and in 1957, few white scholars dared to argue that literature about interracialism was emblematic of America’s national literature. Delivering his lecture in the same year that most (white) citizens of Little Rock opposed black students attending “their” high school, Marx’s discussion of the interracial theme in the novel anticipates what became a social reality after President Eisenhower sent federal troops to forcefully integrate Little Rock. His insistence that “the vernacular was more than a literary technique” set Marx apart from the then-fashionable New Criticism. New Critics such as his colleagues at Minnesota, Robert Penn Warren and Alan Tate, strongly believed in the power of aesthetic objects. Cherishing the organic unity of art works, they focused on form. Marx, however, relates the vernacular style to extraliterary aspects such as politics, human solidarity, and “the nation.” Since his reading of the vernacular highlights American literary and cultural distinctiveness, his approach is reminiscent of the scholarly endeavor to define the American character and distinctive characteristics of the American people.4 At the heart of Marx’s vernacular lies an idealistic, rather than a nationalistic, vision of America. His 1957 formulation of the vernacular is propelled by leftist ideals of the kind that his favorite professor at Harvard, F. O. Matthiessen, expounded.5 In his scholarship, Matthiessen linked aesthetic criticism to social criticism. The combination of a formalist approach with ideological criticism provided the foundation of a radical left-liberal tradition in American literary studies. In his tribute to Matthiessen, Marx expressed his admiration to his mentor because on the one



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hand, he avoided the “shallow, mechanistic Marxism that prevailed during the 1930s,” and on the other hand he fought against “the deadly grip of WASP Victorianism” (Marx 244, 256). The nonconformist attitude he admired so much in Matthiesen is reflected in the subversion at the core of Marx’s definition of the vernacular.6 Both Marx and Matthiessen link the particularity of the emerging national literature to its adherence to democratic values. American literature differs from British literature because it promotes democratic beliefs, Matthiessen argued in his classic study American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Marx made a similar claim in his account of the vernacular tradition. Moreover, they both share a distaste for Victorianism as well as a disapproval of jargon. Underlying Marx’s ideas on the vernacular is a disdain for pretension and overly elaborate rhetoric. Thirty years after Marx first wrote about the vernacular tradition, he claimed that “the vernacular is an invaluable source for our most gifted writers, especially for their resolute nay-saying” (Marx xvii). In his view, the vernacular style had served as a crucial symbolic source and had even become “the dominant style of American literature” (Marx 283; italics L. M.). In other words, Marx claimed that the vernacular plays a formative role within Anglo-American literature, not in spite of, but rather because of its subversive nature. He further made the prophetic claim that the vernacular would prove to be valuable for future “efforts to make ours a more just, a more democratic society” (Marx xvii). Although he did not expand on this utopian vision, nor on the role the vernacular would play in the promotion of “a responsible, consistently critical, radically democratic cultural criticism in the United States” (Marx xvii), Marx nevertheless set the groundwork for later generations to trace vernacular traditions in American literature. Marx was not the only scholar interested in the idea of the vernacular in 1957. The same year Marx delivered his lecture, Henry Nash Smith used the term “vernacular” five times in his legendary essay “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method?” in the newly launched American Quarterly. While most American studies scholars agree on the significance of this classic article for the establishment of American studies as a disciplinary field, nobody commented on Smith’s general interest in the vernacular. In fact, it was Smith who, in his contribution to the first Literary History of the United States, credited Mark Twain with inaugurating a “vernacular” style of writing and for representing a “truly American” literary style (Spillers 650).7 Smith’s pivotal article “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method?” answered the rhetorical question posed in the title by suggesting that the





received self-definition of the discipline as investigating “American culture, past and present, as a whole” was no longer satisfactory. The field had reached a point in its development when a more systematic and academic approach was necessary. Yet a comprehensive method to drive such change was still lacking. “What is needed is a method of analysis that is at once literary and sociological”; Smith insisted that by analyzing the vernacular character, Twain scholars could derive “new insight into American society of the late nineteenth century” (207). By linking literature to extraliterary realities of American life, Smith’s visionary approach faced “the problem of method, [which] arises because the investigation of American culture, past and present, does not coincide with the customary field of operation of any established academic discipline” (Smith 197). Since Smith’s approach sought to inquire into social facts, traditionally left to the social sciences, as well as aesthetic aspects, usually the territory of literary scholars, he envisioned an interdisciplinary method. Smith’s search for such an interdisciplinary approach, interestingly enough, started with a discussion of the vernacular in Huckleberry Finn.8 His essay, however, also has its contradictions. In the last sentence of his article, Smith rhetorically asks, “Why is it not conceivable that the masterpieces of literature, or the exceptionally productive career, might turn out to be an expression of the culture in ways beyond the scope of stereotyped examples of popular art or merely average life-patterns?” (Smith 208). In other words, Smith holds that the masterpieces of literature (i.e., serious art) are particularly telling of a culture and a people because writers and artists are more sensitive to subtle, abstract expressions than ordinary people. Throughout his essay, Smith repeatedly and explicitly draws on the concept of the vernacular, but in its last part he emphatically argues for the superiority of “masterpieces of literature.” To understand the underlying contradiction in his argument one should remember that Smith wanted to distance himself from his colleagues, who focused exclusively on “serious” literature, but ultimately subscribed to this guiding assumption of New Criticism. Finally, the unacknowledged premise of his essay that high literature is the privileged site of literary criticism undermines his attempt to fuse literary and social scientific approaches into a new methodology. The subsequent generation of Americanists rejected Smith and Marx precisely for privileging literature over social concerns. Bruce Kuklick also attacked them for being intuitive, ahistorical, and nonempirical. While Robert Sklar criticized their tendency to value “high cultural history” (Sklar 597), Winfried Fluck found them too indebted to New Criticism. His close readings of Smith as well as of Marx’s The Machine in the Garden



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demonstrate that both ultimately failed to transcend New Critical Formalism. Both were far less concerned with the social dimension of the text as with its aesthetic form. He argued that their assumption that the covert structure of American society could be best analyzed through literary texts was a strategy to legitimize the scholarly endeavors of a literary critic aspiring to social relevance. Fluck has claimed that they were unwilling to make American culture and society the prime object of concern, which undermined their self-proclaimed goal of establishing a truly interdisciplinary method by moving toward a social-scientific approach (Fluck 254). Smith’s work on Twain, however, escapes this criticism because he studied Huckleberry Finn, not for its formal unity, but rather for its vernacular style. In his 1958 introduction to a reprinting of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Smith is attentive to the novel’s narrative technique: “Huck’s vernacular speech as a narrative medium, outside quotation marks, is something new—a drastic, even revolutionary shift in technique” (xxiv). Three years later, in Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, Smith claims that the vernacular style also transmits certain “values, ethical and aesthetic assumptions” and that “the vernacular impulse was potentially subversive of the traditional culture” (Smith 4, 20).9 Though Marx and Smith left vernacular studies dead in the water, the field is alive and kicking. The first comprehensive study of the literary vernacular was Richard Bridgman’s dissertation “The Stylization of Vernacular Elements in American Fiction 1880—1925,” appearing six years later as The Colloquial Style in America.10 His study traces the evolution of America’s vernacular prose style from Richard Sut Lovingood’s 1880s Tales, written in the Yankee dialect, to Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Like Marx, Bridgman was convinced that “the idea of the vernacular was of the greatest importance in the evolution of American prose style” and that it developed from a rudimentary stage—characterized by the use of local dialect, misspellings, neologisms, and wordplay—to increasingly stylized expressions. In contrast to England and its received literary language, American prose of the early nineteenth century, Bridgman argued, relied on spoken language and the casual speech of ordinary people. Over time, this crude, native raw material became increasingly refined by the two masters of “the American colloquial tradition,” Mark Twain and Henry James. The vernacular tradition Bridgman traces has two lineages. The Jamesian branch emphasizes linguistic and stylistic experiments and was taken up by Gertrude Stein. This stylistic distinction is also one of class: it is a vernacular composed not of regional dialect prose but rather of the language of middle-class Americans. Agreeing with Ezra Pound that James is





“the most colloquial” writer, Bridgman goes on to praise James for “working out a careful literary approximation of the spoken word,” for his artful representation of ordinary diction, and for his interior monologues, which are guided by the rambling of the mind in conversation with itself (106). In a sense, Twain’s language gave a spoken voice to James’s psychological colloquy. The second branch leads from Twain to Ernest Hemingway. Twain’s rendering of the vernacular draws attention to single words, Bridgman argues, as well as to the rhythmic flow (as I will discuss in Chapter 2). Thus it anticipates Hemingway’s vernacular style, which unites diction with syntax into a synthesis whose artifice resembles the casual speech of “ordinary people.” Hemingway’s poetic rhythm, word economy, and use of dialogue reminds Bridgman of “the repetition of sound” in Huckleberry Finn. Through the use of present participles and repetition, both Twain and Hemingway “produce local emphasis, immediacy, and a noticeable rhythmic effect” (128, 176). Bridgman outlined the gradual development of the literary vernacular from its regional base to the more artistic renderings of a subtle, intricate, and controlled colloquial style. This “speakerly” style includes elements such as brief sentences, lists of action words, repetition, onomatopoeia, and alliteration (Bridgman 20). In the twentieth century, vernacular literature had moved out of its local confines to become the national standard in modernist fiction. Bridgman’s vernacular tradition, which becomes increasingly experimental as it culminates in modernist aesthetics, focuses on formal aspects and ignores the content of these novels, that is, their moral, ethical, or political dimensions. In other words, Bridgman appreciates the vernacular as a literary form without engaging its politics.11 Modern writers have widely adopted and adapted the vernacular mode, and yet scholars lag far behind in offering a focused study and analysis of this American literary “brand.” Although Marx’s article on the vernacular appeared in the seminal volume Studies in American Culture, the concept never achieved wide use.12 Realizing that the vernacular did not particularly aid their project of legitimizing American studies, Marx and Smith eventually—and unfortunately—lost interest. Since this initial interest, no other scholar has made a substantial use of the term. The vernacular has remained unsubstantiated, fragmented, and marginal in the field of American studies. Given that neither Marx nor Smith dug their claws into the concept, “post-Americanist” Jonathan Arac’s claim that the vernacular “functioned among the founding premises for the institutionalization of literary American Studies” (155) is unconvincing. Another scholarly engagement with the concept appeared in John A. Kouwenhoven’s Made in America. Although his account of the vernacular



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focuses on material culture instead of literature, he does devote an entire chapter to the question “What is Vernacular?” His answer bears striking parallels to Leo Marx’s assessment of the vernacular traditions. Contrasting the American “vernacular style” with the European “cultivated style,” Kouwenhoven maintains that vernacular art is the art of “ordinary people [who] shape the elements of their everyday environment in a democratic, technological age” (Beer Can 132). Kouwenhoven focuses on objects for use in the routine of daily life, “not designed to be kept in frames on the wall, or cherished behind glass doors” (16). An example of the vernacular, as Kouwenhoven defines it, is the American steel spade, since the first settlers modified the spades they imported from England to meet the particular needs of the frontier.13 Apart from arguing for the superiority of American tools over their British counterparts, Kouwenhoven extends his affirmation of the American vernacular from the practical to the artistic realm.14 He insists that the vernacular is of a “specifically American quality” and that “the vernacular assumes a special significance in the United States” (42). Kouwenhoven (a Dutch immigrant) believed that people outside of the United States had been more appreciative of the “human and aesthetic values of vernacular modes of expression” (269) than Americans themselves. Trying to determine “What’s American about America?” and to formulate a theory of American culture, Kouwenhoven later applied his notion of the vernacular to a dozen objects that are “recognized, here and abroad, as distinctively ‘American’” (Kouwenhoven, Beer Can 155).15 His list, which includes a wide range of diverse items from the skyscraper to chewing gum, seems arbitrary; therefore, it suggests that his valorization of the vernacular actually serves strategic purposes: it is a way to celebrate America and its achievements. When Kouwenhoven infers from his list that the most characteristic feature about the American vernacular is “an awareness of, if not a delight in, process” (Kouwenhoven, Beer 155) he undermines his emphatic embrace of “what America really is.” If the vernacular is about process, it cannot be a uniquely “American” quality. Another pioneering work that linked the notion of the vernacular to statements about national character was Constance Rourke’s study American Humor: A Study of the National Character, which traces the roots of America’s humorous tradition alongside the evolution of a distinctly American literary tradition. This vernacular tradition sprang forth from the stories told by three all-American stereotypes: the Yankee, the frontiersman, and the Negro. By locating the indigenous roots of American literature in this trio of common men telling their humorous tales and by emphasizing the importance of the West, Rourke challenged the predominant view that the presumably superior European-inspired traditions of





the East Coast shaped American literary history. In fact, she is explicit about her desire to overturn the WASP mentality and the “burden of British opinion” in regards to cultural and artistic issues (301). If its comic tradition offers an indication, Rourke writes, “the American character is split and many sided” (298). It is multifaceted in ethnic as well as generic terms, as evidenced by a tradition of humor that includes Native American plays, Irish jigs, minstrel performances, and Jewish drama. It is shaped by descendants of Africa, Europe, and (native) America and expressed in tall tales, popular comedy, drama, poetry, novels, short stories, as well as nonfiction. Although Rourke discusses humorous works by classical authors including Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, James, and Twain, her delineation of a national literary tradition focuses primarily on popular literature. The style of the comic literature that emerged out of these contexts and texts is plain, expressed in and through “good and innocent” characters (225). American Humor, published eight years before The American Mind and ten years prior to The American Renaissance, participates in this attempt to construct a national cultural identity. Rourke does not locate America’s cultural identity in forms of high art derived from Europe. In its opposition to elitist orientations, American Humor offers one of the earliest accounts of a veritable vernacular tradition in American literature.16 In her discussion of Southwestern colloquial tales, Rourke maintains that “some of these colloquial expressions passed into common use and moved eastward to join with the drawling speech of New England, mixing with the less marked vernacular” (62). New England’s cultural elite was eventually influenced by the tall tales and popular lingo of the frontier, she argues, implying that the vitality and “verbal thunder” (62) of the vernacular was so pervasive that it disseminated all over the country. In her view, the vernacular tradition was distinctly American, but quintessentially multicultural. Marx and Smith’s accounts in the 1950s as well as subsequent critical accounts in the 1980s—discussed in the next section—present monolithic accounts of the vernacular; American Humor, however, offers a model for an integrated cross-cultural account of the vernacular tradition in American literature. The American vernacular tradition Rourke traced in the 1930s is therefore compatible with the concerns of Americanists in the United States and elsewhere during the 1990s. The 1980s “The most pressing endeavor for scholars of Afro-American literature for the 1980s,” Houston A. Baker admonished, “is the articulation of an adequate theory of Afro-American literature” (Baker, “Introduction” 13). A



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“vernacular model” based on the blues, he contended, provided the most appropriate paradigm for the future of black literary and cultural studies. Four years later, he presented his articulation in Blues, Ideology, and AfroAmerican Literature: A Vernacular Theory, which has been credited with accomplishing “the first sustained theoretical account of the vernacular within the context of African-American literary history” (Blount 591). Arnold Rampersad called it “a learned, demanding study that might well intimidate even the better trained among the lovers of Afro-American literature and culture” (Rampersad). In his introduction, Baker links the etymological root verna, the Latin word for “a slave born in his master’s house, a native,” which dates back to Roman antiquity, with the conditions of slavery in the United States. The vernacular is then by his definition the exclusive property of Americans of African descent. Baker defines the term as follows: “The ‘vernacular’ in relation to human beings signals ‘a slave born on his master’s estate.’ In expressive terms, vernacular indicates ‘arts native or peculiar to a particular country or locale.’ The material conditions of slavery in the United States and the rhythms of Afro-American blues combined and emerged from my revised materialistic perspective as an ancestral matrix that has produced a forceful and indigenous creativity” (Baker 2). Baker appropriates the term for use in reference to expressions particular to African Americans such as the blues, and he locates this “forceful and indigenous creativity” in works created by “the people designated as ‘the desperate class.’ Such people constitute the vernacular in the United States” (3). Accordingly, Baker identifies slave narratives as “the locus classicus of Afro-American literary discourse” (31). His vernacular tradition in American literature also includes classical novels such as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sports of the Gods, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy. But interestingly enough, his individual interpretations of these novels seldom contain the term “vernacular.”17 To Baker, a vernacular model acknowledges the aesthetic power of black literature and its oral quality. By his account vernacular literature is by definition subversive: The Sports of the Gods, for example, undermines the clichéd and racist literature produced by Anglo-American authors, but also rejects oppressive representations of class. Baker alternates between two meanings of the vernacular. Sometimes he uses it in a broader sense meaning “black,” and at other times he uses the term narrowly to refer to texts that qualify as “blues books” because their narrative voice echoes the sound of blues music. Baker does not clearly differentiate this relationship between the oral dimension of literature and blues music, a relation that is crucial to the vernacular tradition





he sets out to delineate. Blues books, he seems to suggest, are vernacular expressions that differ significantly from canonical Anglo-American works of literature because they find their origins in African American verbal art forms (boasts, toasts, and the dozens), folktales, or music (work songs, hollers, and the blues). In this metonymic usage of the term, black music defines vernacular literature. Yet, Baker is interested not particularly in the blues per se but in sketching what he calls “the blues matrix” because it “possesses enormous force for the study of literature, criticism, and culture” (14). In this metaphorical sense, the blues “is a vernacular trope for American cultural explanation in general” (14) and provides a model for new ways of reading African American literature. Baker intended to bring about a black vernacular theory that was a blueprint for a distinctly black version of literary criticism. Black vernacular criticism differs from established modes because the blues matrix, as he calls it, allows for “nonlinear, freely associative nonsequential meditation” (5). “If the investigator’s efforts are sufficiently charged with blues energy,” Baker speculates, “he is almost certain to remodel elements and events appearing in traditional, Anglo-American space-time in ways that make them ‘jump’ several rings toward blackness and the vernacular” (10). Ignoring the many incidences of nonlinearity in Euro-American literature, Baker claims that black vernacular literature is always already nonlinear, improvised, and playful. Accordingly, it demands a critical approach that is itself playful: “An inventive tropological model such as that proposed by Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature entails not only an awareness of the metaphorical nature of the blues matrix, but also a willingness on my own part to do more than merely hear, read, or see the blues. I must also play (with and on) them” (Baker 10). Although it is not clear what playing with and on the blues means if applied to cultural criticism, Baker implicitly calls for the emergence of a vernacular criticism. This mode of criticism would reject closure, avoid simple dualities, privilege indeterminacy, and present its analyses in playful and potentially entertaining ways. His definition is based on a metonymic and metaphorical usage of the blues. In his metonymic use of the blues, he claims “that writing the culturally specific is coextensive with discovering vernacular inscriptions in American culture” (200). He therefore tried to name what was specific or distinctive about black culture in the same way that Kouwenhoven tried to name what was American about America. Baker focuses on the formerly ignored (black) expressions to reveal the essence and aesthetic merits of black American literature. In his broader metaphorical use of the term, however, the vernacular is not synonymous with “blackness,” but signals



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innovative forms of writing about culture and literature. The “blues matrix” is not culturally specific but designates a critical approach, yet Baker remains decidedly unspecific about the nature of his vernacular criticism. These terminological confusions notwithstanding, Baker’s concept presupposes two understandings of the blues. Both of them aspire for divergent agendas: the metonymic usage describes what is culturally particular, whereas the metaphoric usage invents a scholarly model. These two agendas produce the unresolved tensions and inconsistencies of Baker’s project. Consider, for example, this seemingly definitive statement: “The blues should be privileged in the study of American culture to precisely the extent that inventive understanding successfully converges with blues force to yield accounts that persuasively and playfully refigure expressive geographies in the United States. My ludic uses of the blues are various, and each figuration implies a valorization of vernacular facets of American culture” (11). Baker here openly confesses what Marx left unsaid, for he admits that his engagement with the vernacular is motivated by a desire to valorize vernacular, in his case, black expressions. If critics focused on black American cultural expressions, Baker argues, their understanding of American culture would change. Such a refiguring of “expressive geographies” in the United States coincides with foregrounding the many “vernacular facets” of American culture, asserts Baker apodictically—and without giving any examples of those facets. In other words, Baker uses the vernacular as a tool to convince his white colleagues that black cultural expressions should define both the object and the approach of cultural studies. In retrospect, his desire to revise monocultural understandings of American literature and his aspiration to bring about new modes of cultural and literary analysis is understandable; however, it lacks precision. Let us consider what vernacular facets of American culture Baker has in mind. In a discussion of the book Railroad: Trains and Train People in American Culture Baker suggests that the world of “train people” is also the world of blues musicians. He praises its author, James Alan McPherson, for highlighting “the value of a blues matrix for cultural analysis in the United States,” and for showing that “the blues unequivocally signified a ludic predominance of the vernacular with its sassy, growling, moaning, whooping confidence that marks their finest performances” (12). Again Baker is unclear about his use of the blues and his understanding of the vernacular; he additionally fails to explain how McPherson’s study sets a model for future studies of American culture. In his discussion of Ralph Ellison’s short story “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” Baker argues that this autobiographical story about





Ellison’s music teacher, who encouraged her students to always give their best, reveals other vernacular facets of American culture.18 To Baker, this story demonstrates that artists or performers “who ignore the judgment of the vernacular are destined to failure” (13). His conflation of “vernacular facets” and “the judgment of the vernacular” leaves us baffled with a rather ludic use of the term itself. Ellison actually articulates a very different understanding of the vernacular because he not only makes vernacular synonymous with all other African American cultural expressions but also finds marked aspirations toward perfection in those expressions: “Vernacular is, no less than the styles associated with aristocracy, a gesture toward perfection” (Ellison 140). Ellison ultimately believed in the uplifting power of the arts and saw potential in vernacular expressions for personal and social transformations. While Ellison insists on the “democratizing action of the vernacular” (143), Baker refers primarily to expressions of the lower classes (slave narratives, the blues) or to “blues moments”—that is, specific moments when African Americans are confronted with adverse situations and, instead of surrendering, they achieve what he calls “a resonant, improvisional, expressive dignity.” To Ellison, artistic expressions of the vernacular aspire to a perfect form, just as its social equivalent strives for a perfect—egalitarian—society. Whereas Ellison considers his distinguished music teacher Mrs. Breaux as the embodiment of “the vernacular,” Baker argues that the folk character and blues musician in Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, Trueblood, epitomizes the vernacular. Where Ellison is concerned with the democratizing potential of the vernacular to create works of art, Baker uses the concept to formulate a vernacular theory that would, as argued above, transform the field of literary criticism. Apparently, Baker and Ellison construct two versions of the vernacular. While both link the arts to social realities, they choose different frames of reference. Baker refers to the underclass, whereas Ellison’s frame of reference is that of the middle class, a move meant to highlight the democratic as well as the aesthetic dimensions. I will refrain from discussing other unresolved facets of Baker’s account of the vernacular in favor of arguing more concisely that these inconsistencies are the result of a fundamental dissonance in his argument. He uses the term not in a descriptive but in a performative sense. The concept is designed to bring about a vernacular theory and criticism that is the African American counterpart to deconstruction. To accomplish this, Baker borrows from a range of theoretical approaches including structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, philosophy, and symbolic anthropology. His main interest, however, is in deconstruction, and he is very



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explicit—albeit cryptic—about his intentions: “It may ultimately prove the case that deconstruction is the best first step. In an imagistic sense, a deconstructionist initial step can be conceived as a nomadic traipsing over a boundless network of American rails—that is, a ludic and tropological stroll (interdisciplinary ‘bindle’ in hand) that surveys America’s myriad vernacular possibilities” (200). His dense statement, replete with abstract and unclear references (e.g., “imagistic sense,” “nomadic traipsing,” “tropological stroll”), proposes that deconstruction offers the most adequate approach to analyzing vernacular literature. Baker does not clarify here why a new perspective on African American literature should go beyond “reconstruction,” which was the African American mode of literary criticism practiced in the late 1970s. Reflecting the academic Zeitgeist of the 1980s, he simply asserts that “all fixed points are problematic” (200). In fact, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, written when he was a visiting professor at Yale, is entrenched in ideas borrowed from Derrida, Eco, Baudrillard, and Foucault. In the mid-1980s, such forms of critical cross-over between African American studies and the other disciplines were not self-evident. Arnold Rampersad made an important point when he observed that “the ‘Black Aesthetic’ school, in which Baker was once a star pupil, probably would not have been able to imagine, much less tolerate, his use of the insights of white American and European thinkers” (498). Baker’s appropriation of white theory, Rampersad suggests, represents a rejection of his intellectual roots. Likewise, Sandra Adell questions Baker’s use of various Europeanderived theoretical approaches when she maintains that “Baker’s theoretical intentions are badly undermined by his own eclectic moves” (45). Charging him with intellectual betrayal, Adell presupposes a scholarly “purity” that is itself problematic. But Baker’s overall strategy to valorize black vernacular expressions while formulating a black deconstructionist approach puts high demands on scholars of African American literature. It demands facility with deconstruction, a dedication to the blues, as well as the ability to produce critical readings of black artifacts that are also playful.19 His overall agenda—whatever its cognitive dissonances may be— makes sense in light of the broader intellectual and institutional context of the time. In “Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of AfroAmerican Literature,” Baker himself elaborates on the paradigmatic shifts within African American literary criticism from the 1960s to the 1980s. The black aesthetics schools of the 1960s and 1970s presumed that cultural identity was essential to artistic production. The “reconstructionists” of the 1980s were not concerned with sociopolitical aspects of African





American literature but rather emphasized the aesthetic value of these works. To reconstruct the meaning of literary texts and instruct students in becoming sensitive readers, reconstructionists established critical tools to analyze cultural metaphors and poetic rhetoric specific to black American literature. Robert B. Stepto, for example, concentrated on literary and narratological aspects to develop a sound “methodology for an integrated study of Afro-American folklore and literature” (4). Baker objected, interestingly enough, to the reconstructionists’ approach because it was “hopelessly misguided in its wholesale adoption of terminology and implicit assumptions of white, ‘professional’ critics” (“Shifts” 11). To him, their professionalism seemed contrary to what he calls “mass interests” (“Generational Shifts” 3). Instead, he championed an anthropology of art that explored “the symbolic dimensions of human behavior that comprise AfroAmerican literature and verbal art” (Baker, “Shifts” 20). Three years later, he proposed a vernacular model as the solution for the future study of African American literature and expressive culture (Baker, Blues 112). In contrast to the reconstructionists, Baker’s model focuses on culturally specific expressions produced by common black people. Similarly, in opposition to the Black Aesthetics School, it avoids its cultural, nationalist, and chauvinistic tendencies, and refrains from instrumentalizing literary criticism for a (blatantly) political agenda. In contrast to reconstructionism, it neither engages in close readings nor drags its feet along a jargon-ridden path leading toward literary-critical professionalism. A vernacular model, as Baker saw it, focuses on black artistic expressions of the masses, such as the blues, while at the same time venturing toward a genuinely African American theory. His combination of a revised reconstructionist and a revised deconstructionist approach, however, does not keep the promise inscribed in the subtitle of his book Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Instead of providing a sustained theoretical framework, Baker propagates a playful approach drawing on overly generalized statements such as “[the] blues seems implicitly to comprise the All of American culture” (Baker, Blues 13), and “blues [is] the ‘always already’ of Afro-American culture” (Baker, Blues 4). His reference to “an anonymous (nameless) voice issuing from the black (w)hole” is equally elusive and indeterminate (Baker, Blues 5). Baker was not the only scholar of African American literature in the 1980s who drew on the idea of the vernacular to explicate the fundamental difference between the Anglo and African American literary traditions. In his groundbreaking study The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literature, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. characterized what is culturally specific to African American literature. While the term is



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not mentioned in the title, Gates offers nothing less than an exploration of the black vernacular tradition in American literature as well as a viable theory of African American literature. Some critics, such as Marcell Blount, explicitly acknowledge him for reading black “literature through the paradigms of vernacular culture” (Blount 583). The starting point for his engagement with the vernacular is language, or to be precise, linguistic assessments of African American Vernacular English: “Black English vernacular, according to William Labov’s threeyear national Science Foundation study released in 1985, ‘is a healthy, living form of language’ one which ‘shows the signs of people developing their own grammar’ and one which manifests various linguistic signs of ‘separate development.’ Labov’s extensive research leads him to conclude that there is evidence that, far from getting more similar (to standard English), the black vernacular is going its own way” (Gates ixx). The widely acknowledged valorization of the “Black English vernacular” as a language that is independent, but in no way inferior to standard American English, provides the first step for Gates’s argument that the black vernacular literary tradition merits critical attention. He transposes Labov’s assumption of a distinctly “black” vernacular English to African American literature and sets out to trace this vernacular tradition back in time. By examining the revisions within African American literary history, Gates tries to uncover what he calls “the blackness of blackness.” He is not shy about stating his intentions: “The Signifying Monkey explores the relation of the black vernacular tradition to the Afro-American literary tradition. The book attempts to identify a theory of criticism that is inscribed within the black vernacular tradition. My desire has been to allow the black tradition to speak for itself about its nature and various functions, rather than to read it, or analyze it, in terms of literary theory borrowed whole from other traditions, appropriated from without” (Gates, Signifying Monkey ixx). His response to the most pressing critical demand of the 1980s tries, in other words, to formulate a black literary theory from within.20 To do so, Gates takes a close look at black literary history. Although he explicitly claims that these traditions speak for themselves, it should be remembered that literary traditions never speak for themselves—they are invented retroactively. Indeed, Gates constructs a genealogy by inventing a tradition that springs from ancient Africa, continues through the nineteenth century in folk tales and stories about the Signifying Monkey, branches into novels of the twentieth century, and finally splinters into postmodern fiction (i.e., Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo). In search of a myth of origin, Gates identifies the precolonial Yoruban trickster Esu as the founding figure of the black vernacular tradition. His





genealogy connects Esu to the African American figure of the Signifying Monkey: “Together, the two tricksters articulate the black tradition’s theory of its literature” (Gates, Signifying Monkey xxi). This black vernacular tradition, which grew out of these two points of origin, materializes itself not only in the literary history, but also in literary criticism. Gates is convinced that “a truly indigenous black literary criticism is to be found in the vernacular” (xxi).21 This culturally specific literary and theoretical tradition, rooted in West Africa and in the figure of the Signifying Monkey, represents the master trope for his critical reading of black literature and black rhetoric. Apart from these mythical origins, Gates further grounds his vernacular tradition in the rhetorical acts known as signifying. Drawing on several linguistic studies (Roger D. Abraham, Geneva Smitherman, Thomas Kochman, and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan), Gates points out that these speech acts (which include playing the dozens, loud talking, testifying, sounding, and rapping) engage in a verbal playfulness of one-upmanship, bragging, and insulting. These rhetorical acts are also crucial to the stories about the Signifying Monkey that rejoice in the monkey’s triumphs over the lion. The monkey is able to defeat his physically superior opponent thanks to his witticism, mastery of figurative speech, and his indeterminate language. Gates finds similar patterns in literary texts. When a text draws on, or rewrites existing texts, it signifies. Gates goes as far as to say that “all texts signify upon other texts, in motivated or unmotivated ways,” and thereby declares textual revisions to be the dominant structural principle in black literary history.22 Instead of locating a black vernacular tradition in the blues or the folk, as Baker does, he focuses on rhetoric, intertextuality, and the specific usages of literary language. In creating a primogeniture within the African American vernacular literary tradition, Gates also brings in nonfiction texts written in black dialect (“Dreadful Riot on Negro Hill” and “A Black Lecture on Language”) as well as slave narratives. The different versions of the vernacular in twentieth-century fiction are then expounded on through close analyses of three classic novels: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Alice Walker’s Color Purple, and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. Apart from revealing their distinctively black vernacular narrative voice, Gates explores the ways in which these texts signify on each other, as Reed revises Ellison and Walker alludes to Hurston. Highlighting the oral dimension of vernacular literature, he calls attention to the trope of the “talking book,” a common theme in slave narratives, that emerges in revised forms in the “speakerly texts” of Hurston, Reed, and Walker.



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Although Gates’s assessment of the vernacular is more sustained, there are a number of parallels between Gates’s and Baker’s deployment of the concept of the vernacular. Both explicitly and implicitly valorize African American literature and its study. Both attempt to shift black literary criticism, as Gates puts it, “in[to] the mainstream of critical debates in the profession” (Gates, Black Literature 8). To do so, they both constructed a vernacular method and theory that while innovative and sophisticated also simultaneously foregrounded the text’s “blackness.” Whether they were willing to admit it or not, Gates and Baker both employed deconstructionist insights on African American literature. In the 1980s, the field of literary criticism was still segregated in the sense that most white scholars did not have a thorough understanding of African American literature and most African American scholars were not interested in contemporary (European-derived) literary theory. The concept of the vernacular was meant to bridge this gap, as it referred to a black literary tradition most African American scholars were familiar with as well as to a theoretical framework that hoped to appeal to scholars previously uninterested in African American literature. (Thus, it was no coincidence that Gates wrote The Signifying Monkey when he was still at Yale.23) In this context it is helpful to consider Gates’s account of the changes in African American literary studies: In the late 1960s, when Black Studies formally entered the curriculum, history was the predominant subject; a decade later, literary studies had become the “glamour” area of Black Studies. While the black-arts movement of the mid 1960s had declared literature, and especially poetry, to be the cultural wing of the black-power revolution, it had little effect on the curricula offered by traditional departments of English. This intervention was dependent on the studies produced by a group of younger scholars— Donald Gibson, June Jordan, Houston Baker, Jr., Arnold Rampersad, Geneva Smitherman, Mary Helen Washington, Carolyn Fowler, R. Baxter Miller [who] began to theorize about the nature and function of black literature and its criticism. (Gates, “‘Ethnic and Minority’ Studies” 291–92)24

In contrast to Baker who described the generational shift by distinguishing between the Black Aesthetics Schools and reconstructionism, Gates names a group of “younger” scholars who offered theoretical readings. Two of them, Houston Baker, Jr. and Geneva Smitherman, explicitly engage the vernacular in theorizing African American literature and language. Instead of rejecting as Eurocentric theory in general or deconstruction in particular, this new generation of critics offered highly theoretical





readings of black literature, thus positioning themselves within the field of literary criticism. A growing number of articles on African American literature appeared in scholarly journals such as Critical Inquiry and The New Literary History, which previously had little interest in black studies. Prior to this crossover, the analysis of black literature and literary theory was relegated to scholarly journals such as Callaloo or The Black Literature Forum. In the spring issue of 1980 the Black Literature Forum made clear its “attempts to transcend the conservative provincialism that has marked the work of the humanities in twentieth-century America” (Baker, “Introduction” 4). This self-acclaimed “multiethnic avantgarde” wanted to launch a new era in literary study by engaging in radical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary approaches (4). Baker and Gates were among the vanguards of this movement to revolutionize the humanities by integrating it. They latched onto the concept of the vernacular—in response to colleagues who considered black studies untheoretical—hoping to push their field into new directions. This movement eventually became part of an academic avant garde that made headway within the humanities, as shown through the increased number of black studies books published by the university presses and black studies articles published in mainstream scholarly journals. In 1984, the University of Chicago Press published Baker’s Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature. The same year saw the publication of Gates’s book entitled Black Literature and Literary Theory with Methuen, which was later reprinted by Routledge. The blurb on its dust jacket acknowledges this critical intervention into “the traditional fields of Western literature.”25 In 1985, Gates’s anthology “Race,” Writing and Difference (University of Chicago Press) was published, and Critical Inquiry finally devoted an issue to black literature and black theory. This intervention was so significant that it evoked a critical and rather negative response by Tzvetan Todorov, who accused Gates of overemphasizing racial difference. Objecting to indigenous theories of criticism, Todorov argued for an “egalitarian” and “universalist” position. In response to Todorov’s critique, Gates gives another reason why the concept of the vernacular was useful at the time: “To adopt Todorov’s ideology of egalitarianism and universalism is to allow our discourse to be incorporated into the discourse of Europe and then to be naturalized (seemingly) and colonized . . . my call to ‘vernacular’ theories of the Other was intended, as I stated it to be, as an example of where he [Baker] and I found it necessary and fruitful to turn to escape the neocolonialism of the ‘egalitarian criticism’ of Todorov and company” (Gates, “Writing ‘Race’” 209). Their



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vernacular theories reject neocolonialist incorporations and locate that which is specific to the African American literary tradition. In spite of the aforementioned unwillingness to embrace an Afro-centric position, this vernacular balances between (European) theory and black particularity. At the same time, vernacular theories of black literature dismissed the racist assumption that theory was extrinsic to African American culture. Gates’s and Baker’s strategy to incorporate poststructuralism into black studies, however, also met with disapproval by some African American scholars who believed that such an approach lacked a sense of solidarity with the race and promoted elitism, all the while amounting to nothing more than “intellectual indenture.”26 In summation, it seems that Baker and Gates embraced the notion of the vernacular primarily for pragmatic and strategic reasons, in an attempt to establish their field within the larger academic landscape of the 1980s. For that reason, there are parallels with the Anglo-American usage of the term in the 1950s. On a structural level we can deduce a number of affinities between these seemingly discrete applications of the same signifier. In both usages, vernacular designates primarily culturally specific features. Leo Marx’s assertion that “the vernacular style is a distinctive achievement of American culture” collaborates with Baker’s observation that “writing the culturally specific is coextensive with discovering vernacular inscriptions in American culture” (Baker, Blues 200), as well as Ellison’s claim that “our most characteristic American style is that of the vernacular” (Ellison, Going to the Territory 140). All of the scholars discussed agree that a national identity expresses itself, among other things, through a distinct literary style. This style of writing, these critics would all agree, represents the spoken informal language of a common people. It evokes a sense of immediacy, vitality, or vibrant expressivity. Due to their idiomatic colloquialness and salient lyricism, vernacular texts can be characterized as “speakerly” texts, to borrow a phrase used by both Bridgman and Gates. When defining the political intentions or effects of the vernacular, the theoreticians have been very vague, evoking notions of freedom, ethics, solidarity, and democracy. Nevertheless it is tacitly agreed upon that vernacular literature is a literature with a politics in view, as Marx put it. It opposes racial and other forms of discrimination. It embodies class struggle, rejecting elitism for egalitarianism, which to Marx means valorizing the “common man” over more learned or sophisticated classes. Vernacular literature has also been said to represent people of the lower classes, but unlike most proletarian literature, it is never propagandistic. It neither exclusively addresses the lower classes, as Ellison reminds us, nor





is it synonymous with popular literature. In fact, vernacular texts are very often written by canonical authors such as Twain, Hurston, or Ellison. There is a vested interest in defining the term through a number of oppositions: either between an American national identity and a European one, between Anglo-Americans and African Americans with regard to racial differences, or between the center and the margin. Yet if we consider the status of vernacular literature such as Huckleberry Finn or Their Eyes Were Watching God, this hierarchy is subject to change. That these novels were originally overlooked yet finally recognized and canonized shows that initially disrespected vernacular literature can move from the margins toward the center. In this process, critical assertions about their particular (national or racial) identity prove to be instrumental. Marx’s investment in the notion of the vernacular and Twain as a “typically American” author contribute to the ongoing canonization of Huckleberry Finn (as I will show in the following section). Likewise, the fact that Gates pointed to the vernacular in Hurston’s novel contributed to the process of canonizing Their Eyes Were Watching God. Like Marx and Smith, who insisted on the cultural difference between American and British literature, Baker and Gates imply that black vernacular literature challenges the dominant (white) order. In subverting received British or Euro-American writing models, the vernacular style constitutes a genuinely American or African American aesthetic. On the level of content, vernacular texts question social and racial conventions. As I shall demonstrate in Chapter 3, Huckleberry Finn mocked the social code of the genteel society and Their Eyes ignored white Southern codes altogether. The vernacular designates and acknowledges what belongs to the outsider or subordinate. Yet, in the process of identifying the subordinate as vernacular, scholars helped to bring about the canonization of these works. In effect, it is partially because of the vernacular process that the marginal moves toward the center. On the level of literary criticism, it is no coincidence that the discourses on the vernacular surfaced in the 1950s and in the 1980s. American studies developed into a discipline in its own right in the 1950s. Black studies established itself as a discipline in the national landscape of higher learning during the 1980s. The vernacular ultimately functioned to organize these academic fields when they were still in an emerging stage. The turn to vernacular theory or method was motivated by a desire to give respectability and legitimacy to a previously marginalized academic discipline. Where Smith argued for a method that combined sociological with literary perspectives, Baker and Gates combined reconstructionism with deconstructionism to set themselves apart from Afro-centric theories.



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Although the vernacular has in neither case emerged as a key concept, vernacular theorists have played a significant role within the field. As a result of their work on the vernacular, all of them have retroactively been bestowed with prestigious awards from either the American Studies Association (Smith received the Bode-Pearson Prize in 1979, Marx in 1995) or the Modern Language Association (the Hubbell Award was given to Baker in 2003 and to Gates in 2007). Given these acknowledgments, Jonathan Arac’s observation that “[the vernacular] functioned among the founding premises for the institutionalization of literary American Studies,” seems insightful. American studies, of course, is not reducible to Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, just as African American studies is not reducible to Houston A. Baker and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—further confirmed by the fact that their work on the vernacular was only one of many intellectual projects—but all four theoreticians of the vernacular have played an important role in advancing their respective disciplines. Therefore, one has to acknowledge that the vernacular has shaped the field without ever situating itself at the forefront. In contrast to American studies, in which the vernacular did not develop into a dominant concept, the pioneers of a black vernacular discourse, because they focused on developing the myth-and-symbol school approach, were followed by other critics who studied various facets of vernacular literature. To speculate as to why this was the case, one needs to remember that the political climate of the 1950s was not receptive to a conflict-ridden, inherently subversive concept. However, the 1980s—the decade of canon debates, postcolonial criticism, and multiculturalism— seemed to provide the appropriate setting for constructing a black vernacular literature and valorizing black literary criticism. As argued above, the turn to a black vernacular theory helped negotiate the tension between the increased demands of professionalism and an interest in distinguishing a tradition without reverting to an essentialist rhetoric. Interestingly enough, the theoreticians of the black vernacular did not incorporate the existing discourse on Anglo-American vernacular literature into their own work. In the 1980s the field of literary criticism was so racialized—and the world of search engines such a far-off fantasy—that the world of Marx and Smith seemed light years away from the world of Baker and Gates. How did this develop as the 1990s progressed? In the field of American studies, the discourse on the vernacular was most prominent in linguistics and architecture. The fields of African American and cultural studies, however, fostered a boom of scholarly inquiries into cultural and racial manifestations of the vernacular. Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Tommy Lott, Paul Gilroy, and Robert O’Meally were among





those scholars who explicitly and programmatically took up the concept, and thereby the discourse on the vernacular established itself as a veritable cornerstone of research in African American studies. Unfortunately, the institutional separatism between American studies and African American studies kept a cross-disciplinary definition of the vernacular from gaining momentum. The 1990s Toward the end of the twentieth century, the critical discourse on the vernacular expanded in unprecedented ways. It boomed not only in terms of the amount of articles published in the name of the vernacular, but also with regard to the range of objects designated as such. The subject matter encompasses a wide array of art forms and a host of varied cultural backgrounds. When naming vernacular aspects of North American literature, scholars have applied the term to slave narratives, dialect, and regionalist literature as well as to canonical works. Thus, vernacular literature has come to be an umbrella term for canonical writers including Mark Twain, William Carlos Williams, and Toni Morrison working in very different ethnic, gender, and racial contexts.27 In the visual arts, Sharff has used the term to discuss Alfred Hitchcock’s films, and Sayre has used it to discuss Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings and Nicholas Nixon’s photographs. A host of articles have used the term to draw attention to various topics and images. Sayre’s essay “Pursuing Authenticity: The Vernacular Moment in Contemporary American Art” concentrates on photographs of AIDS patients, whereas KirshenblattGimblett’s “The Electronic Vernacular” considers the merits and dangers of the new media and digital culture. Coco Fusco’s “Vernacular Memories” discusses the installations of the Puerto Rican artist Pepón Osorio. And when Paul Gilroy refers to “vernacular moments in the performing arts,” he builds on Stearns’s classic study subtitled The Story of American Vernacular Dance.28 In addition to the proliferation of critical studies on vernacular art (literature, film, photography, new media, visual, and performance arts), the 1990s witnessed the emergence of different theoretical approaches to the vernacular. Thomas McLaughlin’s Street Smarts and Critical Theory: Listening to the Vernacular looks at cultural practices and social movements in order to demonstrate the significant contribution “average people” have made to a range of grassroots movements (e.g., the antipornography movement, the whole language movement, and fan-zine culture). McLaughlin believes that these social movements challenge the established power structure because they undermine what he calls strategies



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of containment. To him, “vernacular theory can be a tactic for cultural and personal survival, a recognition and rejection of strategies of cultural containment” (28). By linking theory to practice, McLaughlin explores populist forms of resistance and opportunities for social change. His overall approach combines poststructuralist thought with critical theory. A postcolonial approach to the vernacular was offered in Homi Bhabha’s article “Naipaul’s Vernacular Cosmopolitans.” The Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul embodies the “spirit of vernacular cosmopolitanism,” Bhabha claims, because his “standards are only those of wit and style,” his “values are always human,” and most importantly, his ideas challenge and “unsettle the moral and metropolitan centres.”29 Since vernacular cosmopolitans like Naipaul establish themselves in the Western world without obliterating their cultural roots, they often clash with an “old elite.” Given that minority writers and intellectuals like Naipaul have increasingly gained visibility and esteem in Europe and the United States, the emergence of these vernacular cosmopolitans also causes anxiety because it threatens to change the social order, as Bhabha argues in “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism and the Anxiety of Cultural Translation.”30 By appropriating the concept for postcolonial theory, Bhabha added a global dimension to the established research on the black American vernacular. The growing discourse on postcolonial vernacularism also includes Fusco’s elaboration on the Puerto Rican artist Pepón Osorio in her article “Vernacular Memories,” Russell Potter’s book-length study on hip-hop, Spectacular Vernaculars, and José David Saldívar’s elaboration on the border vernacular as a rich primary source in Chicano literature. In the following section, I will concentrate on three assessments of the vernacular in U.S. American literature. Jonathan Arac’s chapter on “Vernacular and Nationality” supplements my own examination of early definitions of the vernacular in Anglo-American literature. Robert O’Meally’s “The Vernacular Tradition” extends the discussion about the vernacular tradition in African American literature. And José David Saldívar presents a previously ignored vernacular tradition in American literature. “Vernacular and Nationality” is a chapter in Arac’s seminal study “Huckleberry Finn” as Idol or Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time, which demonstrates, as the title indicates, that Twain’s novel has been made either a target or an object of idolization. Since Lionel Trilling launched the canonization of Huckleberry Finn in 1948, it has been repeatedly used to celebrate what is admirable about America. In the post–World War II era, the novel was also used in seeding America’s literary nationality (62). Arac synthesizes the history of such praise of the novel’s democratic and liberal politics. Lionel Trilling, Henry Nash





Smith, Walter Blair, Leo Marx, and Ralph Ellison have all lauded Twain’s achievements; however, Arac credits Marx above all for the argument that Huckleberry Finn epitomizes the American vernacular. This “national vernacular” extends more broadly, beyond literature to a whole way of life. Arac rightly points out that for Marx, the vernacular tradition is not merely a matter of language; it carries with it social values. “[Its] political ideal is freedom,” both positively and negatively: negatively, “freedom from oppression of society”; positively, “freedom to establish . . . an egalitarian community” (120). Citing Marx’s claim that the political ideal is carried by a vernacular style “‘developed in a new society in a prehistoric landscape,’” Arac induces that Marx’s understanding of the vernacular “receives its final sanction from nature itself ” (157). This totalizing claim suggests that Marx’s vernacular is subsumed, swallowed, engulfed by his interest in the pastoral. Accordingly, Arac calls the sunrise scene in Chapter 19 “Marx’s touchstone for vernacular” literature (170), even though Marx explicitly argued that the raft scene, for example, in Chapter 10 was at the “core of the vernacular” (Marx 113). His reading of “The Vernacular Tradition in American Literature” leads Arac to dismiss the politics of the vernacular as reactionary. To Arac, Marx’s conservative take on the vernacular is indebted to his interest in the natural or pastoral as well as his interest in America’s national identity. When Arac refers to “this national vernacular,” he misattributes a concept Marx never uses. Arac repeatedly forces the conversation in directions Marx never takes it, placing words in Marx’s mouth. In effect, he attributes Marx’s interest in the vernacular to a desire to strengthen American national identity, the title of his chapter “Vernacular and Nationality” echoing this accusation. Though Arac concedes that Marx’s vernacular envisioned progressive politics that aspire for egalitarianism, he discredits the overall intellectual nature of the endeavor. Positioning “nature” instead of “politics” at the core of Marx’s concept leads Arac to infer that “Marx’s sense of the ‘natural’” also evades questions of human agency. To prove his point, Arac cites a passage—curiously enough from Life on the Mississippi instead of Huckleberry Finn—about a couple living on a steamboat, whose boat catches a snag and begins to sink. In trying to save his boat from sinking, the man, Captain Poe, accidentally kills his wife. Marx blames “the murderous river” and “that fearful principle of nature” for the death of Captain Poe’s wife, to which Arac retorts that it is actually the reverse: “The agent was not the river but the captain, acting in the best way he knew how. . . . It is not nature who deals death here, but the man” (163). With statements as these, Arac chides Marx for being apolitical: “Marx, who aimed to be a



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politically aware and engaged critic, has nonetheless joined the national hypercanonization” (163). The moment Marx became interested in the vernacular, Arac feels, was the moment he lost his political edge. In celebrating Twain as a quintessentially American author, Marx abandons the project of reclaiming the marginalized. His failure to identify with a “dissident intellectual minority” makes Marx an ally of the elite that aims to close the possibilities for subversive expression. Arac goes so far as to speculate that something inherent to the vernacular turns any critical engagement with it from dissent into consent. Arac ends his chapter with the advice to “mov[e] away from the praise of vernacular” toward a recognition that “the triumphs of national cultures have participated in a process that has been painful for most of those involved in it and that if national in effects has been global in scope” (179–80). His attempt to move beyond the nationalist stronghold on American studies represented by Marx and his generation leads Arac to choose Ralph Ellison as his ally for globalizing American studies. “Ellison’s assessment of his own inheritance as an author is emphatically not nationalist,” Arac insists in an attempt to turn Ellison into the epitome of a genuinely “internationalist, cosmopolitan cultural commitment” (201). Thus, Ellison is taken to embody a counterforce to nationality and the vernacular. Arac, in other words, makes Marx the target of his critique of nationalism and Ellison his idol. Falling prey to what he himself sets out to expose and criticize, Arac’s objections against the vernacular serve a larger ideological project. To fix the drawbacks of the nationalist paradigm in American studies that has ignored America’s imperialist tendencies, Arac calls for a “Creole perspective,” which would yield, by his estimation, an “understanding of the United States not only as itself a postcolonial nation but also as itself an imperial nation” (209). Ellison’s internationalism and cosmopolitanism is supposedly able to bring about such a Creole perspective, thereby undoing the “wrongs” of the vernacular. Caught in his own agenda, Arac never reconciles the significance Ellison places on the vernacular. Ellison, in fact, realized the import of this concept, arguing “that our most characteristic American style is that of the vernacular” (140). While Ellison emphasizes “is,” I would put the emphasis on “our” to highlight Ellison’s implied strategy to integrate black expressions into the collective self-understanding. Far from dismissing the concept, Ellison insists that “the vernacular process is a way of establishing and discovering national identity” (140). Ellison actually supported the very project to which Arac so vehemently objects. Ellison is even convinced that a vernacular perspective is the most instructive





and thoughtful approach to analyzing the American character in a comprehensive manner. Arac’s dismissal of the vernacular and paradoxical support of Ellison is part of a generational struggle within American studies. He approaches American studies from a Creole perspective that replaces nationalistic assessments with theories of hybridity. Consequently, he finds a perspective that “connotes ‘mixture’ rather than purity more salutary and stimulating for current critical use” because it also addresses “peoples in all the North and South American and Asian areas” (208–9). What made him believe that Marx’s vernacularist argument was incompatible with a multicultural and transnational agenda? The answer is buried in his passing remark on Marx being “one of the few figures still active who reaches back to the beginnings of organized American studies” (156). Given that Marx won the 1995 Lifetime Accomplishment Award from the American Studies Association, he can be seen as a representative man and epitome of that institution. This might explain why Arac, the self-proclaimed new Americanist, defines himself against Marx. Arac’s call for replacing Marx’s vernacularist argument with a Creole perspective is ripe with irony because he overlooks a number of studies that apply such a perspective to American literature and predate his own.31 By 1997, transnational, Creole, or interracial perspectives were no longer marginal in the field. His claim that a Creole perspective would displace the liberal consensus paradigm with a more political, new, or post-Americanist paradigm is the bigger fallacy. In striving to make literary criticism politically suited for a global age, he ironically neglects the political import of literature. So states Brook Thomas in a review of Arac’s book: “Arac’s conclusion leaves me wondering what role for him literature might play in citizens’ civic education, for it seems possible to read him as implying that the function of criticism in our time is to turn the realm of politics over to the politicians” (91). Along those lines, Winfried Fluck observes that “the underlying issue of Arac’s discussion [is] the relation between literature and politics”; he contests Arac’s view that “the category of the literary cannot account for Huckleberry Finn’s value as a book” (126). Arac’s dismissal of the literary value and privileging of politics neglects Marx’s insistence that a vernacular literary style carries with it an egalitarian, democratic potential. In the final analysis, Arac’s rejection stems from a generational conflict. His negation of the vernacular serves to replace the dominant (old) American studies paradigm and establish what was to emerge as the new or postAmericanist American studies. His embrace of Ellison to counter the vernacularist argument is quite ironic, given that so many African American scholars started to turn toward the vernacular at the same time that the new Americanist Arac tried to dismantle it.



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“The Vernacular Tradition,” the first chapter of The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, starts with the extraordinary claim that “in the black tradition no forms are more quick or overflowing with black power and black meaning” than vernacular forms (5). They provide a symbolic reservoir for black literary expression, endowing vigor and verve. Robert O’Meally thinks of them as the essence of black American literature, rhetorically asking the reader, “What would the work of Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison be like without its black vernacular ingredients? What, for that matter, would the writing of Mark Twain or William Faulkner be without these same elements?” (1). When he implicitly argues that the black vernacular crosses racial boundaries, he suggests that the vernacular is not only a wellspring for preeminent texts of the black literary tradition but can also be traced in works by white American writers. Considering that this section of the Norton Anthology reprints folk tales, speeches, sermons, popular jazz pieces, and rap songs, one gets the impression that works of poetry or novels do not belong to the vernacular tradition. Passages from slave narratives, works of Lawrence Dunbar, Sterling Brown, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston make it into other sections of the anthology. Hence, O’Meally represents the vernacular as “part of the oral, not primarily the literate (or, written-down) tradition of black expression” (1). Interestingly, O’Meally’s vernacular tradition excludes the fictional texts discussed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston A. Baker. He seems to have a different project in mind—and a different agenda—than Baker and Gates. Although he uses Gates’s work to say that the vernacular “meets not only formal art, it meets the world of scholarly criticism as well” (4), O’Meally is not interested in black scholarly criticism or theory. He lays the foundations for African American literary history using an eclectic mix of genres, media, and styles. Conceding that “the forms included here are varied and resist aesthetic generalizations” (4), O’Meally nevertheless is able to identify the main characteristics of these vernacular forms. First and foremost, for him, black vernacular aesthetics is constituted by its opposition to white America: “What distinguishes this body of work is its in-group and, at times, secretive, defensive, and aggressive character: it is not, generally speaking, produced for circulation beyond the black group” (1). These in-group and culturally specific expressions are, with respect to their formal features, distinct because of their oral qualities: their sound, rhythm, and lyricism. A call-and-response pattern and a



Constructing Alternative Vernacular Traditions


tendency toward improvisation often frame the oral qualities. Regarding content, O’Meally implies, vernacular texts often convey a pronounced political statement such as the rap song “The Message,” whose very title signals this importance and whose lyrics openly protest the racial inequality of modern society. Since this song combines spoken poetry and syncopated polyrhythmic music with politics, it provides a good example for vernacular literature. O’Meally’s definition in many respects overlaps that of Marx. Both define the term in relation to cultural specificity, aesthetics, and politics. Like Marx, O’Meally discovers a subversive potential in vernacular expressions, insisting that they “pa[y] a minimum of attention to the Thou-shalt-nots of the academy or the arbiters of high style” (3). While O’Meally never mentions Marx’s elaborations on the term, in another context he cites Kouwenhoven to highlight another feature of the vernacular that many scholars have overlooked. In his essay “On Burke and the Vernacular: Ralph Ellison’s Boomerang of History,” O’Meally asks rhetorically, “What do I mean by ‘the vernacular’?” and replies, “By vernacular I also refer to the dynamic processes and products of cultural interaction between more established conventions of expression and those which are more improvised and unselfconscious, and thus more unpretentiously American. The uncultivated forms, as Kouwenhoven put it, are just as important as the ‘play-it-by-ear improvisations’ that adjust given structures to present needs” (italics O’Meally’s, “On Burke” 248). If the term vernacular means, “to adjust given structures to present needs,” it denotes change. Yet, these changes do not follow a preconceived plan; they are invented along the way. If vernacular refers to “the inversive and inventive edge of African-American culture” (250), it can refer as well to the inventive edge of any culture. Likewise, his assumption that the vernacular has informed the writings of Mark Twain and William Faulkner and consequently shaped America’s literature undermines his claim that the vernacular is limited to the black community. A comparison of this definition with the definitions in the opening chapter of the Norton Anthology reveals the underlying contradictions and perhaps an unwillingness to recognize transcultural formulations of the vernacular. An introduction demands justification for this compendium, easily provided by the assertion of something quintessentially black about the vernacular and about black literature. O’Meally, the contributors, and the fellow editors have the task of authorizing a literary tradition that had heretofore been marginal and apparently unworthy of a Norton. By valorizing the vernacular as aesthetically rich and distinctly black, he justifies the significance of the vernacular in American letters. In fact, O’Meally



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himself elaborates on political sensitivities he had to consider: “Defining the vernacular and delineating it as a category of African-American literary studies have been difficult and controversial projects. Some critics note the vernacular’s typical demarcation as a category of things that are male, attached only to lower-class groups, and otherwise simplistically expressive of a vast and complexly layered and dispersed group of people” (O’Meally, “Vernacular Tradition” 1). He detaches the received identification of the vernacular from “low” or “folk” culture, and against the presumption of its simplicity, O’Meally maintains that “many scholars and writers recognized the black vernacular as an enormously rich and various source for historical and critical insight.” He adds that it served as a “wellspring for the writers” (3). Such assertions are not merely hypothetical; they are also performances that yield new realities. Norton finally devoted 2,665 pages to presenting this vernacular literary tradition to a vast readership in and outside of the United States. This volume testifies to the movement of this literary tradition from the margins to the center. Again, Ralph Ellison: “One of the functions of the vernacular culture is that of preparing for the emergence of the unexpected.” The late recognition of African American literature has paved the road for many minority scholars. In Border Matters, José David Saldívar traces a Chicano vernacular tradition in American literature.32 Saldívar calls the poems by Américo Paredes “vernacular poetry” (56) and praises Rubén Martínez’s novel The Other Side for engaging in “a project of vernacular renovation” (143). Border Matters claims that a vernacular tradition in Chicano/a literature is fundamental to the development of its literary history. This history begins with María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel The Squatter and the Don.33 This novel, which is about the marriage between a Euro-American Protestant and a Californian Roman Catholic, has been categorized as a sentimental romance of the local color tradition, but Saldívar reads it as a “(trans)national romance” (171). He argues that the love plot intersects with the political plot, most notably through the issue of land loss (the squatter) and the power of the capitalist magnates controlling the railroads and the mining industry (the Don): “Erotics and politics thus join forces” (174). The political subtext of this vernacular novel therefore manifests itself in the motif of the interracial marriage as well as in the representation of a marginalized, disempowered, and dispossessed ethnic minority. But, Burton also openly critiques American imperialism, monopoly capitalism, and Anglo-centrism. A good example of a “vernacular border poet-in-the-making” is the young protagonist, Chonita, of Américo Paredes’s story “The Hammon and the Beans.” Saldívar proposes that “Chonita’s bicultural vernacular has





a deeper folk meaning. By freely expressing herself in a new border Spanglish (‘Give me the hammon [blending jamón and ham] and the beans!’), Chonita unwittingly signifies on the educated schoolchildren’s supposed superiority” (51). Her self-confident use of border Spanglish mocks their sense of supremacy based on the assumption that standard English was superior to interlingual vernacular English. Moreover, Saldívar cherishes Paredes’s “vernacular musical verses” because they blend Western poetic elements with U.S.-Mexican border experiences. To him, it was Rubén Martínez’s The Other Side that gave the best description of the intensity of border crossings. This portrait of the Tijuana contact zone, where Central American cultural practices meet U.S. pop culture, highlights the “hybridity [that is] part and parcel of a new border landscape and diaspora community”: “Martinez’s particular slant on Tijuana as a materially hybridized city facilitates an alternative way of grappling with what is today known as identity politics—not as rigid essentialism but rather as a project of a vernacular renovation (what one border artist calls rasquachismo) with which diverse groups can take charge of the city” (143). This vernacular reconstruction, as it were, overhauls the concept of hybridity because it expresses a sense of cultural belonging while avoiding essentialist rhetoric.34 In contrast, Helena Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Café,” a short story about a Central American washerwoman coming to the United States in search of her son, allows Saldívar to talk about crossing border zones as well as of literary conventions. Viramontes is a good example of an “experimental border aesthetics,” because she uses prolepsis, analepsis, and stream of consciousness—she brings political as well as stylistic innovation to the vernacular tradition in Chicano/a literature. Saldívar associates the vernacular with the notion of the border to focus on cultural contact zones and narratives that “bring readers into electrifying contact with social forms wholly different from Anglocentric ones” (58). Through the examination of numerous fictional texts (novels, poems, hip-hop music, paintings, essays, and performance art) he determines how Chicanos/as negotiate their transnational identity and mold a vernacular style; he differentiates the Chicano/a literary tradition from Euro-American literature on the grounds of aesthetics and politics. Border Matters seeks to develop a vernacular theory as “a cultural theory in the borderlands.”35 Like Baker, Gates, and O’Meally, Saldívar also constructs his vernacular tradition in opposition to the dominant Euro-American one. All four presume that the vernacular is politically as well as aesthetically subversive. In spite of their overlaps and affinities, Saldívar does not align himself with critics of the black vernacular tradition. He explicitly credits



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Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Kobena Mercer for their investments in transnational studies but ignores their research on the vernacular. This omission costs Saldívar the support of black literature that would have strengthened the comparative component of his envisioned comparative intercultural studies. Paul Gilroy would have been a good ally. In his examination of black performance art he emphatically stated, “The living, nontraditional tradition of black vernacular self-fashioning, culture-making, play and antiphonic communal conversation is complex and complicated by its historic relationship to the covert public worlds of a subaltern modernity” (“Dissident Forms” 13). While he locates this subaltern vernacular modernity in “black vernacular self-fashioning,” he focuses on the diaspora cultures of the black Atlantic. His statement applies, however, to U.S.–Mexican border cultures as well. On the same token, Stuart Hall maintains in “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” that “black popular culture is hybridized from a vernacular base” (28). His characterization of the vernacular as a reservoir of authenticity and a wellspring of black creativity, which is then transformed into marketable commodified forms of popular culture, dovetails with Saldívar’s elaborations on Chicano culture. Hall’s conclusion that African American popular culture is “hybridized from a vernacular base” supports Saldívar’s belief that “hybridity [i]s part and parcel of a new border landscape and diaspora community” (7).36 The critical deployments of the vernacular from Arac, O’Meally, and Saldívar represent very different perspectives. O’Meally presents a diachronic view of the black vernacular tradition ranging from the era of slavery to today. Saldívar retrieves a Chicano/a vernacular tradition from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Arac, in turn, looks at a single literary text and its reception to discuss the effects that the literary scholarship on Huckleberry Finn had in the second half of the twentieth century. While Arac deconstructs previous attempts to establish a vernacular tradition in Anglo- American literature, O’Meally constructs a putative black American literary tradition in the name of the vernacular. Likewise, Saldívar privileges border matters by constructing a vernacular tradition in Chicano/a literature. Instead of criticizing the previous generation of Americanists, O’Meally valorizes a literature that Americanists had previously excluded from dominant accounts of “American” literary history. While all three revert to the same signifier to accentuate culturally specific aspects, they do so by referring to a different signified—be it Anglo-, African, or Mexican American. Arac identifies the vernacular with scholarly attempts to glorify what is quintessentially American— which he finds problematic, since it leads to patriotic idolatry and fosters





a parochial, monocultural view of America. O’Meally and Saldívar, however, claim that the vernacular tradition is counterhegemonic. The disparity in their accounts is obviously linked to the fact that the latter two are so-called minority scholars.37 Furthermore, Arac represents the new Americanists’ or post-Americanist project, which is basically a revisionist project.38 He also expands this revisionist project, which was initially concerned with the cultural work of fictional texts, by exploring the political effect Huckleberry Finn scholarship has had on the formation of American Studies and of America’s national literary identity. Considering that a preliminary version of “Huckleberry Finn” as Idol or Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time appeared under the title “Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn” in National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, it is not surprising that Arac’s project expresses the postnationalist American Studies paradigm often associated with John Carlos Rowe’s Post-Nationalist American Studies or the anthology Cultures of United States Imperialism.39 Although a number of ethnic and minority scholars have contributed to the postnationalist project, it would be inappropriate to subsume O’Meally and Saldívar under that label. Although Saldívar explicitly advocates a remapping of American studies, he is primarily concerned with bicultural or hybrid identities (e.g., of Mexican Americans) as well as with the physical border between the United States and Mexico. His remapping highlights postcolonial spaces—such as those represented in the literary works by Paredes, Martinez, and Viramontes—intended to strengthen our awareness of otherness and difference. This is the driving force in his and in O’Meally’s engagement with the vernacular. Their appraisal of the vigor and counterhegemonic potential of the vernacular combats and transcends a long history of discrimination and marginalization. In the last section of this chapter I shall position these diverging critical deployments of the vernacular—its dismissal and its emphatic appointment—in the context of developments in Cultural Studies during the 1990s. To extrapolate on the larger paradigm out of which these definitions of the vernacular emerge, it is necessary to survey the underlying assumptions concerning the key concept “difference” and the shifts that have occurred over the last two decades. A Comparative Account on Paradigms of Difference The term “difference” has been used to designate various modes of interrelation. It is helpful to differentiate between four paradigms: differences between, differences in-between, differences within, and differences juxtaposed. The first paradigm addresses social and symbolic acts based on



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the exclusion, domination, and exploitation of subordinates. This paradigm of difference is closely associated with the emergence of cultural and postcolonial studies.40 In this salient trend of exposing negative representations of marginalized peoples, scholars focus on symbolic practices that negate “the other” to engage in critiques of racism, sexism, Orientalism, homophobia, chauvinism, and imperialism. In the early 1980s, Stuart Hall drew attention to stereotypical representations of black people. He argued that these images function through a logic that presupposes black inferiority and white superiority. He urged that scholars should expose, contest, and help eliminate these asymmetrical relations.41 In the early 1990s, the “new Americanists” began to point out that America’s sense of nationality was also constructed through acts of exclusion and domination: “[The] national narrative represented other peoples (women, blacks, ‘foreigners,’ the homeless) from whom the property of nationness had been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of the universality of the norm” (Pease, “New Americanists” 4). In other words, America’s national narrative was based on an antagonistic (us vs. them) structure and a normativity that the new Americanists set out to criticize. To challenge this norm—usually defined as white, male, and North American—they used literary criticism as a tool to condemn a long-running history of American abuses including Indian removal, slavery, and U.S. imperialism. In 1998, Janice Radway embraced this critical self-understanding as the new official direction of American studies: “American national identity is constructed in and through relations of difference. As a conceptual entity, it is intricately intertwined with certain alterities which diacritically define it as something that is supposedly normative, normal, and central. As a material and social entity, it is brought into being through relations of dominance and oppression, through processes of super- and subordination” (224). The relation manifests itself in the dominance of men over women, Anglo-Americans over African Americans, heterosexuals over homosexuals, “able” over disabled, Europeans over non-Europeans, the West over the East, and so on.42 This hierarchical and antagonistic structure, which has been fundamental in the formation of nationality as well as “identity,” can be extended to the construction of modernity at large. As Laurence Grossberg aptly observed, the modern is constructed and constituted by a logic of difference in which “the other is defined by its negativity” (354). Having exposed this oppressive logic, in which the presumably superior self negates the presumably inferior other, scholars have either complained about oppression, exclusion, and victimization or fought for recognition by highlighting the achievements and value of the subordinated other.





The former response can manifest in separatist strategies such as cultural nationalism and ethnic chauvinism; the latter manifested itself in the Harlem and the Chicano Renaissance, for example, because these movements bestowed cultural value on the previously marginalized in order to subvert the hierarchy. In this hierarchical paradigm of difference, the fundamental opposition between the margin and the center, however, remains in place. The second paradigm focuses on moments when the self and the other are not mutually exclusive. It addresses intercultural exchanges between the colonial and the postcolonial, often assuming that the “other” is integral to and transforms the “self.” Scholars examining these moments of fusion have focused on inclusionary practices. The research field gravitating around the umbrella term “hybridity” cultivates an awareness of intercultural connections involved in diasporic experiences, interracialism, cosmopolitanism, and alternative modernisms.43 The preeminent postcolonial scholar on hybridity, Homi K. Bhabha, has examined the complexities and ambivalences of postcolonial mimicry generated by acts of cultural and artistic borrowings. Through ventriloquizing the colonizer’s voice, the colonized reclaims the dominant structures of meaning. Thus, it is from the perspective of their hybridity that the postcolonial produces new meanings. Bhabha shifts the center of attention to “cultural interaction which only emerges at the significatory boundary of cultures” (Location of Culture, 34).44 Likewise, Saldívar highlights the “place of hybridity and betweenness . . . composed of historically connected postcolonial spaces” (Saldívar 153). By interrupting a monocultural and purist logic, the hybridity paradigm replaces the nineteenth-century aversion to amalgamation with twentieth-century complexities. The resonance of this discourse has resulted in a proliferation of studies on hybridity in the field of cultural as well as American studies.45 In spite of its ability to address intercultural intricacies, this paradigm runs the risk of amounting to a “happy” cultural pluralism, an uncritical celebration of mixed identities. These two paradigms of difference are concerned with the difference between or inbetween the colonizer and the colonized, the dominant and the marginal. A third paradigm, first adapted by feminist critics, focuses on the differences within a group.46 In 1981, Elaine Showalter’s groundbreaking essay “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” discussed biological, linguistic, psychological, and cultural differences between men and women. These four theories of sexual difference were based on an antagonistic and hierarchical paradigm of difference that demarcates women as “us” and men as “them.” Showalter realized the shortcomings of this



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monolithic view of “women’s writing,” “women’s body,” “women’s language,” “women’s psyche,” and “women’s culture” and the difficulties feminist critics had in determining, for example, “women’s writing”: “We realize that the land promised to us is not the serene undifferentiated universality of texts but the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself ” (266–67). Showalter’s anthology The New Feminist Criticism reflects the awareness that feminists of different cultural backgrounds have to be represented collectively with respect to differences within women’s writings. In the article “New Ethnicities,” Stuart Hall addressed the differences existing among people of American descent, acknowledging the differences within the black community. It was the “end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject,” and the sobering reality that “‘black’ is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category” (Hall, “New Ethnicities” 443). The acknowledgment of “the real heterogeneity” within the community complicated the fight against racism, since such a fight presupposes a fundamental antagonism between the white majority and the oppressed ethnic group. Hall’s notion of “new” ethnicities recognizes the diversity among minority groups and raises the daunting question as to upon which grounds group solidarity can be established in a world of ethnic diversity. To solve this problem, Hall calls for “a new cultural politics which engages rather than suppresses difference and which depends, in part, on the cultural construction of new ethnic identities” (446). This demands recognition of the heterogeneity and diversity within a community. In academia, it means that scholars of African American studies conceive of a nonexclusionary conception of blackness; black lesbian criticism, for example, would then become an integral part of African American studies. When Hall contends that it was necessary to “decouple ethnicity, as it functions in the dominant discourse, from its equivalence with nationalism, imperialism, racism, and the state” (447), he urges that scholars interested in ethnicity should avoid perpetuating the reductionist logic that propels nationalism and racism. Along the same lines, Cornel West encourages minority critics to recognize the differences within their community and end the “black male monopoly on the construction of the Black subject” (29). “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” as West calls it, considers “black” and “white” to be constructed categories. This notwithstanding, the new postmodern diaspora intelligentsia, this “new elite of organic intellectuals,” identifies with the “demoralized, demobilized, depoliticized, and disorganized people” (20) and seeks to terminate “WASP cultural homogeneity” (25).





In contrast to previous generations of minority scholars, this “new” generation applies structuralist, Marxist, or poststructuralist thought in their theoretically sophisticated analyses. West wants to explore particularities and commonalities across a broad social spectrum, thereby resisting the tendency to further fragment the concept of difference. “The new cultural politics of difference affirms the perennial quest for the precious ideals of individuality and democracy by digging deep in the depths of human particularities and social specificities in order to construct new kinds of connections, affinities and communities across empire, nation, region, race, age and sexual orientation” (35). West lives up to this vision by publishing his essay in Out There, a volume he coedited with three other scholars from differing backgrounds. The contributors and the issues they address represent multifarious cultural and racial backgrounds ranging from “The Straight Mind” (Monique Wittig) to “Black Hair/Style Politics” (Kobena Mercer). In spite of West’s aspirations, the collection does not create relationships between different ethnicities;47 interconnections are the exception, not the rule.48 As its title suggests, this important volume explores what is out there at the margins without, however, expounding on new connections between marginalized groups or artists. Another anthology, Identities, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., tries to go beyond the separatist logic underlying the pluralist model of difference. These essays represent a wide variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives, not to mention that its authors come from differing ethnic backgrounds.49 This approach to difference amounts to a concerted effort to replace identity politics with a pluralist model. The volume’s postessentialist approach allegedly focuses on “the multiple intersections of race, class, and gender in feminist, lesbian, and gay studies, the interrelations of postcolonialism, nationalism, and ethnicity in ethnic and area studies, and so on” (1). But unfortunately the collection as a whole focuses primarily on the intersection of gender and race. While it demonstrates, as suggested in its very title, that identity is never one thing, Identities, for the most part, merely juxtaposes different ethnicities and topics. It thematizes, for example, post-Mao China, the black arts movement, Jewish identity, “Irishness,” and “Queerness” without making any cross-cultural comparisons. Another rich multiethnic and multidisciplinary sampler representative of the third paradigm of difference is Cultures of United States Imperialism.50 Its editors, Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, are pivotal figures of “postAmericanist” studies, the new trend in American studies that recognizes the differences within Americanists.51 The post-Americanist perspective



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renounces the holistic paradigm of the previous generation of Americanists and instead of “supplanting heterogeneity with a new synthesis of empire, [they aim at] relating those internal categories of gender, race, and ethnicity to the global dynamics of empire-building” (Pease and Kaplan 16). A forthright rejection of any “synthesis,” it seems, was the one common denominator of American studies scholars during the 1990s.52 Critics of many persuasions took to the task of taking apart American ethnocentrism and deconstructing monolithic understandings of America. Thus, the acknowledgment of heterogeneity was key to the self-understanding of American studies as well as of postcolonialism. As various scholars in the humanities—in the United States and elsewhere—have examined the continually evolving facets of the global dynamics of U.S. empire building and explored ever new ethnic subdivisions, the concept of difference has come to define the new doxa, as Rita Felski puts it.53 In 1992, John Carlos Rowe, one among the trailblazers of the postnationalist approach, envisioned what he called “the comparative U.S. cultures model” and later the “trans-national and comparative ‘American Studies,’” so named because it included research on Latin American, Caribbean, and Canadian cultures (Rowe, “Future” 263). The book-length volume Post-Nationalist American Studies, put together by Rowe and his collaborative research group, sketched out the contours of an American studies that would embrace the project of border studies. More than just acknowledging America’s cultural diversity, Rowe favors American studies departments in which “colleagues in the fields of African-American, Asian-American, Latino and Chicano/a, Native American, Women’s and Gender and Sexual Studies, as well as those in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies” increasingly cooperate with one another (Post-Nationalist 33). Moreover, he expresses his interest in the work of non-U.S.-based scholars of American studies. His conviction that a “new American Studies requires a new internationalism” (28) predates claims made by ASA presidents (Shelly Fisher Fishkin and Emory Elliott) in 2004 and 2005 that American studies should be transformed into a transnational and international field. The commitment to internationalizing the field has resulted in asking European scholars (notably my German colleagues Alfred Hornung and Winfried Fluck) to give their outsider’s perspective on American studies. However, the call for internationalizing our discipline has not yet resulted in substantial scholarly and methodological revisions or new practices.54 The question that clearly suggests itself here is, how should we conceive of a mode of criticism that enables the comparative analysis of U.S. American literatures of such varied cultural and national orientations and





genres? Although it is important that U.S. American studies scholars read the works of their colleagues abroad, this recent trend to globalize the field is, I think, in need of developing new kinds of readings. A shift in critical emphasis from matters of race to matters of class is inevitable. However, those who analyze American literatures—that is, literatures of different backgrounds—need to engage in comparative ways of reading if they want to move beyond a mere rejection of synthesis. Among the many who have tried to do just that, one might think of Peter Schmidt and Amritjit Singh, as they have urged that interethnic and comparative investigations are needed.55 Cornel West insisted that we must “construct new kinds of connections, affinities and communities across empire, nation, region, race, age, and sexual orientation” (Out There 35). Although Singh’s call for a comparative border school, West’s desire to analyze differences between and across empires, nations, regions, and races, and Rowe’s plea for the development of a comparative transcultural model are all very enticing, to this day, very few literary critical volumes offer a truly comparative approach. Given this absence, it is impossible to describe the fourth paradigm of difference. To go beyond the third paradigm, one needs to address not only the differences within but also the intersectional connections between, or among, texts of different ethnic/cultural backgrounds. To go beyond the first, it should not exclude “dominant” literature by recognized (white male) authors. To go beyond the second, it should not primarily be concerned with border crossing but rather juxtapose and compare texts on their own terms. Yet, the parameters of comparison should not be based on an author’s ethnic identity. One of the reasons why such a paradigm has not emerged might have to do with the fact that most scholars still identify—personally or professionally—with their own background. Back in 1992, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. addressed this peculiar conundrum in “‘Ethnic and Minority’ Studies”: “Perhaps it is time for scholars to think of a comparative American culture as a conversation among different voices—even if it is a conversation that some of us were not able to join until very recently” (Gates, “‘Ethnic and Minority’ Studies” 300). To this day, such a conversation among different voices has not taken place. But why has this conversation not begun? Maybe this rendezvous manqué has to do with the fact that Gates conceives of ethnicity as black (albeit a “‘blackness,’ without blood”), whereas Saldívar identifies ethnicity with “Chicanoness” and so on. If scholars believe in a comparative American studies, they should rise to the occasion of reconfiguring relations among ethnic texts in ways that radically reconsider the goal in an effort to determine what marks



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an ethnic position as “black,” “Chicano,” “Asian-American,” or “EuroAmerican.” Moreover, it is time to explore spaces of convergence that exceed the critical paradigm of hybrid spaces. As an inherently transcultural concept that has been used independently in different ethnic contexts, the vernacular is a good starting point for comparative and intersectional analyses. Instead of merely juxtaposing fictional examples of black, white, and Chicano traditions in the received separatist mode, the following chapters try to find similarities between them. Instead of focusing on general thematic overlaps, I will examine each text on its own terms in the context of its respective literary critical tradition, seeking to find a common ground beyond the many differences. Here, rather than merely acting as an assertion of existence, diversity is a starting point for the investigation of particular, local, or indigenous manifestations of cultural difference. My readings of vernacular voices and values is based on a paradigm of difference that builds on those discussed above. In contrast to the hybridity paradigm, my research is not concerned with the interaction or fusion between the dominant and the marginal. It differs as well from the antagonistic paradigm of difference because it is not concerned with the ways in which America’s national identity was constructed by negating the claims of others. Nor is it interested in reversing that hierarchy by either glorifying nonwhite peoples and artifacts or marginalizing the Anglo-American tradition: all three ethnic traditions are discussed on par. Vernacular Matters does not replace the previous paradigms of difference with a “new” or better version (akin to the Oedipal struggle that propelled new and post-Americanists). Likewise, it does not reject the foundational engagements with the concept as put forth by Marx, Smith, Baker, Gates, Arac, O’Meally, and Saldívar. It engages both their insights and their shortcomings to capture what is perhaps most American about American literature: its multiethnic nature. Its underlying paradigm of difference is propelled by a differential logic. I shall elaborate on the specified nature of this paradigm of difference in the conclusion, but it can be induced from the following two chapters, which attempt to put a comparative approach to American literature into practice.







Vernacular Voices [Twain] imparted to the printed page the vivacity of the spoken word, its swiftness and its apparently unpremeditated ease. His sentences never seem labored, no matter how deeply they have been mediated. In reading them they appear spontaneous. —Brander Matthews Border Vernacular in fact harbors a plurality of vernaculars comprised of their multiple interminglings and possible permutations. —Angel Flores

The Prototype A host of scholars in the United States and abroad would probably agree with William Faulkner that Samuel Langhorne Clemens is a “truly American writer.” Some even considered him “the true father of our national literature” (Mencken 300) and ordained Huckleberry Finn the “crown of our literature” (Wouk 20).1 The reason why so many critics in and outside of the United States champion Huckleberry Finn as typically “American” has to be attributed, at least in part, to the colloquial style of Twain’s novel. It echoes the vernacular sound of the American voice. Thus, the novel is just as much about incantation as presentation. It is, perhaps, this “speakerly” style that allows the novel to appeal, even in its many translations, to readers from Tokyo to Hamburg.2 How else would a regionalist novel that represents the linguistic, geographic, and cultural idiosyncrasies of states like Missouri and Illinois appeal to a global audience?3 Among the many early critics who explicitly pointed to the oral quality of Twain’s style of writing, Lionel Trilling was perhaps most succinct when he attributed Twain’s superiority (to Cooper, Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne) to his use of colloquial language: “The prose of Huckleberry Finn established for written prose the virtues of American colloquial



CHAPTER 2


speech. This has nothing to do with pronunciation or grammar. It has something to do with ease and freedom in the use of language. Most of all it has to do with the structure of the sentence, which is simple, direct, and fluent, maintaining the rhythm of the word-groups of speech and the intonations of the speaking voice” (ct. Marks 51). Trilling’s assessment highlights the novel’s rhythm and realistic intonations of the spoken voice. Similarly, H. L. Mencken believed that Twain was superior to other American authors of the time for writing “better English, in the sense of cleaner, straighter, vivider, saner English, than either Irving or Hawthorne” (Mencken, 301). He even uses the term “vernacular” explicitly holding that the vernacular style of Huckleberry Finn takes a definitive place in American literature because it fulfilled an important function at the time it was written: “In the matter of language, American literature had a special problem. The young nation was inclined to think that the mark of the truly literary product was a grandiosity and elegance not to be found in the common speech. It therefore encouraged a greater breach between its vernacular and its literary language than, say English literature allowed” (ct. Marks 51). In writing a novel in the vernacular, in the common speech of “ordinary” Americans, Twain made crucial headway in dismantling America’s cultural inferiority complex. He revolutionized received literary styles, which often emulated English models, and in so doing he brought about North America’s literary independence. Twain, in other words, answered Emerson’s call for cultural self-reliance by devising a style of writing that echoed the spoken voice of the common American. Among the many early Twain scholars who took Twain to be metonymic for America, one boldly maintained that “America’s Voice is Mark Twain’s” (Wouk), and after reading Huckleberry Finn, another exclaimed, “here is America” (DeVoto). Bernard DeVoto, who was an authority on Twain as early as the 1940s, even explicitly connected its genuine American quality to its vernacular style: “The important thing to be observed about Huckleberry’s speech is its achievement in making the vernacular a perfect instrument for all necessities of fiction. . . . The successful use of American vernacular as the sole prose medium of a masterpiece is a triumph in technique. Such attempts have been common in two and a half centuries of English fiction, but no other attempt on the highest level has succeeded. In this respect, too, ‘Huckleberry Finn’ is unique. Patently, American literature has nothing to compare with it” (DeVoto 314, 317–18). Indeed, what makes the novel an artistic masterpiece is related to its rendering of the American vernacular. Huckleberry Finn was not the first novel to make substantial use of dialect; however, it was the first to use dialect to do more than merely add “color.” While it acknowledges the validity of regional dialects, its major accomplishment was to



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turn American informal speech itself into a literary medium. From a post-American studies point of view, DeVoto’s appraisal of this vernacular specimen is part of America’s desperate attempt to construct a national literature. If, however, we remember that several non-U.S.-based scholars also attributed the “Americanness” of Huckleberry Finn to “the vitality of the American vernacular, and the narrative voice of the uneducated protagonist” (Kinch 166), we might be more hesitant to dismiss this use of the vernacular as an act of literary nationalism.4 It was a courageous decision to use the vernacular as the primary medium. No one else put this more succinctly than Ralph Ellison, who called Huckleberry Finn an exemplar of the vernacular tradition in American literature, praising Mark Twain because he “transformed elements of regional vernacular speech into a medium of uniquely American literary expression and thus taught us how to capture that which is essentially American in our folkways and manners. For indeed the vernacular process is a way of establishing and discovering national identity” (140). That is, Twain inaugurated the vernacular as a predominant literary expression, and at the same time he foregrounded what was “essentially American.” Accordingly, an analysis of Twain’s vernacular provides the via regia to America’s understanding of itself. Ellison seems to agree with Marx that the (vernacular) literary style is inextricably linked to a national style. With this chapter’s focus on stylistic and aesthetic matters, a reasonable starting point is Twain’s transformation of regional dialect into a uniquely vernacular style. Twain’s rendering of the vernacular differs distinctly from the established dialect literature of the local color or regionalist traditions.5 In these forms, nonstandard language was clearly separated from standard language by the use of quotation marks. It was used in literary works to signal rhetorical vulgarity or to capture the restricted speech of uneducated folks. Often it coincided with misspellings to affirm the hierarchy between standard English and linguistic substandards; as such, the use of dialect always signaled linguistic inferiority. Twain, on the contrary, boldly used dialect in direct as well as indirect speech, and therefore “the speech of the vernacular character becomes the only available narrative medium” (Smith 108; italics S. L.). Twain emancipated the vernacular voice from the shackles of quotation marks, thereby rejecting the Eurocentric tradition in American literature, which ignored the vernacular altogether. He further rejected even the humorist tradition predicated upon a hierarchical opposition between dialect and standard English. Early critical accounts of Twain’s use of the vernacular assumed that his storytelling valued the authenticity of the common man and the “natural” sound of his language. In his study Rewriting the Vernacular Mark Twain,



Vernacular Voices


the German scholar Gert Hurm aptly reassesses this view by foregrounding the novel’s “vernacular complexities” (183). Hurm specifically points to the narrative’s inconsistency as well as its open, elusive, and highly deceptive qualities. “The Inconsistent Masterpiece,” (177) as he calls it, is paradoxical; it is self-reflexive, constantly playing with accuracy and fabricating authenticity. Thereby Twain’s text can “tease and lure the reader into complicated searches, but in the end do[es] not yield a stable core beneath the deceptive façade” (246). Twain forged an innovative colloquial style from disparaged dialect fiction that was in many ways protomodernist. It is no wonder that Hemingway and Faulkner have expressed their indebtedness to his vernacular aesthetics. His vernacular style had a broad formative effect on American literature, as Richard Bridgman argues in his study The Colloquial Style in America. Bridgman traces the colloquial or vernacular (used synonymously) tradition from Twain to twentieth-century American literature and in so doing demonstrates that the vernacular is quintessential to the evolution of a national prose style: “And whereas in the nineteenth century a very real distinction would be made between the vernacular and standard diction as they were used in prose, in the twentieth century the vernacular had virtually become standard” (20). As I mentioned in Chapter 1, Bridgman traces the colloquial style from Twain and his contemporary, Henry James, to Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. This modernist genealogy is only one among several possible vernacular traditions that scholars have devised thus far. Martha Banta, for one, connects the “vernacular writing by Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, [and] Hamlin Garland,” thereby aligning the vernacular with the regionalist tradition in American literature (Sundquist 502). Similarly, the German scholar Luther S. Luedtke thinks of vernacular writers from the West, the Midwest, New England, and the South.6 The African American scholar Arnold Rampersad sketches a vernacular tradition originating in Huckleberry Finn that includes Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison.7 This trajectory contrasts with the all-white vernacular tradition of Henry Nash Smith, which included Sandburg, H. L. Mencken, James Thurber, James Agee, and J. D. Salinger (Smith xxviii). More recently, Gavin Jones proposed a multicultural vernacular history that incorporates Mark Twain’s Western voices next to Jewish writers such as Abraham Cahan and African American writers such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar. These divergences notwithstanding, there seems to be a consensus that Huckleberry Finn is the prototypical vernacular narrative and the starting point for a multifaceted literary tradition. This diachronic dimension was perhaps best expressed in the Mark Twain Encyclopedia, edited by Jimmie LeMaster. Its entry on the



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vernacular reads, “Peaking in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the first fulllength novel to be told in a character’s speaking voice, Twain developed the vernacular into a richly precise instrument of moral analysis as well as of pictorial elegance. . . . Although Twain uses vernacular for comic effects, he forces it to transcend the strictly comic. . . . His work marks the beginning of the triumph of what we now take for granted: the vernacular voice in American prose fiction” (Covici 761–62). Emphasizing its sweeping effect on American literature, the encyclopedia defines the concept around aesthetic aspects (“speaking voice”) and political concerns (“instrument of moral analysis”) to argue that the vernacular moved from the margins to the center of the American literary stage. The first time that anyone ever explicitly took note of the vernacular in Mark Twain’s writing was in a review of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court from 1889, in which Sylvester Baxter exalted, “The book is marked by real beauty, by a poetry of style worthy of its rich material, with much sympathetic tenderness, as well as frankness of speech.” Beyond praising its “frankness,” he rejoices in the “concisely expressive American vernacular [because it] is unspeakably delightful” (Baxter, “Mark Twain’s Masterwork”). A century after this euphoric assessment, the literary scholar Janet Holmgren McKay meticulously analyzed Twain’s vernacular style in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by showing how the author created the illusion of speech through a number of well-devised narrative techniques. The frequent use of nonstandard verb forms, a limited vocabulary, and apparently simple syntactic relations combined so that “Huckleberry Finn str[uck] the ear with the freshness of the real boy talking out loud” (McKay, “Art So High” 62). She attributes the novel’s “talking” prose to its linguistic, syntactical, and rhetorical features. Apart from the simple syntax and frequent present participles, active and concrete verbs reinforce Twain’s colloquial style, as do double negatives, alliteration, and onomatopoeia. The sound of his devices is unmistakable. Brander Matthews similarly highlights the rhythmic dimension of his vernacular style, which brings “to the printed page the vivacity of the spoken word, its swiftness and its apparently unpremeditated ease. [Twain’s] sentences never seem labored, no matter how deeply they have been mediated. In reading them they appear spontaneous” (ct. Budd 56). This seeming spontaneity yields the effect that “Huck’s friendly, vernacular way of talking lives on the page,” as Victor Donyo put it. How did he manage to achieve this effect? Donyo measures the perfection achieved by uncountable revisions as the key to Huckleberry Finn’s appeal. He points out that Twain’s process of writing was based on a relentless process of cutting and rewriting. To him, the well-documented changes between the draft and the published version show how sensitive Twain was to



Vernacular Voices


inflection and pronunciation. This technique also determines the reading experience: “Part of the pleasure of reading and re-reading Huck lies in the ability to hear tones of voices imaginatively, to listen eloquently, with full human sympathy” (Donyo 41–42). Although Donyo does not elaborate on his observation regarding human sympathy nor on Twain’s use of the plural (voices), nobody would deny that in reading the novel, it is possible to hear different tones of voices. David Sewell offers an interesting account of Twain’s use of various speech patterns, thereby acknowledging the heterogeneity of the vernacular.8 Although he captures the heteroglossic pattern of the vernacular, Sewell limits the term to the use of dialect. He misguidedly downplays the artistic dimension in Twain’s rendering of the vernacular by conflating it with lower class or folk speech. To conclude this brief overview of critical assessments of the novel’s vernacular style, it is important to emphasize that that which appears to be dialect fiction is in fact patently poetic, resoundingly lyrical, and at times even musical.9 Twain’s novel successfully renders ordinary speech in a vernacular voice, the extraordinary colloquial sound, cadence, and rhythm of which strikes the reader with the force of a work of art: “Verbal echoes sound repeatedly throughout, crossing and reviving, so that one is always aware of the book’s music” (Bridgman 114).10 Its musicality and polyvocal structure invites readers to enjoy the different voices comprising Twain’s masterpiece of vernacular fiction. Consequently, the act of reading Huck’s as well as other vernacular voices—knowingly or not— transforms into an act of listening. Listening to Huckleberry Finn The novel’s legendary opening introduces the homodiegetic narrator Huck as the storyteller/speaker, and from the first words the reader hears the adolescent boy speaking in his own voice: You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly,—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before. (Twain 1)

This voice is uncontrived, informal, and colloquial. In his double role as a narrator or storyteller and as a protagonist who is immediately involved 10.1057/9780230101944 - The Vernacular Matters of American Literature, Sieglinde Lemke


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in the action he relates, Huck presents the events “as they transpire.” He appears to be an old pro at spinning yarns. Huck establishes his authority by distancing himself from “Mr. Twain.” His assessment of Twain’s previous novel implies that Huck is the purveyor of the truth. He determines for us what matters and what does not. He exposes the fictionality—the “stretchers”—of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to authorize his narrative as the genuine Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck effectively charms readers into his narrative. One of these strategies is to address his implied reader directly, “You don’t know about me,” thereby establishing a very intimate act of communication. This is not the only moment in the novel when Huck turns directly to us. When reaching Jackson Island, he says, “Everything looked late, and smelt late. You know what I mean—don’t know the words to put it in” (42). Sentences like these appeal to readers’ sympathy and understanding. Echoing his colloquial tone of voice and sense of helplessness, metafictional comments like these strengthen the close relationship between the narrator or storyteller and the reader or listener. This intimate bond grows incrementally stronger throughout the novel. At its very end, the narrator bids a fond farewell to his loyal reader: Tom’s most well, now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before. THE END. YOURS TRULY, HUCK FINN. (362)

Here, the colloquial tone of voice (“ain’t a-going to no more”), the grammatical errors (“knowed”), misspellings (“sivilize”), parenthetical insertions (seven commas), and diegetic phrases (“now”) create a sense of spontaneity. What is perhaps even more striking about this passage in particular and the novel in general concerns the seductive rhythm of his voice. Twain’s rendering of Huck’s voice makes “the action vivid and move,” Blair maintains, without elaborating on this important observation (239). This novel is a masterpiece of vernacular fiction because it gets the spoken word onto the page and moving. It was only after Twain diligently revised his manuscript that he managed to capture the rhythmic dimension of everyday speech in print. Donyo argued that Twain constantly organized and reorganized his material, polishing the phrasing to capture accurately the voice of his protagonists. The extent and significance of his revisions is even more obvious if 10.1057/9780230101944 - The Vernacular Matters of American Literature, Sieglinde Lemke


Vernacular Voices


we compare the 1885 version to the original draft version, which was only recently discovered and first published in 2001.11 For example, in the original manuscript version, the opening reads, “You will not know about me. . . .” Twain later replaced “will not” for “don’t,” taking the first steps toward a colloquial sound that remains present throughout. The diction, inflection, and cadence in the final version carry the reader through to the end of the sentence. Another remarkable difference between the original and the final version concerns the use of commas. The above-quoted opening passage includes five more commas in the manuscript than in the 1885 edition. By composing short sentences connected by commas and inserting parenthetical elements—such as double negatives (“but that ain’t no matter”) or insertions (“that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before”)—the vernacular style of this book takes form. Not satisfied until his vernacular prose sounded just right, Twain included misspellings and many commas to bring out the remarkable rhythm of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The many subordinate clauses and parenthetical elements add a compelling rhythm to the original draft that resounds with the loquaciousness of the spoken word. Thus, his actions and words seem to move. The rhythm is further accelerated by the use of variation and repetition. For example, in the closing passage the novel comes full circle by repeating several key phrases from the beginning such as “sivilize” and “light out for the Territory.”12 Huck’s signature expressions—“I says,” “byand-by,” “I reckon”—are used so often that they become mantras for the verbal resonance of the book. Short active verbs connected with “ands” also enhance the fast rhythm and flow. The pleasure of reading Huckleberry Finn, by my estimation, comes from the novel’s unique rhythm and sound patterns; it is surprising and enjoyable to read that which is usually only heard. Indirection, understatement, and simple syntax propel the colloquial lyricism, proving that Twain was a master of turning the timbre of spoken language into floating lyricism. Comparing Huck’s vernacular and Emmeline Grangerford’s sentimental styles is revealing if one tries to determine the specific nature of Huck’s vernacular lyricism. Looking at Emmeline’s art, he asserts, “These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn’t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fan-tods” (138). This sentence includes idiomatic expressions (“fan-tods”), idiosyncratic phrases (Huck’s favorite phrase “I reckon”), repeated references to personal feelings (“I was down a little”), and four parenthetical insertions. While the words themselves convey a sense of simple honesty, the punctuation dictates a swift rhythm. This passage endorses an informal and



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And did young Stephen sicken, And did young Stephen die? And did the sad hearts thicken, And did the mourners cry? (139)

Her iambic meter and Huck’s plain style are just as much at odds as their characters. No wonder that Huck was unable to write a poem about her: “I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn’t seem to make it go, somehow” (151). His inclination, in other words, is to make his sentences “go” somewhere. While her sentimental lyricism moves like cement, as it were, his vernacular lyricism flows like the Mississippi. Thus, a salient feature of Huckleberry Finn’s vernacular aesthetics is its verbose narrative flow. What about the novel’s narrative structure? As many critics have pointed out, its composition and overall structure is nonlinear, even incoherent.13 Winfried Fluck is among those who argue that Huckleberry Finn subsumes countless fragments, including humorist episodes, pieces of the tall-tale tradition, regionalist scenes of Southern landscape, adventure escapades, and melodramatic scenes of separation and reunion. Instead of criticizing the novel for its digressive and heterogeneous structure, Fluck argues that “Huck’s perpetual digressions and Twain’s incessant change in genre and narrative direction” are crucial to the author’s “epistemology of spontaneity” (Ästhetische Theorie 303, trans. S. L.). The achievement of perpetually transforming the text from within, Fluck claims, challenges the conventions of realism and highlights modernist features. The combination of a colloquial lyricism and what Fluck calls its narrative incoherence, which is at the core of the novel’s vernacular aesthetics, puts specific demands on the reader. Lured into a story whose narrative provides little guidance, the reader has to arrange the fragments and establish the connections. Such engagement shakes loose the bindings of literary and cultural guardianship. The spontaneous and fragmented vernacular style therefore has liberating effects. Apart from the novel’s complex narrative structures, its abovedescribed colloquial lyricism is not limited to Huck’s voice but takes on many different forms and sounds. Its vernacularity is fundamentally heteroglossic. The following humorous dialogue between Huck and Jim exemplifies a slightly different tone than the one we encountered in the opening paragraph:



straightforward style that is at odds with Emmeline’s sentimental lyricism. Her melodramatic obituary for Stephen Dowling Bots is cheap doggerel:


“Looky here, Jim, does a cat talk like we do?” “No, a cat don’t.” “Well, does a cow?” “No, a cow don’t, nuther.” “Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?” “No, dey don’t.” “It’s natural and right for ’em to talk different from each other, ain’t it?” “Course.” “And ain’t it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?” “Why, mos’ sholy it is.” “Well, then, why ain’t it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? –you answer me that.” (Twain 97)

The use of mostly monosyllabic words starting with a consonant (cow, cat, dog, talk, dat) and the repetition of “no” endows this dialogue with a vivid timbre driven by this call-and-response pattern. But it is not only the rhythm of their verbal battle that is noteworthy, the content itself adds to the vernacular content of this passage. The debate heats up: “Is a cat a man, Huck?” “No.” “Well, den, dey ain’t no sense in a cat talkin’ like a man. Is a cow a man?—er is a cow a cat?” “No, she ain’t either of them.” “Well, den, she ain’t got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of ‘em. Is a Frenchman a man?” “Yes.” “Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan’ he talk like a man?—you answer me dat!” (Twain 97)

Huck is losing the verbal battle, so he retorts with a racial diatribe: “I see it warn’t no use wasting words—you can’t learn a nigger to argue. So I quit” (98). When he declares that it was futile to instruct Jim, the reader notices Huck’s naïve reasoning and unwillingness to admit that he lost the face-off. While aspects of Huck’s presumptuousness and justification for ending the conversation can be read humorously, this call-and-response episode is most notable and enjoyable because of its witty, vivid, and moving vernacular quality. What at first sight appears to be a representation of two variants of dialect speech is, on closer analysis, based on a narrative technique that produces an offbeat rhythm—instead of a flowing lyricism. The contrast between two different vernacular voices as well as the



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Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on,—s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time. (127)

What appears to be interior monologue is more precisely described as an interior dialogue between Huck’s own inner voice and an internalized authorial voice. In a self-conscious tone, Huck tries to convince himself that it was okay to do “wrong.” The back and forth of his two internal voices determines the vernacular sound of this passage and clearly exceeds the format of dialect literature. The colloquial expressions, the many active verbs (think, say, hold, feel, etc.), and the relentless repetition of “I” enrich this passage with a captivating rhythm. Because of the commas, insertions, and short sentences, it nearly throbs. As we read this dramatic moment of Huck’s self-questioning, it is the vernacular style that drives home the drama and enables identification with the protagonist. Huck’s vernacular narrative voice in the sunrise scene, however, is devoid of such dialogism and seems more detached: It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid, daytimes; soon as night was most gone, we stopped navigating, and tied up—nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows; and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. . . . You see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers. (156–57)

His account of dawn is told in a quiet and soft voice that mimics the serenity Huck tries to communicate. Huck’s vernacular voice is based on a simple syntax, a number of monosyllabic words (big, mile, half, etc.), and



difference between the character’s reasoning appeals to the reader. In this funny verbal battle, the reader enjoys the lilt of the vernacular in dialogue. The following passage, expressed in interior monologue, presents the reader with a slightly different tone:


the use of active verbs (run, hid, stopped, laid, tied, etc.). Huck merely registers what he sees and hears without providing narrative guidance, describing the morning mist in such a way that his presence in the scene becomes felt. When Huck addresses the reader (“and you see the mist curl”), he evokes a sense of immediacy reinforced by diegetic statements (“Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still”). Because of his neutral camera mode, the reader is drawn into the scene: listening to the bullfrogs, smelling the flowers, and feeling the morning breeze. The diction in this passage seems comparatively slow when viewed alongside passages already discussed. When Jim shockingly reveals that he is to blame for his daughter’s loss of hearing, his African American vernacular voice is rather difficult to comprehend. Since Huck “transcribes” Jim’s confession, this passage joins Jim’s and Huck’s idiom: I fetch’ her a slap side de head dat sont her a-sprawlin’. . . . My, but I wuz mad! I was a-gwyne for de chile, but jis’ den—it was a do’ dat open innerds—jis’ den, ’long come de wind en slam it to, behine de chile, kerblam!—en my lan’, de chile never move’! My breff mos’ hop outer me; en I feel so—so—I doan’ know how I feel. I crope out, all a-tremblin’ . . . en all uv a sudden I says pow! jis’ as loud as I could yell. She never budge! Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her up in my arms, en say, ‘Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Amighty fogive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long’s he live!’ (201–2)

This dramatic passage reveals linguistic features distinct to black dialect such as the elimination of “r” at the end of the word “do’,” the substitution of th with d (“dat”), the final consonant cluster reduction (“chile”), and the deletion of initial unstressed syllables (“’long”). At the same time, it also reveals linguistic and stylistic features common to Huck’s idiosyncratic speech: the use of the prefix “a” (a-sprawlin’, a-tremblin’), of “gwyne” (present participle of go), and of frequent repetitions. Here, Huck introduces us to Jim’s voice, but remains the master of the narrative since he integrates this passage in his overall story using “a-” words and onomatopoeia (“ker-blam). What appears to be direct speech is in fact free indirect discourse, as it fuses the narrator’s and the characters’ voices. This close analysis of the variations of vernacular voice in Huckleberry Finn—the intimate colloquial opening; the spontaneous, seductive sound of the ending; the throbbing dialogue; the pondering interior monologue; the detached voice; the speakerly, free indirect discourse— is intended to reveal that the novel’s vernacular diction and cadence come in different sound patterns.



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Concomitant with this polyvocal structure are two contrary aesthetic experiences. On the one hand, Huck’s idiomatic and idiosyncratic speech demands that we decode its unfamiliar grammar and syntax. On the other hand, we enjoy its diction and timbre. Thus, “reading the book [Huckleberry Finn], one is constantly moving between absorption in the action itself and pleasurable examination of the words that convey the story” (Bridgman 112). In other words, the reader moves between immersion in the vernacular sound and the cognitive engagement with the narrative. Twain’s polyvocal vernacular novel engages the reader in an aesthetic experience that celebrates the poetics of the spoken word. In fact, the entire novel reads through the ears and not through the eyes. Listening to Their Eyes Were Watching God “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men” (9). In the poetic opening of Their Eyes, an anonymous heterodiegetic voice tells the reader of a horizon where ships of desire float along carrying every “man’s” wish. But humans, the narrator tells us, respond differently to their wishes. To some, that is, to the male population, they remain unfulfilled, derided by the unrelenting power of fate. Men, therefore, merely stare at the unattainable horizon, caught in longing, until they finally give up on their dreams. Others, that is, women, respond in more complicated ways: “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (9). The tone of voice changes from a philosophical to a psychological register, addressing the reader in a vernacular voice. The narrator no longer talks about human longing or universal notions of truth but claims that men and women respond differently to truth, fate, and desire. Women repress unpleasant memories and remember only the positive aspects of their past. In this way, they construct a “truth” that allows them to retain their sanity and to take action. While women, the narrator suggests, are active in pursuing their dreams, men are either passive or more accepting of their fates. This gendered worldview is interesting in and of itself, but in this passage it is the informal narrative voice that is truly striking. Expressed in standard English, the voice of this anonymous omniscient narrator appears detached, but at the same time the deixis “now” adds immediacy. The simple syntax adds a straightforward and profane touch that diverges



Vernacular Voices


from other more formal passages.14 But it also differs from Janie’s dialect speech. At the end of the novel when Janie proudly asserts that her dream has become the truth, she says, “So Ah’m back home agin and Ah’m satisfied tuh be heah. Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons” (284). This manifesto in African American English Vernacular (AAEV) is an extreme deployment of the novel’s vernacular aesthetics. It inspires a calland-response between character and narrator. The narrator actively comments on Janie’s sense of loss about her deceased husband, “Of course, he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking” (286). This colloquial narrative voice in standard English carries different registers; here it is less elaborate than the voice interceding in the novel’s poetic finale: “She pulled in the horizon like a great fishnet. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see” (286). The resonance of this final passage, however, only becomes audible when we compare it to the manuscript version: “Janie thrust her feet into a pair of old slides and Pheoby rose to go, Sam would be worried about her. This is the end of what was said on the back porch.”15 Compared to this flat-sounding ending, the published version combines poetic imagery with lush colloquialism. The image of the fish-net connects with that of the horizon in the opening passage. Janie is constructed as a heroine returning to Eatonville in her mid-forties, with money in the bank and a store of romantic memories, she is finally able to watch and know how her ships of desire have come in with the tide. The imagery in this passage is complimented by short sentences, monosyllabic words, and exclamation marks, all of which amplify the vernacular tone of voice. The repetition of “pulled” after the consonant-laden phrase “like a great fish-net” circles the reader’s attention back to the beginning. The repeated sound of monosyllabic words such as waist, world, draped, and life create a resounding timbre that culminates in the exclamation mark following “meshes.” Thereafter, the reading voice lowers to end on a calmer note with the soft-spoken “see”—a homonym that brings us back to the image of water evoked in the novel’s opening. The narrator tugs sonorously at the reader’s ear and finishes in that familiar and colloquial tone of voice: “So much of life in its meshes!” In other words, Their Eyes is a masterpiece of vernacular fiction because of its sound and rhythm, not merely because it is written almost entirely in AAEV. The narrator, who “speaks” primarily in standard English, enchants the reader with a colloquial lyrical quality. Like Huckleberry Finn, Their Eyes presents us with a narrative voice that is polyvocal. It is



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comprised of expressions in black dialect cast in direct speech, in indirect speech that makes use of standard English, and in free indirect discourse. Moreover, the narrative frame of both novels is decidedly vernacular. In the passage that follows, the tone is set not by the protagonist who addresses the implied reader, but by the intradiegetic dialogue between two characters. An appositive highlights the colloquialism and the intonation of the speaking voice in Janie’s remark to Pheoby at the end of the book, “Now, dat’s how everythin’ wuz, Pheoby, jus’ lak Ah told yuh.” Hurston clearly renders a(n) (African American) speaking voice through Janie’s response to Pheoby’s worry that the community would speak ill of her: Dem meatskins is got tuh rattle tuh make out they’s alive. Let ’em consolate theyselves wid talk. ‘Course, talkin’ don’t amount tuh uh hill uh beans when yuh can’t do nothin’ else. And listenin’ tuh dat kind uh talk is jus’ lak openin’ yo’ mouth and lettin’ de moon shine down yo’ throat. It’s known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo’ papa and yo’ mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves. (285)

Obviously, this passage reveals characteristics that are distinct to AAEV such as the dropping of the post-vocalic “r” (your → yo’, for → fo’), the stopping of the dental fricative (“d” in wid), monophthongization (“lak” for “like”), and syntactical features such as double negation (“can’t do nothin’”), as well as the lack of subject-verb agreement (“dem meatskins is”). In addition to these linguistic features, in this brief passage Janie repeats “tuh” ten times. Juxtaposing it with a frequent use of “uh” and “yuh” produces a rhythm that taps melody into Janie’s voice. “Soft, easy phrases,” recounts the narrator in the narrative frame, shape Janie’s dialogue with Pheoby (19). The evocation of dialogical intimacy then culminates in Janie’s assertion: “We been kissin’-friends for twenty years, so Ah depend on you for a good thought. And Ah’m talking to you from dat standpoint” (19). A commentary in standard English immediately follows this emphatic annunciation in the vernacular: “Time makes everything old, so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked” (19). Here, the narrator shifts from extradiegesis to intradiegesis seemingly engaging in a dialogue with the protagonist. From this dialogue emerges a call and response in which the anonymous voice riffs on denotative and connotative meanings of “kissin’.” This play is paradoxical and even confusing: whereas Janie uses the idiomatic “kissin’” synonymously with “bosom” friend, the narrator



Vernacular Voices


uses the standard English form in “kissing, young darkness” to refer to the passing of time. Given that the signifiers do not refer to the same signified, there is a semantic contradiction and tension between the narrative voice expressed in AAEV in direct speech and in standard English used in the presentation of indirect speech. The offbeat relation between the vernacular and the standard challenges the reader to resolve this tension by unwinding the semantics to uncover the implications of “kissin’” and “kissing.” Another passage serves as a prime example of how free indirect discourse fuses the (colloquial) standard English and black English vernacular together: “It was after the picnic that the town began to notice things and got mad. Tea Cake and Mrs. Mayor Starks! All the men that she could get, and fooling with somebody like Tea Cake! Another thing, Joe Starks hadn’t been dead but nine months and here she goes sashaying off to a picnic in pink linen. Done quit attending church, like she used to. Gone off to Sanford in a car with Tea Cake and her all dressed in blue! It was a shame” (166). The tone of this passage, with its idiomatic expressions, exclamation marks, and diegesis, is distinctly colloquial. The frequent use of exclamation marks conveys a sense of immediacy that is otherwise characteristic of direct speech. It appears to be interior monologue, but is in fact narrative commentary presented in such a way that indirect speech renders direct speech in the voice of the protagonist. This is one of the many passages in the novel written in free indirect discourse (FID). Among those scholars who have emphasized the importance of Hurston’s use of free indirect discourse is Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who argues that “the ultimate sign of the dignity and strength of the black voice is the use of a dialect-informed free indirect discourse as narrative commentary beyond that which represents Janie’s thoughts and feelings alone” (Signifying Monkey, 200). Not only do descriptions of the protagonist’s feelings arrive in this dialect-informed free indirect discourse, it is pivotal to the novel’s entire vernacular aesthetics. In the above-quoted passage about “Tea Cake and Mrs. Mayor Starks!” the exclamation mark is an indicator of FID, but in this case the vernacular sound echoes a communal voice: that of the town. In the following quote, it is Jody’s “big” voice that sounds loud and clear in free indirect discourse: “Here he was just pouring honor all over her; building a high chair for her to sit in and overlook the world and she here pouting over it! Not that he wanted anybody else, but just too many women would be glad to be in her place. He ought to box her jaws!” (98). Here the narrative voice cast in FID is devoid of AAEV but the exclamation “He ought to box her jaws!” fuses Jody’s voice with that of the narrator. This indirect speech appears to be direct speech, cast in standard English. In addition to using FID to create a vernacular



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She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. . . . Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her? (24–25)

The poetic voice of the heterodiegetic narrator is so vivid that the passage, which represents an example of psycho-narration, appears to be interior monologue; however the exclamation, “Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom!,” differs from Janie’s usual voice. Rather than dialect, the voice takes on the colloquial sound of the anonymous narrator: “Where were the singing bees for her?” In reading this passage, which has been interpreted as describing Janie’s first orgasm, the reader perceives a sonorous timbre from the repetition of many consonants (a dust-bearing bee sink), then, the reading rhythm accelerates at “the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace.” The throbbing rhythm is enforced by the reference to “the ecstatic shiver . . . frothing with delight,” and the pace accelerates culminating in “marriage!” This graphic indicator, the exclamation point, marks the climax in both senses because thereafter the reading rhythm breaks off. Here the narrative voice does not contradict the protagonist’s voice, as it does in the “kissin’” passage, its vernacular sound emanates from the fusion of direct and indirect speech, third person and first person. Finally, alliteration (limp and languid; bursting buds) and speakerly phrases (such as “so,” “then,” “Oh”) amplify the unique sound and rhythm of this free indirect voice. This vernacularly informed FID differs notably from a dialect-informed FID. In listening to this passage and to the polyvocal sound of Hurston’s novel as a whole, the source of the reader’s enjoyment is similar to that described with regard to Huckleberry Finn. Another source of aesthetic pleasure is Hurston’s use of visual imagery. The combination of imagery with sound is one of the most pertinent narrative strategies of vernacular aesthetics in Their Eyes. Hurston, maybe even more so than Twain,



sound, like Twain before her, Hurston also uses repetition (for example, “here” and “just”) to produce a rhythm dramatically punctuated by exclamation points. Another example of FID cast in standard English is the often-cited passage describing Janie’s revelation under the pear tree:


masterfully combines a speakerly diction with metaphors. However, so far, “little attention has been paid to its visual registers,” which is as Karen Jacobs maintains, “a striking neglect in a text featuring ‘eyes’ and ‘watching’ in its title” (340). When Nanny refers to herself as “a cracked plate” and says that she does not want any man “makin’ a spit-cup” out of Janie, she uses metonymy to describe herself as a broken woman; she wants to spare Janie from the fate of being sexually or verbally abused. The two most important metaphors of the novel—the mule and the horizon—structure the overall composition. They emblematize the exploitation and humiliation African Americans had had to endure from the time of slavery until the Great Depression. Reduced to working animals, they saw their desires and longings often remain floating on the unreachable horizon. The reference to the horizon at the beginning and the end of Their Eyes frames this narrative and equips it with a broader, trans-cultural, and human frame of reference. At one point in the novel, the narrator comments on the significance of imagery to people in Eatonville: “When the people sat around on the porch and passed around pictures of their thoughts for the others to see, it was nice. The fact that these thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to” (81). Comparing these “thought pictures” to crayon drawings suggests that folks in Eatonville tend to visualize what they think in bold colors, which makes them “nicer to listen to.” This oxymoronic and synesthetic statement about people “listening” to “thought pictures” is a mise en abyme for reading Hurston’s novel. As we read Their Eyes, its vernacular sound appeals to our ears, enticing us to listen closely. At the same time, its vivid imagery appeals to our visual senses, enlarging those passages into strikingly colorful representations of life. In her anthropological essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Hurston claims that the reliance on visual images, metaphors, and similes is unique to African American vernacular culture. Whereas “the white man thinks in a written language,” the black man commonly thinks in “rich metaphors” and what she calls “oral hieroglyphics” (Hurston, “Characteristics” 24). The oxymoron “oral hieroglyphics” refers to the fusion of and mediation between the visual and the oral as well as between standard English and black vernacular English. From today’s perspective this characterization of essentially “Negro” expression seems questionable at best; nevertheless, it is helpful to consider the idea of oral hieroglyphics and nice-to-listen-to-thought pictures when looking at Their Eyes. Among those passages exemplifying this linking of sound and sight is Janie’s seemingly naïve description of the fundamental nature of love:



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“Love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore” (182). Janie uses the image of the sea to argue for diversity in matters of the heart. Her thought picture of love as a “movin’ thing” is reinforced through the metaphors of the waves (ups and downs) and the shore (the lovers). To decode this particular crayon enlargement, the reader must not only “see” it, but also enjoy the sound of this thought picture by paying special attention to the lyrical pauses and phrasing. In doing so, they hear the sea.16 Among the few Hurston scholars who pointed to this combination of “sights with words” is Maria Tai Wolf, who elaborates on the intricate interrelation of reading, understanding, listening, seeing, and experiencing Their Eyes.17 As shown above, listening to the text’s captivating colloquial lyricism increases the enjoyment of its diction and timbre. But the interrelatedness of sight—or more precisely, of visual imagery—with words—or more precisely, the vernacular sound of these words—is fundamental to the overall appeal of the novel. Reading it involves an increasing absorption in its rhythm alongside a simultaneous enjoyment of the imagery. But at the same time, the metaphors demand their meaning be decoded. In other words, the novel engages readers in an aesthetic experience that appeals to the ear and imagination while posing a cognitive challenge to decipher metaphors. Similar to the vernacular aesthetics of Huckleberry Finn, which uses several dialects as well as deadpan humor, willful deceptions, and incongruities, Their Eyes demands that the reader decode or see beyond the narrative surface. Like Their Eyes, Huckleberry Finn, although to a lesser extent, invites the reader to “see” and “listen” simultaneously. This dialectic opens up a space wherein the reader can be perceptive to sounds and sights, enhancing the reading experience. The narrative strategy underlying the vernacular aesthetics of Their Eyes becomes even more evident if we compare the manuscript to the published version. It is only in the final version that the narrative frame closes with Pheoby saying, “Ah done growed ten feet higher jus’ from listenin’ tuh you, Janie. Ah ain’t satisfied wid mahself no mo’” (284). Janie’s life story was not merely entertaining or interesting, it inspired Pheoby to rethink her own relationship with her husband. The text is very clear about the empowering effect Janie’s narrative has on Pheoby, who “grows” through listening. In contrast to the unpublished version, in which Pheoby rushes home like an obedient wife, the final version ends with her expressing her resolution in the vernacular: “Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin’ wid him after



Vernacular Voices


this.” (284). Hurston’s revisions therefore highlight the consequences of Janie’s storytelling on Pheoby, who functions as a model for the reading process of this vernacular masterpiece. Just as listening to Janie inspired Pheoby to change her worldview and hence her life, the novel engages the reader in an aesthetic experience of sympathetic, active listening, which ideally amounts to a transformative experience. Reading about Janie’s life might lead to new ways of seeing, and perhaps, even new ways of being in the world. But this requires, as Pheoby demonstrates, an ability to listen. Given its title, it might be surprising that Their Eyes amounts to an allegory for competent listening. In the end, it is the novel’s vernacular style that lures the reader into becoming a sensitive, attentive, and sympathetic listener. Dialectics of listening, seeing, experiencing, and learning generate the vernacular aesthetics of both Their Eyes and Huckleberry Finn. Like Twain, Hurston tapped into a rich oral tradition to devise the vernacular sound of her protagonists’ voices. While Twain was inspired by the tall-tale tradition of the Southwest, Hurston drew on the African American storytelling tradition. More than faithfully representing dialect, both developed a mode of writing that creates the illusion of oral narration by capturing the diction of the spoken voice. Curiously enough, at the time of its publication nobody recognized the aesthetic appeal of Their Eyes, thus failing to see it for what it was: a masterpiece of vernacular literature. Writing about Their Eyes Were Watching God When Their Eyes Were Watching God first appeared, the Euro-American readership mostly ignored the novel while African American reviewers dismissed it as aesthetically flawed and politically dubious folk literature.18 Sterling Brown, for example, remarked on Hurston’s creation of folk-speech that, “Her devotion to these people has rewarded her; Their Eyes Were Watching God is chock-full of earthy and touching poetry.”19 Brown elides her abilities as a writer of vernacular fiction and implies that her “earthy” poetry is far from serious literature. His condescending tone signals that he thinks little either of Hurston’s novel or “these people” and their folk-speech. The Euro-American reviewer George Stevens, however, was impressed by her use of African American English Vernacular: “No one has ever reported the speech of Negroes with a more accurate ear for its raciness, its rich invention, and its music.”20 The African American reviewer Otis Ferguson, in turn, offered quite a different reading of the effects of the vernacular: “The reader’s eye is caught by distortions of the inconsequential, until a sentence in the supposedly vernacular reads with about this emphasis: ‘Dat wuz uh might fine thing fuh you tuh do.’ And



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so all this conflict between the real life we want to read about and the superwordy, flabby lyric discipline we are so sick of leaves a good story where it never should have been potentially: in the grey category of neuter gender, declension indefinite” (Appiah/Gates 23). Ferguson snubs Hurston’s vernacular literary style as “superwordy, flabby” lyricism to suggest that she fails to capture spoken black vernacular English. Why would he argue that this story leads the reader into a world neither male nor female, of blurred declension? His critique of Hurston’s “overliterary expression” contradicts Brown’s judgment of her as producing flawed, simplistic folk literature.21 Their neglect of its wellcrafted vernacular aesthetics explains why Their Eyes had taken on a marginal or subordinate role in African American literary history for more than twenty years. During Hurston’s lifetime, Their Eyes remained almost invisible to American readers, white and black alike. Yet, this exclusion was subject to change, and Hurston eventually became canonized, if not hypercanonized. The history of critical reception for Their Eyes is remarkable. Initially ignored by the academic world and dismissed by black critics as apolitical, Their Eyes is now widely acknowledged as a politically progressive masterpiece of American literature. By the end of the twentieth century, it was undeniably part of both the African American as well as U.S. American literary canon. In the late 1950s one of the first critical studies on black fiction, The Negro Novel in America, mentioned Their Eyes as “a seminal narrative in Afro-American letters” and recognized it as “a classic of Black literature” (Bone 166, 126). But it would be another twenty years before the novel received broader critical attention among African American literary critics. June Jordan praised it as “the prototypical Black novel of affirmation” because it portrayed African American life “freed from the constraints of oppression”; she argued that Hurston’s book allowed black readers “to learn Black possibilities of ourselves if we could ever escape the hateful and alien context that has so deeply disturbed and mutilated our rightful efflorescence—as people” (in Appiah/Gates 6). Likewise, Alice Walker proclaimed that Hurston was a founder of the black female literary tradition. And Mary Helen Washington, later president of the American Studies Association, remembers embracing Their Eyes because it discovered “something of our own experiences, our own language, our own history.”22 It was at an MLA session in 1979 that the first wave of Hurston scholarship began. While these scholars acknowledged Hurston for representing “black” and “womanist” experiences, African American scholarship in the 1980s began to examine her vernacular style of writing. During that decade, a host of critical analyses of her literary as well as her anthropological work



Vernacular Voices


came out of the newly emerging black studies departments. In the late 1980s, scholars in English and American studies also became interested in Their Eyes. By the early 1990s, Hurston’s novel was included on the syllabus of most survey courses on U.S. American literature. Likewise, women’s studies, postcolonial studies, and border studies discovered Hurston. The increased popularity of Their Eyes demanded the reprinting of five new editions between 1990 and 2000.23 The novel that had been out of print and virtually unknown for decades was finally celebrated as “the most widely known and most privileged text in the African American literary canon” (Washington xii). Looking at its history of reception, one might argue that this is yet another example of hyper-canonization. One of the critics involved in this process was Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Apart from his literary analyses on specific texts by Hurston, he also edited her complete works and coedited Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. In pondering the extraordinary significance of Hurston’s work, Gates foregrounds her usage of the black vernacular. To him, Their Eyes is extraordinary not only because it represents experiences specific to African Americans but also because it is able to capture a voice that is distinctly “black.” What was considered a flaw in the 1930s, Gates deems a sign of distinction: I believe that Hurston has such a strong claim on a new generation of readers—students and teachers alike—because of her command of a narrative voice that imitates the storytelling structures of the black vernacular tradition. Indeed, no writer in the African-American literary tradition has been more successful than Hurston in registering the range and timbres of spoken and black voices in written form. The language of her characters dances; her texts seem to come alive as veritable “talking books.” Hurston also succeeded where so many of her predecessors failed in shaping a language, and a point of view, that appears to be directed at her black readers, rather than pandering to an imagined white readership responsible for black social mobility or economic or political amelioration. (Gates xii–xiii)

Gates credits Their Eyes for setting a precedent by establishing a distinctly African American prose style.24 He characterizes her unique novel as a “talking book” and a “speakerly text” because it ingeniously captures the spoken word. This makes Hurston the prototype of the vernacular in African American literature.25 Though adding quotation marks to call attention to the arbitrariness of this concept, Gates nevertheless praises Hurston’s masterful rendering of “‘authentic’ black speech.” To adapt what de Voto said of Huckleberry Finn, Gates seems to say, “Here is black America.”



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Sherley Anne Williams joins that mounting tide of praise. She claims Hurston “had at her command a large store of stories, songs, incidents, idiomatic phrases, and metaphors; her ear for speech rhythms must have been remarkable. Most importantly, she had the literary intelligence and developed the literary skill to convey the power and beauty of this heard speech and lived experience on the printed page. . . . In the speech of her characters, black voices—whether rural or urban, northern or southern—come alive” (ix). Almost verbatim, Williams echoes Brander Matthews’s appraisal of Mark Twain for imparting to “the printed page the vivacity of the spoken word, its swiftness and its apparently unpremeditated ease” (Budd 56). Her statement also brings to mind Trilling’s observation that Twain’s use of language possesses ease and freedom. The parallels between these two authors run farther and deeper, I believe, since both of them undermined the literary and cultural conventions prevailing at the time when they were writing. Whereas Twain breaches received literary styles to create an informal “American” style, Hurston breached white American literary conventions as well as the taboo among African American writers to embrace the vernacular. She highlights the rhythm and intonation of the black speaking voice, thereby contributing to black American literary independence from established (white) literary conventions. In other words, Hurston did to the black literary tradition what Twain did to the Euro-American tradition. Moreover, Hurston was as influential with African American authors as Twain was for those writers’ Euro-American counterparts.26 Alice Walker was the first to claim Hurston as a literary antecedent, but Hurston is also traceable in Toni Morrison’s and Ishmael Reed’s works. Edwidge Danticat might have been right when she prophesied in 2000 that “the influence of Zora’s work, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God, will continue to be felt for years in the works of many generations of writers” (xx). What accounts for her impact on past, present, and future generations of writers is her masterful rendering of the black vernacular speaking voice. Among the hosts of Hurston scholars commenting on aspects of “voice” and the vernacular I would like to discuss four in particular: Michael Awkward, Eva Boesenberg, John Callahan, and Cathy Brigham. In her book Gender-Voice-Vernacular, Eva Boesenberg links vernacular patterns to “voice” and (gender) “identity.” To her, the vernacular is reflected in the “rhythm, figurative language, and grammatical properties of the Black English Vernacular” (19). Apart from the linguistic features of BEV, she highlights Hurston’s “vernacular verbal art” that uses rhetorical practices such as signifying, specifying, and call and response. These vernacular elements in a written text imbue the novel with a tonal rhythmic quality. Boesenberg supports Gates’s view that Their Eyes represents



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a “speakerly” aesthetics when she concludes, “Vernacular ways of speaking inform the novelistic discourse” (293). She links the vernacular to identity construction, that is, Janie’s personal development toward liberation and self-realization. By emphasizing that Janie comes into her own and learns to speak up—in the vernacular—against oppressive structures, Boesenberg joins those critics who use “voice” as a synonym for personal empowerment. She therefore reads Their Eyes as an African American coming of age story with a feminist twist.27 In his insightful essay, “The Audible Voice of it All: Silence, Voice, and Action,” Michael Awkward suggests that the vernacular is presented through the employment of the narrative strategy of shared voice and call-and-response.28 He claims that the novel primarily addresses black readers or listeners and asserts, “Not only does the black audience listen to the text, it helps to create it. Zora Neale Hurston infuses the diegesis of Their Eyes Were Watching God with antiphonal verbal exchanges that correspond to the call-and-response pattern prevalent in all forms of AfroAmerican expressivity” (97). He maintains that the effect that Janie’s storytelling has on Pheoby prefigures the effect the novel has on its reader. He also explicates how Pheoby’s listening enhances Janie’s performance as a storyteller then expounds on the vernacular communicative patterns in Janie’s interactions with Tea Cake. Since Nanny and Joe don’t partake in this dialogic structure, they are not included in this analysis. While Awkward is one among many critics who draw attention to the importance of voice in Their Eyes, his reading exceeds interpretations that read voice as a metaphor for Janie’s gradual process toward becoming more assertive. To him, the vernacular nature of this novel manifests itself in the dialogic call-and-response pattern specific to African American vernacular forms of communication. To John Callahan, however, Hurston’s use of the vernacular exceeds the linear (Boesenberg) and the dialogical (Awkward) model. Through a discussion of the novel’s “vernacular mosaic of language and experience,” he elaborates on its attending value system as well as its polyrhythmic vernacular form. In its form, Callahan maintains, the novel aspires to an egalitarian and democratic politics: “True to her polyrhythmic form, Hurston lets these asymmetrically voiced opinions stand. The very disjointedness testifies to the strength and coherence of Janie’s voice. . . . The novel weaves Hurston’s voice into the woof of Janie’s speakerly dialect, Janie’s voice into the warp of Hurston’s writerly vernacular. Neither voice needs or wants to be dominant, and so authorial control is overthrown in favour of a more equal, democratic womanist idea of voice and form” (142, 145, emphasis J. C.). To summarize, Hurston’s vernacular interweaves



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vernacular voices and values. Similar to Leo Marx’s argument about the interdependence of form and content in Twain’s vernacular masterpiece, Callahan deftly argues that its political agenda is reinforced through its polyvocal and polyrhythmic vernacular form. The coexistence of many different voices parallels the novel’s overall democratic and “womanist” message.29 For Callahan the fundamentally incoherent and unsettling vernacular form of the novel further expresses its (vernacular) politics. Cathy Brigham extends observations about the political dimensions of the novel’s polyvocal structure to the composition of the novel. Claiming that all characters are “boisterous tale-tellers vying with the narrator for the reader’s ear” (403), Brigham observes that these “verbal exchanges do not develop the plot in any recognizable linear fashion,” nor do they aim at verbal accuracy (Brigham 410). This boisterous and dialectic vernacular style primarily serves to disrupt this otherwise linear narrative. In this regard too, Hurston’s polyvocal, episodic, and improvised narrative structure matches Twain’s inconsistent and incongruous narrative.30 In both cases, a fragmented, open, and unsettling style informs their vernacular. To summarize the four critical assessments of Hurston’s vernacular style, it is worth remembering that they highlight four stylistic features of the vernacular akin to those we have come across in our discussion of Huckleberry Finn: its speakerly quality, its dialogical pattern, its polyvocal structure, and its informal spontaneous composition. While all four accounts interrelate the vernacular style with a political agenda, they focus on the issues of identity that were of utmost important during the 1980s and 1990s. The following discussion will examine why contemporary critics in the 1930s and 1940s dismissed the novels’ use of the vernacular as “earthy touching poetry.” Published at the end of the Harlem Renaissance, when black American literature was coming into its own, Their Eyes significantly diverged from the dominant aesthetic ideology of the New Negro movement.31 In defiance of James Weldon Johnson’s notorious prohibition of dialect speech in black literature, Hurston embraced the language of the common (wo)man. She also shunned Alain Locke’s strategy of appropriating European models to create a black American modernism. Moreover, Hurston’s vernacular lyrical modernism departs from the dominant style of black literature of the 1930s, differing from Richard Wright’s and Ralph Ellison’s social realist modernism.32 One could even claim that in blurring the boundaries between fiction and ethnography, Hurston anticipated postmodern modes of writing.33 Apart from her style, her (gender) politics differed significantly from those of Wright or Ellison. Her sensual and romantic narrative differed



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substantially from most proletarian or protest literature written by white American authors such as Meridel LeSeur. But even when compared with the works of African American women writers such as Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset, Hurston was very subversive. In contrast to such genteel novels as Passing and Quicksand, Their Eyes presents a self-assured, modern woman in the rural South who ultimately asserts herself after years of being defined by her three husbands. No wonder Hurston later gained critical acclaim as “the first authentic black female voice in American literature” (Wall 371). If we consider its womanist and democratic values, Their Eyes qualifies as vernacular literature in the sense that it is a novel with a politics in view. Apart from the aforementioned subversive gender and racial politics, its formal and aesthetic features diverge not only from black and white modernism but also from regionalist texts. In regionalist literature of the 1930s, dialect or non-standard speech was still mostly expressed in direct speech. Contained within quotations marks, passages in the vernacular were graphically set off. Its presence in a regionalist text therefore reaffirms the hierarchical division between the dominant literary norm (expressed in standard English) and dialect speech. Using vernacular as the predominant narrative medium, Their Eyes undermined this dichotomy and thereby transcended the regionalist format. Gayle Jones aptly observes that within the black literary tradition “Hurston, in her use of dialect, was one of the first to initiate this breaking out of the frame [and] shattering the conventions of dialect literature, [by] oscillating between standard and vernacular languages, sometimes fusing the two” (152).34 By devising a distinctly vernacular style and by representing vernacular characters such as Tea Cake and Janie positively, Hurston helped to bring about a larger change in black literary history. The vernacular mode of writing in Their Eyes served as a prototype for an emerging literary tradition that was set in an all-black community and that also sounded “black.” Hurston’s vernacular style, in other words, helped to emancipate African American literature by fashioning a style that was exuberantly “racial.” As a blueprint for the African American literary tradition, Their Eyes is comparable to Huckleberry Finn. While Twain’s vernacular style was instrumental in fostering a “national” style in American literature, hers contributed to the emergence and recognition of a “black” tradition.35 In spite of the obvious differences (race, gender, and age, to begin with) between the main characters of these two novels, there are striking similarities between Huck and Janie in their vernacular voices and in their democratic values. Similarities continue to be seen in their fragmented



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and multifaceted compositions, despite genre differences between Huckleberry Finn—which subsumes the adventure story, the bad-boys book, and the picaresque novel—and Their Eyes—which combines elements of romance with coming-of-age stories. Huckleberry Finn incorporates regionalist, realist, and protomodernist elements. Their Eyes has elements of regionalist, modernist, and feminist fiction. Considering these many obvious differences, it is surprising that Huckleberry Finn and Their Eyes have so much in common. It might be even surprising that both of these pillars of vernacular fiction share features with a lesser-known novel, published in 1993 and set in the Southwest, whose narrative voice echoes this band of timbres and sounds: Ana Castillo’s So Far from God. A Postmodern Vernacular: So Far from God Ana Castillo is certainly one of the most prolific Chicano/a writers: She is the author of six novels, five books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays. It was Castillo’s second novel, So Far from God, however, published by Norton, that earned her recognition as “one of the most promising novelists” in America (Shirley 138).36 So Far from God revolves around the home life of Sofi and her four daughters: Esperanza, Fe, Caridad, and La Loca. Upon publication, the novel was widely reviewed in newspapers and magazines across the United States. The San Francisco Chronicle boldly asserted, “History may one day proclaim So Far from God the breakthrough novel about Chicano life.”37 The prophetic truth of this statement—which would be validated should this novel one day become as canonized as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Their Eyes Were Watching God—remains to be proven. In any case, her fellow novelist Barbara Kingsolver praised its exceptional narrative voice as “charming and jocular . . . it’s simply a joyride to follow along as the narrative strays down one side road after another.” And while Julia Alvarez calls its narrative voice “zany, knowing, rhythmic,” in acknowledgement of its swift colloquial and vernacular style, no reviewer or critic has explicitly applied the concept of the vernacular to So Far from God. This is surprising, given that the novel exhibits vernacular features in its form, content, and overall composition. Although numerous critics in Chicano studies, including Saldívar, have used the term border vernacular to designate the distinctive quality of Chicano or Latino fiction, Juan Flores and George Yúdice made an important distinction when arguing that border narratives express the “plurality of vernaculars [being] comprised of their multiple interminglings and possible permutations” (Flores 77). Even still, critics have yet to apply this concept specifically to So Far from God, a novel that this study



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understands as an exemplary model of vernacular fiction.38 In fact, with its “multiple interminglings” and complex narrative structure, it exceeds the vernacular texture of Their Eyes and Huckleberry Finn. Its multifaceted plot joins diverse elements together as alluded to in this excerpt from the book’s jacket: “Tome is a small, outwardly sleepy hamlet in central New Mexico. In Ana Castillo’s hands, though, it stands wondrously revealed as a place of marvels, teeming with life and with all manner of collisions: the past with the present, the real with the supernatural, the comic with the horrific, the Native American with the Latino and the Anglo, the woman with the men. With the talkative, intimate voice and the stylistic narrative freedom of a Southwestern Cervantes, Castillo relates the story of two crowded decades in the life of a Chicana family.” The fictional town of Tome, then, encompasses a vast array of worlds and brings contradictory narrative elements as well as different cultural backgrounds together. On top of these complexities, there is this talkative, intimate narrative voice, or rather voices, that position this narrative as a stellar example of vernacular literature. In her assessment of Castillo in particular and of Latina fiction of the 1990s in general, Ellen McCracken charges Castillo with catering to what she calls a “pleasing narrative exoticism.” To her, So Far from God is merely a “highly pleasurable representation of New Mexican ethnic culture . . . overcoded with the predominant tropes of the postmodern ethnic commodity” (32). In other words, as McCracken sees it, Castillo sold out to mainstream publishing companies. Her “pleasurable” and “pleasing” novel appeals to Anglo readers, since its ethnic touch “satisf[ies] the happily pluralist view of America in vogue in the 1990s” (27). McCracken believes, however, that some Latina narratives are able to resist a smooth integration into the mainstream. Her assessment of Latina literature as either assimilationist and commercial or counterhegemonic is based on a presupposition common among New Historicists and cultural studies scholars during the 1980s and 1990s that literary works aim for subversion but are ultimately caught or contained within the structures they try to undermine. So Far from God escapes this damning assessment by using an outwardly conventional narrative to juxtapose and join seeming oppositions in unexpected and subversive ways.39 More than a “compulsively readable, lilting” book, to quote the San Francisco Chronicle, it displays a compounded mix of vernacular features and exceeds the allegedly exotic formula for at least two reasons. In its vernacular politics, as I will demonstrate shortly, the novel strongly critiques economic and ideological conditions in the United States. By means of its vernacular aesthetics,



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it combines several genres, intermingling autobiography, anthropological study, cuentro (oral storytelling traditions), family history, proletarian novel, epic, domestic novel, and protest novel. What is more, it interweaves two languages. Although Spanish, Chicano colloquialisms, and Caló make up only 5 percent of the text, these breaks in standard English are pivotal to the polyvocal vernacular aesthetics of So Far from God. Generically, linguistically, and narratologically this seemingly delightful novel is actually tremendously compounded and multifaceted. While such complex novels do not usually receive commercial success, So Far from God appealed to readers, as the blurbs and reviews suggest, because of its captivating narrative voice.40 Listening Closely to a Polyvocal Tex-Mex Vernacular From the outset readers encounter a detached, impersonal narrator who remains anonymous and linguistically amorphous throughout the novel. This authorial narrator speaks primarily in standard English, with occasional shifts into more colloquial speech. In the chapter headings, the narrator assumes a formal and detached tone; the first chapter, for example, reads, “An Account of the First Astonishing Occurrence in the Lives of a Woman Named Sofia and Her Four Fated Daughters; and the Equally Astonishing Return of Her Wayward Husband” (19). The narrator gives this account of the “four fated daughters,” conveying reliability and authority via this neutral—and rather stiff—voice. Other chapter headings, however, pass judgment, as in Chapter 9: “Sophia, Who Would Never Again Let Her Husband Have the Last Word” (130). Even in these standard English chapter titles, the narrative voice is never consistent. Its registers range from formal to intimate, sometimes even directly addressing the reader: “8. What Appears to Be a Deviation of Our Story but Wherein, with Some Patience, the Reader Will Discover That There is Always More Than the Eye Can See to Any Account” (120). Comically, the narrator instructs the reader on how to read: between the lines. The first sentences of the narrative introduce us to the heterodiegetic narrator reporting on the sudden death of Sofi’s youngest daughter in standard English: “La Loca was only three years old when she died. Her mother Sofi woke at twelve midnight to the howling and neighing of the five dogs, six cats, and four horses, whose custom it was to go freely in and out of the house. Sofi got up and tiptoed out of her room” (19). This arid and detached tone of voice is omnipresent throughout the novel. The authorial narrator seems far removed from the scene and such neutrality or “objectivity” establishes a high degree of narrative authority from the



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outset. This notwithstanding, the careful reader might wonder why fifteen animals reside in Sofi’s house. If we agree “that there is always more than the eye can see,” we might be inspired to question the reliability of the narrator. A few pages later the narrator once again uses a detached and dry tone of voice to characterize Sofi’s oldest daughter Esperanza: “Esperanza had been the only one to get through college. She had gotten her B.A. in Chicano Studies. During that time, she had lived with her boyfriend, Rubén (who, during the height of his Chicano cosmic consciousness, renamed himself Cuauhtemoc). . . . Upon receiving her degree, she landed a job at the local TV station as a news broadcaster. These were transitional years where she felt like a woman with brains was as good as dead for all the happiness it brought her in the love department” (25–26). Here the matter-of-fact tone is combined with colloquialisms (she had gotten her B.A.) and with a strong dose of irony. In contrast to the opening passage, this narrative voice appears more swift, flowing, and rhythmic. It is not as lyrical as the vernacular voice in Their Eyes, and it is not as informal and nongrammatical as Huck’s homodiegetic voice. Nevertheless, the vernacular narrative voice of this and many other passages in So Far from God display the speakerly qualities that are the lifeblood of the vernacular. If we compare these passages, it is evident that the first quote uses external focalization, whereas the second introduces us to internal focalization. Another of the many passages featuring internal focalization is the one in which the narrator describes how La Loca makes Mexican cookies with her older sister Fe and their mother several years after her resurrection: Then, one afternoon, the two sisters and mother made a batch of biscochitos, which are really customary mostly at las Crismas, but are also a delight at weddings and other types of fiestas. . . . In any case, they are made from rich pie pastry dough, to which you add baking powder, sugar to sweeten, and—here’s the trick, there is always a trick, you know Fe—a bit of clean aniz [sic] seed. Next, you roll it out on the board to about a third of an inch thick (Loca would not say a third of an inch, of course, but for our purposes here, I am adding specific measurements myself ). (167)

The omniscient narrator explains the culinary and cultural significance of these cookies with competent authority while remaining informal in order to present the scene through the eyes of the protagonists. Deictic expressions (“here’s the trick”) create immediacy, and lexical borrowings from Spanish (“las Crismas”) add authenticity to this vernacular. The narrator’s location within the scene and within the characters’ colloquial language compounds this propinquity. The immediacy increases with the



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use of a very familiar direct address (“you know Fe”) and even implied collusion (“for our purposes”). The gradually increasing foreclosure of the narrator’s distance from the narrative culminates in a first person reference: “I am adding specific measurements myself.” With such personal inclusions, this passage seems livelier and sounds more spontaneous than, for example, the opening paragraph. The many insertions and commas in an otherwise long sentence unbroken by periods dictate a swift, throbbing narrative rhythm while the shift in addressees propels the narrative flow. Nevertheless, inscribed in this straightforward and seemingly undemanding vernacular style are stark moments of contradiction. For example, the narrator shifts between temporal registers using “here” in a passage that is set in the past. Moreover, there is the unexpected shift from the third to the first person as well as the use of the second person when the narrator addresses the (no longer implied, but rather) actual readers, inviting them to essentially join the party. Sofi’s recollection of the courtship with her husband Domingo stands out because it is one of the many passages in which the narrator shifts between external and internal focalization to draw out the idiolect of the characters: Ayy! And how that sinvergüenzo could dance! When he left her with their four daughters all she could think of was thank God her mother (que en paz descanse) has not lived to see that day. (105)

These short sentences offer a vernacular diction that reflects Sofi’s excitement and infatuation as the narrator echoes Sofi’s voice. The onomatopoetic expression “Ayy” followed by an exclamation mark and, “how that sinvergüenzo could dance!,” appears to be direct speech, but given the absence of quotation marks this is, technically speaking, free indirect discourse. Of course, it is a modified version since this blend of the protagonist’s and the narrator’s voices uses Spanish expressions to echo Sofi’s idiolect. The insertion in brackets (“may she rest in peace,” in Spanish), however, could be either her aside or the narrator’s. The same stands true for the exclamatory “Ayy,” which appears quite frequently throughout the text (e.g., on pages 22, 31, 139, 154, and 231). Continuing the linguistic play, even this omnipresent expression is not used consistently, alternatively spelled as “Ay” (13) or “Ayy” (31), or “Ayyy” (231). Another rich example of the blending of voices that is characteristic of free indirect speech is a passage in which the narrator echoes the town’s voice:



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You know, la pobre Sofi had never had one moment of fun all those years while she was alone, no birthday or New Year’s Eve fiestas, no Christmas postadas. She did not attend one wedding reception, baptismal party, First Holy Communion, Confirmation, or high school graduation fiesta neither. No quinceaneras for none of the girls’ fifteenth birthdays. Nada. Well, she hardly had been able to attend even a velorio or a funeral for that matter, although she always tried, out of respect for the defuncto’s family. But everyone understood. She was alone with four children. What could people expect? (133; emphasis added S. L.)

The gossipy tone of voice brings out the sense of sympathy that people in Tome have for Sofi. “But everyone understood” implies that everyone in Tome, and perhaps even the reader, has pity for Sofi, while admiring her ability to cope with these tragic events. This version of free indirect discourse echoes a collective voice. Again, it is continually punctuated by lexical borrowings. The seven Spanish words sound the town’s gossip (chisme) as distinctly Chicano. In contrast to the AAEV we encountered in Their Eyes Were Watching God, this vernacular tone is the product of an ingenious mix between English with Spanish. Castillo’s vernacular aesthetics is composed of a combination of English, Spanish, Spanglish, Chicano, and Caló. Obviously, Castillo’s tendency to combine Spanish and English is not unique to her writing. It is a common feature of Mexican American literature, and numerous critics have devised different terms to singularize this distinctive feature. Frances Aparicio calls this “tropicalized English,” while Gloria Anzaldúa refers to this linguistic equivalent of a mestiza consciousness as “Tex-Mex argot.” Expressed most often through English words with Spanish endings such as “cookiar,” “parkiar,” and watcher (Anzaldúa 79), these examples of Tex-Mex and Spanglish reflect the dual identity of Mexican Americans.41 Since over 90 percent of Castillo’s novel is written in standard English, it does not qualify as code-switching; however, those passages in Tex-Mex vernacular give the narrative its distinct tone, bringing these variations in the use of the vernacular to the forefront of this study. In the above-cited passage, for example, untranslated Spanish phrases (such as “Nada” or “la pobre Sofi”) are inserted into standard English sentences. But even non-Spanish speaking readers can guess their meaning. In other passages, the Spanish words are followed by a direct translation—for example, “Aigre (internal draft).” Then there are English words with a Spanish ending (traila) or a Spanish pronunciation (Crismas), or a mixing of the two in the same phrase (e.g., “nuevo mejicano-style Spanish Catholics”). Another variation of this mixing is the use of double negatives so common in Spanish (such as “Tome never



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had no mayor” or “Luella didn’t bring it up no more” [137,173]). In a few instances, English words are even inserted in a Spanish sentence (e.g., “Qué diablos te pasó que we lost sight of you for so damned long, muchacha?”), such that non-Spanish-speaking readers may not grasp the full meaning. Then there are loan translations (calque)—“the day her mother gave light to her” (224)—that is, Spanish idiomatic expressions translated literally into English (e.g., dar luz, “to give birth”). In the latter two examples, the Spanish words are more integrated and assimilated, demanding a certain bilingual competency to decode the text’s full meaning. Strictly speaking, this blending of Spanish and English is one based on lexical borrowings and does not qualify as code-switching, since both languages are hardly ever on equal par. One of the few incidences when this might be the case is this sentence: “Fresh red ristras and sometimes green ones were hung on the vigas of the portales throughout” (170). Its meaning is not immediately discernable to non-Spanish speaking readers. Confronted with sentences like these, a concerted cognitive effort is required for comprehension. Only from contextual clues would readers understand that the narrator refers to strings of chilies hung on the beams of the doorway—a practice intended to ward off evil spirits. Although the text refers to a host of cultural markers unfamiliar to cultural outsiders, they are often easy to decode linguistically and semantically, ensuring that the Spanish or Chicano component of the text does not disrupt the narrative flow. Like Huckleberry Finn and Their Eyes, So Far from God presents an insider’s view and echoes that insider’s speaking voice. The vernacular and speakerly style of So Far from God is primarily produced by a lilting narrative voice that shifts between an authorial heterodiegetic voice with external focalization and a colloquial narrator using internal focalization and free indirect discourse. What matters is that the colloquialism is not limited to passages in direct speech (e.g., Sofi reacts to the news of her three-year-old by screaming “Ave Maria Purisimas,” 20); rather it permeates the narrative structure of the novel. So Far from God is written in the vernacular, and similar to Huckleberry Finn, its artistic rendering of the colloquial narrative voice is remarkable. Frequent insertions of phrases such as “so,” “what,” “yes,” “but no,” and “anyway” into the detached matter-of-fact tone of voice create a jovial, conversational tone. Of equal importance to Castillo’s vernacular aesthetics are her direct addresses to the reader (such as “You know, la pobre Sofi had never one moment of fun all those years,” 133). The vernacular voice therefore shifts between different tones and timbres ranging from the informal to the detached, from a decidedly



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authoritative and stiff voice to a very intimate one. This narrative voice, primarily expressed in informal standard English, sometimes incorporates a slangy rendering of other voices in FID, enhancing its colloquial, speakerly and “authentic” sound. Its “authentic” informality conveys a sense of immediacy and intimacy. Compared to Twain and Hurston, Castillo’s vernacular voice is so compounded and polyvocal that it’s difficult to grasp its many tones and variants. There are even passages in which the heterodiegetic narrator refers to her/himself in both the first and third person.42 Given the polyvocalism of So Far from God, there is a high degree of fluidity to the vernacular narrative situation. In addition to a polyvocal colloquialism, Castillo’s vernacular differs from that of Twain and Hurston in its irony. Consider the passage when Caridad, the curandera, consults the famous spirit channeler (“an Anglowoman from New York who claimed to speak to a two-thousand-year-old spirit”) to learn more about Francisco el Penitente, who dresses all in black, inflicts bodily punishment on himself, and stalks Caridad and her lover Esmeralda: Neither the New Yorker nor the two-thousand-year-old spirit had ever heard of Francisco el Penitente. In fact, neither of them even knew what a penitente was. ‘Where did you say you were from?’ Caridad asked the channeler. ‘Which one of us?’ the channeler asked. ‘Either one,’ Caridad said. ‘Long Island and Egypt, respectively,’ the woman answered in a kind of strange stereophonic-sounding voice. Caridad winced. She didn’t know very much about either of those two places, but she was pretty much convinced then and there that she had just wasted seventy-five hardearned dollars and went back home to consult with her own inner voices. (209)

Caridad’s trust in New Age spirituality is shattered and, what is more, she literally pays the price for her naïve trust in this pseudo-healer. The reader might be amused by the contradiction between her expectations and the events as they actually play out. In this classic example of dramatic irony, the narrator mocks the ignorance of the schizophrenic Anglo woman and, by extension, the humbug of folk and New Age religions. The vernacular sound of this passage relies on simple syntax, deictic expressions (“then and there”), the dialogic pattern of “the-channelerasked-Caridad-said,” and eventually culminates in Caridad’s comical insight that she is better off relying on her own judgment. In contrast to this rather accessible and humorous passage are those passages where the reader is forced to decode more obscure ironic references. To understand the mysterious character, Francisco, it is necessary to know



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that the Penitente brothers are a group of religious fanatics who often flagellate or scourge themselves. Their fascination with Christ’s painful death is a critical aspect of their peculiar religious practices, hymns, rituals, and bultos (religious sculptures).43 In accordance with this, Francisco displays self-destructive character traits and earns his living by carving bultos. The fact that he ultimately hangs himself is related—ironically enough—to his sexual obsession with Caridad and Esmeralda. He follows them everywhere, literally stalking them to death until they both jump off of a cliff (211). The pious Francisco’s infatuation with Caridad is matched in fervor by his terrifying homophobia. In another highly ironic passage, the narrator describes Sofi’s founding of an organization that honors Mothers of Martyrs and Saints (M.O.M.A.S.). This report on the matriarchically organized religious group mocks the patriarchal structures of Catholicism. Instead of perpetuating the exclusionary practices of the traditional Church, which refuses to give women equal power, las M.O.M.A.S. honors mothers of both male and female martyrs. Relating the success of this organization, whose annual conferences become “a world event each year, taking the cake over the World Series and even the Olympics” (247), the narrator satirizes its global expansion. Comparing the subsequent commercialization (i.e., the proliferation of M.O.M.A.S. souvenirs, T-shirts, tarot decks, and other gadgets such as automatic writing pens) with Disney World (249), the narrator ridicules the capitalist logic underlying this secular movement and by extension, that of Christianity. But it is not just in passages like these that we encounter this highly ironic and often sarcastic tone; it is omnipresent and contrasted, for example, with the detached narrative voice of the opening passage, so much so that the early self-description of a “highly opinionated narrator” (15) is an understatement. Like Twain, Castillo’s vernacular novel displays a high degree of irony. In her case, irony is combined with magico-realism. From the outset, the novel fuses seemingly realistic scenes with the supernatural. The description of normally behaved dogs, cats, and horses that enter and leave the house as they please casts doubt in readers’ minds as to the accuracy of the report while inviting us to accept this blend of realism and fantasy. Another surreal incident concerns the beautiful daughter, Caridad, being taken to the hospital at the beginning of the novel after she is brutally beaten, raped, and mutilated beyond recognition (“her nipples had been bitten off ” 33). Chapter 2 then narrates her unexpected “phenomenal recovery.” After she is repaired by modern medical technology, cared for by Sofi, and treated by the curandera Doña Felicia, Caridad eventually heals. Following a strange encounter during her pilgrimage to the holy



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Chimayo, Caridad decides to become a hermit, living in a cave without any food, supplies, or warm clothing for an entire year. Her mysterious survival makes her a living legend, but her untimely death is wholly puzzling. Trying to escape from Francisco, she and her lover Esmeralda drive to the ancient City in the Sky, where Esmeralda starts to run toward the edge of a mesa. The text gives no clues regarding her motive but describes how Caridad suddenly runs after her, takes her hand, and jumps off the cliff with Esmeralda. This scene, which calls to mind 1991’s Thelma and Louise, is one of many textual moments in which the portrayed reality crosses the threshold into the realm of the surreal, becoming indicative of the novel’s magico-realist style.44 Roland Walter’s analysis of the magico-realist elements in So Far from God connects magico-realism to the speakerly style of this vernacular novel: This magico-realist worldview, whose fundamental essence resides in “the interconnectedness of things,” is expressed by means of a “speakerly” texture in which a skaz-like discourse, being at work in and acting on the actual discourse, an unnamed narrator, who as a storyteller represents both a communal and an individual voice, and the use of multiple points of view and perspectives re-create and interweave individual and collective experiences as the novel’s political unconscious. A telling example of this fluid dialogical texture is the episode in which Sofi, La Loca’s mother, announces to a comadre her plan to run for mayor of Tome. . . . Phrases such as “You know, la pobre Sofi . . . ,” “But everyone understood . . . ,” “Everybody still remembered . . . ,” and “nobody . . . had been able to explain . . . ,” lend an oral coating to this interior monologue, a “speakerly” texture . . . (90)

Indeed, this version of vernacular literature blends a “speakerly” dialogical texture with a magico-realist style. In a footnote, he even compares the “speakerly” style of Their Eyes Were Watching God with So Far from God. Although Walter does not explicitly use the term, other literary critics have argued that magico-realism strongly “emphasizes the oral nature of human communication, the vernacular component of their cultures” (Christie 48). “Vernacular” in this context is synonymous with the “ethnic” component. What is so remarkable about the formal and stylistic features of Castillo’s vernacular novel, however, has to do with the text’s union of three aspects: this speakerly narrative voice is ethnically marked by its linguistic borrowings to create a style that is replete with irony and magico-realism. So Far from God is never just one thing. Its narrative voice is composed of many different voices (ranging from the detached to the judgmental to the ironic). The Spanish ranges from simple lexical borrowings to more assimilated loan translations. Its generic and stylistic



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identity is equally compounded. And aside from the above-mentioned ironic and magico-realist elements, one can find aspects of allegory, parody, and the absurd. Among those literary critics who analyze its multigeneric nature, B. J. Manríquez succinctly argues that So Far from God combines “parody, allegory, black comedy, tragic farce, poetry and Heloise-type advice for women in order to mimic the absurdist vision” (40). Out of this list, Manríquez’s mentioning of both absurdity and allegory is probably most pertinent, especially given the allegorical naming of the daughters—Fe (faith), Caridad (charity), Esperanza (hope). These three characters reflect the cardinal virtues of Christianity as set forth in 1 Corinthians 13:13: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” A closer look at the plot, however, reveals an ironic inversion of these virtues. Much as Manríquez suggest, So Far from God is an “ironic allegory” precisely because it renders these allegorical figures in a parodic manner (42). Taking the causes of death of Sofi’s four daughters into consideration— AIDS, cancer, suicide, and the Gulf War—each is frighteningly “real,” yet bound to the supernatural at the same time: La Loca is resurrected after being pronounced dead; Caridad survives her mutilation and when she jumps off of the cliff, her body is almost angel-like, “billowing through midair” (211); and Esperanza is reported to have lived on in Tome after her death in Saudi Arabia. Only Fe’s death is devoid of surreal or spiritual aspects. With her rejection of indigenous and spiritual values, her only remaining support is her materialism. Fe’s undying faith in the American dream actually causes her death: “It was the job that killed her” (171). While an acceptance of incredible bereavements is characteristic of magico-realism, the fatalities in So Far from God have ironic and even sardonic twists. Caridad, initially a whore (la puta), becomes a respected curandera gaining a reputation “as a miracle worker” (119) who devotes her energies to healing others. “Caridad had always been charitable,” (56) the narrator recalls, but later in life she seeks her own satisfaction by admitting to her lesbian desires. This combination of being a puta, a curandera, and a lesbian makes her an unconventional character, to say the least.45 Her fatal ending at Sky City suggests that homosexuals have no place in a homophobic society. Society knows no charity toward lesbians. Fe’s undying faith in the American dream leads her to a well-paying job (cleaning toxic chemicals) that ends in a nightmare. Esperanza, a one-time activist in the Chicano movement, who held out hope for the future of La Raza, gains an education (thus becoming the family’s great hope) and becomes



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a successful broadcast journalist, she dies on the battlefield at the height of her career and is posthumously honoured by the U.S. government as a “national hero.” And La Loca, who had never touched a human being, dies of a sexually transmitted disease. Apparently, the strange deaths of all four daughters are not without irony. The virtues that the allegorical figures Caridad, Fe, and Esperanza personify ultimately destroy them, transforming allegory into parody. Given these distressing plot developments and the “haphazard leaps in plot from one tragic occurrence to another,” as Manríquez puts it, Castillo creates “discontinuous multiple realities that defy explanation or ‘meaning’” (44). That being the case, the multigeneric and multifaceted plot shares features with Their Eyes and Huckleberry Finn, both of which have equally fragmented narrative compositions with regard to their interweaving of several subplots and both of which thereby disorient the reader. At the same time, however, the lyricism appeals to our ears. By Manríquez’s assessment, “Castillo produces a calculated confusion and disorientation of readers . . . to evoke a response to the idea of absurdity” (45). I would instead argue that the narrative confusion and complexity are crucial to the novel’s vernacularity. This postmodern version of the vernacular exacerbates and intensifies the formal features encountered in its predecessors, notably the colloquial narrative voice and its seemingly unarranged composition. Likewise, So Far from God presents its fictional world from an insider’s perspective that speaks the language of its people. When Julia Alvarez acknowledged Castillo’s zany, loquacious style, she implicitly commented on its vernacular aesthetics. Like Hurston and Twain, Castillo artfully captures the spoken voice on the page. While So Far from God shares the ironic and humorous tone of Huckleberry Finn, it is the unnamed storyteller representing many different narrative voices that most closely links it to Their Eyes.46 And like the vernacular aesthetics of Huckleberry Finn and Their Eyes Were Watching God, although So Far from God seems at first deceivingly pleasurable, it actually demands active readers to decipher its multiple voices and deviations. Moreover, the act of reading So Far from God involves us in the act of hearing the sounds of its various vernacular voices. Regarding the act of reading literature that shifts between English and Spanish, it is helpful to distinguish the response of non-Spanishspeaking readers from bilingual readers. In this context, Frances Aparicio aptly observes that “what in English reads as funny, surrealist, or absurd metaphor, the insider reader perceives as a repetition with a difference,” (799). She suggests that the insider reader experiences aesthetic pleasure because of a familiarity with Chicano vernacular and Mexican religious



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and culinary culture, thereby taking pleasure in the word plays and ironic references. Non-Spanish speaking readers, one would assume, draw their enjoyment from experiencing the unfamiliar or exotic.47 Thus, Aparicio’s argument about the popularity of Latino/a fiction opposes McCracken’s hypothesis that the enactment of exoticism explains the novel’s crosscultural appeal. Her argument that U.S. Latino/a writers use tropicalized English to put Spanish-speaking readers at an advantage disproves McCracken’s claim that they primarily appeal to cultural outsiders.48 While both positions are very common in critical debates about ethnic literature that center on the notion of difference, vernacular aesthetics actually account for most the novel’s appeal. Castillo’s postmodern version of the vernacular interweaves a polyvocal, speakerly quality with TexMex colloquialisms to create a swift narrative flow peppered with irony, parody, and magico-realism. The multifaceted vernacular aesthetics of So Far from God are reinforced by its content and politics. With regard to its magico-realist components, for example, the fusion of the real and the surreal coincides with the fusion of fact and fiction, life and death, mind and matter, male and female, the first world with the developing world. Frederick Luis Aldama aptly argues that magico-realism allows for the coexistence of opposites, exceeding binary oppositions and essential ontologies to reveal the playfulness and complexity of postmodern reality. Magico-realism is not a traditionally Latino genre “of the past” but reveals “the cultural, economic, political, biological, sexual, and racial polyphonies at work in this world” (Aldama, “Magicorealism” 200). By artfully interweaving magico-realist elements into an ethnically coded vernacular structure, Ana Castillo replaces a monolithic worldview with one that is postmodern and pluralistic yet decidedly vernacular.



Vernacular Voices




Vernacular Values The question of value will always exert an imperative force which disturbs us from our safe inhabitation of ourselves, impelling us to question beliefs, certainties and values with a view not only to their potential betterment, but to the revaluation of the very notions of better and worse. —Steven Connor

Huckleberry Finn’s Journey into Vernacular Territory In the opening pages of HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Twain explicitly discourages any search for values: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot” (2). The first lines serve as a warning to the reader, however facetious, to resist reading for meaning. And what meaning seems deeper than the matter of values—the principles we hold most dear—in words if not in actions? Twain’s “notice” cautions the reader of the risky road ahead for all who seek to find values from his narrative and perhaps no territory seems more ambiguous and laden with treachery than that of vernacular literature where meanings emerge in subtle and subversive ways. Leo Marx’s pioneering definition of the vernacular as a literature with a politics in view is both revealing and helpful because it evades the question of intentionality. The author’s political intentions are secondary, what matters is the vernacularity of the text. Although its subject matter is rarely spelled out, vernacular literature combines a specific form and political content. In contrast to propagandistic, proletarian, or cultural nationalist literary works, vernacular literature expresses itself as critique or commentary of the established value system with inherent contradictions. Its messages are anarchic, challenging the moral norm and the



CHAPTER 3


dominant value system within which resisters can and will be, in Twain’s words, “prosecuted,” “banished,” and “shot.” In the fragmented, makeshift narrative of the vernacular, readers are confronted with a complex value system and are forced to grapple with the task of decoding it. Twain scholars of Huckleberry Finn offer a range of interpretations that diverge widely, particularly over the book’s burlesque, gaudy ending. Among the many commentators who contest the book’s underlying moral values are Harold Bloom, who considers the ending a “glaring lapse of moral imagination” (Bloom 16) and John Wallace, who dismisses the entire novel single-handedly as “racist trash” (Wallace 16). Other close readings have celebrated the work’s quintessentially American values (as discussed in Chapter 1). Normative textbook interpretations, however, emphasize its subversion and satire. Accordingly, Huckleberry Finn exposes the failings in Victorian genteel culture by ridiculing established religion, social conformity, hypocrisy, the political system of slavery, and, more broadly, nineteenth-century race relations.1 One commentator, David L. Smith, states that “no other nineteenth-century novel so effectively locates racial discourse within the context of a general critique of American institutions and traditions,” because the novel ultimately implies that “American civilization’ enslaves and exploits rather than liberates.”2 The text itself is ripe for such critique. One of the many inherently satirical attacks on nineteenth-century American society and its contemporary racial politics is the dialogue between Huck and Aunt Sally about a riverboat accident. Sally empathetically asks, “Anybody hurt?” and Huck retorts, “No’m. Killed a nigger,” to which Aunt Sally responds with a sigh of relief: “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt” (279). This is only one among many satirical remarks about antebellum racism. Written during the era of Reconstruction, the novel ridicules America’s self-definition as a quintessentially democratic nation. Its ending suggests that the emancipation of the bondsman did not solve the race problem. The plight of African Americans continued to haunt the nation as it expanded westward, a progression symbolized by Huck’s striking out for the territory. Jim, who was kept a slave although he was legally a free man, comes to represent the dreadful situation of the newly freed African Americans, who remained economically exploited as well as politically disenfranchised. The successive repeal of political rights during Reconstruction deprived African Americans of their newly gained citizenship rights. It was common practice during the 1880s for black freedmen without a contract of employment to be charged with “vagrancy” or “the intent to steal,” arrested, and prosecuted. Many of these black prisoners were being leased out for as little as ten to thirty dollars a year. Referring



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to this cheap work force made up of newly freed and newly imprisoned black citizens, Victor Donyo aptly indicts this “legal but immoral exploitation of freedmen in the convict lease system” (Donyo, Writing Huck Finn 235). Because the novel exposes the collective obstructions put in place to hinder racial equality after the official abolition of slavery, Ralph Ellison sees Huckleberry Finn as a fundamentally political book. He reads it as an allegory for the “moral predicament of the nation” created through the failure of Reconstruction (Ellison, Territory 250). Similarly, Ellison views Huck’s moral dilemma as a “contradiction between democratic idealism and the existence of slavery” (267). The novel powerfully addresses “the moral necessity which makes Huck know that he must at least make the attempt to get Jim free; to steal him free” (Ellison, Territory 267). His commitment to free Jim stems from his passionate belief in democratic values and contrasts with the nation’s lack of morality and disregard for human value. In his interpretation of Huckleberry Finn (offered in “Society, Morality, and The Novel”), Ellison does not mention the concept of the vernacular, which he addresses in his earlier essay “Going to the Territory,” which focused on the vernacular in relation to democratic idealism. Curiously enough, despite writing on the vernacular, Ellison did not apply his ideas about it and “the democratic process” to Huckleberry Finn. In “Going to the Territory” Ellison writes, “After all, ‘democracy’ is our term for social perfection (or a perfect society), while ‘excellence’ is a general term for perfect quality. And while the vernacular is shy of abstract standards, it still seeks perfection in the form of functional felicity. But wherever we find the vernacular process operating, we also find individuals who act as transmitters between it and earlier styles, tastes, and techniques . . . the democratic process has been made to operate by dedicated individuals” (Ellison 140–1). How can Ellison’s concepts be related to the values inscribed in Huckleberry Finn? Emphatically, Ellison reminds us that a democracy is never complete but is rather an ongoing process that continually tries to approach the ideal of social equality. Social perfection, then, designates the process of eliminating inequality. Moreover, social perfection involves a transformation of existing styles, tastes, and in a direction that meets the current needs of the community or larger society. Ellison uses the terms democratic process and vernacular process interchangeably, suggesting that both move toward the same goal. While the democratic process connotes that which is more abstract and normative, the vernacular process denotes the individual and concrete aspects of this transformative practice. By applying Ellison’s definition to Twain’s novel, Huck and Jim come to embody the aspiration toward social perfection and equality: Huck



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jeopardizes his privileged social position in order to help Jim. Although Ellison’s phrase “seek[ing] perfection in the form of functional felicity” sounds odd, it proves applicable to their relationship in the sense that both are content and felicitous when removed from the restraints of the shore-bound society. On board the raft, the two share a feeling of loyalty and Huck seems to develop a sense of social commitment. Instead of a master-slave relationship, Huck and Jim form a friendship. Given their age difference, it is perhaps more appropriate to say that Jim assumes the role of a surrogate father, caring for Huck as a loving father would. This dynamic, however, is temporary and if the burlesque ending is brought under consideration, it would be naïve to call their relationship democratic or felicitous. Therefore, Ellison’s emphasis on the dynamic and changing nature of the vernacular seems appropriate despite the fact that he did not explicitly spell out his definition of the vernacular and its values in greater detail. “The notion that vernacular values lie at the heart of Huckleberry Finn,” declares Michael Davitt Bell, “has long been central to serious readings of the novel” (45). If that were the case, it would stand to reason that the notion of vernacular values would be well established in Twain scholarship. Yet, to my knowledge there does not yet exist a systematic definition of vernacular values in this classic American novel. Why does Bell make such a grand assertion? His appraisal of “Huck’s own vernacular honesty” (45) suggests that he understands the vernacular in a metaphoric sense, as a representation of authenticity and truth. The “serious readings” Bell seems to be referring to are those put forth by early Americanists naively perceiving Huck as someone who had not been “perverted” by upper-class stereotypes, as Henry Nash Smith put it (Smith, Development 4). In his reading, Huck embodies “the spontaneous judgments of a vernacular character revealing the falsity of accepted values” (182). Due to his “vernacular protest,” as Smith calls it, Huck personifies “the intuitive good sense of the common man” (115, 182) and critiques the values of genteel society. Smith’s interpretation presupposes an opposition between an elitist, presumptuous genteel code and an uncorrupted, “good” vernacular code. Like Bell, Smith uses the term vernacular to mean “honest.” When understood as such, this counterforce against genteel society stands for democratic values. In Bell’s and Smith’s readings, the vernacular foregrounds the experience of the common man and his “common sense.” They turn Huck into the sympathetic representative of a less-educated class. In effect, Huck’s adolescent rebellion against social authorities and pretensions is interpreted as an act of social protest. Smith’s tribute to Huck’s intuitive



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good sense, however, ignores that Huck loses his presumably innate sense of justice when he engages in his scam with Tom. Smith’s binary and essentialist account neglects the expedient and dynamic nature of Huck’s vernacular values. The primary text in turn incessantly stages the precarious quality and paradoxical development of Huck’s emerging vernacular value system as a process. Of Predicaments and Practical Solutions: “Always do whichever come handiest at the time” Shortly before reaching Cairo, Jim’s last chance to cross the Mississippi into the free state Illinois, Huck realizes for the first time that he is traveling with a runaway slave (Chapter 16). It only then dawns on him that Jim is not just a travel companion on his trip down the river but the “property” of Miss Watson. In other words, it occurs to him that he is committing a crime. Although the novel is set in the 1840s, prior to the ratification of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, severe legal measures were in place to punish Americans accused of helping runaway slaves.3 Violating the legal and ethical code of the slave-holding South was a serious misdemeanor, giving Huck good reason to fear the consequences of his seemingly innocent adventures.4 Huck is plagued by guilt, agonzing as he anxiously tries to justify his misgivings: “I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, ‘But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.’ That was so—I couldn’t get around that, no way. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, . . . I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead” (123–24). His unremitting self-indictment, which culminates in his wishing for death, shows the extent to which the outsider Huck has internalized the dominant slave-holding mentality. Huck “knowed” that he violated the property rights of Miss Watson. He also knows what would have been the “right” thing to do, at least according to the dominant value system. To ease his psychic pain, he finally decides to act within the purview of the slave-holding mentality and betray his companion Jim. Immediately, Huck’s twinge of conscience stops “pinching” him. After his self-reproaches end, his life forces reawaken: “I felt easy and happy and light as a feather right off ” (124). This moment of relief marks the first stage in a long and twisted decisionmaking process. At that very moment, Jim expresses his affection and gratitude saying, “Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s the bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s the only fren’ ole Jim’s got now” (125). His professed loyalty makes it unreasonable for Huck to follow through with



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his resolution to betray him. No wonder Huck “just felt sick” (125). He is torn between two conflicting forces and voices: an authoritative voice reminds him of what he ought to do (“I got to do it”), and a muted voice (“I can’t get out of it”) indicates his frustration with it. In its brevity this interior monologue—graphically enhanced by the italics—shows the utterly tragic nature of his moral dilemma. While already faltering, Huck is still determined to betray Jim at this point in the novel; the next turn of the plot, however, helps to tip the scale. A skiff arrives. When the two slave-hunters ask him if there is a black man on board of the raft, Huck lies. Without thinking about it, Huck intuitively acts in defiance of the authoritative voice and in favor of Jim. After the deed, he once again tries to justify his action. This time he tells himself in a self-accusing tone, “I warn’t man enough.” Far from lacking courage or manliness, he was bold enough to fabricate a tale about his father suffering from smallpox. In fact, his conduct toward the bounty hunters is witty and brave. His self-indictment of not being man enough represents a refusal to comply with what a man in a slave-holding society was supposed to do. Moreover, it conveys the sympathy he feels for a black man. Jim’s passionate declaration of their friendship must have triggered Huck’s change of action. Not only does he silence the voices that had tormented him a few moments earlier, he also lies outright to protect Jim from the cruel slave catchers. In this moment, Huck shifts from a defensive to a self-determined position, regaining his inner peace by doing exactly the opposite of what he earlier meant to do. Accordingly, he constructs a new rationale to justify his presumed immorality by replacing the moral opposition between what is right and what is wrong with a distinction between what feels good and what feels bad. Since his feelings for Jim are stronger than his sense of allegiance to the slave-holding mentality, Huck changes his mind. Thus the self-accusatory tone in his voice changes to a self-confident tone: It warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little, ain’t got no show—when the pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on—s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time. (127)



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His rhetorical question, Why should anyone learn to act in what is supposedly the morally right way, if it’s bothersome to do so? leads Huck to the resolution to do what “comes handiest” that is, what seems practical for the time being. This sudden reversal in his conduct and outright rejection of any a priori moral principle has led some critics to argue that Huck’s “response is all feeling. It is solely by feeling. It is nothing but feeling” (Beaver 96). Indeed, he does follow an ad hoc pleasure principle. First he decided against Jim. Then he realized that he would rather help someone who considers him his best friend than the slave-catchers who make a profit from stealing human beings. Therefore, Huck decided to lie, but he was not just telling a lie as he had done so many times before. This intuitive refusal of the slave-holding mentality marks a decisive turning point in the narrative. Departing from the “boy’s book” formula, the smallpox episode featuring the slave-hunters raises serious moral and political issues. This episode marks the first step in a longer process of moving toward a new value system. Although acting emotionally and intuitively, Huck’s decision has serious consequences, and at this point, he knowingly decides to protect Jim. Huck’s vernacular values are based on spontaneous and expedient decisions; he acts out of selfinterest, which does not necessarily lead to selfish behavior. From today’s perspective, his decision to reject the slave-holding value system was, of course, the right thing to do, his seemingly selfish attitude of doing what comes in handiest actually leading him to noble actions.5 However, the problem with Huck’s moral imperative is that the slavehunters act upon a similar logic. In fact, within the logic of this expedient instinctive morality, there are no grounds for objecting to human beings hunting down other human beings. Anything is acceptable as long as it feels good.6 At this stage, Huck has no clear sense of what he is doing. He is torn between his desire to conform and avoid punishment and his desire to help his loyal companion Jim. The vernacular process, understood in Ellison’s terms, comes to a halt because the dedicated individual, Huck, is unable to save Jim on the basis of his moral convictions and principles. Sixteen chapters later, after a long time of separation from Jim, a time during which he learns a lot about the cruelty of Southerners, Huck is so distraught about the loss of his friend that he starts crying. Thinking about Jim, Huck infers that it would be better for him to be a slave at home than to be a slave among strangers and thus decides to give Jim up in a letter to Miss Watson, presumably for Jim’s own good. If he were to write this letter, however, Huck soon realizes, he would necessarily implicate himself as an accomplice:



Vernacular Values


And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was to ever see anybody from that town again, I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots. . . . The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm . . . (268–69).

Huck fears not only God’s punishment, he also fears the social pressures from people in Petersburg. Once again, his conscience torments him. To alleviate his psychic pain, he blames himself (“I was brung up wicked”) as a way of justifying that he, in the end, “warn’t to blame.” In his rationale, it was not a matter of doing what comes handiest, it was not even a matter of choice, but of nature: “My heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square” (269). This statement proves that Huck has not divorced himself from the value system he had come to hate. Although he saw the depravity of those who supported the slave-holding mentality, Huck had internalized their values and was afraid that everyone in town knew that he “helped a nigger get his freedom.” To relieve himself from his fear and regain the respect of the community, he ultimately writes the letter to Miss Watson. While acting under the guise of doing something for Jim’s own good, Huck is once again following the imperative of doing whatever comes handiest. In contrast to his first moral crisis, Huck now feels “good” when acting according to the dominant value system. By complying with the moral obligation of genteel society, Huck attains a certain peace of mind. At that very moment, however, another twinge of remorse overtakes him: I see Jim before me all the time, in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we afloating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me—so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog . . . he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was atrembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll GO to hell”—and tore it up. (270–71)



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This legendary declaration—perhaps the most familiar monologue in American literature—has evoked a host of critical responses, many of which consider this bold statement to be the climax of the novel.7 Huck’s own explanation for making this decision (“I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him”) reveals his kindness and affection toward Jim. His feelings for Jim make it increasingly difficult for him to harden himself against the fate of a runaway slave. Initially, Huck has no problem with humiliating Jim, playing all kinds of tricks on him, but over the course of time, he develops a sense of appreciation for his companion. In this moment of clarity, Huck realizes “how good he always was.” In other words, it is Jim’s kindness and goodness—not Huck’s innate “goodness” or humanity—that makes him decide to go to hell.8 Knowing that he would face public contempt, social hell, Huck tears up the letter, thereby signaling his willingness to confront the social stigma that he had earlier tried to evade. His symbolic act is not motivated by Christian ethics, an abstract a priori, Kantian principle, or a political critique of slavery Realizing how “good” he feels when Jim is around, Huck decides to steal Jim out of slavery. His conduct—fueled by immediate sensations—is expedient, instantaneous, and informal. Huck essentially makes it up as he goes along. Huck’s vernacular values are always ephemeral and sporadic in nature, hence Ellison’s concept of the vernacular process applies perfectly. By presenting Huck’s inability to act upon his earlier moral resolution and by mocking his compliance in Tom’s burlesque scheme of reenslaving Jim, the novel highlights the unpremeditated nature of Huck’s values. Although literary critics argue over Huck’s wavering attitude toward and mistreatment of Jim, the melodramatic and burlesque ending of Twain’s opus reconfirms the dynamic nature of Huck’s vernacular value system.9 The novel presents a vernacular process in which the protagonists act primarily upon pragmatic motifs. In that sense, the vernacular value system shows traces of pragmatism.10 Often the pragmatic aspect of his values is connected with matters of respect, appreciation, and recognition. This crucial connection between values and appreciation is captured in the German term Wertschätzung (“valuation, esteem”). In addition to this pragmatic side, the vernacular process bears deconstructionist traces. Steven Mailloux, for example, argues that Huckleberry Finn is fundamentally concerned with the notion of difference while repeatedly disrupting binaries: “The debates staged throughout Huckleberry Finn are almost always arguments over differences: differences between fact and fiction, good and bad, wise men and fools, Americans and Frenchmen, servants and slaves. . . . Throughout Huckleberry Finn, dramatized arguments again and again break down



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all these differences or overturn these hierarchies. Wise men become fools, Frenchmen should talk like Americans, what is socially approved is morally reprehensible, the inferior slave is superior to his master” (124). This tendency to subvert established oppositions and to break down hierarchies culminates in an ability “to dismantle the opposition upon which that racism is based: Black and white become morally indistinguishable” (Mailloux 124–25). Given that Jim is presented as morally superior to most (white) protagonists, Twain undermines the ideological basis for nineteenth-century bigoted thought. To that end, Huck’s attitude is fundamentally political. Likewise, Elizabeth Morgan describes Twain’s narrative world as “a world where the disruption of assumed binaries proliferates” (173). Her essay “Huck Finn as Moral Quagmire” discusses eight binaries to show the ways in which this novel subverts opposing terms (heaven and hell; black and white; law and outlaw). For example, the text dismantles romance as a genre while it celebrates the promise of romantic freedom. Contrasting the romantic setting of the river with the cruel life on shore, it shows that this separation does not hold: “Attitudes from land penetrate sacred rafter space” (175). Moreover, it calls the opposition between slaves and free citizens into question. When Tom tips Jim forty dollars for being the subject of their escape scheme, Morgan infers, “Tom may be more enslaved to capitalist, white patriarchy than anyone else at this juncture in the plot” (177). Because of these reversals of established hierarchies and values, the narrative refutes the notion of moral clarity and confronts the reader with a “moral quagmire,” as Morgan calls it. Within this “muddled moral anxiety, with all of its erasures and surprises,” she locates the beauty of Huckleberry Finn (180).11 Mailloux and Morgan invite us to understand the vernacular process as a dialectic ripe with ambivalence and contradiction. Instead of an either-or logic, the vernacular text embraces deconstructionist playfulness. It mocks rigid ways of thinking and being in the world. Thus, it is only fitting that the novel is written in a fragmented and episodic style, resisting easy analysis, as the author cautions in that famous prefatory “Notice.” Indeed, there is not just one motive, one moral, or one plot.12 The beauty of Huckleberry Finn is that it introduces the reader to a dynamic and vivid vernacular process without committing to a full embrace of indeterminacy or arbitrariness. On the contrary, the novel ridicules social inequalities of class, race, and gender. It openly sympathizes with the underprivileged: the outlaw Huck and the lawless Jim. It ridicules undemocratic and inhumane ways of being in the world. Twain presents a full panoply of idiosyncratic, unsympathetic male characters such as the malicious Colonel Grangerford, the selfish, gruesome frauds



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(the Duke and the King), the ignorant and brutal mob, and arrogant men like Colonel Sherburn. No matter if they are drunkards (Boggs), cutthroats (Jake Packard, Jim Turner), or hypocrites (Grangerford), they seem to have lost their sense of human value. They are not only indifferent to the cruel treatment of slaves, they also treat one another without respect. The Duke and the King even try to make a profit out of the death of another, Peter Wilk, by pretending to be his brothers. Witnessing their show of pretentious mourning as part of a scam to claim an inheritance, Huck disdainfully comments, “Well, if ever I struck anything like it, I’m a nigger. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race” (210). Huck’s disdain for his race makes sense given Twain’s well-know and openly expressed contempt “for the damned human race” (Twain, Damned Human Race 2); he even founded The Damned Human Race Luncheon Club. With Huckleberry Finn, Twain creates an acerbic satire of Southern society and its value system. He attacks the self-righteousness, ignorance, hypocrisy, and cruelty of (white) folks in the South. The episodes in Chapters 16 to 19, therefore, highlight different facets of inhumanity. In the Grangerford-Shepherdson episode (Chapter 18), Twain criticizes the barbarism of the slave-holders. Given that the Grangerfords live at Darnell’s Point (in Tennessee, a Confederate state) whereas the Shepherdsons live in Kentucky (a Union state), their conflict is located at the heart of the Civil War (Arac 125). Although their family feud is not related to slavery, the prolonged hostility between the two rival families, and their murderous assaults against each other, reveal the cruelty respectable citizens in the South were capable of. Twain’s critique of white folks exposes the savagery of the South, but it also condemns false piety and pretence. To the outside world, the Grangerfords appear to be highly civilized, well-to-do, religious citizens who subscribe to the genteel code of chivalry, but the narrative exposes their bloodthirsty and brutish nature. In the King and Duke episode, Twain satirizes the social evils of the Reconstruction period. These traveling hucksters symbolize the dishonesty and corruption of carpetbaggers as they take advantage of the defeated South. In a business-savvy way, these corrupt characters are constantly devising schemes to increase their income by cheating, stealing, quackery, and any other form of betrayal they can think of. But these selfish frauds are not the only ones to blame: the masses are so ignorant and gullible that the novel suggests they deserve to be defrauded. When the people take revenge then, they revert to such harsh forms of punishment as tarring and feathering. Watching the King and the Duke become the victims of their own revenge, Huck merely says, “Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”



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The Bricksville episode reveals the sadistic nature of the common man. Whereas “women and girls was crying and taking on, scared most to death” (208), the (male) mob confronts the scornful Colonel Sherburn, determined to lynch him. He addresses the spiteful masses with scorn and indictment. Colonel Sherburn’s final verdict is that “the average man is a coward” (209).13 Following the most recent literary critical paradigms, this statement can be also interpreted as a critique of whiteness, since it is primarily white men in the South who are charged with being hypocritical and cowardly. Aside from the conmen and gentlemen, there is also Huck’s own father, whose cruelty toward his (better educated) son is associated with his whiteness. Pointing out that Pap’s skin color is described as “fish-belly white,” Richard Lowry infers that “Twain’s most compelling exploration of whiteness [is] formed around a core of male anger. . . . In short, Pap’s fish-belly white colors the entire novel, transforming Huck’s escape into a journey to the heart of whiteness.”14 To reduce this novel to the currently fashionable interest in whiteness studies does not do justice to its multifaceted political agenda as the novel is replete with acerbic critiques of racial injustice, religion, and social hypocrisy. Neither does it allow for a nuanced reading of Huck’s predicament and his desperate attempts to establish democratic ways of interacting with Jim. In the pursuit of social perfection, Huck embarks on a difficult journey. The journey itself has no clearly defined goal other than following the ideal of social equality. As such, it comes as little surprise that the ending of Twain’s novel remains open. Huck strikes out for the territory, determined to continue his adventurous process, and his wavering dialectical attitude constitutes the heart of this vernacular process. Janie’s Quest for Inner Values and the Long Road toward “Social Perfection” The value of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is often attributed to its feminist subject matter and the fact that it describes an African American community from an insider’s perspective. Hurston’s ethnographic background was instrumental in writing this coming-of-age novel. Looking at her community through the spyglass of anthropology, as Hurston put it in her preface to Mules and Men, helped her to invent this unprecedented female hero with her remarkable life story. Janie’s courage and endurance in her personal struggle against male domination made her a role model for a liberated black woman. “For the first time in black literature, we feel the growing up of a black girl, not from without but from within” (Christian 57). After Alice Walker’s discovery, Hurston



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became the canonical foremother for black women novelists. And in the 1980s, the proliferation of Hurston scholarship revealed numerous facets of the novel’s gender politics and helped to spark the emergence of a new field: black feminist literary criticism.15 Because the politics in its view should not be reduced to those concerned exclusively with gender, Hurston’s novel qualifies as a vernacular literature. In fact, commentators have analyzed diverse facets of her political agenda, including the novel’s “politics of dislocation” (Sharon Davie), its “politics of human dignity” (Cynthia Bond 214), its “politics of sexuality,” and its “politics of talk” (Carla Kaplan).16 Moreover, the novel qualifies as vernacular literature because Janie—the vernacular hero—faces a dilemma similar to that which Huck faces. She is caught between the established (gender) norms and her own yearning for gender equality. Like Huck, Janie becomes an outsider to her community. The challenge to build a relationship based on democratic forms of social interaction and communication is pivotal to both narratives. Furthermore, the pursuit of racial and gender equality is at the core of Huck’s and Janie’s predicament. Janie dreams of a marriage based on mutual respect and recognition. She wants nothing less than personal as well as sexual satisfaction. Her aspiration for social perfection, to use Ellison’s phrase, involves both setbacks and progress. This process is traditionally described as a linear process of coming of age, which eventually leads to maturity. The following discussion of the novel’s vernacular politics emphasizes its interpersonal dimensions as a process. Similar to Huck’s moral evolution, Janie’s selfrealization is part of an ongoing dialectic. In contrast to the expedient, twisted vernacular process uncovered in Huckleberry Finn, Janie’s vernacular process goes through three stages. The process of Janie’s identity formation—a process that naturally involves the ripening of a sense of self-worth and the cultivating of a feminist consciousness on her part—is innately connected with each of her relationships and develops further as she moves from one to the next: each is an improvement, each a revelation of different sides to and strengths of her character. Of Men and Breakups: Janie Coming into her Own Janie’s first marriage to Logan Killicks brings with it economic security, which is, according to her grandmother, all a black woman could ask for. Nanny forces her granddaughter to marry a farmer who looks like “some old skull-head in de grave yard” (28). It turns out, however. that this ugly man exploits Janie horrifically, measuring her worth as a human by her value as a beast of burden. He treats her like a mule and when he starts beating her into submission, Janie begins to reject Nanny’s economic



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rationale for marrying the brutish Logan and leaves him by running away with another man: Joe “Jody” Starks. Jody initially comes across as a sweet-talking, good-looking, and charming young man. During their courtship the smart businessman, whose last name even embodies austerity and power, promises to treat Janie “lak a lady.” Given the disrespect, oppression, and abuse Janie experienced in her previous marriage, such a proposition seems ideal. As his success as a storeowner and the mayor of Eatonville increases, Joe is able to provide his wife with both a comfortable lifestyle and social prestige. In the allblack town of Eatonville, Janie and Joe are on top of the social ladder. Joe earns the money and thinks of his beautiful wife as a valuable asset to and trophy of his economic and political success. A few years into their marriage, however, the blissful romance turns sour. Joe demands that Janie hide her beautiful hair beneath a scarf and forbids her to speak in public. The more power he accumulates, the more possessive Joe becomes toward his wife. He forces her into submission saying, “All you got tuh do is mind me” (111). His repeated verbal as well as physical assaults change Janie’s joyful character (“She pressed her teeth together and learned to hush”) and the shift greatly affects their sex life: “The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor” (111). Utterly disappointed and alone, Janie withdraws emotionally and hopes for a better future, “saving up feelings for some man she had never seen” (112). Joe’s insults soon reach beyond his wife, his sexist statements denigrating women in general: “Somebody got to think for women and chillum and chickens and cows. I God, they sho don’t think none theirselves” (110). He comes to embody patriarchy, and it takes years before Janie gains enough courage to “talk back.” In response to Joe’s chauvinist arrogance (“When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don’t understand one”), she diffidently replies, “Ah knows uh few things, and woman folks thinks sometimes too!” (111). No longer willing to put up with the humiliation and suffer in silence, she finally strikes back. One day, when Joe insults her in public, Janie forthrightly addresses him and the other men on the porch who have echoed his misogynist assaults: “You big-bellies round here put out a lot of brag, but ’tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice. Humph! Talkin’ bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life” (123). Exposing Jody’s lack of sexual prowess, she strips him of the delusion of irresistible masculinity. In this act of signifying, she unzips his phallic power. After this verbal knockout, Jody’s sense of authority and superiority weakens and his health begins to deteriorate. Her act of retaliation puts an end to Joe’s dominance—and, eventually,



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to his life. Janie’s second marriage, while providing her more material comfort and social prestige, in the end becomes just as oppressive as her first. Instead of being economically oppressed by a poor man, she is psychologically oppressed by a rich man. Janie takes action by first escaping from Killicks, and her blossoming self-esteem later enables her to fight back verbally, an act that ultimately makes her a widow. In her late thirties, with Jody’s passing, Janie inherits enough money to gain financial independence. Her widowhood does not last long, however, and her new lover—the folk hero Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods—seems to be the ideal partner. As his name suggests, he is a sweet and sensual man. His youth makes him even more attractive, not least of all because of his less domineering character. In defiance of received gender hierarchies, Tea Cake treats Janie as an equal. He instructs her in traditionally male activities—playing checkers, fishing, shooting—and participates in traditionally female domestic activities such as helping to prepare dinner. He is characterized as supportive and caring as well as genuinely interested in her opinions, encouraging her to “Have de nerve tuh say what you mean” (165). Living together, the couple enjoys a passionate and sexually satisfying relationship. Even though his attitude toward Janie differs greatly from Joe’s patriarchal stance, Tea Cake still regards himself as the proper master of the household. After years of blissful cohabitation, the power imbalance between Tea Cake and Janie becomes increasingly evident. At one point fueled by jealousy, Tea Cake even hits her. “Being able to whip her,” the narrator tells us, “reassured him of possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss” (218). This incident of domestic violence shows, as several critics have pointed out, that Tea Cake in the end is not all that different from Joe.17 His insensitive, domineering self becomes particularly evident after a rabid dog bites him. Interestingly enough, it is the moment when Janie refuses Tea Cake’s order to share the bed with him that his latent anxieties come to bear. Afraid that he is losing his authority over Janie, his patronizing attitude turns into cruel hostility. For reasons of self-defense, Janie is forced to kill the man who embodies the best a woman could ask for (according to her own standards). This tragic event changes her previously submissive attitude, an attitude that led her to obeying Tea Cake’s order to leave the house during a hurricane. Her complicity with his flawed decision ends with the dog bite that will bring about his demise. When she is almost killed by the rabidly psychotic Tea Cake, Janie has no choice but to protect herself from the mad man that her lover has become. Her necessitated action brings an end to her most passionate romance.



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In the course of her lifetime, the young girl, so the story goes, turns into a mature self-determined woman. While most feminist readings agree that the value of this novel lies in the fact that Janie finally gains a sense of self-esteem, my reading emphasizes the dialectic and interpersonal dynamic that culminates in her finally being able to value herself. Each relationship and each breakup advances Janie’s progression toward self-determination and self-worth. The pursuit of personal perfection goes through three consecutive stages through which Janie learns to respond to male economic domination (Logan), psychological and patriarchal domination (Jody), and patronizing and subtle domination (Tea Cake). In this process, Janie comes into her own and confirms her existence as a vernacular heroine. One of the key statements expressing her independence and maturity is Janie’s advice to Pheoby that “nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves” (285). Her life philosophy that everyone should live on her own terms defiantly bucks the dominant value system and is situated at the heart of the novel’s vernacular politics. Her nonconformity makes Janie an outsider to her community. Nobody other than her friend Pheoby is willing to talk to this renegade woman upon her return to Eatonville following her trial for Tea Cake’s murder. Janie is “up in the mouth” of people in Eatonville because of her decision to be with a man significantly younger than herself. What makes Janie so deviant is this defiance of expectations. Just as Huck learns to follow his heart even at the risk of social reprimand and damnation, Janie follows her heart at risk of social marginalization. Apart from the age and class difference between “Tea Cake and Mrs. Mayor Starks!” (166), the town people object to the ways in which their physical attraction is flaunted.18 A complex and bold treatment of sexuality is one often neglected value of this emancipatory narrative of an African American woman. In the novel, sexuality is a leitmotif. Starting with the tree scene, the novel is invested in and quite openly addresses sexual fulfillment. Janie’s first orgasm is described in language borrowed from nature as she watches how “a dust-bearing bee sinks into the sanctum of a bloom.” This evokes an “ecstatic shiver,” a “creaming,” a “frothing with delight,” ultimately leaving Janie “limp and languid.” Not only does the text touch on a taboo topic, it suggests that Janie believes it her right to experience erotic pleasure: “Ah wants things sweet with mah marriage” (38). After being with the physically unattractive, if not repulsive Logan, Janie‘s first encounter with sexual passion comes when she is with Jody. As their relationship



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loses its sexual momentum, Janie increasingly distances herself emotionally and physically. With Tea Cake she finally enjoys a continuously active and “sweet” sex life. At a time when most African American writers abided by an ethos that George Schuyler summed up as “keep away from the erotic,” Hurston’s representation of female sexuality was provocative (Schuyler 20). In Alain Locke’s influential anthology The New Negro, Elsie John McDougald addresses the commonly held view that the Negro woman is inherently amoral because she has “lower sex standards.” To dismiss this view McDougald cites “research show[ing] that most of the African tribes from which the Negro sprang have strict codes for sex relations. There is no proof of inherent weakness in the ethnic group” (Locke 379). Her essay “The Task of Negro Womanhood” subscribes to Victorian ideals of femininity; she further insists that black women are chaste and primarily devoted to the moral uplift of their race. Likewise, the Black Women’s Club movement and the National Association of the Advancement of Colored Women (NAACW) promoted an ideal of black womanhood based on genteel values: chastity, self-discipline, and altruism.19 The sexual politics of Their Eyes, therefore, deviates from contemporary moral standards promoted within the black community that presented African American women as asexual. Valerie Rohy is among those literary scholars interested in the novel’s liberated sexual politics. She discovers lesbian desire in Hurston’s narrative, notably in the relationship between Janie and Pheoby.20 Rohy quotes the passage when Janie says to Pheoby “mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf,” and refers to the characterization of their relationship as a “love of ‘kissin’-friends” (Rohy 116). Linking female homosexuality to orality, Rohy bases her argument on a misreading; the women neither kiss, nor do they experience an “ecstatic shiver.” Janie has no same-sex-desires, in fact, the novel does not promise that homosexual relationships are an alternative, or even more satisfying than heterosexual ones.21 Nevertheless, the novel’s attitude toward (black) sexuality is subversive, especially considering the moral standards in the 1930s. At the time of publication, most “black woman writers either focused on defending their morality or displaced sexuality onto another terrain” (Carby 176).22 Their Eyes quite radically promotes a sense of morality that acknowledges the life-affirming value of sexuality.



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Beyond this critique of prudish attitudes toward sexuality, the novel addresses the desire among African Americans to become “lak white folks.” There is, for example, Mrs. Turner, a “milky sort of woman” who “can’t stand black niggers” (210). She represents a pathetic, self-deprecating vision of blacks emulating whites as she yearns for “the unattainable—Caucasian characteristics” (216). Moreover, the novel measures Joe’s financial success in terms of white models—he owns a big white house and transforms Eatonville into a white city by installing a street lamp. Because of his privilege, station, and wallet, his wife could afford to live “lak white folks,” so to speak. While her grandmother only dreamt of “settin’ on porches lak de white madam” (172), Janie enjoyed the status of whiteness. Accordingly, several literary scholars consider Joe Starks a “representative of whiteness” who has internalized a “‘white’ point of view” (Benesch 631). Jürgen C. Wolter also associates Joe’s whiteness with a hierarchical world view, suggesting that “Joe introduces a white hierarchical order in the world he creates around him . . . [he] controls the community (and his wife) like a slave owner” (Wolter 239).23 Joe’s power over Janie and over Eatonville’s black citizens depends on “white” definitions of leadership as well as (white) forms of social interaction. Since the same aspiration for power and whiteness motivates Nanny to force her granddaughter into marriage, female characters fare no better in the alluring face of white privilege. The antithesis to this pervasive aspiration for whiteness is the veritable folk hero Tea Cake who figures as the representative of “blackness.” He has little concern for money or prestige and is seemingly indifferent to the values associated with white U.S. society. In her sympathetic rendering of Tea Cake and implicit celebration of black folk culture, Hurston seems to share the DuBoisian disregard for the “cold Teutonic race.” It is Tea Cake’s blackness and sweetness that Janie falls in love with and that the reader comes to appreciate. The vernacular politics of Their Eyes therefore has the duality of idealizing folk life as well as criticizing certain shortcomings in black folks.24 The court scene offers a good case in point. The trial marks the only scene in which white hegemonic culture interrupts the all-black narrative. The segregated courtroom separates the accused Janie from the all-white, all-male jury and the predominantly black audience. But, her co-workers in the muck turn against her because she shot Tea Cake, and they accuse her of sexual betrayal: “As soon as he got a little fever from the water, she had took up with another man. . . . Hanging was too good” (177).



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Caught between the (white) legal authorities and her spiteful people, Janie finds her predicament exacerbated by their hostility. After the verdict is handed down, the angry coworkers explicitly comment on her light skin color: “Aw you know den white mens wuzn’t gointuh do nothin’ tuh no woman dat look lak her” (179). This devastating assessment exposes the chauvinist and misogynist character of African American folk life, which the anthropologist Hurston studied so diligently. The fictional format allows Hurston to transcend the neutral, detached, and value-free attitude expected of an ethnographic study of folk life in the rural South. In addition to charging black folks with humiliating and marginalizing selfdetermined women, the narrative also exposes the pervasive cruelty of the (black) masses. For example, after Janie returns from the muck, nobody welcomes her. The text describes the response of black folks in fictional Eatonville to her homecoming as follows: “They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment. Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive” (10). The narrator suggests that their bitterness is motivated primarily by a sense of envy and resentment. Through their “venomous tongues,” the “skins” and “zigaboos,” as the narrator condescendingly calls Eatonville’s citizens, try to empower themselves by symbolically destroying Janie with their “burning statements.” Far from romanticizing the folk, Their Eyes represents the venom some have in store for deviants. There is nothing sweet about them or folk life in general: this form of blackness connotes nothing more than weakness. At the heart of the novel’s vernacular politics is this conflict between an insensitive, cruel black community that enforces proscribed behavior and nonconformists like Janie. While Adventures of Huckleberry Finn criticizes the hypocrisy and cruelty of (white) genteel society, Their Eyes critiques ignorance, misogyny, and cruelty in black Southern communities.25 Hurston’s critique of rural African Americans also addresses their communicative practices and in many ways mocks the empty rhetoric and egocentric forms of communication heard on the porch of Jody’s shop. The narrator condescendingly dismisses the common inability to engage in a dialogue when referring to the gossipy “mule talkers” or their arrogance as “Mouth-Almighty.” Moreover, the novel exposes the selfish mode of talking exemplified in Joe’s “big voice.” On Joe’s deathbed, Janie finally has the nerve to confront him about his egocentrism: “And now you got tuh die tuh find out dat you got tuh pacify somebody besides yo’self if



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you wants any sympathy in dis world. You ain’t tried to pacify nobody but yo’self. Too busy listening tuh yo’ own big voice’” (133). Joe has to die, Janie maintains, because he is domineering and self-absorbed—his big voice allows no space for anybody other than himself.26 His self-righteous and self-centered attitude makes him “uh man dat changes everything, but nothin’ don’t change him” (79). Joe’s communicative ethos suppresses any democratic exchanges. While Joe is an extreme case, Tea Cake is no different. He too refuses to heed Janie’s warnings: “He stunned the argument with half a word. ‘Fix,’ he said and fought his way outside” (237). His rather severe stance ignores her forebodings, leading both of them into the center of a storm that ends his life. On his deathbed, Tea Cake’s authoritarian ethos incites him to order, “Answer me when Ah speak” (271). Tea Cake and Joe are cautionary figures who warn readers of the detrimental and fatal effects of undemocratic forms of communication.27 The inversion of these destructive forms of communication can be found in the dialogue between Pheoby and Janie. Carla Kaplan describes five characteristics of their way of communicating and interacting: sensuality (“mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf”), nurture (Pheoby offers her a plate of rice), protectiveness (“nobody better not criticize yuh in mah hearing”), discursive passivity (the willingness to remain a listener instead of telling her own story), and sympathy (Pheoby’s “hungry listening”; Kaplan, 133). They establish an alternative communicative practice in which no “big voice” prevents the other from entering in and in which nobody monopolizes the conversation. It exemplifies a dialogic verbal interaction based on mutual sympathy as well as an egalitarian method of communication. Hurston tells her readers that attentive listening is critical to understanding a person or a text. The narrative strategy aims to affect the reader just as Pheoby is transformed by listening to Janie’s experiences: Pheoby “growed ten feet higher jus’ from listenin’” and plans to change oppressive aspects of her own marriage to approximate gender equality in her life. Perhaps the most important message of Their Eyes lies in the framing dialogue that foregrounds the sympathy of Pheoby’s “hungry listening.” Their Eyes invites the reader to become a deep listener, attentive to the concerns of the other and eager to understand instead of engaging in hyperbolic and empty rhetoric. Thus, the novel’s critique of blackness mocks those who “consolate theyselves wid talk” amounting to no more than “uh hill uh beans.” just as it scorns those who have “their tongues cocked and loaded” (285). Throughout the novel, the affirmation and celebration of authentic folk culture is counterbalanced by its subtle social critique. Among the few critics who have pointed to this duality is Leif Sorensen. In his view,



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Their Eyes “simultaneously shows the destructive influence of class, gender, and ethnicity on black southern rural culture and expands the codes of that same culture to critique itself ” (Sorensen 5). Sorensen highlights the novel’s defense of folk authenticity and its coexistence with a potent criticism of chauvinist folk culture. This duality is at the heart of what he calls “Hurston’s alternative modernism.” What is part of that alternative (or as I would call it, vernacular) modernism is closely related to the value Hurston puts on undermining received binaries. Her social protest fiction of African American life in the South affirms an opposition between the dominant American culture and rural authentic life in the muck, but at the same time its critique of blackness undermines that separation. Black folks, in many ways, are no better than white folks. Its resounding social critique transforms the coming-of-age format as it formulates a complex portrait of the negative aspects of the culture it presumably appraises. John Callahan explores this exact quality when he argues, “Their Eyes Were Watching God dissolves the hard lines of voice and idiom, gender, class, and color into a vernacular mosaic of language and experience” (142). He proposes that this vernacular text—as all vernacular literature should— goes beyond a binary logic. Christine Levecq also comments on Hurston’s implicit critique of dualisms saying, “Instead of offering binary oppositions and inverting them, she [Hurston] actually challenges binary opposition as a system of representation and offers a ‘proliferation of difference that dialogically prevents the dominance of any one difference’” (92). Indeed, the novel plays with such established hierarchies as male versus female, low versus high class, and black versus white. It would be wrong to assume that its many differences argue for a moral relativism. Their Eyes is, after all, a novel with a politics in view, its values unmistakably clear. Additionally, they overlap with Huckleberry Finn’s politics, as its main protagonists are also trying to approximate a more egalitarian relationship. Whereas Huckleberry Finn concentrates on race relations, Their Eyes focuses on gender and relationships between men and women. Both novels were initially repudiated for the values they endorsed. At the time of publication, contemporary reviews of Their Eyes dismissed it on the grounds that it lacked what “serious fiction” provides because it was too sensory and sensual, and because it was seen as playing into white exoticism. In his review “Between Laughter and Tears,” Richard Wright dismisses “the sensory sweep of her novel[, which] carries no theme, no message, no thought.”28 The beauty and value of Their Eyes is that it introduces readers to the vernacular process through individual characters as well as larger collective



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developments. But again, this does not lead to an embracing of indeterminacy or arbitrariness. Their Eyes ridicules social inequalities and sympathizes with the outsider, Janie. It ridicules undemocratic and inhumane ways of talking and interacting. In contrast to Huckleberry Finn, Their Eyes has a very clear narrative structure: there are three male protagonists (Logan, Joe, and Tea Cake), three settings (West Florida, Eatonville, and the Everglades), and three socioeconomic spheres (competitive capitalism, monopoly capitalism, and late capitalism).29 Furthermore, it is structured by three key metaphors (the tree, the mule, and the horizon). In this way, Their Eyes transcends a binary structure by interweaving textual threads into a triadic vernacular mosaic, and in so doing, it subscribes to a logic similar to that of Huckleberry Finn. Both novels offer an insider’s perspective into a world as well as its value system and criticize conformity and perceived injustices without falling prey to overly moralistic writing. Sofi’s World: Surviving Injustice(s) in the Borderlands Sofi is the vernacular hero of Ana Castillo’s So Far from God. She is a single mother raising and supporting four children. As a single parent, the fictional character Sofi represents one million female-headed Latino households in the United States.30 Fifty-two percent of those families live in poverty, but Sofi owns a butcher shop and manages to keep all six members of the family afloat. In addition to the four girls, Sofi’s husband Domingo, who had previously abandoned her only to return a year later, is also in the home. Of the three novels discussed in this book, So Far from God is perhaps the most explicit about its political intentions and vernacular values. Like Their Eyes, it is a novel about female resistance to male domination. In this case the novel openly addresses gender politics in the Mexican American context in the hope of dismissing the “pervasive stereotype of Chicanas as passive individuals victimized by oppression or subordinated by a patriarchical church” (Delgadillo 888). According to the Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art, Ana Castillo is “one of the earliest Chicana voices to articulate a sexual politics through textual politics” (Candelaria 146). The textual politics, as it were, promote a feminist agenda; So Far from God illustrates forms of female oppression and subordination as well as the ways in which Chicanas respond to these detriments.31 The literary critic Carmela Delia Lanza maintains that the novel is “infused with political resistance. It is a place where women of color have an opportunity to grow and develop spiritually and politically” (Lanza, “Hearing Voices” 66).32



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The character development of the five female protagonists plays a pivotal role in the narrative, each one presenting a dialectic of female victimization and empowerment. All of them are victims at one point or another, and each finds ways to cope with the experience of pain, loss, and injustice. Caridad—the rape victim—uses spirituality for her own personal healing, eventually learning to heal others. Fe, who suffered because her fiancé’s inability to commit, finds a man who is able to appreciate her. The career-driven Esperanza—the most successful character—becomes the victim of a governmental skirmish. La Loca, who resists any subjugation by avoiding human contact, falls victim to a sexually transmitted disease. Sofi—the powerful matriarch and backbone of her family—is confronted with a mother’s worst nightmare: she outlives all her children. The novel’s vernacular politics, however, exceed obvious gender politics because they address a wide range of sociopolitical problems. Reading So Far from God, one can hardly ignore the critique of capitalism and its attendant environmental politics. Furthermore, the bizarre ways in which Sofi’s daughters die are inextricably related to political, social, economic, and environmental realities. Therefore, Castillo’s seemingly naïve novel is a prime example of a “literature with a politics in view,” to quote Leo Marx’s definition of the vernacular. The novel’s proposed vernacular values are blatantly obvious. The key values of the novel are patently expressed in the allegorically named protagonists: Faith (Fe), Hope (Esperanza), Charity (Caridad), Wisdom (Sofia), and Happiness (doña Felicia). In this act of naming, Castillo points to the significance of predominantly Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. As mentioned earlier, her novel confirms the imperative postulated in the New Testament: “Abideth faith, hope, charity these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:13).33 Following this biblical ethos, Caridad assumes a privileged role in the narrative. While Sofi stands for wisdom, she also embodies caritas because of her motherly love toward her daughters within her home as well as her devotion to her fellow citizens in the fictional town of Tome. Captured in these abstract terms are shared values that are both Christian and universal. To have faith in God, to love thy neighbor, and to hope for salvation either on earth or in the next world are crucial demands in most religious as well as humanitarian value systems. The fourth value, wisdom, is also universal, but since it presupposes acumen, good judgment, and a rich knowledge, it varies culturally and historically. As the Latin term philosophia suggests, wisdom relates to—and relies on—a particular philosophy. The name of Sofi’s youngest daughter, La Loca Santa (The Crazy Saint), represents the antithesis to conventionally defined



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wisdom because La Loca personifies the irrational, which figures so prominently in Castillo’s magico-realism.34 In most societies, madness is not valued but exorcized to maintain (rational) order. As discussed in Chapter 2, the worldview captured in So Far from God allows for the fusion of the rational and the irrational, the blending of the real and the surreal. Thus, it follows that La Loca is added to the pantheon of characters named for virtues. Doña Felicia personifies a value that is cherished in most societies, but since she is a healer using indigenous medicine to cure people, the pursuit of happiness in this case leads to spirituality and charity. By serving as a spiritual mentor for Caridad and training her to become a healer herself, Felicia facilitates happiness. Given the politics of naming in this novel, it is surprising that none of the male protagonists (Domingo, Rúben, Tom, Casimiro, Francisco) signify values or virtues. The path toward personal or social perfection—to riff on Ellison’s definition of the vernacular—is inevitably connected to the struggle of abiding by the universal ideals of faith, hope, charity, wisdom, and happiness. However, as I suggested in the opening of this chapter, vernacular values express principles and beliefs that are subordinate to the dominant value system. Given that the values lauded in So Far from God are common fare within most religious traditions and moral standards, they do not qualify as vernacular values. This raises the question of whether or not So Far from God suggests that the hegemonic value system in the United States is so short on these virtues that they have been pushed to the margins. No, at least not explicitly. In light of this question, taking the epigraph that precedes the narrative into consideration is worthwhile: “‘So Far from God—So near the United States,’ Porfirio Diaz, dictator of Mexico during the Mexican Civil War.” The novel is set in the United States (and not Mexico), which means that America, in other words, is a God-forsaken place. This epigraph warns readers that they will soon be encountering a moral wasteland. It is possible, therefore, to conceive of the five protagonists as messengers of an “alternative” value system. Focusing on five basic virtues, So Far from God does not simply set up role models or virtues that demand emulation. Again, it is more complicated than that. These allegories are not static; they are subject to change. Among the few scholars who have noticed this particular feature is B. J. Manríquez, who has argued that the characters “act out the attribute of the virtue of their names until they experience a catastrophe,” after which point they abandon the personification of these virtues.35 Even worse, the virtue that they each are supposed to embody is—in the end—the very virtue that destroys them. Taking up Manriquez’s observation, a



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close look at each of the characters supports his argument: Caridad dies because Francisco cares too much about her, he is obsessed by her; Fe dies because her naïve faith in the American Dream; Esperanza’s college education no longer embodies hope because she is killed on the job. This parodic and paradoxical dimension is closely linked to the vernacularity of the novel’s textual politics. The allegories presented introduce us to life stories that span the spectrum of Chicano/a subjectivity from cultural assimilation (Fe) and integration (Esperanza) to voluntary separatism (La Loca). On the one end of the spectrum is Fe, who finds happiness in material objects such as “the long-dreamed-of automatic dishwasher, microwave, Cuisinart and the VCR” (SFFG 171). She wants to live the American Dream just like any (middle-class) gringa. Esperanza, who could actually afford a middle-class lifestyle, does not yearn for the trappings of consumer culture. Although she is the most successful member of the family in many ways, she remains skeptical of the American way of life and harbors fond memories of her involvement in the Chicano movement. She does not share Fe’s unsuspecting faith in material values. Her idealism stands in stark contrast to Fe’s materialism. Nevertheless, both sisters integrate themselves into American suburbia to some degree, whereas Caridad, Sofi, and La Loca stay within the regional confines of Tome, New Mexico, with little or no contact with Anglos. Caridad devotes her life to indigenous and spiritual practices and adorns her trailer with pictures of Mexican saints, notably the Virgin of Guadalupe, San Martín Caballero, and El Santo Nino. Sofi devotes her life to help people by improving socioeconomic structures within the community. La Loca concentrates on helping and nursing her sisters and is the farthest removed from any Anglo-American influences. As such, the novel critiques the integrationist model in that the two sisters representing integration die precisely because of their engagement with the white establishment (Fe’s company is run by Anglos; Esperanza, the token Hispanic anchorwoman dies while on assignment for her television station). Their deaths are therefore indictments of “white” America, but not merely in an abstract, metaphorical sense. The text is very explicit about the destructive effects of the dominant white American society. It attributes Esperanza’s death to the U.S. military intervention in Kuwait and the media’s reporting of the Gulf War. Fe dies of exposure to a toxic work environment owned and operated by a high-tech military company. The fictional company Acme International not only fails to protect its employees, but it also lies unabashedly, telling Fe that the chemicals she was using were nothing but “ether.”36 The text goes on to implicate the U.S. government (the FBI and the Attorney General’s office specifically)



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for its failure to assume liability. The judicial system claims it is unable to prosecute because Fe had skin cancer prior to her employment, and the health care system fails her further by exacerbating her condition. The medical staff mistakenly feed a catheter into her head and for ten weeks doctors dismiss her complaints, insisting that her splitting headaches were “all due to stress.” Instead of charging federal institutions for their failures, the narrator relates these grievances with a strong dose of sarcasm when reporting on the “mistakes” that the health care and legal systems made. Commenting on Fe’s discovery that Acme knowingly withheld the information that she was surrounding by highly toxic acids, the narrator plainly says, “Fe, as you can guess, was no longer in the mood to play Acme’s star worker” (188), thus mocking her apparent simple-mindedness along with that of workers who are seen as complicit in their own exploitation. Fe trusts her employer and ignores all symptoms, including a miscarriage. Although Fe feels that there is “something eerie and full of coincidences about it all,” as the narrator observes sarcastically, “she kept working right through the headaches that by then were part of her daily routine” (181). When Fe, the loyal worker, finally realizes that “something was definitely not right” (185), it is too late. She dies shortly after the diagnosis. The novel imputes a capitalist system that exploits and even kills people in the interest of profit while workers remain loyal and docile.37 Given its acerbic critique of American capitalism, the assumption that Fe’s death “illustrates the future awaiting a woman and a community who buy into the consumerist American Dream” (Delgadillo 911), reduces the complexity of its political message. The novel exposes the ruthlessness of capitalism as well as the grievance of environmental injustice. In her essay, “Ecocritical Chicana Literature: Ana Castillo’s Virtual Realism,” Kamala Platt argues that the text draws on the literary genre of social realism to criticize environmental racism. Accordingly, the novel explores the ways in which ecological problems are “tied to sexist, racist, capitalist, and colonialist ideologies” (Platt 154). Castillo’s work therefore contributes to the eco-feminist movement and the political agenda of organizations such as The Mothers of East L.A./Madres Deal Este De Los Angeles, Santa Isabel, People Organized in Defense of the Earth and her Resources, Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, and the umbrella group, Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (155). Castillo openly expresses her solidarity with such political action in her acknowledgments, where she thanks a specific environmentalist group, the Southwest Organizing Project.38 While I find Platt’s point about the underlying eco-critical and feminist agenda convincing, her oxymoronic neologism “virtual realism” is



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not. Platt uses virtual synonymously with fictional without elaborating on the differences inherent to any narrative, but especially to this one. When Platt proposes that Castillo’s novel “borrows from reality to create a fiction that commands its readers to confront the political reality of ‘real life,’” hence a “virtual realism” (154), she presupposes a mimetic model of representation and, more importantly, she ignores the ways in which So Far from God uses irony, parody, and sarcasm to formulate its radical critique of environmental realpolitik in the United States.39 In the chapter tellingly entitled “A Few Random Political Remarks from the Highly Opinionated Narrator,” we learn that “most of the Native and hispano [sic] families throughout the land were living below poverty level, one out of six families collected food stamps” (242).40 Without further commentary, the narrator discusses the effects of the uranium contamination on the Navajo reservation (where many babies are born with brain damage or cancer) to assert that “people all over the land [are] dying from toxic exposure in factories” (242).41 Castillo weaves descriptions of the exploitation of native peoples and their land with a report of the Holy Friday reenactment of Jesus’s crucifixion. This juxtaposition and interweaving of descriptions of Jesus’ death with the deaths of native and Hispanic peoples—as well with the death of the land—imbues this cryptic text passage with a pronounced political message. These “openly political remarks” add to the multitude of denouncements made concerning the political realities and injustices found within the United States. Among them is a sharp critique of sexual violence, which occurs in the United States “at the rate of one every three or four minutes” as Castillo herself stated in an interview (Castillo, “La Macha” 33). The accounts of the rape and death of Caridad, caused by Francisco’s homophobia, criticize the structural violence in a society governed by patriarchal values.42 After her miraculous recovery, Caridad’s decision to become a lesbian means that she chooses female lovers to escape that violence, but it also insinuates that she has been forced to overcome her internalized homophobia. This process is symbolized by her year-long hermitage in a cave, after which she finally comes out into the world. The fact that her relationship with Esmeralda tragically ends in mutual suicide might suggest that in a heterosexist society, women who love women have nowhere to go. Last but not least, La Loca’s death raises awareness about the increasing number of women infected with HIV. It is a fictional response to the alarming political reality that although Latinas constitute only about 8.6 percent of the female population, they account for “20.4 percent of reported female AIDS cases in this country,” asserts Castillo in her collection of essays Massacre of the Dreamers.43



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Of Fatal Endings and New Beginnings; Of Personal Losses and Political Gains: Social Perfection in So Far from God Although all her beloved daughters pass away, Sofi does not despair. Instead of succumbing to depression, she keeps her spirits high by focusing her energy on improving the living conditions of her fellow citizens in Tome. What starts out as a silly idea (such as Sofi’s desire to become the mayor of Tome) eventually transforms the sluggish town. Sofi organizes a sheep-grazing, wool-weaving enterprise and organic food co-ops, establishes low-interest loans for small businesses, and puts together a community group to fight Tome’s drug problem. These projects survive in the face of adversity, and she succeeds in establishing democratic forms of self-government as well as economic structures run “by and for the people.” The unemployment rate in Tome drops, the number of college graduates increases, and the antidrug campaign saves lives. Overall, “the morale of Tome had gone up” (148). By encouraging women to broaden their domestic sphere, Sofi is able to actualize this ambitious socioeconomic undertaking.44 Her political activism aims at improving the living conditions in a particular geopolitical space. Hence, Castillo offers a local model for community improvement that empowers her fellow Mexican Americans by initiating social and economic change from the ground up. This grassroots vernacular process is exemplary of Ralph Ellison’s abstract vision of social perfection. Castillo’s Sofi, however, does not stop there. After the heinous deaths of all her children, she decides to empower other mothers who have lost loved ones. Turning her personal loss into a virtue, she founds the “very prestigious (if not elitist) organization M.O.M.A.S., Mothers of Martyrs and Saints” (247). When she starts M.O.M.A.S., Sofi must be in her fifties, given that she has survived her four adult children, one of whom went through college and established a career of her own. What starts in New Mexico, the narrator maintains, grows over Sofi’s “thirty-eight-year presidency into a global movement: M.O.M.A.S.’s annual conferences became ‘a world event.’”45 Her next project as a political organizer therefore moves beyond the local and regional toward the global. According to its restrictive admission policy, the organization only admits mothers



In light of this array of political criticism that focuses on social, economic, and environmental forms of injustice, So Far from God amounts to a vernacular mosaic of political issues. Apart from these critiques of deplorable conditions, the novel’s vernacular politics envision a more just sociopolitical environment within reach.

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whose daughters or sons had performed miracles or were considered saints during their lifetimes; thus, Sofi’s organization is restricted to women.46 When comparing M.O.M.A.S. with another global organization, the male-dominated Catholic Church, the novel’s gender politics fall just short of advocating a matriarchal utopia. In typical Castillo style, the text satirizes its global expansion, mocking the commercialization that takes hold of this grassroots organization (the popularity of M.O.M.A.S. souvenirs, T-shirts, tarot decks, and other gadgets such as automatic writing pens). Once again, the satirical remarks counterbalance the political or feminist message. Nevertheless, Sofi undeniably undergoes a remarkable development. Her career as a political organizer coincides with a move from the domestic sphere (home) to the public sphere (Tome), from the local to the national, and ultimately, to the global community (M.O.M.A.S.). While Sofi’s stamina and resilience seem almost unreal, her incredible life story conveys an important message. She lives up to her name, since she embodies a knowledge that joins the pragmatic with the political. During her career as a political activist, she takes the long road to Ellison’s “social perfection” and succeeds in empowering others. She uses her maternal and nurturing tendencies for the benefit of a larger end goal. In contrast to the Latino idealization of motherhood—one of selfless nurturing and subordination—Castillo’s narrative politicizes the stereotype of the compassionate mother. The vernacular hero personifies this pursuit of social ideals and shows that this enterprise is a process. In short, the novel’s gender politics join an explicit critique of social, environmental and economic injustice. So Far from God promotes democratic forms of self-government, including local and global forms of female political activism, but the novel’s most radical political critique, perhaps, lies in its subversion of a dualistic logic—the sine qua non of any oppressive political system. Knowledge Production in the Borderlands: Unlearning Dichotomies and Tolerating Ambiguity So Far from God criticizes rigid dualistic thinking based on either/or binaries. Allowing for the simultaneity of mutually exclusive entities, its deconstructionist message is the logical counterpart to its polyvocal narrative structure. The novel gets to the very core of the Mexican American cultural identity by deconstructing the fundamental opposition between the whore (La Chinganda/La Malinche) and the good mother (the Virgin of Guadalupe/Tonantzin). Although the Virgin of Guadalupe is mentioned only a few times, the novel at one point likens Caridad to the



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patron saint of Mexico.47 While it seems logical that the book’s allegorical figure representing charity is aligned with the loving mother goddess, this analogy is also simueltaneously blasphemous given that Caridad was once known as la puta. This contradiction comprises only one small aspect of the overall unruly and perhaps deconstructionist potential of So Far from God. While most readers familiar with Chicano or Mexican cultural history know about the extraordinary symbolic value of the Virgin of Guadalupe, I would like to take this opportunity to briefly outline the events of December 9, 1531 and the narrative of Maria “Coatlalopeuh.”48 On that day, Coatlalopeuh (which is homophonous to the Spanish Guadalupe) appeared to Juan Diego, a poor Indian, at a hill outside of Mexico City known as the place of worship of the Aztec goddess, Tonantzín. Once a local and indigenous saint, the Virgin later became the patroness of New Spain after Pope Pius XII declared her to be “Our Lady of Guadalupe.” As such, the religious (indigenous and then Catholic) icon also became a symbol of colonialism. The significance of this holy figure does not end there. During the Mexican Revolution, she served as a national symbol in Mexico’s fight for independence.49 During the 1960s her image was used in connection with political battles in the United States, appearing on flags at the United Farm Workers and the Delano strikes. In the 1980s she appeared transformed into a self-assertive modern Chicana in the visual arts.50 In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of Chicana feminists reclaimed the Virgin to empower women and Chicana lesbians, thus turning her into a symbol for Chicana feminism (Trujillo 226). Moreover, she became a popular icon widely disseminated on T-shirts, key chains, bumper stickers, mouse pads, and so on. Apart from being omnipresent in Mexican as well as American mass culture, during the 1990s the Virgin was also the subject of critical debates taken up within academia, specifically in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies.51 Castillo herself deemed this figure so important that she published a volume on the Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. All of this serves to show how the Virgin of Guadalupe has been venerated in the Americas for more than five centuries. Millions of visual representations and holy images of the Virgin have circulated in the Americas and throughout the world. Over time, the Virgin has figured in religious (Catholic), (Mexican) nationalist, (Chicano) political, (Chicana) feminist, and mass cultural contexts. The icon has gained prominence in the arts, literature, popular culture, and, to some extent, in academia; given these multiple symbolic functions, the icon helps to construct a distinctly Chicano/Mexican American identity. What began as a story told by a



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poor Indian expanded its local and national boundaries and now exerts influence on a global level. Today, the Virgin of Guadalupe is omnipresent in sculpture, painted, printed, and tattooed form, both offline and on the Web. One can hardly underestimate the polyfunctional value of the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose virtues come to bear through a contrast with the (negative) figure of La Malinche. The mother goddess, the Virgin of Guadalupe represents positive nurturing qualities such as unselfishness, purity, chastity, gentleness, passivity, and submission. Her unwavering love has made her the patron saint and protector of a conquered people. “The secret life of the mestizo oscillates between La Chingada and Tonantzín/Guadalupe,” writes the cultural historian Jacques Lafaye (15). If this dichotomy shapes the collective imagination of mestizos, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans, it is instructive to briefly elaborate on the figure of La Malinche/Malintzín also known as La Chingada—the impure, raped, but powerfully destructive woman—as well. Traditionally, Mexicans and Mexican Americans think of her as a traitor to her people. The well-known Mexican folk legend La Llorona tells the story of this mythological figure.52 With the significance of La Llorona in the Americas, it is not surprising that the story about her misery and continuous weeping is mentioned twice in So Far from God: But no one had ever told Loca the legend of La Llorona. The Weeping Woman astral-traveled all throughout old Mexico, into the United States, and really anywhere people lived, wailing, in search of her children whom she drowned so as to run off with her lover. For that God punished her forever on earth. (160) Just like a country changed its name, so did the names of their legends change. Once, La Llorona may have been Matlaciuatl, the goddess of the Mexica who was said to prey upon men like a vampire! Or she might have been Ciuapipiltin, the goddess in flowing robes who stole babies from their cradles and left in their place an obsidian blade, or Cihuacoatl, the patron of women who died in childbirth, who all wailed and wept and moaned in the night air. (161)

Remarkably, these passages suggest that the woman who committed infanticide may have been a loving mother. This outrageous claim contradicts the commonly held assumption that opposes the good, nurturing mother (the Virgin) and the bad, destructive, suffering mother (La Llorona).53 With poetic license, this passage links La Llorona to indigenous goddesses (Matlaciuatl, Ciuapipiltin, and Cihuacoat) best known for their aggressive behavior, to suggest that these negative figures might not be so horrific after all. The narrator goes as far as to suggest, “La Llorona



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in the beginning (before men got in the way of it all) may have been nothing short of a loving mother goddess” (163). Going far beyond merely undermining the established moral hierarchy, the narrator blames “men” for introducing this binary in the first place. In addition to being responsible for binary modes of thinking within the novel, the male characters are presented with mostly negative traits. They are unreliable (Domingo, Rúben, Tom), strange (Casimiro), or dangerous (Francisco). Domingo, unable to support the family, even gambles away Sofi’s patrimony; Tom is incapable of committing himself to marrying Fe; Rubén, unable to give Esperanza the love she desires, exploits her economically. While Casimiro is probably the most likable male character, he “had acquired the odd affliction of bleating” (175). The priest is an interesting case. When witnessing La Loca’s resurrection, Father Jerome exclaims: “Is this an act of God or Satan . . . Are you the devil’s messenger or a winged angel?” (23). He is so overwhelmed that he can only think in either/or oppositions, to which Sofi reproaches, “Don’t you dare start this backward thinking against her” (23). In other words, her kind of knowledge production and wisdom is progressive in the sense that it acknowledges the coexistence of seeming opposites as well as the dynamic nature of thinking.54 Castillo rejects the casting of women into the puta/virgen dichotomy as a male-dominated means of enforcing the traditional gender image of women as asexual, nurturing, selfless, and submissive. Her portrayal of Sofi as brave and politically active coincides with her endeavor to promote women-identified values. In her book Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, Castillo elaborates on her brand of Chicana feminism, xicanisma, and her strategy to overcome the sexism that dominates religious and Chicano nationalist discourses. Her approach resonates with Gloria Anzaldúa’s feminism, invested in a progressive, nonessentialized, “mestiza consciousness.” Both reclaim the Virgin of Guadalupe and both emphasize her pre-Columbian origin. Anzaldúa relates her to the Nahuatl deity, Coatlalopeuh, and to the Aztec goddesses Tonantsi and Coatlicue to promote an indigenous-inspired feminist mestiza consciousness at odds with logocentric and patriarchic structures.55 To achieve this mestiza consciousness and transcend a Manichean logic, “the first step is to unlearn the puta/virgen dichotomy and to see Coatlalopeuh-Coatlicue in the mother, Guadalupe” (106).56 In her attempt to deconstruct dichotomous thinking, Anzaldúa uses Coatlicue as a “symbol of the fusion of opposites: the eagle and the serpent, heaven and the underworld, life and death, mobility and immobility, beauty and horror” (69).57 This indigenously inspired mestiza consciousness boldly embraces ambiguity.



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The vision behind Anzaldúa’s politics drives So Far from God. The structure of the novel—polyvocal, paradoxical, and pluralist—demands a tolerance for both ambiguity and narrative complexity. A number of strange and peaceful bedfellow are found therein: fact and fantasy, irony and tragedy, cardinal values and change. So Far from God unites culturally distinct aspects of Mexican American identity while acknowledging the plurality of Chicana identity. In contrast to the traditional view that casts women into the false opposition of puta/virgen, So Far from God presents an array of femininities that are as diaphanous as women themselves: the asexual single (La Loca); the heterosexual, notoriously single professional (Esperanza); the happily married, submissive wife (Fe); and the homosexual Caridad. Caridad remains perhaps the most opaque, since she combines three diverse identities: once known as la puta, she later becomes both saint and lesbian. The values underlying So Far from God, in other words, gesture toward a world far away from rigid or binary modes of thought and value. By embracing inclusion over exclusion, and by foregrounding multiplicity and diversity, the novel contributes to a larger project. Castillo once openly expounded on her universal goal: “I’m looking for a broader vision for us as a humanity . . . that cultural diversity they talk about in the universities is another word for tolerance. But it’s not, for me, eventually about tolerance, it’s for us to become human beings. But we can’t be there yet. So what we have to do first [as we are doing], by way of MECha and by way of calling our literature Chicana literature, is to gain certain kind of respect that we deserve, that we need to have acknowledged” (Castillo 151, 113). To gain respect is the first step, to unlearn dualistic thinking the second, and the final is to establish a differential consciousness and ultimately an understanding of humanity that exceeds a tolerance for cultural diversity. Castillo wants to redefine, from the margins, what it means to be human. To conclude my reading of So Far from God as a superior example of the vernacular tradition in U.S. American literature, I would simply reiterate the point that this novel, usually read as exemplary of regional, Chicano, or ethnic fiction, promotes decidedly political and moral values. It values “Chicanoness” while remaining critical of certain trends within Chicano culture. Like Twain and Hurston before, Castillo links sympathy to criticism. These vernacular texts promote collective self-worth as well as an alternative value system. With this in mind, the point I set out to make crystallizes quite clearly: across the vernacular tradition—which brings together the regional, the canonical, and the critical—the ideal of social perfection looms large. Going to the vernacular territory has, as such, led to a new understanding of American literature.



Vernacular Values




Transformative Comparisons Very important work, when you thought about it. —Ana Castillo

One striking characteristic of vernacular literature is the mutually dependent interrelationship between aesthetics and politics at work in it: vernacular literature always talks about values, and it does so in a speakerly tone. Of course, most literary texts have a political dimension that is linked to formal features, but vernacular texts often take a stance on social issues, be they slavery or ecological disaster, and articulate their political message. This colloquial and decidedly lyrical prose draws attention to its orality, such that diction and timbre are crucial to the aesthetic appeal of vernacular literature. What Their Eyes Were Watching God, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and So Far from God share, first and foremost, is a language that is spoken. In the novels, the narrator either speaks in dialect (Huckleberry Finn), the narrating alternates between standard English and dialect (Their Eyes Were Watching God), or it combines English and Spanish (So Far from God). The substandard language in vernacular literature has its roots in oral storytelling traditions primarily associated with marginalized people and is often, therefore, dismissed as inferior. As such, its very vocabulary is inherently political. The vernacular tradition is perhaps best defined as a “literature with a politics in view,” (Marx), but far from being propagandistic or overly didactic, vernacular texts do not flaunt their political message. Their narrative structure is always chaotic, makeshift, and complex: one encounters the episodic, fragmented structure of Huckleberry Finn and the seemingly linear but intricate triadic narrative structure of Their Eyes. While Their Eyes playfully blurs the line that separates the factual and the poetic, So Far from God radically fuses the real and the magical. We encounter a



CONCLUSION


binary textual logic in Twain’s novel (raft vs. shore, genteel vs. vernacular values, etc.), a triadic structure in Hurston’s (three marriages, three leitmotifs, three settings, etc.), and a multifaceted and multivocal structure in Castillo’s novel. Each of these models of structuring conveys a political message in a more or less compact way, adding a healthy dose of humor (Twain), symbolism (Hurston), or parody (Castillo). Written from what is often constructed as a marginal or substandard point of view, vernacular texts offer an insider’s perspective. Instead of lamenting the lack of recognition a marginalized people receives, these texts celebrate what is culturally specific. They value—and even flaunt—their difference. Thus, they offer a glimpse into a world that may well be otherwise unfamiliar. In these cases the fictional worlds are set in the swamps of Florida, on the banks of the Mississippi, and in the scorching heat of the Southwest. Although vernacular texts are not necessarily written in the first person, their narrative perspectives convey a sense of directness and immediacy, closing the space between the reader and the text. Readers enter unknown, regional territories through an aesthetic experience of belonging to the narrator’s world. Although entering a space both unfamiliar and imaginary is characteristic of fiction in general, it is particularly vivid in the examples discussed herein. Close analyses have shown that vernacular voices speak to the reader in intriguing ways: the orality enticing readers to explore structures of feelings that originate in another symbolic order. Colloquial and oral aesthetics enable narrative voices to produce a striking timbre and rhythm, what may well be termed the sound of fiction. In the act of reading vernacular literature, as shown throughout this study, one is caught between simultaneous desires to both decode the nonstandard language and be absorbed by its sound. The reading tempo might be andante or adagio, the tone and rhythm harmonious or offbeat, either way vernacular literature always has an unmistakable ring to it. This sonic dimension prolongs the act of reading and facilitates a mode of reception in which the reader approaches the text with caution—and inevitably becomes a listener. We enjoy its vivid sound while parsing its meaning, thereby becoming increasingly sensitive to the sound of fiction. The talkative, speakerly style functions as a bait that reels its reader into the text to the point of total absorption and radically heightened perception. In the act of reading vernacular literature, the reader unwittingly learns attentive listening. Engagement with a vernacular text is in many ways comparable to the activity of listening in on a conversation. In “Metaphysics of Youth” Walter Benjamin aptly described the ideal communicative interaction: “The listener holds true language in readiness; the words enter him, at the same time he sees the speaker” (7). To Benjamin, it is the listener instead of the speaker who constructs meaning since



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the listener provides what he calls “the unappropriated source of meaning” [“ungefaßte Quelle des Sinns,” trans. S. L.] (6). Benjamin’s abstract account of the interdependency between the speaker and the listener helps explain readers’ responses to vernacular literature. Through its accessible, simple, melodious, speakerly style, the text allows the reader to “see” the vernacular characters in the text and at the same time revel in its complex, compacted meaning. With this in mind, it’s no wonder these texts come across as honest and natural. They appear “authentic” because of their sound, but obviously, rather than coming naturally, the vernacular is the product of painstaking artistry by which certain narrative techniques enhance the oral dimension. Much has been written about reception aesthetics, but the effects of sonic literature on the reader have remained virtually unexplored.1 My interpretations have demonstrated, or rather amplified, the specific vernacular voice(s) of these three novels. Even though these narratives are rooted in a local, culturally specific setting, perspective, and language, they are far more than mere imitations of “local” life. They articulate regional challenges to received and most times standard literary conventions while also gesturing toward a broader vision of humanity. Furthermore, although these narratives are culturally biased, mostly praising the minority culture of the author, they are not engaged in identity politics. Obviously, the narrative politics enacted by the protagonists relates to their objection to racism (Huck), sexism (Janie), homophobia (Caridad), and classism (Sofi), yet there is more to this picture than initially meets the eye. All of these novels share an interest and concern for equality, that is, democratic and egalitarian ways of interacting. Janie yearns for a heterosexual relationship based on equality, Huck struggles to establish an egalitarian relationship with Jim across racial divides, and Sofi attempts to implement socioeconomic justice and class egalitarianism. This arguably naïve yearning to undo the social, economic, and gender hierarchies that are fundamental to American society, however, does not necessarily lead to a self-aggrandizing celebration of one’s own marginal culture. These texts are highly self-critical of hierarchies within their respective communities: hypocrisy, cruelty, and ignorance in Twain; resentment, self-centeredness, and empty rhetoric in Hurston; and patriarchy, naïveté, and homophobia in Castillo. While these novels attempt to promote alternative value systems, they speak at the same time to the conflicting pulls of social conformity and private longing. Huck has to curb his urges to accommodate prescribed social norms. Since the teenage Huck is not yet corrupted by the dominant value system, he dares to resist conforming to the received social order. Coincidentally, however, the novel clearly demonstrates the faltering and ambiguous nature of his moral development. In line with Ralph Ellison’s definition of the vernacular process,



Transformative Comparisons


Twain’s novel reveals the dynamic and pragmatic nature of Huck’s emerging vernacular value system. Their Eyes resolves this dialectic with sensitivity to differentiated socioeconomic positions by proposing that Janie can be loyal to her people as well as to her personal and sexual desires. Janie’s long road to self-actualization leads her to value her autonomy and to engage in more democratic forms of interaction. So Far from God offers a myriad of subject positions: the conformist Fe, the professional formerly political activist Esperanza, the promiscuous-turned-spiritual Caridad, La Loca, and the mother of them all, Sofi. The cardinal virtues of faith, hope, and charity, as well as the two flanking pillars of wisdom (Sofi) and irrationality (La Loca) stake out the value system of So Far from God. Again, the novel emphasizes the shifting and makeshift character of the vernacular. In that sense, the vernacular denotes a process that is nonlinear, ad hoc, and even chaotic. The aesthetic accomplishment of these texts is inextricable from their fictional worlds, which strongly oppose the norms and moral standards of their time. When Huckleberry Finn was published, Huck’s nongenteel behavior violated the contemporary standards of social acceptability; his irreverent, blasphemous conduct, however, enjoyed a certain credibility in the realm of fiction. Likewise, most of Hurston’s peers considered Janie’s pursuit of personal and sexual fulfillment inappropriate, but following the sexual revolution of the 1970s, her book became a model of gender as well as sexual emancipation for future generations of black female readers. Sofi’s world provides the most unequivocal political commentary on social and economic structures in America. Time will tell what aspect of her message anticipates future developments. Since their politics surpass a simplistic valorization of nonstandard speech or of a marginalized ethnic group, these novels patently extend their reach beyond the category of regionalist literature. In that they speak out against oppression and injustice, they are prime exemplars of a literary tradition that is at once colloquial and political. Each novel combines the political and formal elements in ways that reflect the literary era in which they were written. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Their Eyes Were Watching God represent realist and modernist renderings of vernacular literature. Ana Castillo’s So Far from God offers a postmodern example. Mapped out, these three novels offer protomodern, modern, and postmodern renderings of the vernacular. Vernacular Matters unveils a tradition that has been a part of American literature nearly since its inception and whose formal and political revolutions have thus far been overlooked. I have deliberately refrained from offering a conclusive account of the American vernacular tradition



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because under the aforementioned criteria numerous literary texts could find a home. Depending on the selection of texts, a slightly different version of vernacular literature would come to bear.2 In any case, the textual tradition explored in this study featuring novels authored by Americans of different ethno-racial origins, challenges our received notions of what “American” literature is. It lays bare the contours of a literary tradition that is inherently diverse—aesthetically, regionally, and, of course, culturally. From a European perspective, it is this very quality that makes the vernacular tradition distinctly American.3 Similarities in Difference In the past, American studies, African American studies, and Chicano studies have employed the concept of the vernacular as a term of praise to foreground the value of previously marginalized cultural expressions. This usage has been driven by an inexhaustible desire to empower marginalized ethnic or racial traditions. Given that the novels discussed herein are rooted in three ethnic traditions, this study is, by definition, multi- or polycultural, thus moving beyond the seperatist myopia that binded earlier generations of scholars. Over its thirty years of existence, the debates on multiculturalism—once a battle cry to defeat ethnocentrism—have lost their cutting edge. Nevertheless, multiculturalism and cultural pluralism are not only real, they are necessary and important critical concepts. Scholars, artists, and recently even the President of the United States have moved from the notion of multiculturalism towards post-racial understandings of identity and society. They are challenging static, rigid, and monolythic ways of thinking about race. The agenda that drives this book follows President Obama’s eloquent admonition “that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller our common humanity shall reveal itself ” (“Inaugural Address”). In a global era—as Obama’s romantic vision reminds us— commonalities and overlaps tend to increase. At times when religious, ethnic, regional, sexual, and other differences proliferate, it is high time to discover and acknowledge our common humanity—whatever that means. This acknowledgment, Obama maintains, ushers our generation into a “new era of responsibility.” As academics we know that commonalities are constructed, but should that stop us from grappling with the task of exploring the uncharted terrain of such (invented) commonalities? Gilroy, as I mentioned in the introduction, sets out to explore these fundamental moments marked by overlaps and sameness as he puts forth the concept of a “planetary humanism.” He claims, “We need to consider whether the scale upon which sameness and difference are calculated





might be altered productively so that the strangeness of strangers goes out of focus and other dimension of a basic sameness can be acknowledged and made significant. . . . I will suggest that multicultural ethics and politics could be premised upon an antagonistic, planetary humanism capable of comprehending the universality of our elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other” (4). Gilroy’s fine phrase (“the universality of our elemental vulnerability”) uses the first person plural to suggest that there are universal, or shared, feelings that any discourse on human sufferings and—we might add—human joys should address. Vernacular Matters responds to his call by putting such a humanism into practice in the field of American literary studies.4 Although it avoids the term sameness, this study stresses analogies, overlaps, and similarities between texts otherwise marked by their strangeness. This disclosure of commonalties between three pivotal incarnations of the concept of the vernacular yields to an understanding that is not limited to a specific race or space. It also shows that vernacular literatures share an informal, casual, and seemingly improvised quality across cultures and ages. Ultimately, it is from a focus on their considerable commonalties and similarities that a new model for analyzing American literature emerges. This study serves as a springboard for moving from an ethnicity-based approach toward a focus on thematic and formal similarities. Its cross-cultural perspective reveals asymmetries within these novels as well as similarities between them. This study therefore exceeds older conceptions of difference, which tend toward cultural relativism, ethnic separatism, and cosmopolitanism.5 Vernacular Matters also avoids an antagonistic conception, not to mention the notions of hybridity that are so fundamental to postcolonial studies. Or put another way, it sublates, in a Hegelian sense, the three paradigms of difference discussed in Chapter 1. The antagonistic conception of difference plays a role within the novels analyzed in Vernacular Matters. The individual interpretations disclose, for example, Huck’s objection to genteel culture; the schism between the white jury and the black defendant Janie (plus, the black audience’s detestation of Janie); or the blatant exploitation of Mexican Americans by the dominant (white) society. These hierarchical relations between the prevalent authority and a substandard subject position are crucial to each narrative. However, these antagonisms are not the be-all and end-all; all three texts undermine a binary logic as they draw attention to the dynamic and processual nature of the vernacular. If the notion of hybridity refers to the interdependence between the dominant and the subaltern—and by extension, male and female worlds, and white and black America—it certainly plays a role in all the novels discussed in this book. It is, of course, most notable in Castillo’s narrative



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due in large part to borderlands setting and the Tex-Mex English used in parts of the novel. Whereas received understandings of hybridity define the subaltern vis-à-vis white authority, with its concern for variations of subaltern subjectivity, Vernacular Matters goes one step further. The individual readings have shown that Twain, Hurston, and Castillo point to prevalent differences within their communities. Twain explores different types of masculinity, Hurston reveals socioeconomic differences, and Castillo’s novel introduces its readers to the many ways in which one can be a Chicana. By foregrounding the cultural diversity within each ethnic group, Vernacular Matters engages with those paradigms of difference that emphasize cultural heterogeneity. Likewise, the politics expressed here run the gamut from feminism to environmentalism, the social critiques mocking bigotry as well as normativity. Vernacular Matters contributes to (the small world) of American literary studies by building on the best of postcolonial and American ethnic criticism. It extends received paradigms based on difference, hybridity, diversity, and whiteness to explore alliances and moments of connection. In addition to the acknowledgment of cultural antagonisms, moments of fusion, and heterogenity, Vernacular Matters also explores overlaps among these texts of different cultural backgrounds. By putting these three novels side by side, Vernacular Matters explores similarities in difference; it finds congruent narrative patterns and similar investments in democratic egalitarian ethics. Apart from examining each novel’s vernacular voices and values, Vernacular Matters stresses similarities between the primary texts. By tracing trends both chronologically and cross-culturally across genres (comedy, melodrama, parody) and literary periods (premodern, modern, postmodern), this study finds that the variations of the vernacular are part of a larger literary tradition. The acknowledgment of difference and diversity is only a way station in the search for a vernacular tradition in American literature, in keeping with this, this study has not tried to produce or rectify a new cross-racial synthesis of the vernacular with a capital “V.” In the end, the concept of the American vernacular is greater than the sum of its discrete parts. Although Vernacular Matters rethinks monolithic accounts of American literature and pays homage to the kaleidoscopic heritage of American literature, it does not seek a new consensus in which literatures of many colors peacefully join hands in the formation of a liberal rainbow coalition or a neoconservative flange for the reuniting of America.6 To obsess over difference at the expense of existing overlaps or similarities seems ludicrous. As such, Vernacular Matters in no way cloaks neoconservative notions of liberal pluralism in colorful clothes, rather it transcends the current preoccupation with difference without being color-blind.





With its comparative approach to texts that originate in a variety of ethnic contexts, Vernacular Matters acknowledges the simultaneity of difference and similarity. In this vein, Vernacular Matters differs from those comparativist studies that choose a particular genre as their tertium quid.7 It also differs from studies such as Lee’s Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions, because it chooses two comparative foci: aesthetics and politics.8 Moreover, this comparative approach to the vernacular pays special attention to its dynamic nature. Far from being static, the vernacular has the power to generate new modes of perception both within the texts themselves and as they assessed within the literary canon. Often the designation of what is presumably vernacular about the literature of a given people affirms culturally specific qualities. The vernacular demands that what is native to a particular literary or cultural tradition yields to the emergence of what had once been marginal. In other words, what propels the vernacular is the dynamics of emergence. As a result, a previously marginalized tradition comes forward as the new standard. This renders obsolete any pleas for recognition from benevolent liberals. Twain and Hurston serve as prime examples because their novels were initially ignored or openly dismissed, but within a few decades became widely celebrated works of art. In that light, it is not altogether inconceivable that an approach by that name (vernacular) might one day emerge as dominant in literary criticism. While Vernacular Matters crosses disciplinary lines of Chicano, African American, and American studies, its methodology can be applied across any subculture, discipline, or language—to any literary or cultural texts. In that sense a vernacular paradigm is, by definition, postpartisan. Counterbalancing an exclusive focus on vernacular features within a specific community or literary tradition, this study resists essentialisms or nationalisms of any kind. Searching for similarities and commonalties within a sea of difference engenders a favorable environment for the unexpected. As Ellison projected thirty years ago, the unexpected could turn out to be disastrous or marvelous. One possible outcome might be a new humanism that arises from the perspective of those who have previously been barred from defining (and being defined within) the conditio humana. A search for commonalities breaks ground and leads to the emergence of what future scholars might call a “vernacular humanism.” To get there, we must follow a differential logic, one that acknowledges the transformative repercussions of these similarities found in difference. Vernacular Matters ventures first steps into that yet uncharted territory.



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Introduction 1. Paul Gilroy. Postcolonial Melancholia (2005). See also the debates on “The Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World,”(Morrison, “Guest Column”) in which Toni Morrison uses the first person plural to argue that “art’s appeal is humanistic and helps us think about and recall the ways we are indeed a singular species” (717). Gayatri Spivak’s subsequent discussion of the South African writer Bessie Smith presents a reconfiguration of the role of art and the humanities. The volume’s editor extends this revisionist debate by alluding to the emergence of what he calls neo-humanism. More recently, Spivak refers to herself as a feminist alter-humanist. 2. For other attempts to bridge the separatism see Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas (2002), edited by Dominique Marçais, or Robert Lee’s Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003). His chapter “Landmarks,” brings together four classics of ethnic literature (Ellison, Momaday, Anaya, Kingston), and the chapter entitled “Sites” explores literary representations of the barrio, Harlem, Asia town, and the Reservation. 3. For further discussion on the demand for a comparative approach see pages 34–38. 4. Although Kanake, as it relates to variations in the German language, was initially used in a defamatory, xenophobic manner within Germany, many Turkish and Arabic immigrants within the country have since reclaimed the term, emancipating it from its troubled usage. 5. For a detailed discussion of Jonathan Arac’s assessment, see Chapter 1. 6. None of these literary dictionaries holds an entry on vernacular literature: The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Alex Preminger, ed.); Critical Terms for Literary Study (Frank Lentricchia, ed.); A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms (Quinn); The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms (Peter Childs, ed.). 7. An MLA database search on articles and books that have “vernacular” in their titles produces hundreds of entries. One of them, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England, by Mary E. Fissell (2004), deals with ordinary people’s ideas about reproduction in seventeenth-century England. Again, the vernacular is used to highlight a particular space and time. Moreover, it focuses on “ordinary people” instead of “the elite,” but in this case, the term is applied to ideas about the female body.



Notes

Notes

8. See, for example, Taruskin “Authenticity Now,” which provides an overview of musical vernaculars during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, or “Pursuing Authenticity: The Vernacular Moment in Contemporary American Art” (Sayre). For an account on the difference between racial authenticity and sincerity, see Real Black. Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Jackson). 9. “How should we define vernacular literature?” asked the classicist Martin Hinterberger in 2006, who concluded that “I have no definitive answer. . . . [It] will have to await the completion of the Cambridge Medieval Grammar project.” 10. Marx’s “The Vernacular Traditions in American Literature,” which was originally written to explicate the specific features of American literature to a German audience, first appeared in the German journal Die Neueren Sprachen (1958). Two years later, it was published in the landmark volume Studies in American Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images (1960). 11. For an excellent reconsideration of these early accounts of Twain’s rendering of the vernacular, see Gert Hurm’s Rewriting the Vernacular Mark Twain (2003). 12. The graduate program offered there is composed of eight thematic interdisciplinary foci. According to Winfried Fluck, “It is hard to imagine such a comprehensive approach taken in an American Studies program in the U.S. at the present time, where American Studies has progressively dissolved into programs the study of particular ethnic or gendered groups” (Fluck 75). 13. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the European Union is technically and legally a united body although it lacks a shared language and culture. 14. The editor Dohra Ahmad explained in an interview that her preference for the term vernacular over dialect, patois, or creole is based on her conviction that the notion of the vernacular “gives a sense of neutrality but also encapsulates that movement from something that had been negative to something that’s being really made positive by these authors.” In fact, Vernacular Matters reveals that vernacular literature has the potential for emergence. Vernacular Matters also responds to Ahmad’s challenge that we university professors leave our “little bubbles” to engage texts that are usually not considered together. Her words merit a lengthy quotation: “I am a university professor and we live in these little bubbles where somebody does African American literature and somebody studies colonial literature and someone else might study, for example, Pygmalion and the cockney poetry of Rudyard Kipling, but they don’t all get looked at together.” (cf. Koval; Ahmad).

Chapter 1 1. His lecture was published in Die Neueren Sprachen and reprinted in the groundbreaking anthology Studies in American Culture and in Marx’s collection of essays The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States. Die Neueren Sprachen, Beiheft [N.F.] 3 (1959), 46–57. 2. In this lecture, Marx does not refer to the scene where the raft is hit and destroyed by the steamboat that is so crucial to the argument he makes in The Machine in the Garden (1964). Instead of discussing the impact of industrialization, the



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concept of the vernacular foregrounds the personal and interracial aspect of the raft scene. Similarly, Marx claims that Walt Whitman represents the vernacular not only because of the poetic style of “Song of Myself ” but also because it includes the scene in which the narrator invites a runaway slave into his home to give him a bath and new clothes—a bold political act during the antebellum period. In other words, Whitman and Twain wrote vernacular literature because their informal protomodernist style supported a political (in this case, an abolitionist) statement. Given that Marx hardly made any changes for the 1988 printing of his article, one can only induce that Marx believes that the egalitarian faith of the vernacular and its subversive treatment of race were radical even by late 1980s standards. By the standards of the late 1990s, however, this has been contested as will be discussed later with regard to Jonathan Arac’s objections to Marx’s use of the vernacular. Marx’s work can be seen in the tradition of sociological studies such as Denis W. Brogan’s The American Character (1944), Geoffrey Gorer’s The American People: A Study in National Character (1948), and David Potter’s The People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954). While his approach bears resemblances to celebratory assertions about American exceptionalism, he was neither praising nor flattering American virtues but promoting a leftist politics in the radical tradition, as I will argue. Matthiessen had been Marx’s advisor since his enrollment in the fall of 1937. To understand the idealistic and radical premise underlying Marx’s definition of the vernacular, it is helpful to situate him within the context of “the radical tradition” in American studies, as Günter Lenz has done for Matthiessen. While Lenz does not discuss Marx’s work on the vernacular, I believe that Marx’s engagement with the vernacular is a good example of what Lenz calls “the radical tradition.” This was not a projection on Marx’s part; Matthiessen was subversive and nonconformist in more than one respect. He was one of the few Catholic professors, and in the 1950s, he was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee for his socialist commitments. Not to mention the fact that he was gay. Smith, who was among the earliest scholars to hold a Ph.D. in American Studies (instead of in English literature), was one of the most prominent scholars within the first generation of Americanists. Given his prominent position as a forefather in the field, it is not surprising that he felt compelled to develop and express his ideas on the future of American studies. The question that suggests itself at this point, one which Thomas Claviez has so poignantly raised, is: “Why did he [Twain] out of all authors serve as a starting point for the call to consider extra-textual factors?” (Claviez 211). According to Claviez, Smith privileged Twain because he was “an author of the people.” This observation, of course, hardly substantiates the claim that Twain should serve as a starting point for inventing a socioliterary method for American studies. When this method was later developed into the myth-and-symbol approach, it provided the first real contribution to literary criticism by American studies scholars. It should be remembered, however, that this method originated in an analysis of the vernacular.



Notes

Notes

9. Given that Smith praised Huckleberry Finn for serving as a role model “against conformity and for the autonomy of the individual” (Smith xxix), his research on the vernacular was also politically motivated, especially, if we consider that he made this statement at the height of the McCarthy era. 10. It is not quite clear why Bridgman changed the title. When distinguishing the two terms, he declared the following: “As a fact of usage, vernacular normally appears as a noun and colloquial as an adjective—a helpful distinction to begin with. The vernacular is the substance, the verbal clay to be shaped. One way in which that clay is shaped in speech and in writing is designated colloquial” (ital. R. B., 17). This statement is obviously contradictory, since Bridgman himself repeatedly uses vernacular as an adjective—e.g., he refers to “vernacular words” (22), “vernacular stories” (23), “vernacular life” (24) “vernacular tricks” (25), and “vernacular writing” (25). Moreover, his use of metaphor sits at odds with his assertion “rocks make up the vernacular world—hard, individual, rough, heavy, intractable” (24). The catachresis of solid rocks and shapeable, soft, malleable clay is indicative of his befuddled terminology. 11. Interestingly, Bridgman does not discuss Marx’s seminal essay; he quotes him only once in a passage that is not at all related to the notion of the vernacular. Neither does he mention the work on the vernacular that his Ph.D. supervisor at Berkeley, Smith, had produced. 12. Had Smith and Marx, pivotal players in the early phase of American studies, sustained their interest in the vernacular, they could have established it as a key concept in the field. Henry Nash Smith assumed a unique role, since he was among the first graduate students to be awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard’s newly founded History of American Civilization program. In 1954 he was elected vicepresident of the newly established American Studies Association. As a cofounder of the myth-and-symbol school, he was among those who made a contribution to the field of literary criticism that was considered genuinely “American.” And Marx is “one of the few figures still active who reaches back to the beginnings of organized American studies” (Arac 156). Surprisingly, the work carried out by Smith and Marx on the vernacular was never considered important. 13. Among the many “vernacular masterpieces” (14) that the pioneers or later American engineers and architects created was the muley-saw mill, the Corliss Engine, and an architectural style exemplified by buildings such as Raymond Hood’s Chicago Tribune Tower. Kouwenhoven also includes artistic expression (jazz) among the “purely vernacular” (257). 14. His assertions respond to received accounts of technological history that ignore America’s contribution to the history of technology before the twentieth century, and to claims that critics of American art and culture mostly ignored vernacular expressions, i.e., objects made by common people. 15. His list of quintessentially American things includes the skyscraper, the Model T Ford, jazz, the Constitution, Mark Twain’s writing, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, comic strips, soap operas, assembly-line production, and chewing gum (Kouwenhoven 42). Obviously, one could just as well think of many other objects that qualify as distinctively American, such as Levi’s jeans, baseball,



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the Golden Gate Bridge, Coca-Cola, minstrel shows, drive-in movie theaters, popcorn, or McDonalds. Since Kouwenhoven’s inventory is so vast—including objects of high and popular art, a political structure, a building, a car, and African American music—he never clearly defines this assumed common American denominator. While Marx and Smith located the nongenteel tradition of American literature in Twain, they were perhaps not inclined to ground America’s national literature in such “crude” figures as Davy Crockett. In one of the rare instances in which Baker explicitly uses the term vernacular, he calls Dunbar “a brilliant energetic craftsman of the vernacular” because he “gestures towards what I call ‘a blues book most excellent’” (115). This tautological formulation uses the term vernacular indeterminately. The linkage to the blues, so it seems, is just a way to turn it into a term of praise. When Baker claims that Ellison chooses “the railroad way-station as his topos for the American ‘little man,’” he distorts Ellison’s cautionary tale, since Ellison’s essay is not concerned with the railroad way-station, nor with the common or “little” man, rather it is about his teacher’s reminder to “always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room of the Chehaw Station, because in this country, there is always a little man hidden behind the stove” (Ellison 4). By that he meant that there was always someone judging one’s performance even in the most remote of places such as Chehaw Station. Ellison used that image as a metaphor of the general American audience: “The little man draws upon the uncodified Americanness of experience,” he writes (7). Baker puts high demands on his colleagues: “The task of present-day scholars is to situate themselves inventively and daringly at the crossing sign in order to materialize vernacular faces. If scholars are successful, their response to literature, criticism, and culture in the United States will be as wonderfully energetic and engrossing as the response of the bluesman Sonny Terry to the injunction of his guitar-strumming partner Brownie McGhee. Brownie intones: ‘Let me hear you squall, boy, like you never squalled before!’ The answer is a whooping, racing, moaning harmonic stretch that takes one’s breath away, invoking forms, faces and places whose significance was unknown prior to the song’s formidable inscriptions” (Baker 202–3). His cryptic manifesto does not define the scholarly equivalent to the whooping, racing, and moaning harmonic stretch. Gates’ rhetorical question, “And what do we make of the relation between the black vernacular tradition and the black formal tradition, as these inform the shape of a black text?” (Gates, Black Literature 3), presupposes that African American literature is the synthesis of vernacular and formal styles. Gates explicitly says that “[the vernacular] informs and becomes the foundation for formal black literature” (xxii), and he also believes that “the vernacular is the source from which black theory springs” (92). In an interview, Gates was asked, “Does ‘signifying’ differ from so-called ‘mainstream’ intertextuality?” to which he admitted the tenuousness of his argument: “It doesn’t: all texts talk to some other text or set of texts, so that the process of



Notes

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intertextuality is not inherently different for us than for other people. What’s curious for us, though, is how many black authors ground their texts in other texts by African Americans” (450). The claim that black American authors tend to draw more on other black authors, than, for example, French authors draw on other French authors, is not convincing. Claiming intertextuality as a black characteristic serves primarily strategic functions because it provides a structural principle for Gates to construct a black vernacular literary criticism. In the 1990s, Gates confessed that The Signifying Monkey “reeks of New Haven. It is very much a Yale late seventies and early eighties kind of book” (Gates 448). The apologetic tone does not diminish Gates’s effort, like that of Baker before him, to invent a sophisticated, “genuinely” African American literary criticism by borrowing from, and signifying on, deconstructionist criticism. Likewise Charles Frye argued that in the early 1980s the study of African American literature “received expanding legitimacy through the recent efforts by Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Arnold Rampersad, and Margaret Walker” (Frye 23). In its wake, a growing number of black critics (e.g., Mary Helen Washington, Hortense Spillers, Michael Cooke, Robert O’Meally) made important theoretical contributions to the field of literary criticism. It says, “Black Literature and Literary Theory is of the first importance, not only for scholars of black literature, but also for literary critics and theorists in the traditional fields of Western literature” (W. Mitchell, University of Chicago). Joyce A. Joyce, for example, argued against poststructuralist influences on black American literary criticism. Joyce thinks that Baker and Gates are apolitical and “antiblack.” As “black postructuralists,” they are traitors to the race, committing “intellectual indenture.” Gates, in turn, indicts Joyce’s “resistance to theory,” while Baker detects in her position a “new black conservatism” (Gates “Critical Theory” 345, 366). The anthology In the Vernacular: Interviews at Yale with Sculptors of Culture, for example, includes works of renowned artists and writers such as E. L. Doctorow, Eudora Welty, Hanif Kureishi, Toni Morrison, Wendy Wasserstein, and Arthur Miller (Biggs). Curiously, the editor Melissa E. Biggs neither justifies grouping these individuals under this particular term nor clarifies their connections to one another. Gilroy draws attention to “the boundaries that have been placed between high and low, vernacular and refined, respectable and disreputable” (30) that have given the vernacular the reputation for being “low” art in contrast to “refined,” i.e., white, forms. Although never abandoning the elitist subtext, Gilroy acknowledges that the vernacular cannot be understood purely through this one-dimensional relationship: “The living, non-traditional tradition of black vernacular self-fashioning, culture-making, play and antiphonic communal conversation is complex and complicated by its historic relationship to the covert public worlds of a subaltern modernity” (13). Since he does not elaborate on this vernacular “subaltern modernity,” we can only speculate about the nature of this hidden “covert public.” Likewise, we are left with the implied opposition between a “black vernacular cultural criticism” (23) and dominant forms of black cultural criticism.



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29. Bhabha, B13. This article broadcasts the position of the postcolonial subject to the academic mainstream. 30. See his forthcoming book Vernacular Cosmopolitanism (Harvard University Press). 31. Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Was Huck Black? explores the interracial dimensions in Huckleberry Finn. In The Dialect of Modernism (1994) Michael North shows that the modernist style is often informed by black dialect. Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty (1995) creolizes the cultural history of the 1920s and demonstrates how “mongrel” Manhattan was. Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) combines the Creole and transnational perspectives in exploring cultural interrelations between America, Africa, and Europe. My book Primitivist Modernism: Black Cultures and The Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (1998) reveals the hybrid nature of modernism shaped by symbolic entanglements between these three continents. 32. The title of his book consciously plays on Cornel West’s bestseller Race Matters, which proves the continuity and a commonality between minority scholars of different cultural backgrounds. 33. Although he mentions an older text, The Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (1884), by John Gregory Bourke, a lieutenant at West Point and ethnologist, Saldívar does not consider Bourke’s ethnographic writings on U.S.-Mexican border culture a vernacular text because it was written by an outsider and fails to express a genuinely Chicano perspective. 34. Rasquachismo, first and foremost, expresses a sense of belonging, as Tomás Ybasrra-Frausto argues in Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility (1990). 35. He riffs on Elaine Showalter and Henry Louis Gates when substituting criticism in the “wilderness” (Showalter) or the jungle (Gates) for borderlands. 36. Hall describes the relation between the “vernacular base” and “black American popular vernacular traditions” as two ends of one spectrum: “In its expressivity, its musicality, its orality, in its rich, deep, and varied attention to speech, in its inflections toward the vernacular, and the local, in its rich production of counternarratives, and above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary, black popular culture has enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes even of some mainstream popular culture, of elements of a discourse that is different—other forms of life, other traditions of representation” (27). The inflection toward the vernacular and the indigenous, then, plays a crucial role in what makes black popular culture essentially black. The answer to his rhetorical question, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” is that it is the vernacular, both the authentic and hybridized forms, that makes black popular culture black. 37. For lack of a better term, I use the label “minority scholar,” although it carries the unfortunate and inadvertent implication that this scholarship is somehow minor. 38. Hortense J. Spillers praises this “exquisitely modulated revisionist project. Arac is one of our greatest teachers, and I am not at all surprised that he has taught me a great deal” (quoted from the cover of Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target).



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39. Both labels, “post-Americanist” (Pease, Cultures) and “post-nationalist” (Rowe, Post-Nationalist), are somewhat confusing, since both the nation state and the legacy of (old) American studies cannot—or should not—be dismissed. To designate revisions in our understanding of nationalism in a global age and of American studies in the process of becoming a more international field, it might be wise to grapple with new terms instead just adding prefixes. 40. Jacques Derrida’s elaboration on différance might have served as an intellectual spark. In many respects, Derrida laid the groundwork for the fields of race, class, and gender studies. These discourses transpose the notion of difference from the textual to the social world and extend Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics to a postcolonial critique of Euro-centrism. With the privilege of hindsight, his observation that truth was acclaimed by privileging a leading term over a derivative term had consequences he had not foreseen. The same year that Derrida’s translation of L’Ecriture et la Différence was published in English under the title Writing and Difference (1978), Edward Said published his groundbreaking book Orientalism. His main thesis that the Occident constructed “the Orient” through relations of difference builds on the same idea. And Said also draws on Foucault’s discourse analysis to show how the Orient is represented in Western philology, ethnography, political science, art, and literature through a binary logic of identifying Europeans against non-Europeans. This hierarchy legitimized the subordination of the Orient through the presumed superiority of the Occident. 41. Hall tried to put his academic work to political ends in the Campaign Against Racism in the Media (CARM). His fight against racist imagery on television is complicated by his awareness that the media, although functioning in a systematically racist manner, is not produced by a group of racists, nor are the viewers necessarily manipulated by the media. 42. In Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Robert J. C. Young extends this argument to a global perspective: “Postcolonial critique focuses on forces of oppression and coercive domination. . . . The assumption of postcolonial studies is that many of the wrongs, if not crimes, against humanity are a product of the economic dominance of the north over the south” (11, 6). 43. Michel North and Ann Douglas made important contributions in showing how complex American modernism is and how mongrelized America’s cultural landscape has become. And, Henry Wonham’s Criticism and the Colorline: Desegregating American Literary Studies “celebrates the hybridity of American literary culture by examining the dynamic relationship between ‘mainstream’ and African American expressive traditions in America” (2). 44. Hybridity is also the constitutive term in border studies instigated by Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Her study broke new ground in American studies because it drew attention to the hybrid identity of Mexican Americans. Anzaldúa made general claims that people of mixed race are people who cross cultures and possess “a mestiza consciousness . . . a consciousness of the Borderlands” (99). Anzaldúa’s book itself deploys mestizaje by fusing genres and languages. Borderlands/La Frontera is a classic postcolonial studies text that has been taught in literature departments as well as feminist studies and cultural studies courses.



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45. Paul Gilroy’s widely read study The Black Atlantic, for example, refigures older accounts of modernity because it explores the culturally hybridized and transnational space of the Atlantic. And Robert Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity Theory, Culture and Race (1995) demonstrates that the Western self has never been an “essential, core identity from which the other is excluded” (Young 3). In both studies, the notion of hybridity defies antagonistic accounts of difference and deconstructs claims to white superiority. 46. Elizabeth Abel’s Writing and Sexual Difference (1982) and Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine’s The Future of Difference: The Scholar and the Feminists (1980) were among earlier books to explicitly use the concept to explore the specificity of women’s texts. 47. The foreword puts forth the aim of exploring cross-cultural connections: “But while women, people of color, gay men and lesbians, the physically handicapped, the aged (among others), have tried to address each other and examine these issues among themselves, it is only recently that attempts are being made to find our common ground” (Ferguson et al., Out There 7). 48. For example, the queer critic Martha Gever quotes Hall in a discussion of lesbian cultures, and the black American critic James A. Snead refers to Hegel in his discussion of black culture. 49. The volume includes discussions of Chinese (Chen), English (Abel), and African American (Carby) literature. It brings together Americanists (Benn Michaels), philosophers (Butler and Appiah), and postcolonialist scholars (Spivak), as well as feminists and queer theorists (Rothenberg and Valente). 50. This volume brings together scholars from anthropology (Gewertz and Errington), political science (Rogin), women’s studies (Haraway, Jeffords), romance languages (Sommer), business studies (Brannen), and history (Gaines, Diaz) departments. 51. The term refers to Pease’s anthology National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives (1994), which replaces the label “new” with the prefix “post” to signal that Americanists conceive of national identity as “a purely contingent social construction rather than a meta-social universal” (5). Related to his above-cited 1990 critique of nationalism for excluding minorities (an important manifesto of the new Americanists), this collection of post-Americanist narratives expands the scope of ethnic minorities to address e.g., “Queer Nationality” while his 1993 anthology Cultures of United States Imperialism qualifies as “post-Americanist” because it extends the national to a global outlook. 52. Again, the agreement with other disciplines is striking; in her review of feminist discourse, or should we say post-feminist discourse, Rita Felski concludes that “any appeal to general ideals or norms can only be considered questionable and theoretically naïve” (208). 53. Radway’s presidential address of 1998 illustrates that the postnationalist paradigm had become the new norm. With a demanding tone of voice, she formulates the new doxa of American studies ex negativo: “If intellectual practice in the field does not examine the ways in which the construction of a national subject works to the economic and political advantage of some and precisely against the



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interests of others, then American studies runs the risk of functioning as just another technology of nationalism” (221). 54. Comparative American Studies is the publication organ of the International Association of American Studies. Founded in 2000, CAS is a global network of scholars committed to the study of American culture and society. Most of its contributions primarily succeed in expanding the scope rather than—as any comparative approach should—creating connections. 55. Their volume, U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory (2000), reflects the differences within American studies. It includes essays on Native American, Arab American, Asian American, Mexican American issues. The editors announce that their collection “will facilitate the much needed comparative discussions . . . [and calls for] more intra-ethnic or multiracial comparison of, say Asian Americans, blacks, Latinos, and whites in ways that will not treat their cultural histories as if they developed autonomously. ‘Borders’ analyses must be able to focus on what connects such groups as well as what separates them.” (ital. A.S. and W.S. 7). A closer look at the volume, however, reveals its failure to live up to its promise; hardly any of its contributors investigate similarities or connections between and across different groups. Thus, it falls short of realizing a comparative approach.

Chapter 2 1. Twain’s contemporary, the preeminent realist William Dean Howells, called Twain “the Lincoln of American Literature” and the famous literary critic Lionel Trilling thought Huckleberry Finn as “not less than definitive in American literature” (Trilling xvi). Among Germans, the fascination and interest is so extensive that the annotated bibliography of the German critical reception from 1875 to 1986 of Mark Twain’s works grew into a book of several hundred pages (Kinch), in which Ursula Brumm, one of the founding figures in the German American studies movement, proclaimed Twain the “model American, a representative of an irreverent democratic humor and a believer in a progressive, American culture” (Kinch 164). 2. I read Huckleberry Finn as a child when I was living in Hamburg, and like many of my friends, I identified with Huck even though his world seemed very foreign to me. Due to the intimate sound of his voice I felt close to his world, although it seemed (at the time) to be light years away from mine. For examples of Japanese scholars reading Twain as a synecdoche of America, see Kiyohiko Murayama Masago’s Ima “Huck Finn” wo Do Yomuka. 3. Many of its (young) readers living outside of the United States are probably unaware of the fact that Missouri was a slave-holding and Illinois a slave-free state. 4. I am referring back to Jonathan Arac’s critique of Huckleberry Finn as an example of literary nationalism as elaborated in Chapter 1. 5. Among the dialect literature published before Huckleberry Finn there are George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingwood’s Yarns in the Southwest idiom, James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers in Yankee dialect, and the humorous political satire Hoosier School Master by Edward Eggleston (which is considered the first proper



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dialect novel in American literature; Gavin Jones 53). Joel Chandler Harris’ extremely popular Uncle Remus stories represent an early example of black dialect literature written by a Euro-American author. Luedtke proclaims that “the humor and vernacular style of Mark Twain not only opened the cultural and literary establishment to the voices of the Western frontier, but also cleared a path for stories of the Dakota-Minnesota and Nebraska frontiers by Ole Rolvaag, Willa Cather, and Wright Morris, for the New England local colorism of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett, and for the rich harvest of Black folklore and Southern writings by Charles W. Chesnutt, Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy” (188). For Rampersad, “Mark Twain anticipated Dunbar, Hughes, Hurston, Fisher, Thurman, Ellison, Gaines, Childress, Reed, and Alice Walker . . . Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison” (Leonard 227). Sewell refers to Twain’s “note” or “explanatory” that the seven dialects were necessary because “without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.” Sewell differentiates among three vernacular voices: “the speech of pretentious ignorance” (expressed by the King and the Grangerfords), “ornery speech” (expressed by Pap Finn), and Huck’s “folk speech” (Sewell 101). William M. Gibson suggestively links Twain’s sense of music to his “extraordinary grasp of the American vernacular” and his “donning the vernacular mask,” but any extension of his argument is left up to the reader’s imagination (Gibson 3). In her discussion of “Huck’s vernacular speech,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that, “the voice with which Twain captured our national imagination in Huckleberry Finn [is] in large measure a voice that is ‘black’” (3–4). Downplaying the “white” sources (e.g., Southwestern humor) as well as the narratological aspects of Huck’s voice, Fishkin foregrounds the role African Americans played in Twain’s rendering of his unique voice. Drawing on biographical evidence, she argues that Twain made substantial use of the African American folk tradition and was fond of minstrel shows as well as of African American singing voices (inviting the Fisk Jubilee Singers to his home). Fishkin also mentions four African Americans with whom Twain had personal contact: John Lewis (Twain’s black servant at Quarry Farm), Mary Ann Cord (his servant in Elmira), a black boy whom he was to write about in “Sociable Jimmy” (1874), and the teenager Jerry, whom he considered “the greatest orator” (55) due to his verbal brilliance. The 2001 edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from which I have been quoting, is based on the original manuscript, the first part of which was discovered in a Hollywood attic. The original draft version restored by Victor Fisher departs from the first edition “nearly one hundred times in its wording and nearly eleven hundred times in its spelling, punctuation, and other details” (quoted in Twain, Huckleberry Finn 549). His excessive use of punctuation and misspellings, which the first editor felt compelled to correct, was crucial to Twain’s strategy in devising a vernacular style.



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12. I am referring here to the second paragraph: “The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out” (1). 13. Among the critics who have commented on Twain’s nonlinear, improvised narrative structure, De Voto also referred to the concept of the vernacular: “Half way through writing the book [Twain] suddenly realized that he wasn’t getting anywhere . . . . Probably he lost his touch, produced some scenes wholly at random and fell off into improvisation. He had the superb vernacular and in the stuff already written there was latent the purpose he had subsequently found.” (Marks 30). I would agree with Fluck at this point by arguing that Twain’s vernacular was superb, as it were, because of its improvised fragmented style. 14. In one such passage, the narrator relates Janie’s return after the hurricane: “So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment” (9). This detached description of swollen human carcasses with wide open, hollow eyes is devoid of vernacular qualities. 15. Ms. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Box 1, Folder 3, Hurston special collection, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beineke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 16. What Hurston calls an “oral hieroglyph” is, in literary critical terms, synesthesia. Whereas the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (1999) defines synesthesia broadly as “the concurrent appeal to more than one sense,” Hurston artfully combines the visual and oral dimension. 17. Maria Tai Wolff puts this succinctly in an essay entitled “Listening and Living: Reading and Experience in Their Eyes Were Watching God.”: “The listener must form an ‘understanding.’ Yet telling must become experience in order for this to happen; the listener must ‘see’ the story . . . . For telling to be successful, it must become a presentation of sights with words [emphasis S. L.]. The best talkers are ‘big picture talkers.’ In this way the opposition between listening or reading and experience is broken down” (quoted in Appiah and Gates 226). 18. Apart from these interspersed negative responses, Their Eyes was ignored by her contemporaries. In a poll taken of the best fiction on “American life by an American author” taken in 1937, Kenneth Robert’s Northwest Passage outperformed John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (Saturday Review, 2 Apr. 1938, 9). This brings to mind Robert Hemenway’s observation that “Zora Neale Hurston is one of the most significant unread authors in America” (215). 19. The Nation, 16 Oct. 1937 quoted in Appiah and Gates, xxx. 20. See: http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/enam854/summer/hurston.html. 25 Sept. 2008. 21. Again, Stevens came to a different conclusion. In his review “Negroes by Themselves” he maintains that Their Eyes offers a “realistic” representation of black life in the South (Saturday Review, 18 Sep. 1937, 3).



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22. Mary Helen Washington’s introduction to the 1990 edition of Their Eyes deserves to be quoted at length: “If there is anything the outpouring of scholarship on Their Eyes teaches us, it is that this is a rich and complicated text and that each generation of readers will bring something new to our understanding of it. If we were protective of this text and unwilling to subject it to literary analysis during the first years of its rebirth, that was because it was a beloved text for those of us who discovered in it something of our own experiences, our own language, our own history” (Washington ix). It was beloved, I think, not primarily because it reminded these scholars of their own experiences, but mainly because of its bold and artistic use of black vernacular English. 23. The editions were from Perennial Library, 1990; Borgo Press, 1991; University of Illinois Press, 1991; Perennial Classics, 1998; HarperCollins, 2000. 24. Traditional black literary genres such as the slave narrative and black dialect novel hardly represent a distinctly African American prose style since their authors were often influenced by their white co-authors. Writers of black dialect literature modeled their works on the white regionalist and plantation tradition. 25. The term “speakerly” he borrows from Roland Barthes’s opposition between the readerly and the writerly text (183) as well as from Russian Formalism, which called skaz “the phonetic, grammatical, the lexical patterns of actual speech” (Appiah and Gates 165). Arguing that Their Eyes is “a paradigmatic Signifyin(g) text” as well as a speakerly text, Gates uses the two concepts synonymously. In fact, he equates skaz, the speakerly, free indirect discourse, and signifyin(g), and in doing so, ignores the differences between skaz, which is defined as a stylistic modification of one’s own speech, and free indirect discourse, which is based on a narrator ventriloquizing someone else’s speech. 26. To Williams, Their Eyes is also “the mother text for such classic Afro-American works as Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” (1991, xxi). 27. Among those critics who link the concept of voice to identity politics are Maria Racine: “Voice and Interiority in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Pearlie M. Peters’s “Ah Got the Law in My Mouth”: Black Women and Assertive Voice in Hurston’s Fiction and Folklore,” and Ayana I. Karanja’s Zora Neale Hurston; The Breath of Her Voice. Racine’s comment about Janie’s self-assured voice, that “having a voice means owning one’s self and living as an independent person who makes her own decisions and determines her own life” (Racine 290) is a telling example of the understanding of “voice” that highlights the novel’s gender politics. 28. Awkward also examines the import of “action” and “silence” in relation to “voice.” He aptly points out that Janie, after realizing her dissatisfaction with her marriage to Joe Starks, remains silent for nearly twenty years before finally daring to raise her voice and talk back to Joe. Contrasting the empty gossipy rhetoric of the porch-sitters and Joe’s “big voice,” Awkward argues that Janie learns to coordinate her inner voice with meaningful action and that her dialogue with Pheoby represents a more meaningful form of interaction while also reflecting the distinctly black call-and-response pattern.



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29. Callahan presupposes that women, or black women, are less domineering when interacting with each other, equating “womanist” (i.e., black feminist) with democratic speech communication. 30. Gerd Hurm has made a similar argument for the vernacular in Huckleberry Finn. 31. In its setting, narrative perspective, plot, and use of African American oral traditions, Their Eyes differs fundamentally from Anglo-American novels and the majority of African American novels of the 1920s and 1930s. According to Mary Katherine Wainwright, Hurston accomplished “what so many black fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance failed to do. When she chose to dramatize the indigenous elements of an all-black world, Hurston refused to participate in an either/or logic (black versus white) that underlies much black fiction” (240–1). 32. Needless to say, it also differs from The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, which describes the privileged urban black class. Given its setting and its style, Their Eyes shares many aspects with Jean Toomer’s Cane, but differs significantly in its representation of African American women. Janie and Pheoby are far more active than the largely vulnerable and nurturing characters Karintha, Carma, and Fern. 33. For more detail on the postmodern element in her work, see my essay “Zora Neale Hurston; A Writer of Fiction and Anthropologist.” REAL: The Anthropological Turn in Literary Studies, ed. Jürgen Schläger, Tübingen: Narr, 1996, 163–78. 34. The notion of a frame is helpful for illustrating that Their Eyes emancipated colloquial speech from under the shadow of linguistic and moral inferiority. What John Widemann argues in his interpretation of Hurston in “Frame and Dialect: The Evolution of the Black Voice” can be equally applied to Twain’s use of dialect. 35. Lillie P. Howard once observed that Janie Crawford “strikes out, like Huck Finn, for the territory in search of her dreams and possibility of a better life beyond the horizon” (93). She establishes a metaphorical relation between two adventurous characters that ignores the fact that Huck searches for independence and Janie looks for the right man. Rampersad asserts an indirect influence between Hurston and Twain, suggesting that she was one among many who were influenced by Mark Twain. Rampersad delineates the ways Twain’s influence manifests in Hurston’s work, or for that matter, how the stylistic legacy has influenced the works of other writers. (For Rampersad’s discussion on Twain, see Leonard 227.) 36. Ana Castillo was awarded the American Book Award for The Mixquiahuala Letters. The fact that she published this novel with Doubleday is remarkable because Chicano/a fiction was mostly published by smaller or regional presses. Even Sandra Cisnero’s classic The House on Mango Street was published by a small firm called Arte Público. In 1991, Julia Alvarez published How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent with Algonquin Books and Cisnero published Woman Hollering Creek with Random House. While Castillo’s first novel appeared with Doubleday, the hardcover version of So Far from God (1993) was published with Norton and the paperback edition with Plume Books, a division of Penguin Books. 37. This, in addition to the following quotes, is taken from the jacket and the first page of the Penguin Books edition. 38. In his assessment of narrative techniques characteristic of border literature, John Christie briefly remarks that, “the vernacular variety of their language in no way



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reflects any sort of intellectual deficiency, rather the opposite: individuality, creativity, and strength in the face of oppressive powers” (95). He approves of the vernacular variety of border fiction and its alleged counterhegemonic potential without clarifying his definition of the term vernacular. It seems conventional in comparison to Castillo’s epistolary novel The Mixquiahuala Letters, which consists of forty letters. Preceding these letters is a note to the reader encouraging us not to read the text in a linear manner. Explicitly calling for the reader’s participation, Castillo proposes three kinds of readings: “For the Conformist; For the Cynic; For the Quixotic” (7). None of the publications that praised the novel as “exuberant and slangy . . . a chili mix of the conventional and poetic” (The Boston Globe), or lauded its “radical politics and storytelling skill” (Ms.) referred to its vernacular qualities. The term, therefore, extends Anzaldúa’s collective self-definition—”we are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness” (85)— to the level of language. To distinguish these practices of molding English and Spanish, Juan Bruce-Novoa uses the concept “interlingualism.” He differentiates between the juxtaposition of words from both languages and the fusion of grammar and syntax in ways “that monolingual readers will hardly notice” (50). A good example is the heading to Chapter 15: “La Loca Santa Returns to the World via Albuquerque Before Her Transcendental Departure; and a Few Random Political Remarks from the Highly Opinionated Narrator.” The first part of the sentence introduces a distanced and impersonal authoritative voice; the second part is more informal, personal, and ironic because the narrator mocks his or her own predilection to judge and comment on the events she or he relates. For more detailed information see Steele (59). This scene is a good example of the magico-realist elements in the text. In 1955, Angel Flores defined this genre as “an amalgamation of realism and fantasy” (Flores 189). The following argument will reveal that the magic realism in So Far from God exceeds this definition, since there is more involved than the acceptance of a worldview in which the real and the surreal blend together. Fiona Mills argues that through the depiction of Francisco stalking Caridad and Esmeralda, “Castillo uses their deaths to illustrate the destructive homophobia that often accompanies heterosexist ideologies” (322). A good illustration of the similarity shared with Huckleberry Finn can be found in the scene in which the priest warns La Loca that “she would surely burn in hell” if she did not go to church regularly to which she responds simply, “I’ve already been there. . . . And actually, it’s overrated” (221). Aparicio suggests that this encounter with unassimilated difference is employed by many U.S. Latino/a writers as a means of marginalizing and potentially excluding the monolingual reader “by producing texts whose poetic and cultural signifying require crosscultural competency” (800). Aparicio’s article “On Sub-Versive Signifiers: U.S. Latina/o Writers Tropicalize English,” is a prime example because in it she argues that tropicalized English constitutes, “a rewriting of Anglo signifiers from the Latino cultural vantage point. As such it becomes a textual diferencia from the linguistic repertoires of Anglo U. S. authors” (796).



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1. See: CliffsNotes, http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/The-Adventures -of-Huckleberry-Finn-Critical-Essays-Freedom-versus-Civilization-in-The -Adventures-of-Huckleberry-Finn.id-20,pageNum-456.html (20 Oct. 2008); Johnson, Claudia D., Understanding ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’; See also BookRags, http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-huckleberryfinn/themes.html (20 Oct. 2008). 2. Cited in Leonard (116). Although one could argue that Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative were also very effective in criticizing American society, Huckleberry Finn certainly shows that in this presumably democratic nation, freedom and human dignity remained a privilege of white Americans. African Americans were unable to find “real individual freedom” because EuroAmericans enslaved and exploited them. 3. If indicted and convicted before the District Court of the United States, he would have been subject to a fine of up to one thousand dollars, years of hard labor, or imprisonment for up to six months. In 1841, Twain’s own father, John Clemens, served on a jury in a trial that sentenced three abolitionists who helped three slaves escape to Canada to twelve years of hard labor (Blair 110). 4. In retrospect, Twain himself once aptly described the severe psychological effect such an offense had in antebellum America. “In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing—the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him, or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away” (cited in Beaver 4, 5). 5. Walter Blair draws on biographical evidence to suggest that Twain (at the time he was writing this passage) endorsed a school of thought on morality that favored the selfish principle. Blair cites the interesting distinction, formulated by the nineteenth-century philosopher W. E. H. Lecky, between two schools of morality: the stoical, intuitive, independent school and the epicurean, inductive, utilitarian, and selfish school. The former stoical school was supported by the noble “intuitive moralists” who believed not only that an innate natural power guides our moral conduct, but also that it is our duty to follow these intuitions as well as cultivate this innate sense of morality. Blair infers that Twain favored the epicurean selfish position and therefore wrote a story in which Huck’s expedient and self-centered morality motivated him to act nobly. Huckleberry Finn critiques the noble intuitive philosophers and endorses a utilitarian model (Blair 143). 6. Being struck by this paradox, Twain felt increasingly ambivalent toward his own narrative. Caught between his sense of dissatisfaction and his inability to formulate an alternative, Twain became so distressed that he wanted to burn the entire manuscript. In the fall of 1879, after his return from Europe, Twain felt prepared to confront this aporia. He took up writing. His immediate response was to evade the problem by introducing the raft-steamboat crash. After that, he resumed a more aggressive attitude and attacked America’s immorality head-on.



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7. Jonathan Arac believes that this funny statement is making hell a joke rather than suggesting that Huck seriously believed he had to go there (Arac 53). In his notorious reading, Leslie Fiedler reads it as a sign of “mutual love of a white man and a colored” (Fiedler 667). His disclosure of “innocent homosexuality” is anachronistic, as Phelan observes, because a clear demarcation between homoand heterosexuals did not yet exist in the 1840s. It was only toward the end of the century that the heterosexual norm was constructed (Phelan 539). 8. This refers to those critics who have used an essentialist rhetoric to argue for Huck’s “innate humanity” (Blair 145), his “innate goodness” (Salomon 144), or his “innate sense of right” (Roberts 38). 9. Americanists of the early generation were mostly disappointed about the ending of the novel. Many new Americanists, however, have read the burlesque ending as Twain’s critique of the humiliation of black Americans during Reconstruction. In this view, Huck should be held responsible for Jim’s fate in a way that America should be held responsible for its racist and separatist practices. 10. Charles Pierce first introduced pragmatism around the time Twain wrote the second half of Huckleberry Finn. In the 1880s and 90s, William James further elaborated on the pragmatic value of truth claims. There are interesting overlaps between the pragmatist position and the expedient, spontaneous vernacular model as James’s description of a pragmatist suggests: a pragmatist “turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power” (James, Essays in Pragmatism 144). 11. See also Toni Morrison, “Huckleberry Finn: An Amazing, Troubling Book.” Morrison also finds value in its difficult and troubling narrative structure. She specifically talks about the accumulation of gaps and silences in this novel. 12. Most critical assessments of the past have criticized the novel for its choppy, haphazard composition. Even recently, Arac objected to “the self-undoing plot of the novel [because it] prevents either Jim or Huck from effective action, and the miseen-scène and language of the book carefully shield it from politics” (Arac 61). 13. This passage matches Twain’s dismissals of American racism as he expressed it in his essay “The United States of Lyncherdom” (Zwick 111–31). Harold Beaver claims that Twain felt so guilty over “the wrong the white race had done to the black race in slavery,” that he paid his dues to a black American student (Beaver 7). Shelley Fisher Fishkin also detects a sense of anger operating behind Huckleberry Finn. To her, Twain’s novel shows that “there was nothing a black man could do . . . that would make white society see beyond the color of his skin” (Fishkin 6). 14. Apart from Lowry’s essay “Mark Twain and Whiteness” (57, 58) see also Fishkin’s Was Huck Black?, which argues that the character Huck and his voice emulated the voice of African American slaves (e.g., Jimmy) Twain had known personally. In her pioneering study Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison argues that Huckleberry Finn reveals the dependency of white freedom on black oppression: “Freedom has no meaning to Huck or to



Notes

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

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the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism; the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another” (Playing in the Dark 56). In that sense, (white) individualism is constructed through (black) enslavement as well as a general blindness toward African American citizens and their culture. See for example: Lupton, “Survival” 45–54; Kubritschek, “Female Quest” 109– 15; Bethel, “Black Female Literary Tradition” 176–88; and Mary Helen Washington 110 (cited in Appiah and Gates, Hurston). For Davie, “the text’s deliberately undermining of hierarchy as an unquestionable perspective—its habit of surprising readers with their own ignorance—is a profoundly political act” (448). And Kaplan argues that the framing dialogue between the two black women, although politically ambiguous, “has political bite” (133). These deployments of the term political indicate a rather metaphorical usage typical of the critical discourse of the 1990s. Among them are Michael Awkward, who argues that Tea Cake is “an exceedingly charming, but nonetheless dominant, husband” (90, 83). Likewise, Todd McGrowan observes that Tea Cake, who seemed to be a liberating force, ultimately, “inaugurates a new kind of domination” (117). And Eva Boesenberg criticizes Tea Cake for treating “Janie like a child, just as the other men in her life” (56). While all three critics impeach Tea Cake for his patronizing and sexist behavior, Ann DuCille argues that Tea Cake is more “a patriarchical father than equal partner” (121), thereby ignoring that Janie loved him precisely because she thought that he respected her as an equal. This passage from Chapter 2 reveals the town’s disdain for their physical attraction: “It was after the picnic that the town began to notice things and got mad. Tea Cake and Mrs. Mayor Starks! . . . here she goes sashaying off to a picnic in pink linen. . . . Gone off to Sanford in a car with Tea Cake and her all dressed in blue! It was a shame” (166). Hurston had contact with the founder of the National Council of Negro Women and president of Bethune-Cookman College, Mary McLeod Bethune, who intended to employ Hurston in the drama department. Their contact, however, ended abruptly because Hurston “was very soon at odds with Mrs. Bethune” (Hemenway 201). On lesbian sexuality in Their Eyes, see Rohy, Impossible Women; Carla Kaplan, “The Erotics of Talk”; Gallop, Around 1981; Hull, Smith, Some of Us Are Brave. Here I agree with DuCille that “Their Eyes critiques, challenges, and subverts male authority, ultimately eliminating the male oppressor, but female subjectivity does not win out over patriarchical ideology” (121). Hurston’s representation of female sexuality obviously differs from the submerged sexuality we find in novels by other black women writers such as Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Quicksand or Passing by Nella Larsen (DuCille 116). Susan Edwards Meisenhelder aptly argues that Nanny, unable to imagine a world beyond the logics of domination, equates whiteness with social status and blackness with living a low life. To spare her granddaughter from the fate of most black women, Nanny “embraces an ideal that from her experience seems the



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only alternative, one drawn from a romanticized conception of the lives of white women” (63, 66). On Joe Stark’s whiteness, see also Awkward (75) and Wall (385). Their Eyes performs a deconstructivist move similar to the one Gert Hurm observed in Huckleberry Finn when he argued that “Clemens conceives the vernacular both as a tool and an object, a medium and a target of his cultural criticism” (182). I am referring to the aptly titled portrait of Hurston—“Fighter against Complacency and Ignorance”—that was published in Barnard College Alumnae Magazine 36 (Autumn 1946): 6–7. Janie plays on the metaphor of space and voice when she complains that “mah own mind had to be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me” (133). Maria J. Racine argues that “Janie’s marriage to Tea Cake shows the inability of males to express themselves verbally” (289). Tea Cake and Joe certainly exemplify the nondialogical mode, but the text does not propose that an inability to communicate is an essentially male character trait. Wright’s statement reads as follows: “Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move into serious fiction . . . her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley. Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes. Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears . . . the sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.” (Appiah and Gates 16, 17)

29. On the socioeconomic context see Todd McGowan’s “Liberation and Domination: Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Evolution of Capitalism” in which McGowan relates Janie’s marriages to different versions of gender oppression and different forms of capitalism. In her marriage with Joe Starks, Janie is confronted with “a logocentric structure of domination—representative of monopoly capitalism” and with Tea Cake she experiences “a type of domination endemic to late capitalism” (117). 30. Although her husband returned, Domingo did not support the family financially. Somehow Sofi and her daughters never suffered from a lack of money. According to the 1987 Department of Labor Report, one out of three Hispanic households was female-headed, and 52 percent of those households lived in poverty.



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31. Reading it as a “counterhegemony in the Chicano borderlands,” Roland Walter analyzes the novel’s “cultural politics of dislocation and relocation.” He praises So Far from God for investing in a “nonessentialized consciousness based on radical mestiza subjectivity” (92) that creates “an identity based on difference with the capacity to relocate a ‘differential consciousness’” (92). His account of Castillo’s politics overlaps with McCracken’s assessment because the latter examines what she calls a “politics of signification” based on “disarticulating signifiers from dominant meaning systems and rearticulating them in new connotational chains” (McCracken 42). Instead of discussing Castillo’s strategies of “significatory resignification” (McCracken) or politics of relocation (Walter), the following paragraphs will elaborate on the concern with realpolitik. 32. As the novel proceeds, the female protagonists, however, “experience loss in the collision of their need to create a home space with the destructive forces outside,” which ultimately turns them into “victims of patriarchy” (Lanza 68, 78). Accordingly, the protagonists are either enthroned as heroines or as victims of patriarchy. Lanza’s account, like Ellen McCracken’s, oscillates between the judgments that the text is either subversive and self-empowering or losing out in its counterhegemonic struggle to displace the powers that be. 33. In the previous chapter, I discussed the use of irony and the fact that these allegories turn into parody. In this chapter, I intend to elaborate on the characters themselves, to discuss the specific values each of them personifies, and to explore the ways in which they are undermined, questioned, and transformed. 34. This name goes back to her near death at age three, when she resurrected at her own funeral and insulted the priest. Ever since La Loca suffered from a “phobia of people” (38). 35. His observation is worth quoting at length: The characters act out the attribute of the virtue of their names until they experience a catastrophe of ‘life’ or until they interact with the macho male characters. Under these two circumstances, the women no longer embody the virtue of their allegorical name. For example . . . Fe’s faith in the capitalist system and her ambition to possess a house, car, and social status are curtailed because her dedication to her job is based on her desire to make more and more money, so much that she blinds herself to her poisonous surroundings. [ . . . ] The virtue of charity is also undermined by life and men [la vida y los machos]. Caridad’s loving and charitable aspirations are stifled by an erotic obsession with Memo that results in promiscuity and later after her miraculous recovery, a naïve homoerotic attraction for Esmeralda, her lesbian lover” (Manriquez 42). 36. While such working conditions seem outrageous, they are factually based. A small contract assembly company with the name U.S.M. Technology had its employees handle hazardous solvents without providing masks, gloves, or safety sheets (Platt 150). U.S.M. was only one among several companies violating state safety and health laws. Downriver from the National Laboratory in Los Alamos,



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38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

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New Mexico, about 2,400 sites were suspected of contamination with uranium, plutonium, tritium, strontium 90, and other highly toxic chemicals. Thus, it is not a coincidence that the actual town of Tome is located seventy-five miles downriver from Los Alamitos. Fe does not consider Acme to be a class enemy, and for years she denies that a ruthlessly exploitative company was to blame for her illness. Thus, the text’s critique of capitalism mocks the notion of a conscious proletariat. Castillo’s acknowledgment in So Far from God reads as follows: “I am indebted to the members of the Southwest Organizing Project who assisted in my research; above all, for the inspiration I received from their consciousness, ongoing commitment, and hope.” Platt further defines virtual realism in contrast to virtual reality, arguing that the latter is about escaping reality through a simulation of reality, whereas the former refers to fictional texts that document “real world” conditions. Thus, she ignores the active and imaginative element involved in the act of literary representation. In the 1990s, one out of every four Chicano families, and one out of every three children, was reported to be living below the poverty line. One Navajo woman complains that, “we, as a people, are being eliminated from the ecosystem, too . . . like the dolphins, like the eagle” (242). Reporting on the vicious attack on Caridad, the narrator asserts that “it was not a man with a face and a name who had attacked and left Caridad mangled like a run-down rabbit” (77). Caridad was raped by what the narrator refers to as a “thing.” Instead of laying blame on individual perpetrators, the text criticizes sexist structures, institutionalized disregard for women. Castillo quotes a report of the Center for Health Promotion and from Howard’s International AIDS 1994 index that also states that 70 percent of HIV new infections occur in heterosexual relationships (Castillo, Xicanisma 225). Her cooperative is modeled “after the one started by the group up north that had also saved its community from destruction” (146); the narrator suggests drawing an analogy between the fictional co-op and the actual Ganados del Valle, located in northern New Mexico, which is also organized by women. Platt makes an important observation about the women organizing Ganados del Valle. Prior to their economic intervention they saw themselves only as housewives. But as they acquired various talents and skills, they became more politicized (151). In other words, the political process also changed them as people. If her presidency lasted 38 years, she must have been in her eighties when retiring from this prestigious and demanding office. Again, this hints at the make-believe and magico-realist quality of So Far from God. This group of female activists is probably modeled after the mothers who protest the disappearance of their children under the Argentinean dictatorship, The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, or, the Mothers of East Los Angeles, a group of Latinas who also successfully fought the installation of a hazardous-waste incinerator in the L.A. basin. Their support of the grass-root politician Gloria Molina contributed to her overall popularity. In 1992, Molina became the first Latina to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council and later became a county supervisor,



Notes

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48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

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controlling a budget of over thirteen billion dollars. Molina in fact might serve as a model for the fictional character Sofi. “One man said that when he laid eyes on her, he saw a beautiful halo radiate around the whole body, like the Virgin de Guadalupe” (Castillo, So Far From God 90). Commenting on the textual analogy between Caridad and la Virgin of Guadalupe, Thereasa Delgadillo suggests that So Far from God, “asks us to see in the worship of Our Lady of Guadalupe not the ever-brilliant colonizers duping those poor Indians, but instead the possibility [of ] an indigenous practice” (898–9). By linking the worship of Guadalupe not to Catholic traditions but to indigenous goddesses, Delgadillo reads it as a counterhegemonic force against the Catholic Church, the colonial legacy, and a phallocentric logos. Although this is certainly the case, Castillo herself once argued that the Virgin is “not as much a manifestation of the Church but of the women’s culture and ethnic identity” (Castillo, Xicanisma 48). And one might add that the novel turns her also into a manifestation of nonrigid (mestiza) thinking. The majority of images depict her as a young woman clad in a red dress with a blue robe covering her from head to toe. She is surrounded by a halo-like aura of gold rays. Underneath her is a half moon held up by a winged angel. Some representations of this legendary incident also show the peasant Juan. As the story goes, Coatlalopeuh told Juan that she wished for a temple to be built on the Tepeyec hill. In return, she promised to help the newly conquered Indian people. Juan approached the Bishop in this matter, telling him about the encounter, but the Spanish prelate refused to believe him. After Juan was sent away, the Virgin appeared again and told him to pick roses from the hill (which had grown there out of season). As Juan was delivering the roses to the Bishop, the image of the Virgin suddenly appeared, and the prelate ordered that a temple be built there in her name. See Brading. See Wolf and Rodriguez. Yolanda M. López’s Portrait of the Artists: Tableau Vivant. Guadalupe series depicts the Virgin dressed in gym clothes holding paint brushes. In a painting by Ester Hernández, the Virgin is tattooed on the back of a tough-looking Chicana. Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking study Borderlands attributes a crucial role to the Virgin, bringing her to the attention of scholars in Chicano, feminist, and cultural studies. As such, the academic interest in this figure exceeds the disciplinary confines of anthropology and theology. A prime example of its critical presence in the humanities was a MLA workshop entitled “La Virgen de Guadalupe: Icon, Identity, Text” (see: MLA Newsletter Spring 2002 20). La Llorona is associated with Malintzín (also known by her Spanish name “La Malinche”), a Nahuatl woman of noble birth who was the personal slave and translator of Hernán Cortés. She was also the mother of his children. Cortés broke off their relationship when his wife arrived from Spain and made plans to take the boys he had had with Malinche back to Europe with him. Out of despair, she killed her children by drowning them. Thereafter, Malinche was



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often seen near the lake wailing for her children (hence the name La Llorona). Her agonizing pain as well as sense of guilt and loss was heard mostly at night when she wandered through the streets or along rivers. In the public imagination, her sexual relationship with the conqueror of Mesoamerica made her a whore and a traitor to the Indians, and she is thus vulgarly referred to as la chingada (“the fucked woman”). Apart from being accused of betraying her people, she was blamed for the fall of the Aztec Empire. More generally, a malinchista refers to a sellout, one who turns her back on her own culture. Octavio Paz argues that the image of Malinche and the concept of la chingada is essential to the self-understanding of Mexicans (see also Castillo, Writings 197–208). 53. This binary originated in religious patriarchical traditions but was perpetuated in the male-dominated Chicano nationalist discourse of the 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s Chicana feminists objected to the fact that “Chicanas can occupy only one position, either as the self-renounced female, la madre abnegada (suffering mother), the passive virgin, or the embodiment of female treachery and sexual promiscuity, respectively, sublimated into the either/or binary of ‘virgen de Guadalupe/la malinche’” (Rosa Linda Fregoso 78). 54. Another example of male binary thinking can be seen in Ruben instructing Esperanza as to “the role of women and the role of men and how they were not to be questioned” (36). 55. Her call for a mestiza consciousness is very explicit about the need to reject logocentric and Manichean modes of thinking: La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move towards a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a plural mode— nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. (Anzaldúa 101) 56. Anzaldúa’s call to see Coatlalopeuh-Coatlicue in Guadalupe foregrounds the indigenous origins. One could also argue that it is necessary to see Cihuacoatl (woman serpent), who in turn is associated with Malintzin, La Malinche, and La Llorona in the virtuous Guadalupe. In fact, the text even suggests that “La Llorona may have been nothing short of a loving mother goddess” (Castillo So Far 163). 57. Coatlicue personifies destructive and awesome natural forces; she is “the monster who devoured the sun at night [and] brought it to life in the morning” (Anton 59).



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Notes

1. Regarding the important insights that reader-response criticism has produced, see Wolfgang Iser’s Der Akt des Lesens and Der Implizite Leser as well as the overview by Robert L. Holub, Reception Theory. For a pioneering attempt to capture the sound of literature, see Philipp Schweighauser, The Noises of American Literature, 1890—1985. 2. Apart from those novels mentioned in the introduction (Sapphire’s Push, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger), Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica is a good example of a poetic rendering of vernacular literature in that her narrative poem expresses its political message in a highly informal and musical style. 3. The fact that the United States, unlike Europe, is a nation of immigrants that brings together multiple national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds has for a long time fascinated European Americanists. As early as 1969, the German-born Harvard professor Werner Sollors indicted American racism: “Zur Rassenjustiz in den USA”; the Swiss scholar Fritz Gysin wrote about The Grotesque in American Negro Fiction; not to mention the pioneering work of Stuart Hall in Britain. In other words, at a time when the few American scholars working in the field were themselves minority scholars, a number of European Americanists were working on issues related to what would later be called multiculturalism. And in the 1980s, the heyday of multiculturalism, a host of European scholars published works on black and ethnic literature. Among them were Michel and Geneviève Fabre, Maria Diedrich, Bernd Ostendorf, Günther Lenz, Justine Tally, Carl Pedersen, and William Boelhower. 4. It therefore differs from the recent publication by that same title because American Literary Studies is a collection of essays that covers a wide range of different topics focusing on race, class, gender, and media without trying to reveal interconnections. 5. In his essay “Comparative American Studies: Hybridity and Beyond,” Cyrus R. K Patell contributes to the shift of multiculturalism from pluralism toward cosmopolitanism. He quotes Sylvia Wynter’s contribution to Poetics of the Americas. Assessing Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage, she chooses an approach that is not ethnicity based but closer to approaches favored in the initial phase of black studies, in which “the call for Black studies joined with the calls for a series of other non-White studies—American Indian (the Red), Chicanos, Asian—as well as for feminist studies” (Wynter, 148). 6. This pursuit has little in common with the sort of neoconservative attempts to reunite America that Arthur M. Schlesinger suggested in The Disuniting of America. A genuine concern for commonalities also repudiates conservative attempts (à la Allan Bloom, Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich) to promote nonintegrationist models for American society. Neither does it try to rescue a national consensus as Richard Rorty does in Saving Our Country. 7. Frederick L. Aldama’s cross-cultural study Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and



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Salman Rushdie, for example, looks at magico-realist novels representing Mexican American, black British, and postcolonial contexts. On a comparative reassessment on American Literary History see Messmer. 8. Lee organizes the chapters thematically. The first section, “Landmarks,” brings together four classical authors (Ellison, Momaday, Anaya, Kingston) of ethnic literature, and the chapter entitled “Sites” explores literary representations of the barrio, Harlem, Asia town, and the reservation. His cross-cultural comparisons abound in a few short paragraphs that disclose one or two overlapping themes. Nevertheless, it is a step toward a cross-cultural model. Another attempt in that direction, also by a European scholar of American studies, is the volume edited by Dominique Marçais, Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas.



Notes




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Edited Volumes Eye-catcher: Visual Culture in 19th Century America. Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, forthcoming (coedited with Anette Jael Lehmann). Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature: Festschrift für Winfried Fluck zum 60. Geburtstag. Heidelberg: Winter, 2006 (coedited with Thomas Claviez und Ulla Haselstein). Zora Neale Hurston: The Complete Stories. New York: Harper Collins, 1995 (coedited with Henry Louis Gates Jr.).

Articles “Liberty: A Transnational Icon par excellence.” Transnational American Studies: Edited Collection. Ed. Winfried Fluck, Don Pease, and John Rowe. UP of New England, forthcoming. “Du Bois: Of the Coming of John.” The Oxford Companion to The Souls of Black Folk. Ed. Shamoon Zamir. Oxford UP, 2008. “Diaspora Aesthetics: Exploring the African Diaspora in the Works of Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence and Jean-Michel Basquiat.” Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers. Ed. Kobena Mercer. Cambridge: MIT P, 2007. 122–45. “Aesthetics of Transgression: Awe, Alterity, and Apprehension in The Scarlet Letter.” Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature: Festschrift für Winfried Fluck zum 60. Geburtstag. Ed. Thomas Claviez, Ulla Haselstein, and Sieglinde Lemke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2006. 163–94. “Vernacular Aesthetics.” Cultural Interactions: 50 Years of American Studies in Germany. Ed. Bernd Ostendorf and Ulla Haselstein. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. 139–59. “Theories of American Culture in the Name of the Vernacular.” Theories of American Culture: Theories of American Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck and Thomas Claviez.





Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 19. Tübingen: Narr, 2003. 155–74. “Primitivist Modernism.” Primitivism and 20th Century Art: A Documentary History. Ed. Jack Flam and Miriam Deutsch. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 240–55. “Response to Todd Gitlin and Susan Armitage.” Transnational America: The Fading of Borders in the Western Hemisphere. Ed. Bernd Ostendorf. Heidelberg: Winter, 2002. 231–37. “Transatlantic Relations: The German Du Bois.” German? American? Literature? New Directions in German–American Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck und Werner Sollors. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 207–16. “Review of Gender–Voice–Vernacular: The Formation of Female Subjectivity in Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.” ZAA XLIX, Heft 2/2 (2001): 197–8. “Trans-Culturalism.” Double-Crossings: Entrecruzamientos. Ed. Carlos Von Son. San Diego: Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, 2001. 22–37. “Hybridity the Subtext of Modernism.” Crossover: Cultural Hybridity and Ethnicity, Gender, Ethics. Ed. Therese Steffen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000. 49–60. “Berlin and Boundaries: Sollen vs. Geschehen.” Boundary 2 27.3 (WS 2000): 45–78. “Hamlin Garland,” “Joel Chandler Harris,” “James Weldon Johnson,” “Nella Larsen.” Metzler Lexikon amerikanischer Autoren. Ed. Bernd Engler und Kurt Müller. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000. “Mapping the Harlem Renaissance.” Mapping African America: History, Narrative Formation and the Production of Knowledge. Ed. Maria Diedrich, Carl Pedersen, und Justine Tally. FORECAAST 1. Hamburg: LIT, 1999. 119–28. “A Forgotten Legacy.” Introduction. Lifting as They Climb: The History of the National Association of Colored Women. By Elizabeth Lindsay Davis. Schomburg Library Series. New York: MacMillan, 1996. xv-xxxiii. “Blurring Generic Boundaries: Zora Neale Hurston: A Writer of Fiction and Anthropologist.” The Anthropological Turn in Literary Studies. Ed. Jürgen Schläger. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 12. Tübingen: Narr, 1996. 163–78. “Josephine Baker.” Dictionary of American Negro Biography. Ed. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. 233–34. “White on White Act 2.” Transition 64 (1994): 110–12. “White on White: When the West Represents the Rest, Who Comes off Worse?” Transition 59 (1993): 145–54. “Im Zeichen des FORDschritts.” Amerikastudien 38.38 (1993): 251–63. “Schwarze (Über-) Lebenskunst.” Perspectives on Multiculturalism in North America. Ed. Carol W. Pfaff. Materialien 33. Berlin: John F. Kennedy P, 1992. 121–38.



182

aesthetics, vernacular, 5, 8, 127–29 critical reception of, within African American studies, 6, 21–26, 39–40 Chicano and border studies, 42, 89–90 formal features fragmented, improvised composition, 61, 77–79, 90, 94, 102, 127 informal colloquial style, 5, 8, 13–14, 58–60, 82, 86, 132, 149, 158 (see also vernacular: sounds in fiction) multifaceted deconstructionist aspects, 24–26, 29, 32, 81, 90, 101–2, 121–22, 140 See also black aesthetics school African American English vernacular (AAEV, BEV), 27, 68, 75 African American feminism, 73, 75, 105 African American literary history, 21, 28–30, 43, 73, 78 African American studies, history of, 2, 25, 33, 34, 47–48, 131 Agee, James, 56 AIDS, 34, 89, 119, 155 Aldama, Frederick Luis, 7, 91, 158 altruism, 109 Alvarez, Julia, 79, 90, 148 ambiguity, 124–25, 157 American dream, 89, 117–18 American exceptionalism, 137 American studies, 3–11, 15–18, 32–34, 37–38, 44–50, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138, 142, 143, 144, 159

comparative American studies, 50, 144, 158 new and post-Americanists, 38, 44–45, 143, 151 transnational American studies, 2, 6, 38, 42–43, 49, 141, 143 See also African American studies, history of; Chicano: studies; mythand-symbol school anthropology, 24, 26, 104, 143, 156 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 84, 124–25, 142, 149, 156, 157 Aparicio, Frances, 84, 90–91, 149 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 58, 73, 143 Arac, Jonathan A., 11, 18, 33, 35–38, 43–44, 51 authenticity, 4, 34, 43, 55–56, 82, 96, 113, 136 Awkward, Michael, 76, 147, 152, 153 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 6, 20–26, 28–33, 39, 42, 51, 139, 140 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 34 Bell, Michael David, 96 Bhabha, Homi, 33–35, 46, 141 bilingualism, 85, 90 binary logic and dualistic thinking, 14, 113, 121, 125, 132, 142 black aesthetics school, 25, 26, 29 black English vernacular (BEV). See African American studies, history of black feminist literary criticism. See African American feminism; literary criticism Bloom, Allan, 158



Index

Index

Bloom, Harold, 94 Blount, Marcell, 21, 27 Boesenberg, Eva, 75–76, 152 border aesthetics (see aesthetics, vernacular) studies, 6–7, 49–50, 74, 142 Bridgman, Richard, 17–18, 31, 56, 58, 65, 138 Brown, Sterling, 39, 72, 73 Callahan, John, 75–77, 113, 148 Caló, 81, 84 canonization, 32, 35 hypercanonization, 36–37, 44, 74 capitalism, 41, 114–15, 118, 153, 155 Castillo, Ana, 79–80, 84, 114, 118, 119, 125, 148, 155, 156. See also So Far from God Chicana feminism, 122, 124 Chicano code-switching, 6, 35, 41, 81, 84–85 literature, 41–43, 79 Renaissance, 46 studies, 50, 79, 124–25, 141, 155, 157 Christian ethics, 87, 89, 101, 115 citizenship rights, 4, 94 Civil War, 103, 116 class, 5–8, 10, 12, 15, 17, 21, 24, 31, 41, 50, 58, 96, 117, 129 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. See also Twain, Mark Columbus, Christopher, 158 coming-of-age novel, 76, 79, 104, 105, 113 communication, 76, 88, 105, 111–12. See also democratic: communication; individual novels comparative American studies. See under American studies comparative approach, 105, 108, 113, 125, 131–32 cosmopolitanism, 35, 37, 46, 132, 141, 158 Creole, 37–38, 136

cultural studies, 49, 80, 122 paradigms of difference, 44–51, 132–33 culture cultural ignorance cultural pluralism, 4, 46, 131 intercultural, 43, 46 monocultural, 23, 44, 46 multiculturalism, 4, 6, 9, 15, 20, 33, 38, 56, 131–32, 134 pop culture, 42, 43, 122, 141 See also diversity definitions of the vernacular by Arac, Jonathan, 35–38 Baker, Houston A., 20–26 Bhabha, Homi, 35 Bridgman, Richard, 17 Ellison, Ralph, 24 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 26–29 Kouwenhoven, John A., 18–19 Kymlicka, Will, 4 Lemke, Sieglinde, 8–9, 128–30 Marx, Leo, 5, 11–15 McLaughlin, Thomas, 34–35 Mercer, Kobena, 4–5 O’Meally, Robert, 39–41, 43–44 Oxford English Dictionary, 3–4 Rourke, Constance, 19–20 Saldívar, José David, 41–44 Smith, Henry Nash, 15–17 various critics from the 1990s, 4 democratic communication, 2, 5, 38, 76–79, 104–5, 112, 114, 129, 130, 144, 148 (see also communication) idealism, 94–96 process, 4, 76–79, 95 DeVoto, Bernard, 54–55 dialect, 3, 14, 17, 28, 54–56, 58, 62–64, 68, 69, 71–72, 77–78, 105, 108, 115, 127, 136, 144–45, 147, 148. See also linguistic inferiority Díaz, Junot, 9, 158



184

diction, 18, 56, 60, 64–65, 69–72, 127 diversity, 6–8, 47, 49, 51, 71, 125, 133 Donyo, Victor, 57–59, 95 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 21, 39, 56, 139, 145 egalitarianism, 12–13, 30–31, 36, 129. See also elitism Eliot, T. S., 10 elitism, 14, 31 Ellison, Ralph, 1, 2, 10, 21, 23–24, 28, 31–32, 36, 37–41, 55, 77, 95–96, 99, 139 environmentalism. See under politics ethnicity, 2, 47–50, 132, 158 ethnic chauvinism, 45–46 ethnic literature, 91, 135, 158, 159 ethnic separatism, 2, 34, 117, 135 ethnography, 77, 142 fantasy, 87, 125, 149 Faulkner, William, 39, 40 Fauset, Jessie, 78, 152 female self-actualization, 130 victimization, 115 feminism. See African American feminism; Chicana feminism Fluck, Winfried, ix, 16–17, 38, 49, 61, 136, 146 focalization, 82, 83, 85 folk hero, 107, 110 literature and culture, 14, 22, 24, 27–28, 39, 41, 72–73, 110–13, 123, 145 free indirect discourse (FID). See under narrative voices Fugitive Slave Law, 97 Fusco, Coco, 34–35 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ix, 6, 26–33, 39, 42, 48–51, 68, 74–75, 139, 140, 141, 147

185

genteel culture, 8, 32, 78, 96, 100, 103, 109, 111, 128, 130, 139. See also Victorianism Gilroy, Paul, 2, 33–34, 43, 131–32, 135, 140, 141, 143 globalization, 3, 4 Great Depression, 70 Hall, Stuart, 33, 43, 45, 47, 141, 142, 143, 158 Harlem Renaissance, 77, 148 Hemingway, Ernest, 17, 18, 56, 146 heteroglossia, 58, 61–62 polyvocality (see under narrative voices) tropicalized English, 84, 91, 149 heteronormativity, 45, 109, 119, 149, 151 heterosexuality, 45, 109, 119, 125, 129, 149, 151, 155. See also heteronormativity; homosexuality hip-hop, 4, 35, 42 homosexuality, 45, 89, 109, 125, 151. See also heteronormativity; heterosexuality Huckleberry Finn critical reception of, 11, 53–55 democratic values, 95–96 episodes, specific Grangerford-Shepherdson, 103 King and Duke, 103 raft scene, 12 moral evolution, pragmatist attitude, 97–102 racism, 94–95 rhythm and polyvocal structure, 58–65 use of nonstandard language, 55–56 whiteness, 104 Hughes, Langston, 39, 56, 145 humanism, 2, 10, 132, 134, 135 human solidarity, 12–14 neohumanism, 2 planetary humanism, 2, 131–32 See also vernacular: humanism



Index

186

humanities, the, 1–2, 4, 7, 30, 49, 135, 156 humor, 19–20, 55, 61–62, 86, 90, 128, 144, 145. See also irony; parody Hurm, Gert, 56, 136, 148, 153 Hurston, Zora Neale, 39, 70, 73–78, 104–5, 110–13, 146, 148. See also Their Eyes Were Watching God hybridity, 38, 42–43, 46, 51, 132–33, 142, 143, 158 identity conflict, 98, 111, 129 politics, 42, 48, 129, 147 idiomatic expressions, 31, 60, 65, 67–68, 85 inflection, 58, 60, 141 interior monologue. See under narrative voices irony, 10, 38, 82, 86–88, 154 Iser, Wolfgang, 158 James, Henry, 17–18, 20, 56 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 56, 145 John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, 7 Johnson, James Weldon, 77, 146, 148 Jones, Gavin, 56, 145 Jordan, June, 29, 73 Kingsolver, Barbara, 79 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 9, 135 Kouwenhoven, John A., 18–19, 22, 40, 138, 139 Larsen, Nella, 78, 152 linguistic inferiority, 55 literary criticism comparativist approach, 4, 7, 9, 43, 44–51 interdisciplinary approaches, 2, 16–17, 30, 136 New Criticism, 14, 16 New Historicism, 80

postcolonialism, 48, 49, 74, 122, 132, 141, 142 translation studies, 2, 35, 84–85 See also whiteness studies literary regionalism. See local color fiction literature African American, 22, 25–31, 39–41, 74, 139 Anglo-American, 15, 21–22, 35, 43, 148 British, 12–13, 15, 32, 159 comic, 20 Mexican American, 84, 125 popular, 20, 31–32 Llorona, La, and La Malinche, 123, 156, 157 local color fiction, 4, 41, 55, 145 Locke, Alain, 77, 109 Mailloux, Steven, 101–2 Manríquez, B. J., 89–90, 116, 154 Martínez, Rubén, 41–42, 44 Marx, Leo definition of the vernacular, 5, 11–15 on Huckleberry Finn, 5–6, 11–13, 17 role in American studies, 15–20 masculinity in Huckleberry Finn, 102–4 in So Far from God, 116, 124 in Their Eyes Were Watching God, 106–8 See also ethnicity: ethnic chauvinism Matthews, Brander, 53, 57, 75 Matthiessen, F. O., 14–15, 137 McCracken, Ellen, 80, 91, 154 McKay, Janet Holmgren, 57 McLaughlin, Thomas, 34–35 Mencken, H. L., 53, 54, 56 metaphor, 22–23, 26, 70–71, 75, 90, 96, 114, 138, 139, 141, 153 metaphysics, 12, 13, 142 metonymy, 22–23, 54, 70 Mexican Revolution, 122 Michaels, Walter Benn, 6, 143



Index

Index

Naipaul, V. S., 35 narrative structure, 127 in Huckleberry Finn, 61–62, 114, 146, 151 in So Far from God, 79–80, 85, 121 in Their Eyes Were Watching God, 67–69, 76–77, 114 narrative voices, 28, 55, 63–69, 74, 75, 79–82, 85–88, 90, 128 free indirect discourse (FID), 64, 67–69, 83–86, 147 interior monologue, 63–64, 68–69, 88, 98 polyvocality, 61–66, 69, 76, 77, 81–91 psycho-narration, 69 stream of consciousness, 42 (see also vernacular: sounds in fiction) national identity in literary history, 31–32, 36–37, 45, 51, 143 nationalism, 13, 55 Obama, Barack, 1, 10, 131 O’Meally, Robert, ix, 33–34, 35, 39–44 definition of vernacular, 39–41, 43–44

orality, 109, 127–28, 141. See also storytelling tradition; tall tale Osorio, Pepón, 34, 35 Paredes, Américo, 41–42 parody, 89–91, 119, 128. See also humor; symbolism pastoral, the, 36 patriarchal structures, 87, 102, 106–8, 119, 124, 129, 152, 154, 157 Pease, Donald, ix, 48, 49, 142, 143 politics environmental, 8, 12–13, 115, 118–21 gender, 77, 114–15, 121, 147, 195 multifaceted and deconstructionist aspects, 76, 102, 113, 121, 129 sexual, 75–76, 89–90, 104–9, 120–21 social critique, 103, 111, 113, 117, 129 subversiveness, 35, 77–79, 104–9, 114 polyvocality. See under narrative voices pop culture. See under culture postmodernism, 5, 77 psycho-narration, 65. See also narrative voices race, 30–31, 50, 94, 103, 109, 113, 131, 137, 140, 142, 151. See also ethnicity Radway, Janice, 45, 143 Rampersad, Arnold, 21, 25, 29, 46, 145, 148 reader act of reading, 58–59, 90, 128 as listener in Huckleberry Finn, 58–60, 62–64 as listener in So Far from God, 81–91 as listener in Their Eyes Were Watching God, 65–72, 76, 112 realism, 61 magico-realism, 87–89, 91, 149, 155, 159 virtual realism, 118–19, 155



modernism alternative, 112–13 experimental, 17–18, 42 (see also Eliot, T. S.; Hemingway, Ernest; Stein, Gertrude) postmodernism, 5, 77 Primitivist Modernism, 141 protomodern, 132 (see also Twain, Mark) moral conscience, 97, 100 dilemma, 95, 98, 105 relativism, 113 Morgan, Elizabeth, 102 Morrison, Toni, 7, 135. See also whiteness studies multiculturalism. See under culture myth-and-symbol school, 33, 137, 138

187

188

Index

Saldívar, José David, 6–7, 35, 41–44, 46, 50–51, 79, 141 satire, 94, 103, 144 Sewell, David, 58, 145 Showalter, Elaine, 46–47, 141 Signifying Monkey, 26–29, 68, 140. See also Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. similarities among the novels, 113, 105, 108, 125, 131. See also comparative approach Singh, Amritjit, 50 slavery slave-holding mentality, 97–100 slave narratives, 24, 28, 34, 39, 147, 150 Smith, Henry Nash, 5, 6, 15–18, 20, 32–33, 36, 51, 55–56, 96–97, 137, 138, 139 Smitherman, Geneva, 28–29 sociolect, 3 So Far from God critical reception, 79–81 irony, 86–87 magic(o) realism, 87–89 narrative voices, 81–84 use of nonstandard language, 84–85 Virgen de Guadalupe, 117, 121–24, 156, 157 speakerly text. See narrative voices Stein, Gertrude, 17, 56 Stepto, Robert B., 26 storytelling tradition, 72, 81, 127. See also orality; tall tale stream of consciousness. See under narrative voices subaltern, the, 3, 8–9, 43, 132–33, 140

subversion, 35, 104–9, 114 symbolism, 15, 26, 39, 44–45, 94, 101, 103, 111, 119, 122–24, 128. See also parody tall tale, 20, 61, 72. See also orality; storytelling tradition Their Eyes Were Watching God critical reception, 73–75 use of nonstandard language, 66–69 visual imagery, 69–71 whiteness, 110–11 Thomas, Brook, 38 Thurber, James, 56 tone sarcastic tone, 87, 118 tone of voice, 59, 65–66, 81–85, 143 See also narrative voices transnational American studies. See under American studies Trilling, Lionel, 35, 53–54, 75, 144 Twain, Mark, 17–18, 53–58, 59, 72, 94, 96, 102–4, 136, 144, 145, 146, 150, 151. See also Huckleberry Finn utopia, 2, 15, 121 values, 8, 93–125 vernacular African American literary tradition, 21–22, 25–28, 27, 64, 66–68, 72, 75, 84 Chicano vernacular literary tradition, 6, 35, 41–44, 79–80, 90, 141 Euro-American vernacular literary tradition, 10, 56 humanism, 10, 134 modernism, 43, 113 performative vernacular, 24 politics, 12, 77, 80, 105, 108–11, 120 (see also politics) polyrhythmic form, 40, 76–77 (see also narrative voices)



Reconstruction era, 94–95, 103, 151 Reed, Ishmael, 27, 28, 75 revisions, 27–28, 44, 49, 57, 59, 72, 135, 142 Rorty, Richard, 158 Rosaldo, Renato, 7 Rourke, Constance, 19–20

Index

voice. See narrative voices vulgarity, 55, 157 Walker, Alice, 28, 73, 75 Walter, Roland, 88, 154 Warren, Robert Penn, 14 Washington, Mary Helen, 29, 73–74, 140, 147, 152 West, Cornel, 7, 47–48, 50, 141 whiteness studies, 7, 104, 110, 133, 151, 153 Williams, Shirley Anne, 75, 147 Williams, William Carlos, 34 Wright, Richard, 21, 77, 113, 153 xicanisma, 124 Yankee culture, 17, 19, 144



process, 32, 37, 55, 95, 99–105, 129–30 (see also Ellison, Ralph) sounds in fiction cadence, 58, 60, 64, 128 call-and-response, 39, 62, 75–76 onomatopoeia, 18, 57, 64 timbre, 60–62, 65–66, 69, 71, 74, 85, 127 See also narrative voices See also aesthetics, vernacular; definitions of the vernacular by vernacularity, 12, 90, 93, 117 Victorianism, 15, 94, 109. See also genteel culture Viramontes, Helena, 42, 44 Virgen de Guadalupe. See under So Far from God visual arts, 4, 34, 122 visual imagery in literature, 69–71

189

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