Chronopolitics and race, rag-time and symphonic time in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Bruce Barnhart

Thus, the time-conception regnant in the music of figures like James P. Johnson and James Weldon Johnson's narrator is indebted to the form of African time kept alive in the ring-shout tradition, but is in no way reducible to it. In Blues People, his seminal work on the sociological significance of jazz and other forms of African American music, Leroi Jones--later Amiri Baraka--contends that "the African, because of the violent differences between what was native and what he [or she] was forced to in slavery, developed some of the most complex ideas about the world imaginable" (7). Time is one of these ideas, and the complexity of the time-conception at work in ragtime means that the opposition Johnson sets up between classical music and ragtime can not be a simple one. Ragtime improvises through the distinction between European and African culture with a brilliance perhaps best captured by James Snead's essay "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture." Snead defines black culture as a culture built on acknowledgment of repetition and of time's social basis. In his formulation, however, European culture does not (and cannot) eschew repetition; it merely tries to suppress its implications. He concludes that there are "elements of black culture already there [in European culture] in latent form" and "that the separation between the cultures was perhaps all along not one of nature, but of force" (75). Snead captures the complex interplay at work in black music's rhythmic shaping of repetition without ever losing sight of the fact that this music is the product of black culture and that it aims, in James Baldwin's words, "to checkmate the European notion of the world" (87). Critiquing allochronism is a key part of checkmating the European conception of the world, and in critiquing what I am calling "official time," Johnson allies himself with the imperatives of the music that his narrator ultimately abandons.

What marks my essay's departure from previous criticism is its focus on this alliance and on the importance of the category of time in Johnson's novel. While several critics have commented on the centrality of music to the novel to my knowledge none have highlighted the way Johnson's use of music is linked to strategies and conceptions of temporality. (6) I examine the conception of time implicit in and motivating the narrator's classical project, and then turn to the way ragtime attempts to evade this temporality to propose an alternative organization of time and of social interaction. I read the argument between the narrator and the patron concerning the narrator's desire to compose a work on "Negro themes," and then move to the narrator's behavior in the South before returning to consider the late night ragtime sessions that precede both scenes.

In the late night confrontation between the narrator's performance of ragtime and the patron's simultaneous command of, and willed deafness to, the music, Johnson gives us a scene of chronopolitical struggle. In exerting his power over the narrator's time and in refusing to heed the kinetic imperatives of his music, the patron makes use of the prerogatives of an official time divorced from participation. Yet ultimately more powerful is the patron's ability to articulate persuasively his conception of time to the narrator. The patron's attempt to use ragtime to "blot out" time is doomed to failure, but his attempt to conscript the narrator into allegiance to his view of time is much more successful. With the success of this argument, Johnson emphasizes that dominant conceptions and performances of time are maintained more through ideological rather than physical force.