Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Signifying Monkey
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Contextual note: I have to read (skim) Gates’ work very quickly, because it’s been recalled by the library. Please read my notes with that in mind… I’ll return to this entry and give a more detailed reading when I get the book back.
each literary tradition, at least implicitly, contains within it an argument for how it can be read (xix-xx).
I think that, for my stuff, the most valuable parts of Gates’ text involve meta-discourse and the vernacular: the idea that a discourse can discuss itself in a coded meta-language.
I have turned to two signal trickster figures, Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey, in whose myths are registered certain principles of both formal language use and its interpretation. These two separate but related trickster figures serve in their respective traditions as points of conscious articulation of language traditions aware of themselves as traditions, complete with a history, patterns of development and revision, and internal principles of patterning and organization. Theirs is a meta-discourse, a discourse about itself. These admittedly complex matters are addressed, in the black tradition, in the vernacular, far away from the eyes and ears of outsiders, those who do not speak the language of tradition. (xxi)
Importantly, this meta-discourse is intertextual: …”the Monkey’s language of Signifyin(g) functions as a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition” (xxi).
Signification is an act that reassembles a coherent cultural tradition in the face of diaspora (xxiv). Signifyin(g) is “repetition with a signal difference” (xxiv), an act of intertextual repetition and revision, which in literature
is similar to parody and pastiche, wherein parody corresponds to what I am calling motivated Signification while pastiche would correspond roughly to unmotivated Signification. (xxvii)
However, unmotivated Signification does not necessarily carry with it the postmodern critique one associates with pastiche. Gates points out the “intertextual” homage performances in black jazz albums, like Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, as a “double-voiced” form that “implies unity and resemblance rather than critique and difference” (xxvii).
Esu-Elegbara is a a trickster figure of West African and Caribbean descent, refigured in Vodoun (Haiti) and Hoodoo (New Orleans) traditions as the loa Papa Legba or Papa La Bas. This loa of gateways and crossroads is invoked by Jim Crow in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles.
As a loa of crossroads, Esu-Elegbara occupies the space between man and the gods; he is the mediator. This mediation manifests itself linguistically: “For Esu is the Yoruba figure of the meta-level of formal language use, of the ontological and epistemological status of figurative language and its interpretation” (6). Esu is the representation of interpretation, of the ongoing, open-ended unfolding of a text (21).
Gates discusses the intertextuality of Signifying Monkey poems and distinguishes narremes or cardinal functions from authorial invention on the level of the signifier rather than the story signified:
It is as if a received structire of crucial elements provides a base for poeisis, and the narrator’s technique, his or her craft, is to be gauged by the creative (re)placement of these expected or anticipated formulaic phrases and formulaic events, rendered anew in unexpected ways… meaning is devalued while the signifier is valorized… all other common structural elements are repeated with variations across the texts that, together, comprise the text of the Monkey. In other words, there is no fixed text of these poems; they exist as a play of differences. (61)
Out of time. More soon.