August Wilson: A Casebook.

Harrison, Paul Carter

Marilyn Elkins, ed. August Wilson: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 2000. 228 pp. $26.95.

It would seem, following the success of his 1984 Broadway production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, that August Wilson's declared assignation to write a cycle of ten plays around the twentieth-century black experience rang in the ears of skeptics as hollow exuberance. Such a task would appear even more daunting when burdened with presenting black life "on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence," thereby locating the black experience within a culturally specific social and historical reality beyond the familiar sociological inscription. Having received two Pulitzer Awards since then (for Fences and The Piano Lesson), his eighth play of the cycle, King Hedley II, opened on Broadway in April 2001. Clearly, Wilson, having established himself as being one of the most significant playwrights to emerge in the history of American theatre, deserves se rious critical examination and interrogation. While there is much to recommend in editor Marilyn Elkins's August Wilson: A Casebook, deeper inspection of Wilson's aesthetic sensibility would have minted a more coherent discourse.

Perhaps the biggest problem, if not failing, of the casebook approach to critical analysis is that it invites contributors to present a discourse that justifies their particular research issues, thereby offering interpretations without the benefit of a common critical foundation that can lead to a coherent response to the specific cultural and historical significations of the subject. A case in point is Gunilla Theander Kester, who, preoccupied with the idea that the "recurring dialectic in the poetics of memory between a static and a dynamic presentation of the black self develops into a strong metaphorics which is both referential and self-reflexive," makes a cumbersome effort to apply post-modem analysis to the cultural metalanguage of gesture in Fences, describing Gabriel's "soundless and terrifying dance" at the end of the play (which is more an heraldic epiphany than "terrifying") as a "silent pantomime... his version of the intolerable yet dynamic relationship between the poetics of memory and the body ," which signifies the moment when the "body becomes the primary locus for the poetics of memory and the struggle for change."

Despite Wilson's pursuit of a culturally specific African American cosmological world view forged from ancestral memory that informs the aesthetics of his work, proffering what Larry Neal had proposed in the late Sixties for the Black Arts Movement as "a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology" that allows specific articulation and definition to black responses to the American experience, Elkins alerts us in her introduction that her main concern is "why Wilson goes so far out of his way to disconnect himself from the Western tradition of drama, even though his plays reside comfortably within that tradition." It is not uncommon for Wilson to be referenced by O'Neill, Williams, and Miller as opposed to Tutuola, Toomer, or Reverend Ike; or for critics to myopically attribute his ritual elements to Greek drama without the slightest regard for the African underpinnings of his work that had also influenced the Greeks, such attributes being unimpressive even for Elkins, who notes that Bearden's invol vement with collage was "first introduced by Picasso in his Cubist experiments," never acknowledging that the Cubist experiments were a riff if not a parody, of African image making.

Therein lies the problem with the casebook method--an unwillingness to accept the discomforting need to probe beneath the surface of Wilson's dramaturgy to engage the black experience as unfamiliar, even new, territory for intellectual inquiry. Rather, the tendency is to make the black experience fit more common paradigms of intellectual discourse. Thus, the limitations of Elkins's inquiry encumber the fullest exposition of the Wilson project to reveal the black experience as a unique testimony of post-bellum socialization, its vernacular narrative (which should not to be confused with the regionalism of Southern dialect) reflecting an African memory that is uncircumscribed by the borders of the North American continent, producing (as I have noted in an earlier essay) "the improvisational configuration of the blues, work songs, church and field hollers, and verbal dexterity coupled with the mythic significations of folktales, boasts, toasts, the dozens," and contemporary rap.

Typical of the contradictions that proliferate the discourse of most of the essays in the casebook, Elkins is able to recognize the influence of Baraka in Wilson's plays as being "the motion of history as the emergence of the African 'Geist' out of the bones of the Middle Passage, the enactment of the ritual dance in which personal experience and racial history converge, and, most importantly, the quest for one's song that is ultimately realized in the blues." But it is not certain that her appreciation of the Blues is beyond Mark William Rocha's observation of the form being "the American language for telling and confronting the tragic reality," unmindful of the Blues as a source of personal edification and revitalization, as Patricia Gantt observes in The Piano Lesson: "The piano's song reaffirms the stories of the past, transforming the ugly and awful, along with the beautiful and tender, into a joyous melody of hope."

Song, as a healing metaphor, first appeared in Joe Turner's Come and Gone. David L. G. Arnold notes that "Wilson uses music to signify the presence of something numinous or supernatural," when in fact the metaphysics of song is tied directly to the spiritual connection and reconciliation made with the African past, what Wilson calls "Blood memory," which leads to self-empowerment. Frequently, throughout the casebook, the metaphysics of spirituality is summarily described as a preoccupation with what Joanne Gordon describes as Wilson's "brilliant evocation of the supernatural." Grounding the spiritual elements of the work as a "mythical dimension to the apparently naturalistic environment of his plays," Gordon concludes that Wilson crafts these "anarchic free" spirits as expressions of the "African soul" that serve as "positive role models" to explode white "cultural and even epistemological expectations," a sort of intemperate numinous personality that rejects the constraints of the dominant culture. Framing the work in the imperatives of sociology without an understanding of an African ontology reduces Wilson's intentions to whimsical, if not arbitrary, "theatrical epiphanies" without substance. With the exception of Trudier Harris, few essayists discuss the African cosmogony that supports the spiritual "influence of the past upon the present, the dead upon the living" in the consciousness of African American traditions that own a prevalence for "circular imagery," as opposed to linear, suggesting" a return to the best in the self as well as a return to the African cultural forms that underlie African American experience."

The most tendentious, perhaps even egregious, reading of Wilson's dramaturgy comes in the form of an unrelenting, near histrionic feminist ideological interrogation from Kim Marra, who refers to Wilson as a "mythographer of the African American experience" whose "poetically realistic methods" have allowed him acceptance and success from the white male establishment, which views his narrative style as a "representational strategy [that] naturalizes power relations of sexual difference rooted in biological essentialism which perpetuates male dominance." As if anticipating some raging response from the black male world, Marra initiates her uninformed tirade with a disclaimer (curiously--more aptly, pompously--aligning herself to reactions to Michelle Wallace's less spurious gender mission) by observing that a "feminist critique foregrounding dynamics of gender ideology in the work of a male artist widely heralded for success in overcoming racial oppression risks being construed as counterproductive to the cause of black racial advancement." Such would be the case if the reader would come away with the slightest notion that Marra had a clue about the social codes that inform black male and female gender relationships.

Clearly, Marra has used the experiential barometer of white women to gauge what she erroneously perceives to be the same experience for black women. Most black women, certainly those who have not been seduced by a middle-class sense of insecurity, openly acknowledge that the experiences of white women are markedly different from those of black women; and since black men are not positioned pervasively throughout society in postures of power, both black men and women share the same adversarial response to the power structures of the dominant culture.

Marra, however, is convinced that the greatest impediment to racial advancement is the battle of the sexes "indelibly inscribed in the monolithic gender constructs Wilson's [work] perpetuates from generation to generation." In her view, the black males in Wilson's plays represent the "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy's phallocentric ideal" and are constantly defending their genitals from the castrating gaze of black women. Even bell hooks (whose analysis of black manhood Marra curiously cites in support of her view) offers a caveat to such a blind assumption when she notes that "it must be emphasized that the black men who are most worried about castration and emasculation are those who have completely absorbed white patriarchial definitions of masculinity." From Marra's ideological gaze, the roles for black women are hopelessly subordinated to "stereotypical bipolar constructions of black femininity: castrating matriarch/maternal savior and Jezebel/Madonna." Applying these narrowly inscribed reductive categories of experience, black women are viewed as nurturing mammies and oversexed Jezebels who cannot but emerge from a Wilson play without being victimized as a "depreciated sex object" or otherwise "a sexual trophy in dominant cultural terms." Though acknowledging the "hero's need for black maternal nurturing to emerge from the horrors of white terror and oppression," the black female characters can do no right in Marra's view, since every response to the male characters is ideologically wrong when such resourcefulness in black women becomes a testament that "shores up traditional race/gender stereotypes, like superstrong motherhood." Though in one breath she embraces the archetypical creative "mythos of Mother Africa" with a citation from Barbara Christian, who observes that "there is no doubt that motherhood is for most African people symbolic of creativity and continuity," Marra continues to view black female sexuality as a problematic in the next breath, since a "black Madonna/Jezebel dichotomy simpl y supplants the white Virgin/Whore paradigm and reiterates the oppressive dynamics inherent in bipolar stereotypic constructs in another context."

Perhaps it would be useful if Marra reviewed ntozake shange's for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf to become reacquainted with the black female point of social reference which is not agonized by any notion of black male power, recognizing in the behavior of black males the manifest pathology of social impotence which is directly related to the corruptions of Afrocentric values. These colored girls still luv them some colored boys and are not the least bit intimidated by their need for phallocentric responses to an oppressive society, certainly not to the point that would have them consider turning into jelly, a protoplasmic mass of gender sensitivity reacting to male persuasions that threaten or challenge the ideological view of gender politics.

While August Wilson: A Casebook is a meritorious beginning toward a serious investigation of August Wilson's dramaturgy, it would have greater fidelity if it were not subordinated solely to traditional Western canonical expositions locked in the immutable Negro Gaze, the fixed eye on the social dysfunction and deprivation of black experience. Instead, a study of the African American vernacular tradition framed by the hermeneutics of African cosmogony would contribute greater resonance in the inquiry of Wilson texts, revealing the ancient Blood Song that resides deep in the recesses of memory. August Wilson would have us all sing the Blood Song that resurrects the dislocations of the spirit, if we could remember the tune.