Charles H. Nichols, Jr. lecture on the slave narratives and some sources of the Black Picaresque in biography and fiction at the University of Iowa, March 27, 1970

Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of The University of Iowa in cooperation with the department of English and the Afro-American studies program at the university, presents a series of programs by Black specialists as material for the university's course Afro-American literature. The lecturer for this week is Charles H. Nichols Jr., director of Brown University's Afro-American Studies program. Speaking on the slave narratives and some sources of the Black picaresque in biography and fiction. Nichols has taught in Germany and is the author of a book on slaves account of their bondage and freedom. In coming weeks, we will have other lectures. The week of April 6th through 10th, the speaker will be Charles T. Davis professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, speaking on the Harlem Renaissance. He is author of books on Walt Whitman and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Speaker 1: April 13th through 17th, Clinton Oliver will speak on plays by Black dramatists. Oliver is associate professor of English at Queens College and former visiting professor at the University of Iowa. He has edited an anthology of short stories by Black writers, as well as an edition of Henry James novel, The Princess Casamassima. Charles H. Nilon professor of English at the University of Colorado will speak the week of April 20th, through 24th on contemporary Black fiction. Nilon is the author of Faulkner and the Negro. May 4th through 8th, Don L. Lee writer-in-residence at Northeastern State College will speak on contemporary black verse. Lee is a prominent young Afro-American poet. Speaker 1: And for the week of spring break here at the University of Iowa, that is beginning next Monday, at 1:30 PM, we will broadcast The Future of the University, a series of lectures and discussions on the future of the university in the United States. And at 5:00 PM, at the time these Afro-American lectures are usually rebroadcast, we will have a rebroadcast of the five lectures, which were given by Saunders Redding. Now, here is Charles H. Nichols Jr., director of Brown University's Afro-American studies program, speaking on the slave narratives and some sources of the Black picaresque in biography and fiction. Charles H. Nich...: Ladies and gentlemen, this is our final meeting of this series on the heritage of the slave narrative. And we have been considering the slave narrative as a form of the picaresque. We then went on to consider certain autobiographies particularly that of Richard Wright in Black Boy and the autobiography of Malcolm X as in a sense live picaresque works. And we began last time considering the picaresque in Black fiction. We discussed particularly the work of Richard Wright again, the novel, which is often not read by people called The Outsider, which he published in 1953. This afternoon, I would like to begin by discussing Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, as in some ways, the most imaginative and extraordinary development of the picaresque mode in the Black experience. Charles H. Nich...: There is no doubt that Ralph Ellison is the author who has made the most creative use of this picaresque mode. Invisible Man presents us with a protagonist who is on a lonely journey to the discovery of the self and the world which surrounds him. He is overwhelmed by a rush of events. He is a protean figure, a student, a trickster, a confidence man, a laborer, a rabble-rouser, a political organizer. He goes through rehearsals of chaos and harrowing events with a marvelous use of language, satire, symbols, and comic moves. The writer carries his character through a series of epiphanies or revelations. The book is in a real sense an epistemological novel. That is to say it deals with our ways of perceiving and knowing the truth. Ellison's character grows from naive acceptance and passive conformity through social protest, revolution, and anarchy to discover at last, the way to his own identity. He becomes a man of principle, his pilgrimage through chaos, violence, and hate brings him to a wholeness, a health, which is based on idealism and hope. Charles H. Nich...: In this sense, you see the picaresque beginning as it does in chaos, despair and verging frequently on pathology, reaches in the work of Ellison, a new sense of individual identity and direction, and a new sense of community. For the main character says at the end, "In spite of all that's happened and in spite of considerable reservation, and pain, and suffering, and cynicism, I love. I find, I still love." Ellison, who was a jazz musician, employs the quality of improvisation, daring, and intensity characteristic of jazz. Richard Wright in fact tells us that blue jazz became The Outsider's only emotional home. "Blue jazz was the scornful gesture of men turned ecstatic in their state of rejection. It was the musical language of the satisfiedly amoral The boastings of the contentedly lawless. The recreations of the innocently criminal." Charles H. Nich...: As such, jazz and blues are surely a vivid evocation of the picaresque mode. Jazz supplies, therefore, an interesting analog for the Invisible Man. For Ellison's novel is an elaborately contrived, but with all improvised joke, a sustained fuss, a cynical rejection of blind assumptions. He is not singing the blues, but freely exploring the possibilities of his instrument. The book runs the gamut of the common place illusions in the racial situation, and forces us by paradox, irony, and satire to see where we have been blind before. And you may remember the number of ways in which Ellison symbolizes the idea of seeing. And the many levels of consciousness on which the novel operates, from dream states through visions of hope and forms of disguise and song. Thus the narrator's grandfather, the meekest of men tells his son on his deathbed, "I never told you, but our life is a war. And I have been a traitor all my born days. A spy in the enemy's territory. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome him to death and destruction. Let them swallow you till they vomit or bust wide open." Charles H. Nich...: This deathbed council is a marvelous paradox, which leaps to the very heart of the Black and white relationship in the United States for it demonstrates that the dishonest mask of submission to evil is corrosive and treacherous. The most devastating of curses. The life of the South has been blighted by it. It is the harrowing joke of all of the Uncle Toms, the Stepin Fetchits, the Gitlows, and the Rochesters. The book carries the mirror and mass game to hilarious limits, and drives home repeatedly the point that all of this furniture, which clutters up the house of men, have made the individual invisible. As in jazz, Ellison's book is filled with truncated and syncopated forms. Unheard songs, unconscious motives, flashes of insight. Describing this double vision of the outcast, Ellison writes, "Invisibility gives one a slightly different sense of time. You're never quite on the beat, sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still, or from which it leaps ahead, and you slip into the brakes and look around. Charles H. Nich...: That's what you hear vaguely in Louis Armstrong's music. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music, but descended like Dante into its depths." Invisible Man contains many bitter and harrowing events, but its mode, is a comic mode. The comedy here is like that of a Gogol in Dead Souls or Melville in The Confidence-Man, a merciless and cynical unmasking of human selfishness and stupidity, by a sensibility so delicate and honest, as to be incapable of that solemnity, which often borders on humbug. Genet in The Blacks uses this mirror and mask game also, with stunning effect. Thus, the prologue of Ellison's novel presents the main character living alone in a cold cellar, lighted by 1,369 bulbs, which are powered by stolen electricity. For he says, "The truth is the light, and the light is the truth." Charles H. Nich...: Having descended after a long and meaningless quest into his own psyche, he has found the source of light, heat, and power in the individual, in himself. The novel itself is an account of this rather fruitless search. I should, of course point out that I do not mean by fruitless that the author, that the subject of the book does not learn, develop, and grow. He does. The novel itself as an account of the search. He begins as a student who has been taught the Booker T. Washington presets, "Accept your place in society, work hard, trust the good white people, and you will succeed." But he soon perceives that this is a system of lies and oppression and flees to the world of union solidarity and social protest. Here again, he finds that the individual is betrayed and having flirted with radicalism, and Black nationalism, and anarchy falls by accident into his underground room. Charles H. Nich...: The situation of men in the modern world is symbolized in a variety of skillfully managed scenes. Thus at the outset, the narrator is invited to give his graduation speech to one of the tin pot fraternal orders at a stag party, but finds himself corralled with a group of other Black boys who are paid to fight each other, blindfolded on an electrically charged rug for the amusement of the whites. Later, he is employed in a monstrous mechanized paint factory, allows the paint, which looks black until it is stirred, and then turns white to run over. And he cannot find the right valve to turn it off. He is involved in an explosion in this factory and wakes up to find himself the object of an experiment by a somewhat sadistic doctor, who operates on his brain and attempts to create a new personality and outlook. This lobotomy and the state of mind that it induces is of course, an interesting symbol of the various ways in which we are all whitewashed into certain kinds of behavior and reaction. Charles H. Nich...: However, the lobotomy failed in his case, and he soon comes out of the mist of unconsciousness and semi consciousness, which it has induced and moves on toward the show of development of his own sense of the possibilities of his personality. Finally, he discovered by accident in the midst of a riot that a hat and a pair of dark glasses, so transform him that he is mistaken for Rinehart, a notorious confidence man, in three different disguises. In amused clownery, he plays out their roles. He discovers that between Rinehart and invisibility, there are great potentialities. "By changing the joke," says, Ellison, "we may slip the yoke, this use of wild burlesque and farcical humor emphasizes the meaninglessness and incongruity of much of our experience in modern life. Charles H. Nich...: Ellison has revealed something of the variety and complexity of the individual. And in this case, of course, of the Black man in this country, he is also used the Black experience to enable us to see beyond familiar cliches, to our common humanity. With the arrival of writers like Wright and Ellison on our literary sea, it would appear to me that the Black writer is in a sense at last emancipated. For the writer's freedom is in his perception of the possibilities of his art. In this story, Ellison of course, by these ironies, reverses the stereotypes and forces us to see the injustice and absurdity about us. Thus, the concealment of the main character in the coal cellar, as I have pointed out, suggests not darkness in the Anglo-Saxon connotation, but, "A voice issuing its wisdom out of the substance of its own inwardness after having undergone the transformation from ranter to writer." This is a quotation from Ellison himself. Charles H. Nich...: The main character's movement downward is in keeping with the reverse English of the plot, a process of rising to an understanding of his human condition. The main character is in a sense running throughout the novel, like the picaresque hero, unlike certainly many of us in the world today. He is to fulfill other people's visions of what he should be. And in the complexity of the modern world, he is lost. As when, as I have pointed out, he is trapped in situations where he cannot find the right valves. The novel suggests alternatives therefore, to the violence of one of the demagogues in the book, through the use of mistaken identity. But his most significant discovery is of course, in the possibilities of his own personality, in the meaning of his own identity, in the possibilities of life, in whatever the situation that the psyche finds itself. Charles H. Nich...: Ellison has written, "Life is to be lived, not controlled. And humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat." Our faith is to become one and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description. That's one of the great jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day. And the black striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know where he is, or who he is, or where he is going. The main characters, therefore, in Invisible Man experienced the indignities and cruelties and uncertainties of the picaroon. Charles H. Nich...: They experienced also the iron ring of prejudice and they are familiar of course, to those of us who are literate. The contribution of the book, however, lies in that concern with the problem of identity, each individual self-realization, which is the goal and glory of a free society, is the heart of the matter. "If I were asked," said Ellison, "what I considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man, I would reply it is its attempt to return to the mood of personal, moral responsibility for democracy, which typified the best of our 19th century fiction." Charles H. Nich...: I would like to turn now to some observations about the contemporary scene in Black writing. And to suggest that the kind of awareness, the kind of consciousness, which has grown out of a book like Invisible Man, and out of the experiences that we have gone through as a result of the careers of some of the leadership in the struggle of Black people for liberation, we have arrived at certain conclusions and judgments with respect to the nature of the kind of future, which Black people by and large are striving toward. I have suggested that we might call what I have to say a description of the Black assertion in our time. The Black writer is moving increasingly today toward belief and affirmation of his own sense of the possibilities in his own identity and in his own group. Charles H. Nich...: Dante's Inferno represents, you may remember, the doorways of hell as bearing the inscription "abandon hope, all ye who enter here." Heaven, if I may paraphrase FitzGerald's Rubaiyat is, but the vision of fulfilled desire and hell the shadow from a soul on fire. Desperation and hopelessness are of course the ultimate in human suffering and degradation, but none of us can survive without hope. And we who live in the most affluent and the most powerful nation in the world, who should in the year 1970, be at the zenith of Western civilization are profoundly disturbed, and without much hope in our future. We might well conclude a series of lectures like this by asking ourselves why? For the first time in human history, any one of the great nations has the power to destroy human life totally. That total annihilation is now a genuine possibility. It has been estimated by men like Oppenheimer, that a man who is 40 years old, has seen a greater development of power in the sense both of energy and the sense of authority in our time, then in all previous human history. Charles H. Nich...: And this power is largely in the hands of selfish and unscrupulous men. Should we succeed in bringing the Vietnam War to a close at once, and unconditionally as we are morally obligated to do, we would still not have made a beginning on those evils, which threaten our survival, militarism, corruption, pollution, poverty, and racism. While we are spending $3 billion a year... Pardon me. $30 billion a year on an oppressive war, 20 million Americans are still hungry. And it is not only that our public officials are corrupt and willing to sacrifice all our lives in the miserable for lack financial collusion of the Pentagon and the weapons makers. It is that the freedoms and opportunities we boast of, the sacred rights of the individual, are persistently and viciously denied. Nine men were on trial for conspiracy in Chicago, for believing that the constitution of the United States means what it says. Charles H. Nich...: Black people are constantly being harassed by the officers of the law. We had the prospect of one man's being gagged and chained at his own trial. As Bertolt Brecht once said, "We believe we have freedom because we never dare to behave like free men. We never put our alleged freedom to the test." Most of us have been educated, of course, in Western humanism, the legacy of the renaissance and the enlightenment. We were taught that the individual is sacred, that we all have an inviolate moral obligation to each other. That judgment must be based on fact and evidence. That in respect to these rights, all men are created equal. The young and the conscientious among us have grown cynical about Western humanism, which is more honored in the breach than in the observance. We recognize that we live in a society devoted wholly to the gross national product, to production for profit and waste. Charles H. Nich...: And that our society as Melville, once wrote, is rushing from all havens astir to certain destruction unless we change it radically. A sense of this urgency has driven us to social action for we live in an apocalyptic age. That is to say an age of prophecy, haunted by a sense of impending doom, but also an age buoyed up by a last wishful dream of a sense of community and a hope for utopia. Perhaps we can reverse this tide and we have directed our creative intelligence to the profit motive, the endless expansion of technology, war, and space programs, but it is time to call for a leadership, which puts people ahead of property, and peace ahead of national prestige. Charles H. Nich...: There are of course powerful forces against us, Nixon like Coolidge, if he believes anything, certainly believes that the business of America is business. Agnew would rather turn the country over to the Cosa Nostra than to the hungry, the students, or the activist clergy. Law enforcement has become increasingly a means of repression and the imprisonment of the leadership of Black people and other dissenters. Clearly what we need is a coalition of ethical men who can postpone some of their private interests to save the country. At least one group stands out, in my opinion, in this new thrust for survival, and these are the Afro-Americans. Charles H. Nich...: What is then the nature of the Black assertion in our time? This assertion, I have been trying to describe through the picaresque mode, as it has developed since the 17th century in slave narratives, in slave revolts, in the painful revelation of the various ways in which this country has been false to its pretentious. The Black assertion of course reached as we pointed out a new sense of urgency after the assassination of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. LeRoi Jones maintains that the denial of reality has become institutionalized in America. Our folklore continues to celebrate the freedom loving pioneer, the land of opportunity. And most Americans, especially here in middle America, really believe that we are innocents struggling against communist conspiracy at home and abroad, but at the heart of the nation is soft. This, as Jones once remarked, is the fantasy which Americans are prepared to wipe out the rest of the world to preserve. Charles H. Nich...: The contribution of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was of course, that they put to the test, the question, are democracy, and justice, and freedom possible in America? Are all those song-singing in Christians, prepared to rescue those who have fallen among thieves? Can the power of love be made the basis on non-violence social change? King was of course not a naive or a frivolous man, but he was a believer. He was constantly appalled however, by the hatred, violence, and brutality he encountered. The power structure knew that his goals were revolutionary, from the Montgomery bus boycott to the sit-ins boycotts protests, marches, and strikes that he led in the south and in the north, he learned the unmistakable reality of American life, that its democratic claims are often fraudulent. Its law offices frequent leaders in trampling, the bill of rights on the foot. And its' Christians Sunday school picnickers, who can join lynch mobs. And it's much wanted civilization shot through with the ethics of wild beasts in a jungle. Charles H. Nich...: King himself was arrested 15 times. He was brutalized and beaten by police and hateful people. He was spat on. His followers face police dogs, hoses, assault, and death for exercising their constitutional rights. Stokely Carmichael has pointed out that he was arrested 30 times for non-violent protest. A systematic attempt is being made of course, to wipe out and harass the Black Panthers and to ignore their constitutional rights. As one witness said, "America is the only country that has passed from barbarism to decadence without going through any of the intervening stages." All these of course has suggested to Black people that they must see the need to find on their own new ways to freedom. Having fled and rebelled as slaves, petitioned and sued in the courts as freedmen organized and protested as citizens sought cooperation and non-violent ethical approaches through numerous organizations, we were compelled to see ourselves at last as embattled colonials, subject to an imperialistic despotism. We were compelled in short to find all our resources in ourselves. Charles H. Nich...: This then is the nature of the Black assertion in LeRoi Jones. LeRoi Jones puts it this way, "High art," he writes, "first of all, must reflect the experiences of the human being, the emotional predicament of the man as he exists in the defined world of his being, it must be produced from the legitimate, emotional resources of the soul in the world." There is of course, nothing startlingly new in this statement about the nature of significant writing and its origins in human experience, and the emotional resources of the soul. What is important is that the context in which the Black writers now write, writers like Jones and Eldridge Cleaver, like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, gives a vital new emphasis, a new romanticism and a new interpretation to these concepts, based not only on experience, but on a wider awareness on knowledge and an awareness of other cultures. Charles H. Nich...: The intellectual and emotional climate of Black America is epitomized in this Black assertion in literature, and has three major thrusts. First, there is the passionate rejection on the part of Black writers today, of the dominant crass, materialistic character of the Western tradition with all its technology and its production for waste, and war, and profit. It's rationalism and its aesthetic effeteness. Secondly, it is characterized this Black assertion by the search for a new and more nourishing human tradition, that we have known through Western humanism. And the Black writers have felt many of them, that such a tradition maybe found in the African background, in the past of the Afro-American people. And third, the Black assertion is characterized by a vigorous affirmation of the sense of community, of the brotherhood of blacks, of a democratic equalitarianism and fraternal ideal held in equal poise with a sharp and naked view of reality. Charles H. Nich...: Let me try to describe for you some of the ways in which this assertion expresses itself in recent literature. The effort, for example, to find a new mood and a more nourishing human tradition has two aspects. The first, is in the effort that we are making to revive the Black past, its historical and literary canon. We have revived our interest in, let us say David Walker's Appeal, in the writings of Frederick Douglass, and in the narratives of fugitive slaves. Second, we are engaged in the rewriting and revision of Western history, and insisting that they left out culture and a bowdlerized background of the Afro-American be restored to its proper focus. This has led of course, to an interest in the study of Afro-American culture in schools and colleges. Charles H. Nich...: In seeking new nourishment for the Black assertion, African-Americans have dipped also into the lower class Black experience, and into the African background, the language of the uneducated, soul, gospel, jazz have created new and fresh forms for poetry and music. "The poet seeks," says Jones, "to make words surprise themselves." Expressions like telling it like it is, soul, bread, split and so on, do just that. Literature of course is not pretty letters nor is art artifacts. As LeRoi Jones puts it, "Hunting is not those heads on the wall. It is a process which transforms the artist and the observer." And this is what we mean by art, the African background, it sense of family kinship of group responsibility. Its' harmonious relationship to nature. Its' spontaneity, its social and personal use of art in everyday life. Its sense of wonder and respect for all life, became a part of the Black philosophy and aesthetic and lifestyle. Charles H. Nich...: The third and larger phase of this new mood involves of course, a new affirmation of a democratic equalitarian and fraternal ideal. Held as I said in equipoise, with a sharp view of naked reality. Such writers as Eldridge Cleaver and LeRoi Jones must be seen not only in the light of the bitter experience of Black people and the immersion of these people in the literary tradition striking... Pardon me, stretching from Dante to Elliot, from William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson backward into the past, but in the light of the collapse of European imperialist influence in Africa and elsewhere. The emergence of the revolution, for example, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The murder of Lumumba, the rise of Castro, the ringing challenge of Frantz Fanon have expanded the consciousness of Black people to global wrongs. Charles H. Nich...: Important to our understanding of this present mood, is the sensitive and militant example of people like Eldridge Cleaver, who like Malcolm X, made the perilous journey in a society which sought to destroy him from a hustler and a pimp, and a picaroon, to a black Muslim nationalist, to a voice at last speaking for all the wretched of the Earth. The influence of Fanon was crucial for him as it was for Jones. Cleaver indicts the barbarism of American society as have few others. The corruption of its politics, the tyranny of its power elite, the civility of its press and public service, the brutality of its police. Cleaver's warnings of a conspiracy to murder Black leaders and commit genocide against the rest of us, may seem like paranoia to those of us who do not know what is going on, but there is plenty of evidence to support his charges. Charles H. Nich...: Cleaver is concerned with the emasculating effect of discrimination and the debasement of the image of Black men. Sex is his symbol for the battleground where we must muster our forces against those who would make eunichs of us. But Cleaver is also intelligent enough to know, that the emasculated Black male filled with self-hatred may manifest himself in either of two ways, either he can try to escape everything that reminds him of his own people or, and lose himself, of course, in the larger world, or he can attempt to repress or suppress and deny such drives in his own psyche. And become a rather ostentatious separationist, a kind of Black Muslim marquee, a back to Africa advocate. Significantly Cleaver sees both white and Black young people as losing faith in their old heroes, rejecting the inhumanity and money-grubbing of their own country. He reminds us that Norman Mailer in The White Negro and the Beatles, as well as the whole beat generation of writers have been discovering soul and moving toward an alliance with the blacks. Charles H. Nich...: What we have been experiencing, of course, in our re-evaluation of what is of value, what is nourishing in our own tradition, is a recognition of certain familiar historical processes, which Black people have gone through on several occasions in almost cyclical regularity. The question of whether we are, or should be searching for integration or Black nationalism. The problem of integration of course, constantly raises the question as to whether we wish to be integrated into a burning house. The second of course is the problem of the dichotomy between society and community. Are we going to accept the role of certain invested interests and institutions in our society and relate ourselves to these? Or are we going to build a brotherhood of common interests in a community of people? Charles H. Nich...: The third question, of course, that constantly recurs is the question of whether one can liberate himself violently through guerrilla warfare or whether the proper approach, the only approach is non-violent civil resistance? The fourth question of course involves our attitude toward the entire so-called democratic process. Shall we attempt to use constitutional means of protest or are we driven to subversion of the system and outward revolution? All these problems recur in the literature, which we might consider. And if there were time, I would go into some detail in pointing out how these things work. I would, however, in the remaining time, like to confine myself to LeRoi Jones, who is of course, one of the most talented of the recent writers and who contains within himself, the various tendencies, which we have been describing. One sees in Jones, a development from the picaresque to a new awareness and search for a sense of community. Charles H. Nich...: One sees in Jones, the arrival of an understanding of the problem of identity, at the same time that he is searching for a sense of community and fraternity. The case of LeRoi Jones is of course complex, but it is certainly relevant to our discussion, for Jones is not only a revolutionary poet dedicated to the course of Black liberation. He is an immensely talented writer, learned, sensitive, ruthlessly honest, and prophetic. He has more than any other contemporary writer, embodied the anguish of Black America in its present day life in his work. In such plays as The Dutchman and The Slave, and most recently in the Slave Ship Jones by introducing interracial couples, dramatizes the intense love-hate relationship of Black and white America. Charles H. Nich...: In Dutchman, for example, the dalliance between Lula, the white girl, and Clay, the Negro man culminates in a rising hostility as their ambivalences and conflicts emerge. Significantly, they are on a subway train in the underbelly of the city, in steaming heat, their most inward emotional lives, therefore come out. She wants the warm, natural contact with life, which she thinks Black men have. He wants to have a reinforcement from her of his need to realize his manhood. In a long diatribe, Clay points out the variety of neuroses by which Black men have attempted to survive their bondage. He says, "Crazy niggas turning their backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act, murder. Just murder, would make us all sane." He goes on to tell her that if Black people listen to whites talking about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white men, they would murder him. Charles H. Nich...: That is to say white men, and have very rational explanations very much like your role, but in the play, Lula does not talk of murder. She takes out a knife and stabs him. The bitter irony of this play, its cynical view of Western civilization and its picture of the ruthlessness of the whites, is the background for LeRoi Jones sense of embattlement. The Slave is a book in which the revolution and fire are in progress, and the Black character does indeed shoot the white. This new candor and frankness of the Afro-American today, is directed not only against the mythmakers and Madison Avenue, its light is also directed at black people themselves, who see their own stupidity, cowardice, and self hatred for what it is. We are rejecting the old etiquette of Jim Crow and are refusing to tell people white or Black, simply what they want to hear. There are far more revolutionary goals among us, and a genuinely revolutionary spirit. Charles H. Nich...: As Margaret Walker says in her poem Delta, we with our blood have watered these fields and they belong to us. We are seeking a consciousness which is loyal to the group, yet preserving the normality of difference. LeRoi Jones in one of his essays at home, has formulated also the ethics... Pardon me, the aesthetics of the Black revolution. In a real sense, all these writers of whom we've been speaking, Wright, Cleaver, Ellison, even Baldwin share the essentials of this aesthetic. Jones attacks the mere aestheticism of some of the writers of the Western tradition. He has adopted the role of the revolutionary artist who sees a vital connection between ethics and aesthetics of the revolutionary theater. He writes, "It should force change. It should be change. It should stagger through our universe, correcting insulting, preaching, spitting craziness, but a craziness taught to us in our most rational moments." Charles H. Nich...: People must be taught to trust through scientists, and that the holiness of life is the constant possibility of widening of the consciousness. It must accuse and attack because it is a theater of victims. It looks at the sky with the victim's eyes and moves the victims, or one might say the picaroons to look at the strength in their minds and their bodies. But Jones' artistic practice does not interpret the revolutionary function of art in terms of mere propaganda. He condemns Negro literature as middle-class and not serious. One can only consider, he said, most Negro books serious, if one has never read Melville or Joyce. For him therefore, art is a process rather than an artifact, as I've been saying. Even the artist is more valuable than his artifact because the art process goes on in his mind. But the process itself is the most important quality, because it can transform and create. And its only form is possibility. Charles H. Nich...: In summary then, the literature of the Black assertion is in furious battle against the oppressive and materialistic aspects of Western intellectual tradition and society. It is searching for new ways of exposing Western society and reaffirming what it regards as humanly significant. Second, it is searching for a counter tradition by reviving the literary and historical canon of African American writings by a new emphasis on the past, it is seeking a new pride and a sense of power in African cultural influences. It is seeking to revive in short, the sense of wonder and of the mystical, our sense of possibility in human life. The revival of this sense of wonder is of course clear in the character of the poetry of a writer like Jones. What Dante might have called the language of the piazza, the language of the marketplace of the common people, characterizes the spirit of many of the modern Black poets. It is a spirit characterized by naked candor and openness. And yet it is cool, sophisticated, and critical. It fosters the sense of community. Charles H. Nich...: Seeing critically, some of the recent Black writers may of course be too shrill, too slovenly about form and parochial in their celebration of mere blackness. At times they have flown into irrationality and absolutism celebrating a Black mystique and a separate Black, never-never land. They appeared to have forgotten the rest of the human race and the fact that we are all pilgrims in the long march of men through history, to the fulfillment of our manhood, facing outrageous odds. But these are of course the excesses of the totally committed, which time will clearly resolve. The Black assertion may serve to save us if it reverses the direction of our society and our world, for this is a society as LeRoi Jones once wrote, which has little use for anything except gain. Charles H. Nich...: All is hacked down in its service, whether people, ideas or ideals. A man who writes or makes beautiful music will be asked to immortalize a soap. Beyond the anger, violence, and frustration he depicts, the Black writer reminds us of those springs, which bring justice in a community of brothers where the sense of wonder and faith in the unseen, beckons us to a genuine rediscovery of the holiness of all life. I want to thank you for your attention. Speaker 1: That was Charles H. Nichols Jr. director of Afro-American studies at Brown University, with today's lecture. These series of programs is presented by the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the department of English and the Afro-American studies program at the university, as material for the course, Afro-American literature. This presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30 PM, March 27th, 1970 from Shambaugh Auditorium and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.