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 26, 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 lectures 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 Accounts of Their Bondage and Freedom.
Charles H. Nich...: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the fourth in our series of lectures on the heritage of the slave narrative, in which we have dealt with the autobiographies of ex-slaves and their relation to the picaresque tradition in the first lecture. Then we've gone on to point out in the second lecture, some of the ways in which the slave narrative which tends to be a stock historical picture of the experience of Black people in slavery tends to disarm the magnolia myths and plantation legends and confederate romances like Gone With the Wind, which surround the history of the South. In our third lecture, we discussed the use of the slave narrative as a literary source in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Styron in his recent novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Today, I would like us to discuss the picaresque tradition in autobiography and in the fiction of Black authors. Stuart Miller has written a book called The Picaresque Novel in which he sums up what he means by picaresque in the following way.
Charles H. Nich...: A Picaresque Novel is a novel which has an episodic plot. The episodic plot together with a fortune pattern, the accident motif, the rush of events pattern, projects a universe in a state of chaos. The hero of The Picaresque Novel differs from characters and other types of fiction in that his origins are uncertain. He becomes a rogue in a world full of roguery. He cannot love or feel strong emotion. He is incapable of anchoring his personality to some idea or ideal of conduct. His internal chaos is externally reflected in his protean or changing roles. This instability of personality is seen in The picaresque novel as a reflection of the outer chaos revealed by the plot patterns. The picaresque character is not merely a rogue and his chaos, a personality is greater than any purely moral chaos. It reflects a total lack of structure in the world, not merely a lack of ethical and social structure.
Charles H. Nich...: What relation does this genre bear to the picaresque forms in Afro-American writing? A study of the autobiographies of Afro-Americans enables the reader to grasp the bitterness and intensity of their lives and the humanity of those who struggled so mightily against cynicism and destruction. For the literary critic, this study is an essential step as we analyze the ways in which the existential experience of Black people is transmuted by authors into subtler and more creative fictional form. We turn first then to a consideration of some of the autobiographies of Black writers, particularly of Richard Wright's Black Boy, and the autobiography of Malcolm X. Autobiographical writings like these are intense, passionate revelations of the deepest conflicts in the Black experience. An experience which when translated into fiction assumes frequently, the picaresque form. The distinguishing mark of the Black picaroon is that his fate is determined not only by class, but perhaps more importantly by caste status. The Negro wrote, "James Baldwin is absolutely necessary to American society as showing in a constantly shifting populace where the bottom is."
Charles H. Nich...: Black Boy is the modern archetype of the life of an American freedman. It illustrates vividly how effectively the South has restored the status quo ante by an elaborate system of taboos, restraints and invidious distinctions sanctioned by law, and then forced by ruthless violence against the posterity of the ex slaves. The Southern politicians and their white constituents, not only wished to ensure their own political and economic supremacy, they set out to destroy the Black man's identity and individuality, to reduce him to a pre-individual state, to rob him of his humanity. The system insists therefore on his total obedience and submission. Richard writes account of his childhood, Black Boy, achieves its stunning impact by dramatizing the collision of a vigorous imaginative and daring youth with a family and a society which set out to stamp out his individuality. His first awareness is of a family setting so cramping and lacking in spiritual nourishment that he is driven to outrageous acts of defiance by its cold hostility. His humble origins with his parents do not spare him the jeopardy of the picaroon like Lazarillo de Tormes for he is hungry, cold and deprived.
Charles H. Nich...: Indeed his experience is the more alienating precisely because it is his own mother and father, the father soon abandons the family, who are the first to repress his normal curiosity and assertiveness. From the very outset, his contact with his environment is traumatic. He is beaten and robbed by gangs, insulted and terrified by whites and sharply restricted in all his movements. At the age of six, he finds himself drunk in a local tavern and a frightened observer of the ghettos on the world life. The next phase of his life is spent with an austere Calvinistic grandmother whose stern admonitions against sin, turn his guilt and hostility against himself and alienate him completely from any human warmth or affection. By the time he was compelled to confront the public school and his vicious white employers in cities like Jackson and Memphis, he was a lost soul bitterly estranged from his relatives, the Black community and from the larger American society. Each days, or deals brought him to the brink of that vast chasm beyond which lay humiliation, terror, rage, and even death.
Charles H. Nich...: "There were more violent quarrels," he writes, "in our deeply religious home than in the home of a gangster, a burglar or a prostitute, a fact which I use to hint gently to granny and which did my cause no good. Granny bore the standard for God, but she was always fighting. The peace that passes understanding, never dwelt with us. I too fought, but I fought because I felt I had to keep from being crushed, to fend off continuous attack." Thus Richard Wright was stigmatized as a bad boy, a sinner and a reprobate. And he played out this role with a certain gusto. Like the picaresque hero, he learned to mask his anger, to repress his natural instincts, to dissemble and to control. The price he paid was dear, a bitter alienation, a lack of identity and an incapacity for love.
Charles H. Nich...: He writes, "Again and again I vowed that someday. I would end this hunger of mine, this apartness, this eternal difference. And I did not suspect that I would ever get intimately into their lives. That I was doomed to live with them, but not of them. That I had my own strange and separate road, a road which in later years would make them wonder how I had come to tread it. I now saw world leak to life before my eyes because I could explore it and that meant not going home when school was out, but wondering, watching, asking, talking."
Charles H. Nich...: The cruelty of these surroundings therefore, could not stamp out the searching intelligence, the critical awareness, the love of life welling up inside this Black boy. He discovered newspapers, books, the beauty of the land and the sunset, and even a few friends. Like the picaro and the fugitive slave, Richard Wright dreamed, "Of going North and writing books, novels. The North symbolized to me, all that I had not felt and seen. It had no relation whatever to what actually existed. Yet by imagining a place where everything was possible. I kept hope alive in it."
Charles H. Nich...: This utopian dream was severely tested by the reality of discrimination, insult, lynching and violence. But the boy continued his rootless wandering and heartbreaking quest. "In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be. And upon which the penalty of death had been placed." The chaos in his life continued however. He knocked about from one menial job to another, he remained on guard against attack by hostile white people. He avoided stealing only out of fear. As a bell boy, he learned to peddle bootleg liquor. "I no longer felt bound by the laws which white and Black was supposed to obey in common. I was outside the laws, the white people had told me so. Now when I thought of ways to escape from my environment, I no longer felt the inner restraint that would have made stealing impossible. And this new freedom made me lonely and afraid."
Charles H. Nich...: The brutality of the system affected him in a thousand ways. He was forced to watch his employers attack and beat up a Negro woman while he and the police stood by and merely watched. He was forced out of a job with a firm of opticians for daring to entertain the hope of learning himself to be a technician. He was struck down for failing to say, "Sir," to white men. He is forced into a boxing match for the entertainment of whites. And at last he escaped to the new uncertainties of Chicago, "Not only had the Southern whites not known me," he writes, "but more important still as I had lived in the South, I had not had the chance to learn who I was."
Charles H. Nich...: Indeed the world he had known had tossed away the best and deepest things of heart and mind in blind ignorance and hate. Richard Wright compelled to preserve some rag of honor in the face of the barbarism of the South was a bad boy and a rogue to his family and his acquaintances. But the fact is he was a conscious rebel against an inhuman environment and Chicago led him down the road to revolution and Black nationalism. His whole career has therefore for us, a prophetic significance. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is probably the most influential book read by this generation of Afro-Americans. For not only is the account of Malcolm little an absorbing and heart shattering encounter with the realities of poverty, crime, and racism, it is a fantastic success story.
Charles H. Nich...: Paradoxically, the book designed to be an indictment of American and European bigotry and exploitation is a triumphant affirmation of the possibilities of the human spirit. Malcolm X presents us with a manifesto, a call to arms, a revolutionary doctrine. At the same time, he reveals an incredible and dogged perseverance in the face of soul destroying limitations, a passionate eagerness to learn, a love of life, an ingenious and passionate capacity for survival. In him, the picaresque mode is given a new psychic dementia, a sense of history and a tragic force. The chaos which would engulf the protagonist here extends in ever widening circles from the hunger, squalor and petty thievery of the street corner, to the crises in international relations and colonialism. And at last to the vexed questions s men's faith and their ultimate relation to the cosmos. The journey of the picaroon Malcolm X is from ragged obscurity to world spokesman, to charismatic leader, to modern saint, a long sordid yet visionary quest through the underworld to a vision of some just and ordered millennia.
Charles H. Nich...: Thus, the Black picaresque characteristically presents us with a religious agonist whose search out of poverty, deprivation, and despair leads him through dreams of liberation to a transcendent sense of community. This then is the essential meaning of the autobiography of Malcolm X. He was born into a family of eight children in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19th, 1925. He knew hunger, poverty, and deprivation, but above all his family lived surrounded by an iron ring of hate, constant threats by the Ku Klux Klan and innumerable forms of insult and indignity. Malcolm's father, a proud militant man and a Baptist preacher propagated the Black nationalism of Marcus Garvey. The bigots responded by burning down the Little's house and at last murdering their father. Malcolm and his brothers were separated and farmed out to relatives and friends. His mother suffered a mental breakdown and had to be hospitalized. Malcolm was sent to Lansing, Michigan and then to Boston, Massachusetts. His schooling was very sporadic.
Charles H. Nich...: The next phase of his life led him into petty crimes, truancy, thievery, dope peddling, pimping. Like the picaroon he survived by trickery and deceit, by outsmarting others, by hustling his way through a vicious underground existence. At last, apprehended by the police for one of his petty crimes, he landed in jail by the time he was 16. Then came his conversion to the Black Muslim religion of Elijah Muhammad. A curious amalgam of faith, myth, asceticism, and revolutionary doctrine. The Black Muslim's overriding goal is of course the liberation of Black people from the thralldom and exploitation of dominant white racists. They sought not only to prepare blacks for the inevitable confrontation with the power structure, but to give them a new self-esteem, pride and determination to establish their own nation. The experience of conversion to the Muslim faith transformed Malcolm's character.
Charles H. Nich...: Upon his release from prison, he turned from crime and self-indulgence to reading, learning, and proselytizing for the group. His first exposure to the history of slavery, discrimination and imperialism convinced him that Elijah Muhammad was right. The white man is a devil and that Black men must not only cast off the corrupting influences of Western society, but work toward a separate Black state, the nation of Islam. One is amazed by Malcolm X's zeal for learning by the range of his intellectual interests and the far reaching character of his organizing effort for the cause. Malcolm listened as Elijah Muhammad railed against integration and reconciliation. He dedicated himself to the same cause and represented his leaders ideas in innumerable speeches.
Charles H. Nich...: Then came the break. Disillusioned by evidences of immorality and adultery charged against the Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X was silenced by the man who plainly felt threatened by his disciples' popularity. For Malcolm X understood the mentality of the ghetto, the strivings and conflicts of the Black masses. He wrote, "The Black man in North America was spiritually sick because for centuries, he had accepted the white man's Christianity which asked the Black, so-called Christian, to expect no true brotherhood of man, but to endure the cruelties of the white, so-called Christians. Christianity had made the Black men fuzzy, nebulous, confused in their thinking." He wrote, "The Black man in North America was economically sick. As a consumer he got less than his share and as a producer gave least. In New York City with over a million Negroes, there aren't twenty Black owned businesses employing over ten people. It's because Black men don't own and don't control their own communities' retail establishments, that they can't stabilize their own community."
Charles H. Nich...: These ideas got, of course, a wide hearing throughout the world. The bitter disillusionment of Black people who had tried moral suasion, peaceful protest and nonviolence only to confront dogs, clubs, guns and unjust imprisonment seized upon this new Black nationalism. The assassination of Martin Luther King and of Malcolm X himself changed radically the whole climate of race relations in America.
Charles H. Nich...: What many Black nationalists and followers of Malcolm X seem to have forgotten however, is Malcolm's pilgrimage to Mecca and the subsequent widening of his horizons. Though indefatigable in his struggle for the liberation of Black America, he saw the worldwide implications of oppression and exploitation. He sensed that the wretched of the earth have a common cause and that in our struggle we need allies. And there are many allies among those who have been robbed of their heritage by people from Europe and the United States. The life of Malcolm Little outdoes the fantasies, the jeopardy, the rush of event and accident, which we associate with the picaroon. The personalized essays of Eldridge Cleaver and LeRoi Jones have the same stock rebellious impact. Fiction could hardly recapture its intensity or its tragic dimension, but the imaginative writer could not fail to be enticed by the power of the Black picaresque and the creative possibilities of the theme, which destroyed the American union and which still threatens the very foundations of our American national life.
Charles H. Nich...: It is apparent then that the Black experience itself suggested to some Afro-American writers, the picaresque form when they turn to fiction for they were conscious victims of fortuitous circumstance, rootless and lonely men forced to survive by various stratagems and protean roles. Indeed their immersion in a bitter underground life robbed them of the aesthetic distance which could use the picaresque mode creatively in fiction until the 20th century. Two factors, I think, explain the flourishing of a more creative and experimental use of this fictional form in recent times. One is the fact that the pilgrimage of the plantation Black to the urban setting has increased and enriched his cultural contact and his group solidarity.
Charles H. Nich...: Second, the refinement of his sensibility and the deepening of his perception have resulted from a closer contact with Western literary tradition. We have seen how the slave narratives created their own picaresque forms. Works like Don Quixote, Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, and Huckleberry Finn suggested further variations on familiar themes. Yet these work scarcely appeal to the Black writer as having the depth and seriousness of his own experience in America. Even Moll Flanders seemed contrived and somewhat frivolous. And Tom Jones, though a bastard abandoned by his benefactors and making a shaky adjustment to a merciless London world, is never convincingly a lower-class character. Huckleberry Finn on the other hand, provided the most useful model in his outcast status, his perilous flights, his ingenuity and shifting roles and his subversion of the established values of the society. Yet the older of the plantation stereotypes has always clung to Huckleberry Finn and to Jim and their adventures could scarcely seem relevant to the industrial setting of twentieth century ghetto life.
Charles H. Nich...: When we turn to the Black writers, it is playing that none of them is consciously imitating the Western picaresque mode, but is more influenced by the Black experience as we have seen it in autobiographies and biographies of both slaves and alleged freedman. Hence in structuring the action, the character and the language of their novels, they have taken for granted the essential elements of the picaresque. What they have created are literary modes and fictional forms, which achieve the intensity, tension and bitter rebellion characteristic of the group's life. For the Black picaroon never can escape the iron ring of his caste status. His alienation and struggle for survival are more intensely felt. He must be capable of playing numerous exacting roles for he is the victim of accident, chaos and irrational caprice. His world conspires to oppress and unsettling him. The maxim of the society by which we are surrounded might be summed up in the directive in Invisible Man, "Keep this nigga running." The instability of his emotional life leads him into the agony and conflict of a shaky ego. Yet he has developed considerable resilience and ingenuity.
Charles H. Nich...: His speech, his blues, his jazz, his double vision and sophisticated awareness provide a rich cultural gallery. And he is able by improvisation, disguise, irony, paradox, and wordplay to explore means of escape to a spiritual freedom, which even the traditional picaroon could not know. The early efforts of the Black picaresque were trial flights like Claude McKay's novel, Home to Harlem, published about 1925. In this novel, the protagonist, Jake, is a lonely wander stranded in Europe who goes AWOL to get back to Harlem. He is somewhat reminiscent of Tom Jones in his irrepressible good spirits, his episodic career, his furious and hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. Drink, sex, dancing and gambling seem to fill his life. And he wastes no time in dour reflection. He spends his time looking for his lost love, Felice. He works because he must, but he is free of self hatred and self-pity.
Charles H. Nich...: Especially one contrasted with his foil, the educated young man, Ray, he seems a stereotyped portrait of the happy-go-lucky darky. But on closer examination, we discover that his roguery goes beyond mere lasciviousness and folly for he is a fugitive and a rebel, resisting the police and refusing to serve as a scab. The picaresque character status is symbolized here by the persona of the pullman car porter and the dining car waiter who must perform a daily balancing act on a shaky train, while hurtling towards some uncertain destination. The hysterical and feverous search of Jake and Ray for some haven, some lasting human relationship never ends. And they are part of that flotsam and jetsam, which the lake tides will at last float to some abandoned shore. It is Richard Wright, of course, who establishes the tradition and revealed something of the range and possibilities of the fall. As we have seen in Black Boy, he lived through the anguish of the Black picaroon and could depict the extent of his estrangement and the revolutionary implications of the theme.
Charles H. Nich...: Generally speaking, critics have described Native Son only as a naturalistic novel. A bold and candid revelation of lower class life in a rat infested ghetto. A harsh indictment of an exploitative society. A picture of those victimized by impersonal and predetermined forces. All this has certainly its element of truth. Yet there is more to Native Son than that. For the achievement of the novel is in Wright's success in humanizing the murderer and the bully, Bigger Thomas and giving him a certain tragic dimension. Bigger's humanity strikes us first of all in the nature of his rogue-ish adjustment to his world. His obscure origins, his thievery, his pretenses and dreams, his protean roles as gang leader, chauffeur, servant, kidnapper, Black nationalists are picaresque. But Bigger stands out in contrast to the traditional picaroon in the intensity, the stock reality and the revolutionary character of his role, but his is a perilous lack of any adjustment.
Charles H. Nich...: His behavior is plainly moving toward the pathological. He is the archetype of the Black militant who has discovered that he is willing to pay any price for freedom, even murder and death. And his fantasies of a Black nation, his expanding awareness of his powers out of his world raise the novel to a new order of consciousness.
Charles H. Nich...: In the long short story, The Man Who Lived Underground, Richard Wright turns from realism to surrealism and symbolism, from the episodic tale to the interior conflicts of the psyche. For rights contribution is his fearful anticipation of the psychic as well as the social perils which the rebel Black picaroon faces. Yet again, there are elements of the picaresque which anticipate LeRoi Jones' system of Dante's hell and that master of the Black picaresque Ralph Ellison. The Man Who Lived Underground is not named and we learned nothing of his origins. This story incidentally was written and published about 1949, but he is fleeing from the police and drops down a manhole into the sewer onto the city. Though apparently innocent of any crime, he has signed a confession of murder and he feels guilty. In his wanderings underground, he finds a cave, a church, an undertaker's establishment, a movie house, a coal bin, a safe, a butcher shop, an office, and a jeweler's establishment.
Charles H. Nich...: He establishes himself in a cave where he installs lights and stores the dollars, the diamonds and the rings that he has stolen. For a time, he has a deceptive euphoria. "He had triumphed over the world above ground. He was free. He wanted to run from his cave and yell his discovery to the world." When he emerges into the street later on, no one notices him. Compulsively, he himself goes to the police to assure them that he is a criminal and he urges them to come and see his underground cave and his stolen goods. The officers of the law think him insane, but finally they follow him to the manhole and stand above the entrance. And when he has descended into the maelstrom, one of them shoots him. The story ends with the line, "He sighed and closed his eyes. A whirling object rushing alone in the darkness, veering, tossing, lost in the heart of the earth."
Charles H. Nich...: The story clearly operates on at least two symbolic levels, the psychological and the social. The protagonist like Dostoevsky's underground man is fearful, unstable, masochistic, aggressive and somewhat paranoid. His descend to the sewer, brings him face to face with his own conflicts and nightmares. The awful squalor and degradation into which his own ego is drowning. At the same time, the awful, the dead bodies, the castoff abortions, the decay of the inquisitive and wasteful society above him, poorly concealed below the surface of our cities, is an indictment of the society from which he has fled. Here the anguish and chaos of the picaroon, the outcast, cry out his indictment against the barbarism of the society, which defines him as a criminal and a non-person and robs him of his manhood.
Charles H. Nich...: Richard Wright's novel, The Outsider, published in 1953 has received little critical attention and has been dismissed by those who refer to it as an inept and poorly written novel. The book's importance to our contemporary sensibility, it's prophetic and ideological significance have been much underestimated. The Outsider, written under the influence of Sartre's existentialism is never less a powerful sequel to Richard Wright's central theme as we have seen it in Black Boy, Native Son, and The Man Who Lived Underground. It adds a new dimension to the Black picaresque genre in its inexorable pursuit of the conflicts in the soul of the outcast, the brutalized and oppressed black man. Wright's earlier writings found heroic elements in the victim turned assailant by convincing us that those who challenged oppression and were defined as criminals by an unjust society had proved that the only possible stance for the Black masses is one of rebellion.
Charles H. Nich...: As Eldridge Cleveland might say, the Black man must not allow himself to be castrated. I am convinced that this idea owes more to Richard Wright's Black nationalism than to Marxist ideology. In The Outsider, the narrative power of the novel stems not only from the perilous and protean career of the protagonist, but from his attempt to confront the chaos about him by seizing the initiative and fashioning his own identity and his own destiny. Cross Damon, the main character, a 33 year old Negro is divorced, has three children whom he loves and is surrounded by his friends and fellow postal workers. He has a love affair with a young girl whom he gets pregnant. Yet he is alone, rootless, alienated, his bitter quarrels with his wife, his drinking and extracurricular sex adventures are symptomatic of his passionate, but fruitless quest to find wholeness and health for a way out of his debts, his shattered marriage and the humiliations of a racist society.
Charles H. Nich...: The opening scenes of the novel in which he is walking in the snow and constantly fleeing the cold are symbolic in this regard. Then Cross Damon is in a subway accident. His coat containing his identification papers, which he has taken off in attempting to extricate himself from the wreck falls near a Negro who resembles him. To his amazement he discovers that the next day's newspapers report him among the dead. He reads his own obituaries and watches his own funeral from a safe distance. It is then that he decides to seize the opportunity to blot out his miserable past and create a new identity. "All of his life, he had been hankering after his personal freedom and now freedom was knocking at his door, begging him to come in. He shivered in the cold." The numerous disguises and changing roles of the picaroon suggest how hungrily the search for a new identity characterizes the persons in this kind of fiction.
Charles H. Nich...: Not only is this symptomatic of the instability of the personality, which is concerned. A personality which is deeply involved in an identity crisis, but it suggests the chaos and the jeopardy which haunts them. Cross Damon flees to New York, adopts various names and stolen credentials. He commits four murders to protect himself from discovery and suffers the constant agony and fear of the fugitive. "Now depending only upon his lonely will, he saw that to map out his life entirely upon his own assumptions was a task that terrified him just to think of it, for he knew that he first had to know what he thought life was. The question summed itself up. What is a man? He had unknowingly set himself a project of no less magnitude than contained in that awful question." Cross Damon thinks that in abandoning his old identity, he is free to choose to be anyone he likes, but he eventually discovers that he has greatly increased the chaos and sickness in his own heart for he is not a man at all without an identity, without a past, without a background. He is a ghost and a spook.
Charles H. Nich...: Moreover, he determines not only to manipulate and fashion his own life, but that of others. He assumes god-like prerogatives over others. His association with the Communist party enlarges his opportunities for violating coldly the rights of other people. In short, Cross Damon's mental state is clearly pathological. He is suffering from paranoid, delusions of persecution followed by delusions of omnipotence. The Outsider is often referred to as an existentialist novel. It is more accurately an attack on a certain kind of existentialism, a therein flirtation with its tenets and a final rejection of the selfish and sick view of the existentialism which Cross Damon represents, for Damon, of course, believes in nothing. "God is dead and everything is allowed." Man is a feudal passion. A man is only what he makes of himself. Cross Damon says, "We 20th century Westerners have outlived the faith of our fathers. Our minds have grown so skeptical that we cannot accept the old scheme of moral precepts which once guided man's life. In our modern society, we try to steer our hearts by impoverished pragmatic rules, which are in the end, no rules at all."
Charles H. Nich...: Cross Damon's career dramatizes the risks faced by the Black picaroon, personality disintegration, lack of identity, brutalization and then last paranoia or paranoid schizophrenia. He is shot by another communist and having stripped himself of all of illusions, having dared everything to preserve himself and create his own new identity and his own law, he achieves some new insights only on his deathbed. Insights which are after all as old as our first explorations with ethics and moral principle. He says, "I wish I had some way to give the meaning of my life to others, to make a bridge from man to man. Starting from scratch every time is no good. Tell them not to come down this road. Men hate themselves and it makes them hate others. We must find some way of being good to ourselves for man is all we've got. I wish I could ask men to meet themselves. Man is returning to the earth. The real men, the last men are coming."
Charles H. Nich...: I had intended to conclude with an analysis of Ellison's Invisible Man, but I see that the time is almost gone. So, I think we might begin next time at our final meeting with that analysis. And then I would like to say something about the new spirit, which seems to me to dominate the consciousness of our very contemporary Black writers. Are there any comments or questions you'd like to raise in the moment we have left? Yes.
Speaker 3: [inaudible] concluded the lecture [inaudible] a Black poet, I think, you said. I wonder if you still [inaudible] Malcolm X's existential, and I wonder if you would comment on [inaudible] for a Black poet. I don't try to understand why I tried to understand what you said yesterday, and then why you spoke so highly of Malcolm X today, because you've seen the same amount of [inaudible].
Charles H. Nich...: Well, as a matter of fact I said that yesterday as well. That one found in the career of Malcolm X, something of this quality. What I was talking about, of course, was the creative writer, the imaginative writer and the imaginative work or works, which would, I think, approach something of the dimensions of the Black experience. This was what I was calling for. I think that my intention, of course, was to say in effect to my audience the next chapter, next week. Next time, I'll try to show you some of the ways in which I think we are indeed moving toward that poet. Do you understand what I mean? And I think that when we think of writers like Wright and Ellison and LeRoi Jones, we are moving in the direction of which I'm speaking.
Speaker 3: [inaudible] or something like that.
Charles H. Nich...: Yes. I think he represents a certain-
Speaker 3: Movement.
Charles H. Nich...: -high point in the development of Afro-American writing. The only reason why I have not discussed Ellison within the context that I was speaking of last time of the tragic, was primarily that the mood of his novel, Invisible Man is more a comic rather than a tragic mood.
Speaker 3: I get it.
Charles H. Nich...: I don't know whether I'm making myself plain. Is there any other question or comment. If not, then we'll adjourn for this afternoon and next time, tomorrow afternoon, we'll go on with our discussion of Ellison and of the Black assertion in our time. We're adjourned for today.
Speaker 1: That was Charles H. Nichols Jr, Director of the Afro-American studies program at Brown University, with today's lecture. This 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 26th, 1970 from Shambaugh Auditorium and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.