Towards a poetization of the "Field of Manners"

African American Review, Winter, 1995 by Qun Wang

Indeed, what is so problematic about the Swedish Academy's statement is that the search for abstract universalities not only justifies, but also necessitates, what British scholar Raymond Williams calls the "recognition of the essential." Williams posits that the traditional notion of "typicality" in literature is "in effect a rendering of 'universals,'" those characteristics which purport to be "permanently important elements of human nature and the human condition" (101). The problem with upholding the traditional definition of "typicality," Williams suggests, is that, instead of looking at social and historical reality as a dynamic process, people, in seeking out "permanent elements of the human social situation," gravitate toward "not only recognition of the essential but through this recognition . . . its desirability and inevitability" (102).

African American feminist scholar Mae G. Henderson sees the problem of "the rhetoric of universality" to be as cultural as it is political. Rather than canonizing any voice, including the African American voice, Henderson would prefer "the privileging of difference," or "a multiplicity of 'interested readings,'" in order to resist "the totalizing character of much theory and criticism - readings that can enter into dialogic relationship with other 'interested readings' - past and present." Henderson remains concerned that "the rhetoric of universality . . . has excluded gender, race, and class perspectives from the dominant literary-critical discourse as well as the socio-political centers of power," and she observes that "the reduction of multiplicity to undifferentiated sameness . . . has empowered white feminists to speak for all women, black men to speak for all blacks, and white males to speak for everyone" (156).(2)

Indeed, contrary to what is suggested in the Swedish Academy's statement about Toni Morrison's achievement with language, the best writings in African American literature are not those that use languages that "transcend" the African American experience, but those which are inspired by what Morrison calls "huge silences in literature, things that had never been articulated, printed or imagined" (M. Brown 6A). The best writings in African American literature challenge the cultural, political, and social configuration of the literary voice in America with their insistence on celebrating the African American cultural heritage. As Morrison once told a reporter from the New York Times, "My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger."(3) To understand the ethos of contemporary African American literature is, therefore, to reappropriate our understanding of the dialectical relationship between specificity and universality and between marginality and centralization; to appreciate contemporary African American writers' accomplishments is to understand the importance for African Americans to achieve what Houston A. Baker, Jr., calls "a reversed, or inverted, perceptual reorientation"(77).(4) For without the "perceptual reorientation," African Americans would be condemned to struggle forever in the so-called "double-consciousness" experience described by African American scholar David Levering Lewis in his recent biography of W. E. B. Du Bois as an "epiphenomenal limbo" (282). Or, in African American dramatist August Wilson's words,

I write about the black experience in America and try to explore in terms of the life I know best those things which are common to all cultures. I see myself as answering James Baldwin's call for a profound articulation of the black experience, which he defined as "that field of manners and ritual of intercourse that can sustain a man once he has left his father's house." I try to concretize the values of the black American and place them on stage in loud action to demonstrate the existence of the above "field of manners" and point to some avenues of sustenance.(5)

August Wilson's is one of the most exciting and inspiring voices in contemporary American theater. His plays have won numerous prizes and awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, five New York Drama Critics Best Play Awards, and a Tony Award. His five full-length plays(6) Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1985), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), The Piano Lesson (1987), and Two Trains Running (1990) - have been praised by critics as being "compelling," "eloquent," "uplifting," and "powerful." But to go beyond the thumbs-up/thumbs-down formulaic approach in appreciating Wilson's achievement as both a dramatist and a culturalist is to recognize that what distinguishes Wilson from other contemporary American playwrights is the writer's sensitivity, sharpened by his awareness of and determination to celebrate the African American cultural heritage; his sharp ear for a language that is as colorful as the African American experience itself; and his sense of humor, which is compassionate, mesmerizing, and entertaining at the same time.

During his interview with Matteo Bellinelli for SSR-RTSI Swiss Television, Wilson cited four "Bs" as major influences on his works: African American painter Romare Bearden, African American writer Amiri Baraka, Argentinean short story writer Jorge Luis Borges, and, most important of all, the blues. Wilson explained to Bellinelli: