At
some early stage in its metonymising arc, the understanding of the
Latin word for 'city,' urbs,
merged with its juxtapositional notion of civitas,
deriving from civis,
meaning a resident of a city
(Online
Etymology Dictionary, 2017). This etymology endorses the general, if
ill-defined, view
that a city is the recognisable but quasi-mystical nexus of its
inhabitants with the buildings and topographies which are their
identifying physical idiom and expression. So we may feel entitled to
examine this question of a city “presented up close and at a
distance” in the rather dreamlike sense of a superpositioning of
psychologies, histories, cultures, human bodies, and architectural
structures. To examine a
complex and entangled entity called 'Dublin,' for instance, in the
flickering magic lantern of James Joyce's 'The Dead,' or another
called 'New York' through the fervent, angry, celebratory
affirmations that are the Harlem-words
of Langston Hughes, is to experience these cities
as liminal,
as subjective, simulacraic characterisations of two specific cities,
and as some deconstruction of the ultimate idea of city
itself. These cities, with their shadow cities beyond—Galway
City, or the greater New York surrounding Harlem—become
narratives and discourses, intertextual mosaics that are in some way
real, and yet appear dreamlike. They are embattled from without; they
bestride thresholds between old worlds (whose Baudelairean ghosts
still clutch at the sleeve), and new, burgeoning worlds attempting to
become, and we
read of them as
states
hovering indeterminately between historicity and mythopoeia. They are
liminal
too in the anthropological sense of ritualistically
incomplete, for these
evocations are in some sense ritual texts suggesting or hoping for
transformative social epiphanies and actualisations as their
conclusions;
and
the voices, characters, structures, terrains and events they present
are captured at
indefinite waypoints
between
their previous identities
and the indeterminate outcomes they foreshadow.
Liminal
is also the word used to translate another signifier for
in-betweenness: the Tibetan bardo,
representing an intermediate state between life and death. And the
Harlem we find in Langston Hughes is such a state, a physical place
whose earlier incarnations have died (though architectural and other
cultural shells remain), but whose human renaissance, whose next
manifestation, which Hughes is wishing into being, is as yet
incomplete—for instance, the 'Harlem Renaissance,' for all its
lyrical homages to black women, has at this point provided genuine
emancipation or equality for very few of them. In 'The Dead' too we
find everywhere this intermediate state: to read through the
dream-streets and iconography of Joyce's Dublin is to feel the mythic
Dead rise through the layers of the other Dublins that lie sleeping
below. And hovering above
Joyce's city are the two Biblical taxiarchs,
the totemic and militarised archangels: the uncertain,
conditional-tense Gabriel, and the affirmative and cohortative
Michael, existing in a state of cold war unrealised even by Gabriel;
both dead and undead in their different ways, contending to see which
of them, which of the dreams they represent—and whose version of
the
city—will
be most alive when the snow settles. And we feel this tension also in
the representation of the new Dublin middle class represented by
Gabriel, the “Western Briton” (Joyce in Norris, 2006, p. 165),
and by both Miss Ivors and his own wife, Gretta, representing the
Irish resurgence. These incomplete rituals of becoming
in these cities are, of course, enacted through words; through
images, musics and song; and through layers of excavated or
constructed myth. (Norris, 2006; Gates and
Appiah, 1993)
'The
Dead' is undoubtedly the text from 'Dubliners' that takes us most
deeply into the essential mythologies of Joyce's Dublin and its
'geologic' layering. Selecting any of the available texts from Hughes
to do the same level of representation initially appears more
difficult: these are saccades
of up-close Harlem life rather than the grand sweep of multi-layered
perspective which is 'The Dead.' Their Modernism is of another type
entirely, from a different continent, with locally differing, if
allied, socio-political imperatives; but they too give us insight
into the experience of a city, and of a people striving to orient and
reinvent itself in a cultural and politicised context which would
have been impossible for most Black people in the US only a few years
earlier, and which would still, even during the 1920s, have been
unimaginable in the still-resentful, erstwhile slave-states of the
American South with its lynching culture and Ku Klux Klan, and with
the 'Jim Crow Laws' operating as minimally-modified reworkings of the
'Black Codes.' As with the deep history in every corner of 'The
Dead,' Hughes's poems, despite their celebration of Harlem, still
evoke the poverty and suffering of the 1920s, and the deep histories
of slavery, and of Africa beyond. These realities too stare at us
from every shadow, and we stare down at Harlem, as with Dublin, in
this far wider historical context. As Hughes pithily states it in
'Not A Movie,' “there ain't no Ku Klux on a 133rd”, showing us both the joy of this huge
fact, and of Harlem as a decisive refuge and haven, but also the
roots that clutch, and the act of remembering the disenfranchising
south with its extremes of racist violence: “Well they rocked him
with road apples […] and whipped his head with clubs”. So while Joyce's and Hughes's texts give
us to differing degrees images of cities in paralysis—perfectly
illustrated by Gabriel's absurdist 'equestrian' perambulations around
a symbol of his own unrecognised oppression—they show us also
peoples historically oppressed and brutalised, but for whom there are
signs that change has begun, even if for both peoples that change
will, as we now know, yet be long and bloody. (Johnson, 2000)
“The
rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm, Honey,” states the incongruously
asexual Hughes in 'Lenox Avenue: Midnight', and this is approximately the first moment in history when
anyone could have written these revolutionary words, by which he
means that the frequencies and cadences of Jazz are somehow
mathematically observable and integral in nature, in the rain, on the
hissing and rumbling streets, even in the structures and idioms of
the city and its inhabitants. It is the rhythm of life and therefore
of sex and the creating of life, and he writes these words in the
context of Harlem at night, thereby celebrating and proclaiming the
sexed-up, dangerous, jazzed-up nightlife of Harlem. But unmistakably
too we sense the alienation and weariness in the poem; this is an
area where street cars rumble all night; haven though it may be, this
is not some quiet, salubrious zone of the city, and we have the
defiant binaries of Hughes peering at his own reflection in Harlem,
painting something “dark yet shining, harsh yet gentle, bitter yet
jubilant—a Freedom song sung in our midst” (Blesh in Gates and
Appiah, 1993. p. 41). But more important, perhaps, than Hughes's
words themselves—as Harold Bloom and Arnold Rampersad have
suggested—is the fact of him writing them here in this moment. In
some ways Hughes is his own opus, his “life a larger poem than any
he could write” (Bloom, 2007, p. 3), the detail of his words less
significant than the facts of his peripatetic and demonstrative life
(at a time when, in reality, few black people had such general
freedoms), and his proclaiming that this Harlem,
this emancipatory mind-thing,
is now possible here, so shortly after the dreadful history of
slavery and subsequent oppression, and of the South's de
facto
ethnic cleansing. So Hughes's poetry of Harlem is a flag waving in a
new breeze; it is a decisive snub; and at least in its authorial
intent, it asserts a district displacing the beating heart of New
York from 'The Great White Way,' or from Broadway, to Lenox Avenue,
which he unequivocally constructs as mythic. (Rampersad, in Bloom, 2007)
The
derivation of 'Jazz' remains uncertain (though elaborate associations
between 'Jezebel' and 'orgasm' and 'jism' and 'jasm' have been
proposed), but undoubtedly there is a sexualising of the Harlem scene
in 'Lenox Avenue: Midnight,' as there is in other Hughes poems such
as the rather infantilising 'Harlem Sweeties,' or 'Juke Box Love
Song.' And 'Jazz' is undoubtedly a new, sexy, magic word of the
city—recently declared 'the
word of the 20th
century' by the American Dialect Society (Wikipedia, 2017)—trumpeting
both the freedom and equality of black Americans, as the unmistakable
virtuosity of Jazz musicians left white visitors to Harlem with
little credible rationale for notions of racial supremacy. The word
is powerful, and as with many other black idioms and neologisms it
will go on to imprint itself upon the world. It is a new structure
raised first in New Orleans, but now here in Harlem, and when the
white folks awake they will see it towering there on the skyline—they
will wonder and resent and scoff, and finally they will embrace it.
So here we have Hughes spreading the word of this Jazzed-up new
freedom in a new black language, which is informal and
conversational, and rather more authentic than, for instance, the
non-Jamaican-vernacular poems of Claude McKay, which remain less
stylistically free, less urban and modern, and largely “imprisoned
in the pentameter” (Brathwaite in Jenkins, 2003, p. 285). Hughes,
albeit in a more readerly
sense than Joyce, is announcing some sort of revolution, and the
modern freedom of his language tells us something about the city and
its voices. But alongside the celebration we feel always the menace
of the city outside: that other city where few black people yet live,
the surrounding vastness of New York with its overarching and
watchful narratives filled with “images of impenetrable whiteness”
(Morrison, 1992, p. 33). “There ain't no Ku Klux on a 133rd” is
not merely a triumphal cry of escape from southern oppression: with
its rejection of other potential stopping points en
route
to Harlem (Washington, Baltimore, Newark), it is a decisive
identification of territory and a warning. So Hughes's poetry,
language and consciousness constitute, perhaps, a unique Modernism,
which will become profoundly influential, will lead, ultimately,
amongst other things, to the white Beat culture, to Kerouac and
Ginsberg et
al
emulating its Jazz styling. “The gods are laughing at us,” declares Hughes, becoming in some way one
of those laughing gods overarching the city which he himself is
instrumental in creating—and an enquiry of modern black Americans
for the purposes of this essay reveals that he is still regarded as
iconic in this process. Whatever the alleged limitations of his
poetry, Hughes, “well before his compeers [...] demonstrated how to
use black vernacular language and music […] as a poetic diction, a
formal language of poetry” (Gates, 1993, pp. x-xi), and we feel
keenly both the rising of this language from the shadows, and with it
the rising of a new city. (Wikipedia, 2017)
So
while 'The Dead' is perhaps more writerly, giving us
components rather than overt declarations, here too we are
presented with—or enabled to construct—a city whose spirit and
language are rising from the dead, and of actual or latent conflict.
The paintings of 'the balcony scene' and the 'little princes' are
effectively 'intertextual,' intersecting images of death, factional
violence, and blood feud, which we know are already spreading and
worsening across Dublin at this time, as though the 'Furies' (and
would Joyce have failed to notice the Erin in Erinyes,
the Greek name for the 'Furies?') are indeed rising, called
back, like Furey's name itself evoking some Homeric or 'Aeschylusian'
atavism of retribution and reclamation, in poetical and linguistic
opposition even to Gabriel's surname, 'Conroy,' which we can
reasonably deconstruct into a Joycean wordplay meaning with the
king. And in the references to the surrounding city, we have the
church on Haddington Road, next to Wolfe Tone Square; we have the
jarring binary juxtaposition of tyranny and rebellion in the
Wellington Monument near the site of the 'Phoenix Park Murders;' and
in all the references to imagery, to statuary, even to music and to
the food served, we have these same binary tensions that are
presented between Michael and Gabriel; between Galway and Dublin;
between the west and east coasts; even between Gabriel and Gretta in
the vast closing epiphany between them which says so much about
Dublin and Ireland and the rising (if partly invented) spirit of its
history and tradition. All of this is wonderfully captured in the
instant visual canonizing of Gretta captured against the stained
glass in John Huston's film of 'The Dead' like the the 'Spirit of
Éireann' (contemporaneous poster-icon adversary of the 'West
Briton') suddenly incarnate in Dublin, in that atavistic burst of
colour and song which has Gabriel suddenly transfixed, though still
failing to grasp the resurrection here, still in denial until the
final moments where he realises he has been competing with the
chthonic Michael, whose undead Gallic spirit and the discourse it
represents—which he had hoped was long exorcised from Gretta and
from Dublin—has been here throughout. And if he had only looked
more closely at the city and his wife, perhaps he might have seen it
all along.
.
