To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance - Review

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by C. K. Doreski

In "The Anatomy of 'Sleep,'" George Hutchinson, Thadious Davis, and Deborah McDowell supply the critical matrix against which Woodson reads Quicksand and Passing. Each critic has produced, despite ignorance of Gurdjieffian topography, readings that chart an indescribable "otherness" in Nella Larsen's writings. But these critical apprehensions may not prepare them to consider (or accept) the transvestite, transgender, Gurdjieffian "riddles" (Quicksand's Mrs.Hayes-Rore and Passing's Gertrude Martin) Woodson posits here. These are not simply critical substitutions of one fixity (the "Gurdjieffian) for another (lesbian or feminist). They are, if we are persuaded by Woodson's "blueprint" for reading, essential stylistic devices common to the entire group. Scholars wedded to normative identity politics may be vexed or flummoxed by these critical sleights of hand. Larsen's systematic attack on race results in the Ultimate Gurdjieffian goal: the requisite mental freedom to shed such "socially prescribed roles [as] wi fe, woman, man, white man, mother, Negro, father, husband."

George Schuyler inspires this study's boldest inquiry into the language of art and scholarship. Schuyler is Gurdjieffian in his "sense of power and mastery over other people"--as well as in the certainty brought to that identity. Slaves Today and Black No More complicate the attack on racialism by considering specific aspects of period addleheadedness: the pseudoscientific discourses of eugenics and racist anthropology exemplified, for example, by Lothrop Stoddard in his Rising Tide of Color. Even the critical dialogue of this chapter--between Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and John C. Gruesser--asks tough questions about literary and critical risks when dealing with extraliterary concerns. Gates, impatient with or unaware of the Gurdjieffian subtexts, dismisses Schuyler as a "literary schizophrenic ... fragmented self"; Gruesser, at the nexus of intuition and empiricism, concludes that Schuyler was a "black writer who responded to white racism and the pressure to toe the line within the black community by creating a variety of personae for himself." Gruesser's uninitiated attentiveness to factual detail inadvertently yields a Gurdjieffian reading that would seem independently to corroborate Woodson.

Zora Neale Hurston occasions little here in the way of critical overview. The study's concluding chapter concerns itself with the culminating philosophy of the Gurdjieff movement in Harlem. Less encumbered by the jargon, didactic purpose, and obtrusive narrative tricks of Toomer and his colleagues, Hurston is secure in the literary and anthropological roots of her allegorical and mythological tales. With their "highly refined ... attacks on reading," Jonah's Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the Mountain, and Seraph on the Suwanee contribute to our evolving understanding of the "important but unfashionable figure of the superman." Through aesthetically and philosophically complex characters, Hurston limns a Gurdjieffian world of "supermen [who] embody the preeminence of compassion, psychological insight, and a visionary perception of human possibilities."