Carolyn Gipson lecture, "DuBois the Novelist: The Quest of the Silver Fleece," at the University of Iowa, June-July 1972

Speaker 1: The following is an address recorded at the Fourth Annual Institute for Afro American culture held at the University of Iowa, June 25th through July 7th, 1972. Speaking on De Bois, the novelist, the Quest of the Silver Fleece is Dr. Carolyn Gibson, and introducing Dr. Gibson is Charles T. Davis professor of English at the University of Iowa, and Chairman of the Institute. Charles T. Davi...: She received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Michigan, completing her work there with a dissertation on Du Bois' novels. Her undergraduate degree is from Fisk University. Where, as we all know, Du Bois is still a living presence. I've been impressed by the kinds of knowledge that Ms. Gibson has brought to the Institute. Charles T. Davi...: I'm thinking specifically about her sensitivity to the shaping influence of the literary tradition, Black as well as white, European as well as American, and a familiarity with the fact of intellectual history. She's equally skilled at establishing the pattern of a rhetorical essay, and reconstructing the moment of time from which the essay has sprung, as with describing the structure of the quest of the silver fleece, which he has been doing so ably this morning. Charles T. Davi...: We look forward to her review article, the one that she is writing now for the New York review of books, though Ms. Gibson has richly fulfilled all of my expectations for her. I'm puzzled by one question she has posed, perhaps inadvertently, the question indeed is a mark of punctuation. To the standard question presented in the questionnaire submitted to the institute faculty, please indicate if you will be accompanied by spouse. Ms. Gibson responded yes dash no spouse exclamation point. Charles T. Davi...: Now, rather than ask what is responsible for the emphasis, surely none of my business. I prefer to open the quotation marks for her lecture this afternoon. This act suggesting only a willingness to learn requires no comment. I take pleasure in introducing Ms. Gibson, who will discuss the Du Bois' novel. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: I suppose that after an introduction like that, one either performs or begins to fade into the woodwork. At any rate to begin, I suspect that a reader of Du Bois' novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece comes away from that book with the feeling that he has just completed a curious piece of fiction. That the experience of reading it has been a strange one. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: If he reacts to that book upon an initial reading, as I did, a reader may well feel that some vital component, perhaps the very essence, and hence the significance of the book has alluded him. No doubt. This mythical reader will be certain that the Quest of the Silver Fleece is not a great book. If he is certain, that Du Bois' fiction, like his other writing, is serious work, this reader will keep wondering about the quest, and its meaning long after he has completed it. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: If he is aware of Du Bois' complicity in so much of what is happening to, and around us now, the reader might begin to search for clues to the man in the mysteries of his fiction. Not surprisingly in the Negro novel in America, Robert Bone has called the Quest of the Silver Fleece, a literary hybrid. Certainly, it is that though not probably for the reasons that Bone suggests. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: That is, it seems to me that the quest is a strange book, not simply because it mixes the anachronistic idiom of the genteel tradition, with a rather awkward effort to produce reproduce Southern dialect. Nor, simply I would think because Du Bois' attempts to evolve in this book a communal economic theory in the context of manners and morays, which are the products of a decidedly capitalistic society. It is therefore I would suggest, neither the peculiar idiom of the novel nor the disconcerting proximity of capitalist, and socialist in it, that account wholly for our uneasiness with the quest. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: On the contrary, everything in the book seems to have meaning by virtue of the fact that it is at odds with something else. That that something has it's antithesis. It is possible that whatever discomfort we feel about the Quest of the Silver Fleece arises from the fact that its parts seem to resist synthesis. The story, and character, and situation appear to be generated, and even sustained in polarity. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: To be more specific, the quest places us at various times in two very different, and distinctive worlds. These dichotomous worlds in the quest derive from differing conceptions of the nature of the human experience. Further, these differing ways of viewing the human condition have supplied literary traditions, which are fundamentally, and diametrically opposed. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Clearly I am speaking of the novel tradition on the one hand, and the romance tradition on the other. In distinguishing the novel and romance traditions, I am assuming in a very unoriginal way that the romance, and the novel differ, not merely in their intended effects upon the perceiver, but also in the human needs they furnish needs, which are corelative to the peculiar sets, of social and cultural circumstances from which each of these forums emerged. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Moreover, I am suggesting that the presence of these disjunctive worlds in the quest, that is the world of the novel, and the world of the romance, should not merely be taken as an indication of Du Bois' ineptness as a fiction writer, but as further evidence of the personal paradox, the two warring ideals, the contradiction of double aims about which he wrote so persuasively in the souls of Black folk. The manifestation of this conflict, to which I have referenced, the manifestations are those that might be observed in his imaginative literature. The assumption here is that some leap of faith, some suspension of disbelief is essential to a sympathetic explication of them. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Further, the Du Bois about to whom I am speaking is a man who believed deeply in the value of imaginative literature, and who had exhibited a good deal of faith in the inviolability of the individual imagination. In other words, the Du Bois who wrote "it had always been my ambition to write, to seek through the written word, the expression of my relation to the world and of the world to me." If this statement can be taken as proof, it is apparent that Du Bois has conception of literature was an intensely romantic ego centered one. It indicates the Du Bois conceived of literature as a means of defining the outer world in relation to the inner self, and as the means of interpreting the human experience in the light of personal meditations on the individual, and on the group experience. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Finally, the imaginative Du Bois about whom I am speaking is a man, who was at least as far as his creative writing is concerned, a philosophical Manichaean. That is a man alert to the dualities, and the dichotomies that are implicit in the human condition. His literature shows him to have been torn between his love for the New England tradition and its intellectual idealism, on the one hand, and his very romantic attraction to the legendary South, on the other hand. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: It shows him also to have been the spiritual aristocrat, enamored of the idea of democracy. He was a man who shared the value system of a leisured class, but hated at the same time, the blatant exploitation, which unquestionably sustained the value system of that class. Indeed, he was what we might call the final contradiction, in any terms, a Black westerner. Du Bois was there for, in a very real sense, the victim of what he so eloquently described as two warring ideals imprisoned in one dark body. The presence of these apparent conflicts reached, I submit, crisis proportions at certain times in Du Bois' life. He's strived in his creative literature for synthesis for unitary vision. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: This explains, I think, the peculiar tension in the quest, and the very different kind of tension in dark princes. I am satisfied at least at this point in my own life, the Du Bois did not reach a satisfactory resolution of these various conflicts in his fiction until the very last years in the apocalyptic vision of his trilogy, the Black Flame. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois refer to the Quest of the Silver Fleece as an economic study of some merit, and because the novel has elements of the economic naturalistic novel, the traditional reformist fiction that reached its peak in the first decade of the 20th century, it has generally been assumed in writing the Quest of the Silver Fleece, Du Bois was imitating Frank Norris' novels, the Octopus and the Pit. For example, in Negro Voices in American fiction, Hugh Gloucester as stressed the naturalistic influences in the quest. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: No doubt the book can be read as an assessment of Du Bois' view of the economic situation in America in 1911. Still it is apparent that Du Bois' novel, is a good deal more than an economic novel. For one thing, the quest is Zora, for another thing, the quest is Caroline Wynn, and Mrs. Vanderpool and a host of other characters. If the quest is all of these things, or more aptly, if it's fictive universe is inhabited by such diverse, and varied characters, it is doubtlessly more than an economic novel, because the prescriptive, and reductive laws that must govern the naturalistic novel by definition are suspended here. To be sure, the quest makes an economic statement, a sociopolitical statement, if you will. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: That statement clearly registers Du Bois as an equivocal belief in the ultimate rewards of a communal, and utopian society. One might conclude therefore, that the quest is a utopian novel. To say that it is that, does not, I think, say all that can be said about it. In other words, once it has been established, the two worlds do exist in the Quest of the Silver Fleece, and that Zora's world, that is the imaginative universe she inhabits, is different from the world of the say Caroline Wynn. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Once it has been established that the atmosphere, the texture of one world differs from that of the other, what more can be said? A good deal, I think, if only because Northrop Frye has indicated where we might go from here. To be sure, in the anatomy of criticism, Frye notes that an essential difference exists between the novel, and the romance, and that that difference lies in the conception of characterization. In the novel, according to Frye, one is likely to come across real people acting and reacting incredible social situations. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: That is the novelist, again according to Frye, requiring the framework of a stable society, and beginning from the assumption that social stability is of inherent value in itself, is compelled by the very definition of the form to accept a principle of social order as an aspect of his imaginative construct. Frye's assumption is therefore that the novelist will work from the social principles he knows best. That is those principles of social organization, which are characteristic of the society of which he is apart, because the difference between the novel, and the romance lies, again according to Frye, in the way character is conceived. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: The novelist will attempt verisimilitude as he conceives characters, and his characters will reflect therefore the recognizable manners, and morays of certain social types. In the romance, on the other hand, characters are more likely to suggest psychological archetypes, and a peculiar kind of individuality that is antagonistic to the values of society. Consequently, because of the atypicality of its focus, the romance is a more revolutionary form than is the novel, and because of the romancer's predilection for the asocial character, he is more likely to give us a story in which allegory is, according to Frye, constantly creeping around the fringes. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: In other words, the story in the romance is always threatening to become something more than a literal rendition of fact. By implication, the romance writer appears always to be saying that the world, and the quality of life in it, ought to be something more than they are. The impulses then that might lead one to write a romance can be called anarchistic. If the romance derives from an essentially asocial impulse, on the one hand, the novel derives from a more conservatizing tendency on the other. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: To look to the quest for more specific evidence of this, we might think briefly, for example of those sections in the quest that exist within the tradition of the realistic novel proper. The events that occur beyond Zora's swamp constitute a kind of novel of manners set first in the South, and then in the North. The realistic sections of the quest are unified by the forays of Zora, and Bles Alwyn into the wider world. Significantly, apart from Zora, and Elspeth, who are the stylized archetypical characters from the romance tradition. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: The other characters in the quest do not veer in either their thoughts, or actions from the narrowly conceived class stereotypes, which they were intended to represent. As we observed the Cresswells, and the Taylors, and the Easterlies, and Caroline Wynn and Mrs. Vanderpool, we're made acutely aware that each of these characters lives in society, and that each has his being in the trappings, and the currency and the status, which that society can bestow. Given those assumptions then about the nature of being, for those live in society, or at least for those who care a good deal about their places in it. We have only to observe the way characters react in relation to one another. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Indeed given the stereotypical basis for the creation of these characters they move necessarily within a very narrow frame of reference. They possess no room in which to grow. Rather they represent and exhibit the manners and morays the Du Bois believed must attach to a particular social station, or to the yearning after it. Parenthetically, there is a rather perplexing matter in all of this. That is in Du Bois' manipulation of the novel of manners. Interestingly enough, the picture of the white world that is sketched in the Quest of the Silver Fleece is more subtle than the picture of the Black world that is sketched there. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Surely, one must be struck by the utter lack of humanity in the Black middle class characters who vow to rise in what remains for them an mobile society. For example, the motive subscribed to Caroline Wynn do not differ from those attributed to Mary Taylor, each lacking independent wealth helps to attract a husband of some fortune. To be sure the road to success is a more difficult one for Caroline Wynn. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: For all of the evidence parallels in their situations, Mary Taylor emerges as the more human indeed, the more humane character. Similarly, if one compares John Taylor, the mercenary northerner in the novel, to Sam [inaudible] were Caroline's friends. It is again apparent that the white character is granted the most humanity, taken on that score alone the quest becomes a rather scathing indictment of the smallness, and the villainy of the moribund Black middle class. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: This in spite of Du Bois' insistence in his nonfiction prose on the spiritual, and moral superiority of those who dwell beyond the veil. By way of contrast Du Bois' white world is varied. It encompasses the sympathetic virtue of Sarah Smith, the tainted idealism of her brother, Steven, the greedy amorality of John Taylor, the unimaginative frivolity of Helen Creswell, and so on. Above all the white world in the quest includes the sportsmanlike cynicism, the cool sense of irony, and a philosophical detachment characteristic of Mrs. Vanderpool. Her's this a view of the world spawned by a life of leisure. By comparison, the vapid pursuits of the Black middle class seems small and petty. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: These sections of the quests do in fact, represent Du Bois' perception of the state of society at this time in his life. It represents a civilized man's view of civilization, for Du Bois was above all things in 1911 a creature of civilization. Still, it is Zora who captures our attention, much as she captured Du Bois' affection, and catalyzed his imagination. Moreover, I would suggest that it is Zora who turned the quest into something quite other than what Du Bois had initially intended it to be. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Certainly, it is Zora who raises the novel above the level of the mundane. Zora's world is held together as an imaginative universe by the symbolic silver fleece. It is the world which Zora shares with her witch like mother Elspeth, and the shadowy creatures who venture there on occasions to participate in mysterious initiatory rights of human sexual relations. In the context of the swamp, Zora's story is in fact, an initiation into the mysteries of life. Her journey is the age old journey from innocence to experience her ritual quest, a pursuit of atonement and salvation. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Ultimately, Zora is helped toward a symbolic grail by her knight errant Bles and her wealthy fairy queen Mrs. Vanderpool. Her world is there for a mythic one, not bound by the laws that govern the worlds of commerce, and social interaction. One might add here that we rarely hear Zora conversing in the novel. We usually see her either meditating, or hear her orating. At any rate Zora's world is a world in which the passion to live, and the impulse to survive assume Gothic proportions. In short Zora's World is that of the romance, where the miraculous, and the inscrutable are givens. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: It seems to me that when Du Bois began the quest, he was committed to the idea of a socioeconomic novel. As a social scientist, trying to observe social phenomena, Du Bois would no doubt have been fascinated with reproducing his notion of the processes, and the effects of social stratification. His idea, in other words, of the dynamic of society. As a socialist, he undoubtedly felt compelled to interpret this dynamic in the light of economics, but Du Bois was also an introspective man. A man personally sensitive to the corrosive effects it cast on the human spirit. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: What is more, his imagination was romantic, and by extension, both individualistic, and anarchistic, therefore the kind of sociopolitical statement that Du Bois appears to have been attempting in the quest was actually alien to the kind of imagination, which he possessed. Indeed, when comparing what Du Bois so often attempted in his fiction, with what he actually achieved, one often feels that he was continually trying to unite [Millio] as disparate as the worlds of Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. In the quest, Zora becomes, then, the receptacle for excessive flights of fantasy for what Frye has called the individualized libido. Bles is, I think, a much less interesting character. In essence, his presence and function in the novel suggest that, despite Du Bois' obvious fondness for Zora, he needed somehow to minimize her dominance in the novel. I suspect that Du Bois incorporated a good deal of his own desire to rebel against the inhibiting influences of civilization in Zora. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yet, I suspect also that Du Bois sensed that the substance of Zora's charm, that is, her instinctive amorality, could not be explained away as a temporary error of judgment to be suffered without consequence. Rather, he appears to have recognized that Zora's behavior has to be seen as a fully developed mechanism for survival. Incapable of aligning himself in the final analysis with the mode of behavior alien to the values of civilization, Du Bois sought to neutralize Zora's code and the attractiveness of it through the character of Bles. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Bles is, after all, the primary advocate of conventional morality in the novel. He is also, and, again, quite appropriately, a bridge between the alien worlds of the novel and the romance. Toward the end of the novel, it is therefore Bles who sanctions Zora's plan for a utopian community. Du Bois has, in effect, achieved a synthesis of sorts by the end of the novel. His utopian community will fuse the civilization of the leisured class with the legendary values of a Southern and agrarian society. Significantly, Zora has been properly educated by Mrs. Vanderpool and will presumably carry the lessons she has learned to her ideal community in the South. Whereas The Quest of the Silver Fleece can be called a social novel if only in the broadest sense of that term, Dark Princess is quite a different kind of creative effort. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Du Bois published Dark Princess, his second novel, in 1928. We might for the sake of expediency call Dark Princess and novel of sensibility. That is, in the second novel, Du Bois attempted to locate the sources of human differences in the quality of mind rather than in the social meilleur as he had in The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Consequently, the primary character in second novel moves and around above restrictive social forces. But still, Matthew Townes, the protagonist of Dark Princess, is not a creature of fantasy as Zora has been, neither is his consort, Kautilya, the East Indian princess. Rather, both Townes and Kautilya are different from those around them because they think differently. They are, for all practical purposes, creatures of pure intellect. The novel is the story of Matthew Townes, an ex-medical student who falls in love with the exiled the East Indian princess Kautilya. The plot of the novel revolves around the intrigue in which the lovers become involved as they participate in a plan to initiate a third world revolution. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: If The Quest of the Silver Fleece is an odd book as critical consensus would have it, Dark Princess is even more so. About Dark Princess, Saunders Redding has remarked, "The novel is a strange book, a strange compound of revolutionary doctrine and feudalistic philosophy." To professor Redding's evaluation. One might add that Du Bois insisted the Dark Princess was to be seen as a romance, thereby warning us, no doubt, that the laws of very similitude should not apply here. Still, Professor Redding is right. It is a strange book and for a variety of reasons, only few of which can be enumerated here. At any rate, first of all, there is in the second novel a troubling lack of consistency in the ideology. Ostensibly, the novel should be read as an affirmation of socialist political theory. Yet, the protagonist Townes is obviously disdainful of the masses. It is Kautilya, the deposed princess, who is the Democrat and who leads Townes back to a hereditary throne which will [inaudible] become the force for democracy in the world. Moreover, the crucial quest in this novel is for beauty rather than justice. Or put more correctly, justice is envisioned in this novel as a component of some some vague, platonic conception of beauty. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Moreover, despite the rather implied, and to be taken seriously here, the implied decadence of Western civilization, it is in the artifacts of a supposedly decaying West that Townes finds the sustaining beauty which he so craves. Moreover, the Black world in this novel, represented largely by an unscrupulous politician and his scheming secretary, Sara Andrews, who is another version of Caroline Wen. This Black world is almost uniformly vicious and money grubbing, so much so in fact that Du Bois suggests that Townes, the man of sensitivity, can only hope to survive if he escapes the Black world in which he lives. And despite the continuing discussion in the novel of an impending revolution in the third world, the Confederation, which meets to plot this revolution, is without an African representative. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: It is the Japanese representative to the Confederation who becomes the obvious ideal in the novel. And I might add in the rather disconcerting sense that this man also happens to be a Renaissance man in the European sense of that word. Moreover, when Townes is provided with an escape from American society, the road that he takes leads to Asia rather than to Africa. And interestingly enough, there is a good deal of talk in the novel about the fitness of Blacks to participate in a revolution. Many of the participants in the discussions continually describe Blacks as an historically servile race. Du Bois does, interestingly enough, simply raise the issue and then proceed to evade it. Moreover, the social ideal established at the beginning of Dark Princess presupposes that in democracy, a natural aristocracy, what Du Bois called an aristocracy of talent, will emerge. But Townes fathers a future maharaja who will lead the world toward a higher state of civilization. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Du Bois opted in Dark Princess for what might be called the politics of sensibility. That is, one cannot ignore the visionary approach to politics in the novel, an approach which assumes that a direct correlation exists between a man's aesthetic temperament on the one hand and his political sympathies on the other. And crucial to this view of politics in the novel is the fact that there appears to be an affinity here between Du Bois' conception of politics and that which a man like D.H. Lawrence espouse. The irony here is that there is less tension between the kind of authoritarianism and the kind of sensibility toward which Lawrence was inclined. Then there is between the political democracy or the politics of democracy and the elitist temperament ascribed and attributed to Townes. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Finally, the formal conflict and Dark Princess is between the novel of character and the political expose. To the degree that Dark Princess is a novel of sensibility, it is also a psychological novel. And the world of that psychological novel is alien to the world of political expose. But again, Du Bois does achieve a synthesis of sorts. That is, the resolution of Dark Princess is Townes' escape to a utopia, a foreign one this time, to a place where the cultivation of beauty will be synonymous with the realization of the aims of a just society. Du Bois' last series of novels, The Black Flame, his trilogy, is much more difficult to talk about. Of course, one of the problems with fiction criticism in general is that the commentaries are often necessarily impressionistic simply because one can never have the whole thing quite there in the same way that one might have a poem. This is particularly true of a work of the magnitude of the trilogy, for The Black Flame was in a very real sense Du Bois' creative magnum opus. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Apparently, Du Bois always wanted to write a very big novel. For example, much earlier in his life, Du Bois sketched the plans for two other trilogies. Shortly before 1912, he planned a series of panoramic historical novels, which he'd planned to call Scorn. Portions of these manuscripts are in the Fisk collection. Later in the 1920s, Du Bois made an outline for another series of epic novels to be called [inaudible] Golden Scepter. He envisioned initially that these novels would encompass three centuries, beginning with the African diaspora and tracing the development of a family from Africa in the 17th century to America in the 1920s. In the mid 1950s Du Bois apparently began work on The Black Flame. I say apparently because there was no other way to connect The Black Flame to any point in time other than the prose style. And the prose style does seem narrow here to that of the world in Africa, the edition that came out in the 40s. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: At any rate, the novels that make up the trilogy are The Ordeal of Mansart published in 1957, Mansart Builds a School published in 1959 and Worlds of Color published in 1961. In the postscript to the first volume of the trilogy, Du Bois remarks that he lacked sufficient money and time for scholarly research and was trying, therefore, he says, by the method of historical fiction to complete the cycle of history that had compelled his thought for half a century. Consequently, in The Black Flame, Du Bois relied more on his reasoned understanding of post-reconstruction American history than on the sheer force of his creative imagination. The trilogy is actually a series of [inaudible 00:00:32:15]. It follows Manuel Mansart, the titular figure of two of the novels from his birth to his death. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: And the time span of the trilogy is from about 1876 to 1956. The trilogy does, in essence, give us Du Bois' retrospective view of almost everything that he could remember in his last years. One can not possibly cite all the examples, but I might just try to give you a few. For example, he explains his view in the trilogy of both the Wilson and the Roosevelt administrations. He gives you some idea of his own understanding of the inner workings of the NAACP during his tenure there. He gives you a bit of the history of Africa and of the West Indies. And he also gives you his understanding of what the British class system was all about. He also analyzes the situation in Indochina and does, in fact, refer specifically to Vietnam. Ultimately, therefore, simply because of the monumental nature of the undertaking involved here, the characters in the narrative in The Black Flame are subordinate Du Bois' idea of the meaning of the 20th century, as that idea was refracted through his consciousness in the last years of his life. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Indeed, the meaning of the 20th century for the late Du Bois as he describes it in the trilogy is that life was very much like, as he says, "The sudden revealing of hidden volcanoes that could fill the air with fire and blood." It was in short, the apocalyptic vision of the exiled romantic. The organizing frame of reference for the trilogy is quite clearly Marxian ideology, and the novels do chart the economic, moral, and literal suicide of the Western capitalist order. Du Bois appears himself in the trilogy in the not too veiled guise of Burghardt, whom we first meet as a professor at a southern Black university, obviously Atlanta, and who later goes off to edit what Du Bois calls an influential magazine. I wonder which one. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: What the most fascinating thing though about all this is that Du Bois may well have planned at the time that he first thought about writing the trilogy to dramatize his differences here with Booker T. Washington in the characters of Burghardt, Du Bois and Manuel Mansart, Washington. Note the name Manuel Mansart. But something quite curious happens here in the process because Mansart, initially the Washington figure I suspect, becomes Du Bois, and Mansart's story is, in the final analysis, Du Bois' spiritual autobiography. There is in Mansart's story, for an example, the unfortunate first marriage, which if we can believe, the autobiography must've paralleled Du Bois' first marriage. And then there is also the second more compatible union with a woman who might, in Du Bois' view at least, have a good deal in common with Shirley Graham. Moreover, and more importantly, Mansart moves in the trilogy toward a militant socialism in much the same way the Du Bois did, again, if the autobiography is to be trusted. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Significantly, the last book of the trilogy is entitled Worlds of Color, and the narrative moves a bit ponderously at times toward Mansart's death and his visionary prophesy of the end of a declining West. He dies symbolically facing the East and envisioning that a new order of Phoenix will arise out of the ashes of a colonialist society destroyed by fire. Of significance too is the fact that Mansart's grandson has gone to Africa to live, suggesting that the future of the colored peoples of the world is an Africa. I have spoken continually of conflicts in these novels, of the presence of a perplexing tension deriving from disparate ways of interpreting the human experience. That tension, which is so much a part of the imaginative dilemma of The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess, is of minimal importance in the trilogy and for good reason. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: In the first two books of The Black Flame, the Marxist orientation is so strong that it effectively dissipates any competing interests and the unified worlds of those first two novels can be explained, I think, in those terms. But the focus of Worlds of Color shifts away from a Marxian interpretation of experience to a romantic one. In the very last section of Worlds of Color, it is a kind of visionary, prophetic Pan-Africanism that informs Du Bois' conception of the meaning of Mansart's, and hence his own, life. Moreover, the last sections are devoted to a lyrical rendering of Du Bois' own perception of the beauty and the vitality of the African sensibility. It would appear, then, the Du Bois had reached yet another synthesis in The Black Flame, that he found in what he described as the riot of limb and life in African culture, an antidote to the hazards of civilization. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: To be sure, this final notion of Africa was probably as romantic, as idealized as his early view of the mission of Western civilization had been. But this view of Africa appears to have been the sustaining vision in the last days of his life. And it was, after all, that visionary impulse inspired by his stubborn and unshakable faith in human dignity and the human potential which made Du Bois' tremendous achievement possible. For visionaries like Du Bois, we must all be eternally grateful. Speaker 2: Thank you very much, [inaudible]. We have just talked about the questions [inaudible] this morning. And you must be full of questions that you wish to put to her. Yes, Ms. [Capon]. Ms. Capon: [inaudible] Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Probably the cotton motif again. He'd contemplated using that. And so [inaudible]. Knowing Du Bois, he would, of course, have wanted to make it his own in some odd sort of way. Speaker 2: Other questions. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: You can attack me too. I'm not opposed to that. [crosstalk]. Charles T. Davi...: [inaudible]. (laughs) In some ways, the two novels, the Dark Princess and The Quest of the Silver Fleece, seem to be very much alike. And I'm interested, first of all, in your exploring the correspondence, the correspondences themselves which seem to be obvious in terms of theme in which you have a male character who experiences the complexities and the disillusion of the world. And a female character, because of her first superior nature, seems to be spared some of these disillusionments. I wonder if you could look at that for just a minute to see how much identity there is there, how much correspondence there is there. And then if you could tell us what differences there are too. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, obviously, the princess and Princess Kautilya is a more sophisticated version of Zora. But of course, some interesting things happen here. And I may be getting away from the question, but I'd just sort of like to go into some of the things that happened that I considered to be so interesting. By Dark Princess, Du Bois has, well, maybe not switched on his morality, but he willing to concede certain things that he is not conceded in The Quest of the Silver Fleece. For example, it seems to me that Zora is treated in the quest with a certain detachment, precisely because she is amoral. Well, what you finally have him doing in Dark Princess is sanctioning an illicit relationship. Interestingly enough, Matthew Townes is married to Sara Andrews, but he goes off always to this apartment with Kautilya. And Du Bois does condone all of this. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Kautilya becomes, later in the trilogy, Jean Du Bignon who is, I suppose, a kind of Shirley Graham figure. But it's very interesting that whereas you have had Bles leading Zora essentially for all practical purposes, by Dark Princess, you get the female figure doing the leading, and that continues for the rest of the creative work. I don't know what one can make of it, but I think it's very interesting. Charles T. Davi...: I wonder if you could comment a little bit more on this kind of peculiar notion of the female leader, the female principal that seems to be developing here in Du Bois. He, in his own active life, would seek to epitomize the kind of shaping that the egocentric and powerful man might be able to do with the word. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah, that's true. Well, one, I think, always runs the risk here of getting into lifecycle analysis. I wouldn't know. I think- Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Like psychoanalysis? Charles T. Davi...: Yes. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: No, I think that's a very real tendency. Charles T. Davi...: [crosstalk] He never resisted the opportunity to do so. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Oh, okay. It's difficult to say. I suspect that the fact that Du Bois' mother was such an overwhelming influence in his life simply because his father was not there must've had something to do with it. He does, though continually too, when he later has this rather romantic vision of Africa, continually refer to the significance of the female in Africa, he calls Africa, mother Africa, the sexual implications of all of this might be terribly interesting. You know, if somebody wanted to, to pursue that. I'm not sure though that I can say a good deal more about that. Charles T. Davi...: You've done pretty well already. [inaudible] Speaker 3: I just like to call your attention too, I think we talked about this before that the image that tried to reoccurring and in Du Bois [inaudible], the image of the receding man in the face of injustices woman and he finds it as little things, [inaudible] find it in [inaudible], Texas. And there is that sense of the strength and beauty embodied in the man, [inaudible] that sense foremost is his justices becoming greater in the presence of that woman. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: That's true. [crosstalk]. That's really very true. And I, again, I keep wondering what this has to do with, with Du Bois is personal life in the trilogy for example, we get the feeling that man's side only becomes a great man when his first wife dies off and his free to marry Jean, all of these things are interesting, but I must admit that I'm really not sure what they mean. I don't really know, but I think it does mean something. I'm not sure what it means. Charles T. Davi...: Yes. Ms. Cott Miss Cott: This morning in our discussion, we had occasioned to somewhat briefly alluded to dark light symbolism. And it occurs to me that dark lights, symbolism in angled cultures are inherently racist in the sense that like imagery is obviously separately oriented ways and darkness, Blackness, et cetera, is obviously debasement et cetera. And you in your talk a few minutes ago, talked about attack that the novel somewhat resist surfaces, not only in culture, but, and certain stylistic devices. And I wonder if you yourself have been able to observe any kind of synthesis and he's use of [inaudible]. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah and it's resolved in a very touchy way. It's resolved in the mulatto. The child, for example, who is the product of the union at the end of Dark Princess. There's something very significant that what makes it have more significance is that in one of the unpublished short stories, and I don't recall the names of all of these now, because it's been a long time since I actually looked at them. But in one of those short stories, Du Bois does in fact predicted it kind of salvation of the world for the mulatto. All of this gets to be really touchy. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: For the Du Bois to have been sort of operating from this frame of reference. Of course, I guess I agree with James Baldwin about the hope thing, the Black, white symbolism, and how that becomes so important in Black culture. And maybe that was one of the influences of Christianity, but it did somehow give Black suddenly an idiom from which they could begin to describe their own self-hatred of their own fear of Blackness that had become so deeply embedded in their consciousness. That as a result of living in Western culture, Du Bois was by no means immune to this just like other writers like Chestnuts were not and Du Bois does have right tendencies. Miss Cott: The fact that he was the Blacks that, and obviously focused much of the rhetoric on the positive qualities of, of being Black pride and self-reliance etcetera. I sort of was, well dismayed a little bit that he, he too seemed to be, to be subject to this traditional kind of symbolic matrix, which almost seems inconsistent. [crosstalk] Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Look, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. Well, one of the things that impressed me most of all, was that involved in all of the Du Bois fiction, there is not actually a consummated, a healthy consummated relationship between a Black man and a Black woman. It's implied certainly at the end of the quest that all of this will occur with Zuora and Bles, but the relationships are always a Jean for example, it's an octoroon and Du Bois makes a big deal about this. Speaker 3: Wait, isn't it also true that Carolyn Winn and Sarah Andrews are both models and they're both real villain of this story. And then they're both real villain in of this story Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah okay, but I think that part of that is that they're also bourgeois, Du Bois was terribly anti-bourgeois. A terribly disillusioned with Black blue vein society. Largely because of that society, at least in his view did not become the talented 10th that he had hoped. So I think that it can be explained in those terms. Charles T. Davi...: Yes Ms. [inaudible] Speaker 4: In discussing dark emphasis you made a statement about an African revolutionary was not allowed. Well, Du Bois didn't include in African revolutionary. And I was wondering if you had any explanation for this, what happened to Du Bois talented pen? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, I think at the time the Du Bois was, was writing Dark Princess. He was very much under the influence of the Pan-African conferences. And there had not, of course been an awful lot of American Blacks and I'm not sure about Africans. I know that it was largely dominated. I suspect by French West Africans rather than by British related Africans. But at any rate, what I think here is that Du Bois is evolving a kind of mistake but it has not become a nationalistic mistake. It has become a mystic of culture, of color in a sense. That he saw in the French West Africans to a certain extent and more so in the Orientals with whom he came in contact. The potential for an aristocracy because Oriental culture had always had a kind of supremacy in the world. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: They had always had art and aristocracies, and that sort of things, all the trappings of culture, in other words, and I suspect that under the influences again of the Pan-African conferences, but his sympathies were very closely allied to these groups. Mary White Ovington does note at one point, the Du Bois probably saw a woman, a haranguing, is that correct? [crosstalk]. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: At the conferences who would have inspired maybe the whole notion of the Dark Princess? Did I answer your questions, [crosstalk] if I didn't? Charles T. Davi...: We want to let Mr. Singh [inaudible]. Mr. Singh: No, I was saying that he, the fact that African, Afro American revolution, he was not included in the third [inaudible] group, is being criticized by Du Bois in the book. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Oh, I'm not sure. That's true. And... Mr. Singh: He's offering critic of that. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: [crosstalk] I don't know. Remember Matthew Townes is rather weak response when he goes to the meeting and all of these people are talking about whether Black people should in fact, participate and Townes began singing a spiritual, and he says, can you say that these people who produce spirituals are Barbara's? Well, it seems to me that that is essentially a weak response. What I sent you more than anything with Du Bois is a pretty consistent disillusionment with Black America as time goes on love for Black America. Certainly no question about that, but a pretty consistent disillusionment. Mr. Singh: I think that there is another dimension to it. He is a [inaudible] Black America, but at the same time, he is not accepting the kind of outlook, this group of not the races as on African than Afro Americans. And even though he said more than just this, he talks about a [inaudible] ultimatum salvation of the world is going to be through the common man and [crosstalk] the Africa and the Afro American is going to be [crosstalk] Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Exactly. Mr. Singh: It's strong, it's not as elaborated as he expected. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah. I find it personally to be weak. I find it to be rather odd that Du Bois is... now prior to maybe 1910. One could say that this is true because Du Bois simply didn't know all that much about African culture. He's interested in African culture definitely started in the 20th century. There's no question about that but he had remember written The Negro I by this time and he has traveled a lot and he knows a lot about the world. And he's been getting to talk about the development of Pan-Americanism but I find it very interesting that he does not somehow include Africa more. That Africa simply almost is not a part of that. Mr. Singh: I don't know, I couldn't be easily wrong, but I think I got away from the reading the book. I got away with the impression that he was offering a critique and it's illustrated also in Matthew Donald's responses, [crosstalk] efforts on behalf of the globe to contact him. He has been very disillusioned with them and he refuses to be contacted. And so after, separate as process that Kautilya finally gets [inaudible] Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah except, you know there's some other rather odd things happening there too. Remember at the time that Kautilya and Townes become involved in and he discovers that she's going to have a child. And his first reaction is the stain of, bastardy not bastardy in the fact that in the sense that that union is not a legitimate one, but bastardy in the sense that there is something inherently bad about being Black. That implication is so clear and so real at the end of Dark Princess one might say, for example, first of all, that that is town's is I'm very self conscious reaction, but I don't think you can just dismiss it. I mean, I think it, it means something, or at least from my point of view. Charles T. Davi...: Lets me go back, [crosstalk] cause this is always the good [crosstalk 00:00:53:27], Mr. Matthews? Mr. Matthews: You suggested that some ways social [inaudible] inappropriate terms for defining the quest, extending it to combination of the romance and novel, the romance when you told me I [inaudible] I wonder how you parallel this or see this in relation to the statement of Du Bois [inaudible] propaganda. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, I think Du Bois was right about that. And I don't see that there is a integrate problem there. I mean, I, Mr. Matthews: Well, I'm taking the token to be something that is mutually unrealized, something that's is almost in literature [inaudible] form. And we're a propaganda would be something that is- Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Not necessarily, not necessarily, if I say that all artists propaganda, I don't necessarily mean that one has to write political tracks. Rather if I say that artists' propaganda, I mean, in the sense that our does tend to either perpetuate or to deny the values of a given society, it seems to me that's clearly a part of art that most art does that. Ellison as incidentally made the same statement, he says, I will not be charged with being a political or the grounds that Invisible Man is not a political novel. All art is political in the largest sense of that word. Mr. Matthews: Is that what you meant when you defined romance being more revolutionary than [crosstalk] Dr. Carolyn Gib...: I think so. I think so. I agree with Frye and his use of those terms. It seems to me that there, and to me, this of course does explain the consistent tendency in American literature toward the romance, precisely that fact, the individualistic ego that is always somehow rebelling against restraint, it's important. Mr. Matthews: I guess what I was just trying to square. It was the idea that if this is part of an archetype, almost anticipate how it's going to end and I was wondering why this is so revolutionary? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Why? Mr. Matthews: Why this is been so revolutionary? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: The romance? Mr. Matthews: Yes. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, as I said, the tendency, I think toward to sanction a social characters, you don't get that kind of sanction in a typical novel of let's say the Jane Austen tradition, or even the Henry James tradition in the same way. That tendency to accept values that basically deny the inherent premises of society. It seems to me that that is revolutionary. I, of course, I'm not using revolutionary in the sense that we still very often use it. It's a misused term, but I'm using revolutionary in the sense of reacting very strongly against the restraints that society tends to impose upon the individual. Charles T. Davi...: You would suggest that the Black [inaudible]? Mr Moses: I would like compliment your dress plain paper and I think that the point it's made it so good is what you've avoided a problem with very often occurs. And I'm trying to deal with, I see you go beyond a, a simple new critical method, close reading method, and that you use the archetypal method of fried in particular, which I think is particularly appropriate. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, I'm not very big on the new criticism personally, anyways. So I was inclined for that. I suspect. Charles T. Davi...: Ms. [Greyling]? Miss Greyling: well, I'm interested in a couple of things. One is being really familiar with the form of the novel per se genre, and the fact that I have, once you say and throw that other part, at least most of the sources of vitality of the novels emerges from the fact arise from the fact that there is this presentation of the conflicts which- Dr. Carolyn Gib...: From which novels? Miss Greyling: Both novels specifically [inaudible]. Miss Greyling: [crosstalk] specifically the third, the trilogy move slightly away from that form. But there's a conflict between forces, a Black world versus a white world. We talked, it even goes for base the imagery light versus dark that Du Bois talked about. That kind of thing is very prominent in more contemporary Black literature, Black novels. It even comes up to the new poetry of revolutionary nationalist, whatever you want to call it in terms of the theme and efficient of opposites, where you have the imagery of both birth, death symbolism, a light, dark, that kind of thing. What do you make of that in terms of either a Du Bois or shadowing or some just, do you have any comments in relation to- Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, I'm not sure that tendency though is at all peculiar to modern Black literature in the first place. [crosstalk]. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah, I think it's strong and all of the modernist literature, I guess we notice it so much in Du Bois. And I guess this is why we tend generally to put the voices novels down. Is that these novels do, at least in the formal sense of the word belong to the 19th century. I'm very much so in the 20th century we have, so we tend to assault a level of sophistication and character, a kind of all absorbing consciousness that can kind of take all of this and put it all together. And therefore things don't seem so dichotomous but Du Bois did not create that kind of character. A Bles is for all practical purposes, one dimensional. And that's why the worlds don't seem to match somehow we accepted in [inaudible], for example, with absolutely no problem, but it's because he has created a different kind of character essentially. And to the psychological dimension in the 20th century, novel has to come something quite other than what it is here. We can accept many 20th century novels on that premise, too. I think Charles T. Davi...: We have to now pose The Quest to the Silver Fleece, and the [inaudible] printers. One written in 1911, and the second word written in ... publish in 1928. The second one was published in during the time when the so called Harlem Renaissance, what characteristics of the second would seem to support any commitment on the part of Du Bois to the mythology of the Renaissance? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, I guess the exotic thing, first of all, the fact that he is, it becomes a kind of universalist statement in a way that the other things have not been before. I just in light of the dresses were in critical comments for the Renaissance later in life. I would say, not too much, except the game though, if you take the illicit love relationship and all of that- Charles T. Davi...: What about the shift in the attitudes about sensuality? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah, yeah precisely. Charles T. Davi...: That would seem to be involved with this too. What about the definition of the emotional nature of this exotic world of Blacks, particularly, it seems to me that we do have some elements in it? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Except I think thought that same sense of the emotional nature of the Black world has existed in The Quest, but it's just more stylized there, but this is a different kind of Black world that we're talking about in Dark Princess. It is the Black world of the North and Du Bois did tend to see the distinctions there. He tended to make the distinctions and to emphasize them, this is not the world of the Southern peasantry in other words. And so the assumptions from which he began seem to be different on the one hand, in the sense that it is not the same group and he does not expect the same kind of behavior from them, but similar on the other hand, and that he does argue that there is this emotive quality, which distinguishes them from others. So I think it is both alike and not alike. Charles T. Davi...: What do you make of the earliest? One of the early pieces of fiction we have from Du Bois' Of the Coming of John and you know exactly what I'm going to ask you to do? What do you make of that? The writer Of the Coming of John? How is that to be related to The Quest of the Silver Fleece and to the Dark Princess? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, I guess like all of the earlier things that he wrote that were created, even those that do sort of crop up occasionally in dark water, I think Du Bois was trying to find the form in which he could work. He tried that sort of, well, you wouldn't really, I suppose, called Of the Coming of John a short story by any means, I guess, a kind of vignette that would be the only way I would know to describe it. But I think he was trying there as in the other things, to find some way in which he could show a correlation between what he felt to be those well, what he called the deeper recesses of the human consciousness, the darker recesses as being in between the things that exist in that class and the very real social problems that he was in front of me. And I think what you get in Of the Coming of John, is a kind of bliss and they have the two, but it's short not sustained. And so there's not much of a problem there it's in the longer things where one has to. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: So there's not much of a problem there. It's in the longer things where one has to see some kind of sustaining quality that it really becomes a problem. Charles T. Davi...: Oddly enough in some ways, if one looks for connections here, they would seem to be more apparent in the study of the decadent life in the South. Of the study of Southern decadent aristocracy, which prepares us a little bit for the Cresswell family. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Charles T. Davi...: And also the intimate connection between the two Johns. Actually, it should be the Coming of Johns, or the Going of Johns, or the Going and Coming of Johns. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah. That's true. That's very true. Yeah, yeah. And of course, the problem there too, is that I can sense there, the sympathy for the decaying Southern aristocracy in that first trilogy that Du Bois was writing. It's much more sympathetic of the South than anything we see in print. Even though I do think that the portrait of the Breckenridges in the trilogy is rather sympathetic. Certainly Clarice comes across as a sympathetic character. And Du Bois even fully comprehends, as a matter of fact, John Breckenridge in much the same way he does in the Coming of John. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: He comprehends the feelings of the Southern aristocrat, who on the one hand believes that slavery can somehow sustain a culture. And Du Bois is very sympathetic to that idea that somehow a stratified society will produce a cultured class, on the one hand. But on the other hand, he believes, good Christian that he could be at times, he believes that there is the stain of sin in slavery, implicit in slavery. And that's the dichotomy that he is always confronting there. And as I said in my discussion section this morning, the nearest parallel which I can think must be a man very much like Faulkner. Of that same view of the stain of sin, an almost Calvinistic view, even. Charles T. Davi...: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Let's see. Ms. Kind 01:05:11]? Miss Cott: I was just wondering if a point could possibly be made for the statement that you made, vis-a-vis, [inaudible], that his novel seemed to be characteristically romantic in making a point around a revolutionary stand... If these characters don't somehow indicate a sort of existential stance? Or is that perhaps reading too much into what Du Bois was trying to do? The fact that these characters, the protagonist, generally somehow seem to evolve, and change, and become, and transcend their original states [crosstalk]. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Okay, without having thought about all this very carefully, instinctively, I would say no. Because it seems to me that whatever revolutionary impulse one senses, for example, in existentialist literature, is quite a rational one. I mean, it's been thought out, there's no question about that. Even in a character like the man in The Stranger, there is still a certain rational basis for that. Du Bois, I think, would have argued, it seems to me, that the revolutionary impulse, if he would have admitted to it, is emotive rather than rationalistic. This was his great hope for the Black world, the emotive power and force that he sensed there. And so it would have been much more instinctive. I don't know if I've answered your question, but I guess I- Miss Cott: So you're saying instinctive as opposed to reasoned? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah, as opposed to reasoned. Miss Cott: I see. Okay. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah, I think that would be my own view of it. And more even emotional than instinctive. I think emotional would be the key word there. Charles T. Davi...: Is there any visible evidence in your analysis of the structure of the fiction that Du Bois read Joyce, Kafka, or Proust? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, the difficult problem with this is that it's so very hard to find out what Du Bois did read. He never wrote very much about what he had read. I suppose I would say that Du Bois read all of the things that one would have expected a civilized man to read. I would suspect certainly that Du Bois read Tolstoy, and that in his effort to write the big historical novel, he was trying in a way to achieve the very same thing that he thought Tolstoy might have achieved. But I can't say that with any degree of certainty, because I don't know what he read other than the standard things, again, that I would suspect that he read. Charles T. Davi...: His exploration of the states of consciousness are explorations which seem to be almost wholly 19th century and not touched, for example, even by the tradition that comes out of Dostoevsky. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah. Except I do think that there is one very interesting thing that I mentioned to my section this morning. I'm at this point seeing all sorts of parallels between Russian literature and Black literature. Primarily because it seems to me that when you get a cultural elite writing literature, a cultural elite who is also, at the same time, a part of a group which has a kind of inferiority complex, then they tend to see things in terms of mystical experiences and so forth. And the mystical connection between the peasantry and the land in Russian literature seems to have parallels in Black literature, and certainly in Du Bois. Charles T. Davi...: That's very good. Yes? Speaker 5: We have enjoyed, Ms. Gibson, in our discussion group, rather particularly, the thesis. Since Professor [inaudible] is here, I was wondering if he would tell us if he has any impressions of the extent of Du Bois' European influence that he expressed when he converted the Negro in the field [crosstalk]. Charles T. Davi...: I interpret that as two questions that I'll very happy put to Professor [inaudible]. One is, presumably, what influence Du Bois conceivably had upon the French, upon French literature, upon French culture? The second is- Speaker 5: [crosstalk] Charles T. Davi...: ...the other way around, what kind of- Speaker 5: ...Du Bois expressed, whether consciously or not, which he might have absorbed from his German training and knowledge of French and German [inaudible]. Charles T. Davi...: This is right. [Michel 00:01:09:45]? Michel: Tough question. Charles T. Davi...: Why don't you- Michel: I just took a survey, fairly recently, concerning the influence Black American writers may have exerted upon French literature, and especially on the way they're known. Now, strangely enough, Du Bois is not very well known. And he's the one who has been least translated. Something like 0.5% of his works have been translated. Only one book [inaudible]. Now, this book has been translated in '58 or '59- Charles T. Davi...: Late. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Michel: ...through the influence of [French], which seems to indicate that the French, well, either didn't know or didn't care too much for Du Bois, at least for his writings. But when the question was asked to a number of French writers, not necessarily coming to the ideological [inaudible] of French writers, Du Bois was pretty well known as a big figure for American thinking. So I don't know whether they read him in English, because most of those people were the older generation of writers, or simply whether they mentioned him because they had heard about him in connection with [inaudible]. But his influence would be small as far as literature is concerned, if not zero. And difficult to estimate, as far as ideology is concerned. Michel: Now, about Du bois' own impressions about France, I think we have to distinguish between two things. On one hand, he is very consistent in his view of French colonialism. He thinks French colonialism is extremely clever, very successful, because it is able to do what is not being done in the States. It is a goal to integrate, to assimilate, Black people. But he knows... So in one way, he will tell the world, "Well, look, here's the way the French people treat Black people in Africa. Wouldn't it be beautiful if the Negro were treated in the same way in America?" But this is propaganda, because at the same time, he says, "Well, the French are extremely clever. So clever that their integration, or the way they accept Black people, is just another way of enforcing colonialism." So he condemns it at the same time. Now, as far as his, well, personal likings were concerned, it has been told very often that he was more inclined towards Germany. Michel: I didn't find any references, either in his correspondence or his early publications, concerning that. I know he went to Germany a number of times. He was very interested in Germany. I don't know whether this has anything to do with Alain Locke's own interest in Germany, whether there was a connection [inaudible]. But there are a few references concerning France, and for him, France is still... Well, up to 1940, very roughly, is still the epitome of Western culture, seen in the positive perspective he often sees it. But I didn't find any reference to his reading any French authors or thinkers, except, I think, to Rousseau and that tradition of the enlightenment and those. Charles T. Davi...: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What about the references to French socialist thinkers? Did he know, for example, Fourier or Saint-Simon? Any references of that kind? Michel: I couldn't tell. I didn't find any reference. I think he was more interested in Marx, of course, than those pre-Marxist thinkers. I would like to ask you a question, too. When you talked about Dark Princess, you said it was a strange book. I agree. And I mean, I like it because it is a strange book. Now you said... You gave a number of reasons, about five or six, but you said, "I don't have enough time to give more. There are many reasons, but I don't think I have time." So if we give you some more time- Charles T. Davi...: We have the time. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Oh, okay. I think, of course, part of it is the language there. That's always a problem in Du Bois. I think a good deal of it is that. I think a part of it, again, is the fact that the worlds do not seem somehow to mesh. That at the one point we see Townes going off... Well, I think I said that... To his apartment with all these artifacts, like all his Picasso paintings and all his beautiful music, and then saying at the same time that Western civilization is decadent. I think that this runs through it, though, in so many ways, all of which I couldn't even begin to remember now. I don't think I've answered your question, but- Charles T. Davi...: [crosstalk] Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah. One of the problems, of course, is that I have not re-read these novels in the past three months and they all sort of like- Michel: Now, if you see it as a kind of transitional piece between the first novel and the trilogy, how would you situate it? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: If I saw a Dark Princess as a transition- Michel: Yes. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, I think it has to do with the phases that Du Bois was going through. That it becomes his first exploration and creative writing, at any rate, of his feelings about the possibility of a Pan-African world. I find that to be very important, I think, in terms of the writing itself. What I'd sensed more and more in Du Bois is that his prose style becomes sparer consistently as he goes on, and on, and on. There's still very much this tendency toward the superlative, and I think that's the German influence, when he'd lapsed into German and that whole bit. But still, I think that his prose style is being pared consistently as he writes. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that he had been writing so much for the crisis in between, and that he had changed his prose style. I see him becoming, again, a bit more disillusioned with Black America, and looking more toward a wider world as a source of comfort when he despairs about what is going on in the world around him. That's all I can say at the minute. Charles T. Davi...: One of the discoveries of the Renaissance, at least I think it is one, is a variation of the picaresque romance that you find, especially in the work of McKay. I'm thinking particularly about Home to Harlem. Would you like to make a comment on the Dark Princess viewed in that particular light? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: I guess I wouldn't really consider it as a picaresque novel. It's true that Townes is the rebel out of the picaresque tradition. It's true that that Townes can emerge because for all practical purposes, the traditional class structure is breaking down and he can have that kind of rise of the bourgeois hero. And yet from my own point of view, and I haven't thought about this in that context, I guess I tend to believe that I do not really see a Black picaresque novel in America until Invisible Man. Charles T. Davi...: Until Invisible Man. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Dr. Carolyn Gib...: And I think, well, [Bone] does make that point here. That's another thing I do agree with him about, that it's very interesting that the last American picaresque novel, Anglo American picaresque novel, should have been Mark Twain. And that what you get in the '50s... Should have been Huck Finn. And what you get in the '50s, emerging at the same time, is Invisible Man together with The Adventures of Augie March, which means that something is happening in the Jewish and Black communities because that is a peculiarly bourgeois form. And it usually emerges when you get a group, a bourgeois group, feeling secure. It's linked to the rise of a secure bourgeois class. And I would think that- Charles T. Davi...: I would say that that same phenomenon occurred in the '20s. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: But I think it was a different one. Charles T. Davi...: All right. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: I think it was... Yeah. Charles T. Davi...: Yeah, I think there's some differences, too, with it. Mr. [Walton]? Mr. Walton: There is a Black critic who was working on Black literary tradition, Charles Nichols, and he argues that there is a Black picaresque tradition- Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Oh, really? Mr. Walton: ...and that the origin of it is the slave narrative. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Oh, that's very interesting. That's interesting. Mr. Walton: I can't talk about it in detail. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Oh, that's interesting. Well, maybe... I guess I just wouldn't see the slave narratives as being within the same... I wouldn't look at them from the same point of view that I would the novel, which is linked to a lot of social circumstances that seem somehow not to match with that. Well, you think, for example, of the rise of the novel in England. I mean, it simply doesn't occur until you've got a middle class, for all sorts of obvious reasons. Mr. Walton: Well, what he sees here is the migration tied to a historical event. The process of migration, which begins, of course, with a walk. I think a whole lot can be done with this. Especially- Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah, but couldn't you- Mr. Walton: ...if you use something like the studies on Negro migration. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah, maybe. Mr. Walton: And the movements, or the necessity for movement because of the unstable situation that's forced upon Black people by the society from outside, which creates a great deal of movement and the inability to establish oneself in one place, in one single place- Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Couldn't you link that, though, just as easily to the epic tradition? Mr. Walton: Yeah, I think you could. I think you could. But I think that also that this is a way of looking at it. And while we don't necessarily mean, when we talk about a Black literary tradition, that doesn't exist elsewhere. Yet sometimes I think its helpful to see things that do exist in very, very poignant ways in the Black tradition [crosstalk]. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Oh, I think that's true. Of course. One of the problems, I think that all of us who are sort of involved in fiction criticism... And I don't by any means, apply that term to myself because I haven't reached that state yet, but one of the things that we know makes it so difficult to talk about fiction is that we have tended primarily, I suppose, because of the disdain for so long and English departments of the novel, of fiction as such, we have tended to- Charles T. Davi...: I don't know why you should turn to talk to me right there. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: We have spoken about these things like the picaresque novel and the naturalistic novel in such loose terms that they mean very little. Which means, essentially, that it's so much easier for a critic to talk about a poem, because the terminology has tended to be much more precise. And I guess that's the only reason I would take issue with using it there. I think we've got to begin to see very specific things here, or we'll keep doing what we've been doing forever, which is talking about the novel and the romance and not really getting anywhere. Okay. Charles T. Davi...: Mr. Singh? Mr. Singh: Yeah. I was going to say, what sort of a connection do you see between the novels of Du Bois and the Black novels of the preceding period or in the old tradition, also. Where would you place these novels in the tradition of the Black novel, from [inaudible]- Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Oh, I suppose... Well, somewhere between Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson. Somewhere in that category. It belongs there quite obviously. The Quest, for example, is really rather an old-fashioned novel. It had been written in 1911. Somehow the tendency, at least for me, would be to place it with an earlier period. I think it belongs to that genteel tradition of the 19th century. It certainly does not, I think... And I would have real problems even placing Dark Princess in the Renaissance as a representative kind of Renaissance work. Charles T. Davi...: It's a deviant, certainly, isn't it? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Yeah. In time, certainly, it belongs there. And you might assume, possibly, the Du Bois wrote Dark Princess because he was getting rather uptight about what other people in the Renaissance were writing. That might well be a way of looking at it, as a kind of corrective, you might say. Mr. Singh: What does it correct [inaudible]? Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, nothing. But in his own view it was a kind of correct... Well, he was getting really uptight about Claude McKay's exoticism... I mean, about what all these people were doing. His review of Cane was certainly favorable, but you sense that somewhere beneath the surface Du Bois is getting kind of uncomfortable, even in 1923, with what all these young kids... And they were that to him, I suspect... were going around doing. Mr. Singh: Yeah, but one suspects that he does belong with them in spite of himself. Dr. Carolyn Gib...: Well, maybe. Yeah, we can put him there, sure. Charles T. Davi...: Well, are any other questions? Charles T. Davi...: We want to thank Ms. Gibson very much again for a splendid performance.