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

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Bruce Barnhart

The narrator's conscription into the patron's conception of time occurs in an argument between the two, an argument that follows on the heels of the late night ragtime sessions and that exposes the underpinnings of the patron's conception of time and the larger implications of his desire to "blot out" time.

Tellingly, the argument concerns the narrator's desire to transform himself from a ragtime pianist into a classical composer. He wants to leave the patron's employ and return to the United States to compose a symphony "on Negro themes." (7) Having heard the theme of one of his ragtime compositions transposed into "classical form" by a German guest of his patron's, the narrator becomes possessed by the idea of "making ragtime classical." But when he tells the patron of his plans, of his desire "to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form" (148), he is met by a "cynical" smile. The patron has nothing but scorn for the narrator's planned return to America, and refers to it as "this idea of making a Negro out of yourself" (145). This scorn is a manifestation of the patron's conception of time and his indifference to the past; like a good modernist he envisions the past as a dead force void of consequence for the present and the future. (8) He sees the narrator's artistic plans as an endorsement of the racial divisions of US society, divisions that he disdains as much as the narrator does. To the patron, race is something that one assumes rather than something one is born into; he finds it ludicrous that the narrator's experience might inspire his desire to work with "Negro themes," and the patron can see this desire as nothing more than a free and irrational choice, based as it is on a seemingly unnecessary exposure of the narrator to prejudice and violence. Unlike Johnson, the patron cannot see that divisions based on racial identity are both irrationally arbitrary and productive of a cultural heritage that has a different value or weight for individuals of different racial identities. He cannot understand that the race of the narrator is not just a function of decisions and categories in the present, but is produced by the weight of the past on the present, both the past of the narrator and the past of the people who have produced the "Negro themes" that the narrator is so eager to get his hands on. Concomitant with the patron's blindness to the past is his theory of art, a theory perhaps best understood as a 'free market' theory of art. In his continuing attempts to dissuade the narrator from his intended course of action, the patron argues that "Music is a universal art; anybody's music belongs to everybody; you can't limit it to race or country" (144). When the patron speaks, he speaks the language of capital; art is attached only to those who can appreciate and pay for its value. The possibility of art functioning as an expression of national or racial ideals is as meaningless to him as the narrator's plan to "make a Negro" out of himself. The universality of art that the patron espouses envisions an art unattached to and untainted by the conditions of its making, free to circulate beyond the bounds of race and nation. In this construction, art bears none of the responsibility to community that is so important to both Johnson and his narrator. We should recognize here the conditions of the circulation of jazz that characterized its propagation in the period book ended by the two release dates of Johnson's novel, as well as the conditions of the narrator's presence in Europe. The narrator's detachment from the place where he learned the music that endears him to the patron makes him liable to the financial arrangement that binds him to the patron and allows him to circulate throughout Europe. His very situation is an exemplification of his patron's theory of art, an exemplification that the unbinding from responsibility to race or nation is a binding to the dictates of capital. In his passage through the capitals of European culture, the narrator must indulge every whim of the patron and is prohibited from playing without the patron's mandate. What the patron imagines as the "universality" of art is the replacement of one set of constraints for another, the severing of the ties to the past that the demands of racial and national identity constitute replaced by a "free" contractual agreement predicated on the patron's ability to continue to pay for the narrator's complete allegiance.