The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism

319 Pages·1988·21.5 MB·English

by  Henry Louis Gates

THE SIGNIFYING MONKEY
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THE SIGNIFYING
MONKEY
A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
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and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1988 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
First published in 1988 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1989
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.
The signifying monkey.
Bibliography: p. Includes index.
1. American literature-Afro-American authors-History
and criticism-Theory, etc. 2. Afro-Americans-Intellectual life.
3. Afro-Americans in literature. 4. Criticism-United States.
5. Oral tradition-United States. 6. Mythology, African, in literature.
7. Afro-Americans-Folklore. 8. American literature-African influences.
I. Title.
PS153.N5G28 1988 810'.9'896073 88-14005
ISBN-13 978-0-19-503463-9; 978-0-19-506075-1 (pbk.)
20 19 18 17
Printed in the United States of America
For Sharon Adams
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There is a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true
jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each
true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial perfor-
mance) springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the
rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive
canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as mem-
ber of the collectivity and as link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because
jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional ma-
terials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it.
Ralph Ellison
Improvisation is the play of black differences. Kimberly W. Benston
Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually
to replace the dream of political power,—a powerful movement, the rise
of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night
after a clouded day. It was the ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity,
born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the caba-
listic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed
to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the
highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, lead-
ing to heights high enough to overlook life.
The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the
knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neigh-
bors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek
to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that
set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but con-
fusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed
to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised,
and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of
double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought
sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thou-
sand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false
means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them
ashamed of themselves. W. E. B. Du Bois
Look like to me only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel
peculiar to your mind. Alice Walker
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Preface
The Signifying Monkey, even more than is usual, has been shaped with the
help of my friends. The central idea of this book assumed its initial form
in a paper that I delivered at a Yale English Department seminar on Parody,
conducted by James A. Snead, an old friend since our undergraduate days
at Yale College. Snead's enthusiastic response, and that of his students,
confirmed my hope that I had at last located within the African and Afro-
American traditions a system of rhetoric and interpretation that could be
drawn upon both as figures for a genuinely "black" criticism and as frames
through which I could interpret, or "read," theories of contemporary literary
criticism.
After several active years of work applying literary theory to African and
Afro-American literatures, I realized that what had early on seemed to me
to be the fulfillment of my project as a would-be theorist of black literature
was, in fact, only a moment in a progression. The challenge of my project,
if not exactly to invent a black theory, was to locate and identify how the
"black tradition" had theorized about itself. It was Geoffrey H. Hartman,
shortly after my return to Yale from graduate school at Cambridge, who
issued this challenge to me, accompanied by what has proven to be his un-
flagging support for this project.
Ralph Ellison's example of a thoroughly integrated critical discourse, in-
formed by the black vernacular tradition and Western criticism, provided the
model for my work. Ishmael Reed's formal revision and critique of the
Afro-American literary tradition, a project that had arrested my attention
since graduate school, helped to generate this theory, especially as Reed mani-
fested his critique in his third novel, Mumbo Jumbo. It seemed to me that the
relation of Reed's text to those of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, Jean
Toomer and Sterling A. Brown, and Zora Neale Hurston, was a "Signifying)"
relation, as the Afro-American tradition would have it. Through Reed's charac-
ter, Papa La Bas, I was able to construct a myth of origins for Signifyin(g) and
its sign, the Signifying Monkey. Slowly and surely, my search for a chart of de-
scent for the Monkey ended with that Pan-African repository of figuration and
interpretation, Esu-Elegbara, the Yoruba trickster figure, by way of Nigeria,
Benin, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and New Orleans. In a curious way, which I was to
realize only much later, my discovery of Esu was a rediscovery; for my super-