The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many - Review

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Charles Scruggs

Mark Helbling. The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 211 pp. $57.95.

Mark Heibling has written a useful, intelligent book, but his title is misleading. His slant on the Harlem Renaissance is very selective, and a more accurate title might have been "The Anthropological Influence upon the Harlem Renaissance," or, more specifically, "Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, and Five Writers of the Harlem Renaissance." Other significant personalities get thrown into the loop--e.g., the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, the art collector Albert C. Barnes, and the distinguished photographer Alfred Stieglitz--but this is a book meant to explore a precise theme from a very specific perspective: the tension between the individual and "group-life." Moreover, the exploration occasionally suffers because it is so top-heavy with anthropological theory and detail that Heibling doesn't always have space to develop the implications of his critical arguments.

His thesis goes as follows: If American modernism (as distinct from T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound's "high" modernism) expresses "both a search for and a questioning of all forms of collective identity," then we can also see this ambivalence reflected in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Main Locke, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), for instance, DU Bois's famous statement about the Negro's "double-consciousness" also reflects his attempt to negotiate a terrain between a folk spirit as a ground for art and the individual artist or scholar who must see the world on his or her own terms. With Alain Locke, the problem between the "one and the many" becomes even more problematical, as Locke tries, with the help of Herskovits, to arrive at "some criteria of true race" that will not only escape the perils of rigid categorization but will free the artist to find his or her unique voice.

McKay expresses the struggle between the "one and the many" in a different way. He uses primitivism in his writings as a political weapon against the dominant white hierarchy, only to reject it simultaneously as an answer to the knotty problem of identity. Indeed, Helbling's most insightful literary analyses are those that center upon Home to Harlem (1928) and Banana Bottom (1932), in which he sees Ray's and Jake's relationship to "place" (Harlem, Haiti), or Bita's relationship to the "folk," as raising questions that haunt the Renaissance itself. For example, to what extent can the individual draw upon "place" or "race" or the "folk" for sustenance, and when does the individual have to flee all three if he or she is to retain his or her personal integrity?

Toomer thought he could solve the problem of personal wholeness through "the achievement of 'a compelling literary form' "that would be commensurate with discovering the spiritual form of his own life. However, trouble would arise when the author outside the text of Cane (1923) confessed to Waldo Frank that "Kabnis is Me!" since Kabnis is a character who is trapped by race and who is overwhelmed by the "intangible oppression" of the South. Within the text, of course, Kabnis is only one of Toomer's multiple personae; however, his prominence in Cane critiques the effectiveness of literary form as a means of imposing order on "the many" through art, for Kabnis's presence acts as a centrifugal force that explodes that order.

This question of multiple selves is also a problem for Zora Neale Hurston, especially when we consider her approach to black life through the "spy glass of Anthropology." Hurston agreed with Ruth Benedict that "no man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes," for all human beings see it through the lens of "culture," which Benedict defined as "the outward expression of a deeply imagined core of values unique to a people's collective existence." Thus the dilemma for Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) lies in acquiring access to the metaphor (the drama of the storefront porch) without being devoured by a communal consciousness that degrades her as a woman. For Helbling the dilemma is solved through the creative imagination, a form of sight that subsumes language within a higher reality. First grounded in the language of the community, personal vision must ultimately be a flight away from language. Ironically, Janie's own unique spiritual journey--knowing the horizon by going "there"--will return t o the community by way of her story.

Helbling's best insights come when his philosophical content leads to close readings of seminal texts. One case in which this is true is his treatment of Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925) within the context of his entire intellectual career. Locke struggled to make sense of the African-American artist's relationship to African art, and he was continually revising his views on the subject. Helbling perceptively observes that Locke's advocacy of the study of modernism by African American artists in The New Negro is "more complicated than" Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s complaint that, because modernists like Picasso used African art in their own work, Locke thought that "African-Americans w[ould] become African by becoming modern." On the contrary, Locke thought that modernism's treatment of African art might help African Americans to perceive their spiritual heritage in ways that would enable them to understand and to shape their own distinctive experiences in the New World.