The Liberating Literary and African American Vernacular Voices of Gayl Jones Liberating Voices: Oral Traditions in African

American Literature by Gayl Jones; The Healing by Gayl Jones Review by: Bernard W. Bell Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3 (1999), pp. 247-258 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247184 . Accessed: 13/07/2012 18:15
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Review Essay
The Liberating Literaryand African American VernacularVoices of Gayl Jones
LiberatingVoices: Oral Traditionsin African American Literature. By Gayl

Jones. New York:Penguin, 1992. 228 pp. $36.00. TheHealing. By GaylJones.Boston:BeaconP, 1998. 283 pp. $23.00 hardcover; $12.00 paperback. After five yearsin Europe,Gayl Jones has returnedto the United States with a new attitude and two new books:Liberating Voices,a collection of blues women in her highly novel.1 Like the essays, and The Healing,a successfulearlyfiction, she lives a life of quiet desperation,volcanic desire, male domination, and distrustof white Americans.Fromits tenor, tone, and texture, her writings seem to be her political liberation and spiritual salvation. Raw, sexually explicit and violent, psychologically dense and painfullypoignant, the languageof the vernacularvoices that and Eva in Eva's Jones uses to representthe lives of Ursa in Corregidora thematic and stylistic conventions. In these earlynovMan transgresses els Jonesfingersthe jaggedgrain(Ellison's descriptive phraseforthe blues) black women in of that of the legacy of slaveryand the politics identity love and troubleon the marginsof society struggleto transformas they tell their own stories and sing their own songs in African Americanvernacularvoices. Illustrativeof the complex relationship among life, language, and at the University of literature,Jones abruptlyresignedher professorship Ronald to President letter 1983 in a Reaganafterher husband's Michigan violent confrontation with gay activists and his indictment for assault, taking flight to Europewith Robert Higgins, her husband.During their lived mainly nearlysix-yearexpatriationin Europe,the couple apparently in France as the celebrated author of such black feminist novels as (1975) and Eva'sMan (1976) immersedherself in the multiCorregidora
COMPARATIVELITERATURESTUDIES, Vol. 36, No. 3, 1999. Copyright 1999 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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lingual soundsand sense of transcultural experiences,continued to write and in Gera Die fiction, (TheBirdcatcher) published novel, Vogelfangerin many.Returningin late 1988 to her hometown of Lexington,Kentucky, to care for her gravelyill mother,the extremelyreclusivewriterarranged with Beacon Pressin her usualmanner(by e-mail ratherthan in person) to have her recent fiction published.At the same time, an intermittent conflict in writing between the Joneses and the local authorities over alleged racial injusticestowardthe family,especiallythe hospital care of her mother, culminated in a violent confrontationwith the police that resulted in RobertJones cutting his throat and Gayl Jones being hospitalizedfor mental examination. Manytraditionalspecialistsin comparativeliteratureand some conmulticulturalists will find GaylJones's voices in LiberatingVoices temporary dulceet utile and in The Healingmore experimentalin theme, style and structure, yet less radically black feminist than her earlier fiction. A transcultural critical surveyof literature,LiberatingVoices transhistorical, focuseson the relationshipof oralto writtentechniqueby AfricanAmerican writers and critics in their development of an indigenous literary tradition.Its thesis is that "the movementfromthe restrictiveforms(inheritorsof self-doubt,self-repudiation, and the minstreltradition)to the liberationof voice and freerpersonalitiesin moreintricatetexts . . . links the writersof [the] African American literarytradition and is common to all literatureswhich have held (or assumed)a position of subordination to another literarytradition."But Jones glosses over the fact that neither all subordinationnor all liberation strugglesare the same and that historical differences are fundamentalto cultural distinctiveness. Organizedin sections on poetry,short fiction, and the novel, the Intro- to my Voices duction, fifteen chapters, and Conclusion of Liberating the first critical a writer black woman knowledge surveyby contemporary that attemptsan extended comparisonof the oral foundationof African American literaturewith those of non-African American literatures provide a provocative and importantyet inadequate,misleadingmap of the oral or vernaculartradition in African American literature. The primary Voicesis that in supporting the importanceof Liberating traditionis oral,whether propositionthat "thefoundationof everyliterary it is visible or invisible in the text," Jones gives extensive examplesof "thefreeingof voice"in literature fromdifferenttimes,places,andpeoples. FromChaucer and Joyce to the CanadianwriterMargaret Laurenceon one hand, and fromLadyMurasaki"s TaleofGenji to Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard on the other, readersexperience a cavalcadeof stories and storytellersfrom aroundthe world that move innovatively be-

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yond the conventions of their time. "Like many of their Latin American counterparts," Jones writes in the Introduction, "African American writers frequently combine aesthetics with social motive, so that art almost always conjoins humanity and society; thus, kinetic art' is mostly championed" (Voices 2). But the most frequent comparisons of the vernacular and literary voices are with Spanish authors and texts, especially Cervantes and Lorca, who, consistent with her emphasis, were more subversive in literary technique than in thematic and social practice. In the Conclusion, Jones makes an interesting case for the validity of a blues standard by comparing it to some of the significant literary standards and "stylistic strategies" of the oral traditions in Africa and Asia that conflict with those of the West. In her efforts to situate the oral and literary tradition of African Americans in the global context of world literature, however, Jones does not provide adequate sociohistorical and socioculutural contexts to illuminate the distinctiveness of the codeswitching between dialects and between languages in the different texts that she briefly analyses and injudiciously uses to make broad generalizations in the short chapters on selected African American writers and texts. A similar inadequacy is apparent in what she calls the "movement from literary double-consciousness to literary 'true self-consciousness'" (Voices 178).

with manyof the recentAfricanAmeriunfamiliar Jonesis apparently can vernacularstudies that were basically inspiredby the theories and andAct (1964). On one hand practiceof RalphEllison,especiallyShadow are those by such black academics and writers as Stephen Henderson, W. Bell, John Edgar Bernard Wideman,Houston A. Baker, Jr.,and Henry academicsas white such those are hand other On the LouisGates, Jr.2 by Eric and LawrenceLevine, Keith Beyerman, Sundquist.3 John Callahan, Althoughshe refersvaguelyto the criticismof Wideman,BakerandGates, as well as to an essayby Callahan, andGlossary, especiallyin the Postscript and criticism in the distinctive her not does theory literary ground Jones historicalpatternof the journeyof black AmericansfromAfrica and slavery in the United States to freedom.This weakensthe authenticityand authorityof her discussionof the importanceof the complex relationship between black folk speech or dialect and minstrelsy. Although her comparisonof the creative use of language,especially the vernacular, by HenryJamesand MarkTwainis useful,Jones neglects to outline the sociohistoricalcontexts necessaryto understandthe complex dynamicsof how specific racial, ethnic, gender,class, and regional powerrelationshipswere maintainedor subvertedby language.Specifically,she does not illumine the mannerand degreeto which texts during

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the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods by James, the expatriate around 1876 to England, and Twain, the migrant around 1874 to New England, neglected, reflected, or reconstructed the principles and conventions of the romantic, plantation, minstrel, and realistic traditions of literary representation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nor does she address the tensions between crole languages, regional dialects, and standard American English in the struggle for freedom, literacy, and civil rights in different black communities in the South and North, especially the role of publishing companies established by black churches beginning in 1817 and of black newspapers beginning in 1827, as well as the subsequent role of black literary clubs. And though her analysis of "the links between dialect, perspective, character, and audience" in Dunbar's "The Lynching of Jube Benson" and in Sterling A. Brown's "Uncle Joe" are highly instructive, it would have been even more illuminating had Jones explained why and how the "realistic dialect" in the 1930s of Brown, a distinguished Howard University professor, poet and critic, contrasted with the "ridiculous dialect of the minstrel tradition" and contributed to the poetic "reappraisal of the folk as serious, complex, and multidimensional" (Voices 31). Finally, Jones's surface comparison of Sherley A. Williams and Langston Hughes as blues poets is provocative, but misleading. Williams's criticism of Hughes's conventional blues poem "Young Gal's Blues" as "'an example of an oral form moving unchanged into literary tradition'" is cited to demonstrate that Williams's own poem, "Someone Sweet Angel Chile," is more improvisational (Voices 38). Instead, this conclusion dramatically demonstrates the dangers of hasty inductive leaps from inadequate evidence. Although her movement of black feminist critics and writers from the literary margins to the center is appropriately in tune with the 1980s, Jones misleadingly suggests, based on this single example, that Williams is a better blues poet than Hughes. Even though she is insightful in her use of John Wideman's 1976 bicentennial essay "Frame and Dialect" and acknowledges the need for asserting personal and national identity through language, Jones does not provide a clear, adequate definition of the historical and sociocultural differences among American, especially African American, dialects. Nor does her theory of a black literary voice provide a coherent explanation of how these differences influence literary representations of African American character and culture during different major art movements, except for the distorting influence of minstrel humor on Paul Laurence Dunbar, by such individuals as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, George Washington Cable, and MarkTwain.

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The tension between Jones's early education in Kentucky and elite college education in Connecticut and Rhode Island, as well as her years in Europe explains much of the paradox of her liberating voice in fiction. It also explains in part why she fallaciously assumes in the Postscript that African American literary criticism reverted between 1982, when she first wrote LiberatingVoices, and 1991, when the book was first published by Harvard University Press, to "New Criticism" in reaction to the "prescriptive and proscriptive criticism" of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. But as the writings in the late 1970s and 1980s by such important black critics as Baker, Gates, Hortense Spillers, and Robert Stepto confirm, many celebrated black academic critics moved beyond the radical, non-academic vernacular theories and practices of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. Earning their doctoral degrees from white institutions, they were primarily influenced by the structuralism and post-structuralism of such French and continental theorists as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and M. M. Bakhtin. In the 1980s the aesthetic battle over literary voice and audience thus shifted once again from "art for people's sake" to the poetics of postmodernism. In assessing the manner and degree to which the literary and African American vernacular voices in The Healing are liberating, it is appropriate to apply Jones's own literary standards for excellence. In her assessment of the dialect and folklore in the literary texts of Dunbar and Hurston, Jones asks: "How does one employ the language in order to return it to the elasticity, viability, and indeed complexity, 'intelligence and sensibility,' that it often has when not divorced from the oral modes and folk creators?"Although Jones neglects to consider the interference of the author's idiolect, the distinctive pattern of linguistic features of one's own speech behavior, in the literary representation of the speech of different characters with authority and authenticity, it is reasonable nevertheless for readers to examine "the elasticity, viability, and. . .complexity" of the language in The Healing. According to Wideman, moreover, "Once a convention for dramatizing black speech appears in fiction, the literary critic should be concerned not with matters of phonetic accuracy, but with tracing the evolution of a written code and determining how that code refers to the spoken language in suggestive, artful, creative ways" ("Frame and Dialect" 36). How, then, should readers, especially literary critics, respond to the position of contemporary novelists and critics like Jones and Wideman in assessing the black voice in The Healing! Assuming that language is a system of signs for communicating ideas and feelings about reality and

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for establishingand maintainingrelationshipswith others, the most reasonable and appropriate responseis to addresstheir concern by focusing on the problemsof agency, authenticity, and authority in the text. In an agent is the representation of a humanbeing whosespeech narratology acts influence events. But as it is used here, agency, to paraphrase philosopherCharlesTaylor,is the socioculturaland sociopsychologicalprocess by which the individual assumesa responsiblepolitical position in maintainingor changingthe systemsof languageand powerby which he or she constructsand representsa personaland groupidentity or subjecandAuthentictivity of authenticityand authority.4 Although in Sincerity Lionel of art and as a "as a criterion ity Trilling explains authenticity of the life be or diminished which either enhanced quality personal may CharlesTaylordefines authenticity more broadlyin The Ethics by art,"5 of Authenticity. "[Authenticity (A) involves (i) creation and construction as well as discovery,(ii) originaliity,and frequently(iii) opposition to the rules of society and even potentially to what we recognizeas morality.But it is also true . . . that it (B) requires(i) opennessto horizonsof significance (for otherwise the creation loses the backgroundthat can save it from insignificance) and (ii) a self-definition in dialogue. That these demandsmay be in tension has to be allowed. But what must be wrong is a simple privileging of one over the other of (A), say, at the expense of (B), or vice versa."6 Authenticity thus impliesboth transcendor ing or overcoming restrictive material conditions and transgressing violating social and moralboundaries.In contrast, authorityis basically the powerto influenceor commandthought,opinion, or behavior."Three groundson which legitimate authorityoften rest,"MarvinE. Olsen reminds us in "Poweras a Social Process,""are(a) traditionalvalues, beliefs, norms, and customs, (b) legal prerogatives established through more-or-less rationalagreements,and (c) special expertiseor knowledge relevant to the situation. To the extent that an actor drawslegitimacy from three sources... his authorityis especiallystrong."7 The problems of agency, authenticity, and authority in The Healingare most productively exploredby focusing on the residualoral formsof religiousritual, vernacularlanguage,and music. and Eva'sMan was praised Although the black voice in Corregidora by such literarylights as JamesBaldwin,MayaAngelou, JamesUpdike, and John Wideman,Wideman'sanalysisis the most critically illuminatthere is no hierarchicalrelationship between ing. "In . . . Corregidora black speech and a separateliterarylanguage,no implicit dependency," Widemanwrites. "The normsof black oral traditionexist full-bodiedin the verbalstyle of the novel: lexicon, syntax, grammar, attitudestoward

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speech, moral and aesthetic judgments are rendered in the terms of the universe they reflect and reinforce. The entire novel flows through the filter of the narrator's sensibility, and Corregidora's sensibility is constructed of blocks of black speech, her own, her men's, the speech of the people who patronize Happy's bar, the voices of her mother and the dead black women keeping alive the memories of slavery" ("Frame and Dialect" 36). But The Healing moves beyond her previous blues novels because, as Jones states, "they emphasized the narrowest range of subject matter- the man-done-her-wrong-type blues- and even the blues itself has more possibility and range. The Healing is meant to be a rejection of those earlier novels."8 Rather than a blues singer, the central character and principal narrator of The Healing is a faith healer, Harlan Jane Eagleton, who was formerly a beautician who gambled on horses and the business manager of a not-so-famous black rock-and-roll singer, Joan Savage, who is a bibliophile that "prefers to be called, Savage Joan the Darling Bitch" (148). We first meet Harlan in the frame story as she travels by bus to one of the "little southern and midwestern tank towns" where she performs her healing ritual with a gathering of believers and skeptics. "I open a tin of Spirit of Scandinavia sardines, floating in mustard sauce," the vernacular voice of the narrator begins dramatically in the opening paragraphof the novel. "The woman on the bus beside me grunts and leans toward the aisle .... .A Bible's open in my lap. I'm holding it eater-cornered, trying to keep the sardine oil off the pages, or the mustard sauce. When I finish the tin of sardines, I drink the mustard sauce. The woman beside me grunts again" (3). Picked up by Martha and a local welcoming committee, Harlan reflects on the relationship of language, knowledge, and power that is the primary theme of the novel. "The women in the backseat are still thinking how common I am, how full of chitchat, and my vocabulary sounds elementary, it don't even sound like that preacher-teacher woman that give that lecture, ain't that wondrous and fantabulous vocabulary them healers uses, and if I could really heal, wouldn't I already just know about them trains too? And I don't talk that revelation talk, that prophet passion. Just some ordinary woman, could be one of them, or one of their daughters, one of their own girls" (25). After establishing the authority and viability of the black female faith healer in the initial two chapters, the dialect becomes more elastic and complex as the story within a story shifts in flashbacks and increasingly shorter chapters to the relationship between Harlan and Joan. The agency and authority of Harlan, the protagonist/narrator, is challenged and contested by other voices in her non-linear, retrogressive movement

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from healer to Joan'sbusiness manager,to beautician, and to her selfhealing of a stab woundfroma jealous, misguidedJoan that transformed her into the healing womanwhom we meet in the opening chapter.The with framestorycloses the forty-sixchapter,five-partnovel enigmatically a two-page Epilogue in the black dialect of a local hostess committee that welcomes Harlan, the healing woman, to yet another town. But in this town, Nicholas does not tell the storyof her healing powers.Instead of Nicholas, she discoversa male fromher past whom she least expected waiting to bear witness to her healing powers.Stylistically and structurally, The Healingis compellinglyand challengingly innovative. In moving beyond the "humorous or pathetic"black dialect of the and minstrel traditions and of the conventional framestrucplantation ture for representingblack American cultureand character, Jones filters who transher novel throughthe sensibility of the protagonist/narrator, gressesthe hierarchicalrelationshipbetweenAfricanAmericanvernacular English and literary language and between foreign languages and standardAmerican English dialects. Omitting all quotation marksfor direct addresses and dialogue,as well as erasingall specific time markers in identifyingspecific episodes,Jones constructsa complex text of characters and events whose authorityand authenticity are occasionallyunderminedby its ambitiouselasticity and heteroglossia. For example, after one of Harlan 's healing rituals, we hear the following creative voices strainingto encompassboth the local and global, the oral and literate modesof knowing and being in the worldwith others: I can alreadyhear 'em talking about me, those flibbertigibbets. She ain't no preacherwoman or a teacher woman neither, she a faith healer,one of them others be saying.What'sthe difference?She look like she belong on a submarine or on a motorcycle. don't allow womens on no submarine.On the modernsubThey marine they do, 'cause this is the age of feminism. Her and that bum'sjacket. It's what they call a bomberjacket. Anyway,I seen her heal someone in D.C. I seen her when she healed in Memphis and then again in KansasCity. She even healed folks in Milan, that'sover there in Italy.Dottoressais what they calls her there in that Milan. I seen this picture of her healing over there in Italy and she weresurrounded by all these Italianswho lookedjust liked coloredpeople to me. Say she'seven healed folks in Brazil.I know what they call her they'sgot colored people in Brazil.Curandera's in Brazil.(13)

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On one hand the non-standard grammar,vocabulary, and pronunciation, especially the use of neologisms, foreign words, and repetition to control the vitality and rhythm of the dialogue, enhances the transgressive agency, epistemology, and ontology of the narrative as Jones juxtaposes at different times and to various degrees a wide range of voices that are orthographically but not typographically marked by hierarchical social and national distinctiveness. On the other hand, the authority and authenticity of the wide range of voices are diminished by anomalous and incongruous repetitions of words, catalogues of books, and sentences in different languages. Although Harlan was born in New Orleans and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, people say that she has a Geechee or Gullah accent, which is characteristic of the residual African speech behavior of black Americans acculturated on the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands. "Don't sound like a accent to me, but other people call it a Gechee accent. Then some people tell me I got a blend of different types of accents" (43). The transgressive, experimental style and structure of The Healing suggest that crossing traditional national, cultural, social, and linguistic boundaries is the liberating healing for or faith in the promise of a new world order of mutual respect for cultural unity with diversity for believers and disbelievers. In addition to the voice of the narrator/protagonist, the range of voices whose regional distinctiveness and social variations are not clear include Martha and her welcoming committee; Josef Ehelich von Fremd, the Afro-German thorough-bred horse owner and Harlan's lover; Nicholas, his black security guard and the witness to Harlan's first healing; Joan, the well-read, multilingual black college graduate and socially misguided rock-and-roll singer; James, Joan's ex-husband with whom Harlan has a sexual encounter; Norvelle, the medical anthropologist in Africa and Harlan's ex-husband; and Jaboti, the grandmother whose stories about the turtle shell that she was required to wear while performing in a carnival as the Turtle Woman symbolizes the strategies of mask-wearing and tricksterism that enabled black Americans, especially women, to survive the prejudice of and domination by others. In blending fact with fiction, non-standard with standard English, American with non- American languages, and vernacular with literary voices, Jones moves thematically and stylistically beyond national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. "I grew up speaking English as well as German," Harlan's Afro-German lover responds to her apparent cultural provincialism. "Most Europeans speak several languages. I speak English, French, German, Dutch, a little Portuguese. It's only you Americans who're stingy about language, who believe that your own language is the univer-

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sal language.I guess it is the universallanguage.You'vemade it the universal language.You'vemade it so your languageis identified with mo' dernity, with internationalism.I even know some Americans, though, who've lived in Berlin for years,and in other Europeancities, and insist on speakingonly English.Who insist on Englishonly even when they're in other people'scountry" (46). Clearlycriticalof Harlan's linguisticlimicontations,Jones,the impliedauthor,is moresympatheticwith Harlan's testing of modern narrativepractice and modern ways of knowing and being in the worldwith others. Reflectingon the possibilitythat Nicholas, the Afro-German's bodyguard who "witnessed the first true healing," would retire as her his replacementin the Epiwitness, and foreshadowing "confabulatory" logue, Harlanstates: Course there's probablya lot of fakersthat hires theyselves wit- there'strue evannesses, y'all know like them evangelist fakers gelists and there'sevangelist fakers and some of them probably do better witnessing than the true witnesses. You know, maybe one of them evangelist fakershave a true witness to thy healings, but the people don't believe the true witness so'sthey'sgot to hire theyselvesa fake witness, 'causethe fake witness to the healings is morebelievablethan the truewitness.Now I'mwondering whether that would make the healer a faker,if the healings theyselves is real, but the healer got to hire a fake witness, 'causeeven the true believers don't believe the true witness. 'Cause maybe the fake witness got moreconfabulatory imaginationthan the truewitness that just got a knowledgeof the healings."(11) In so far as truth is a fictive or imaginativeconstructionin languagethat communicatesthe ideas and feelings of the speakeror writerabout the nature of reality to an audience, storytelling is both an epistemological and ontological act. Nicholas, for example, "usedtatell the tale with morefanfare,more And when he tells about that healing, flourish,more confabulatoriness. it sounds like a true tale; it don't sound like no confabulatory tale. Lest the way he usedtatell the tale of that healing. Now he tends to be kinda dry.And those people that come to faith healing most of them want to hear confabulatory-sounding stories, which don't mean they's stories they ownself. It'sjust that when people come to be confabulatory stories.And healed, they just likes to hear them confabulatory-sounding there'sother folks that comes to them faith healings not to be heal'd but

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to be entertained, like it's a circus or a carnival rather than a faith healing. Them sorts you don't know whether there's true believers amongst them or not" (11). Rather than provide a specific example of Nicholas' "confabulatory" storytelling, the entire text of The Healing is Jones' "confabulatory" tale. Unlike her earlier novels, the language of the vernacular and litervoices in The Healing is neither raw, nor sexually explicit and violent, ary nor painfully poignant. Instead, the language with which Jones constructs the lives of Harlan Eagleton and Joan Savage, aspires with uneven success to the narrative and sociolinguistic standards or elasticity, viability, and complexity that the novelist outlines in LiberatingVoices. By grounding her text in the religious ritual of healing, the vernacular voices of a black healing woman, and the music of a college-educated black rockand-roll singer, Jones moves beyond the cultural limitations of her blues voice in Corregidoraand Eva's Man. In order to expand the varieties and complexities of agency, authority, and authenticity that mark The Healing, Jones explicitly contrasts the notorious Eva of her earlier novel with the identity formation of contemporary Americans of African descent, especially ordinary black women who are not "criminally insane." But only Jones's imaginative construction of Harlan bears witness to some of the levels of irony and paradox that mark the political and spiritual struggle of many black women to reconcile the double consciousness of their personal and group identities as people of African descent. Stylistically and structurally, the liberation movement of the novel is most apparent in the non-linear, reflexive interplay between the past and present, the spoken and written language, and the vernacular and formal cultural forms of the characters. Regrettably, however, the liberating movement of the voices in The Healing disrupts a static, unitary, blues construction of black identity with a more confusing than compelling narrative vision of an emerging transracial, transcultural social order of variable ways of knowing and being black in the world with others. Even so, many readers, including the National Book Awards Panel that nominated the book as a finalist, may judge the vision and voices of The Healing more satisfying than other novels published in 1998 Bernard W. Bell The Pennsylvania State University

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1. Gayl Jones, Liberating in AfricanAmericanLiterature Voices:Oral Tradition (New York:Penguin, 1992); Gayl Jones, The Healing(Boston: Beacon, 1998). 2. Stephen Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry (New York:William Morrow,1973); BernardW. Bell, The FolkRootsof Contemporary Poetry Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Detroit: Broadside,1974); BernardW. Bell, The Afro-American (Amherst: U of MassachusettsP, 1987); John EdgarWideman, "Frameand Dialect: The Evolution of the Black Voice in Fiction,"American PoetryReview5 (1976): 33-37; John EdgarWideman, "Defining the Black Voice in Fiction," BlackAmericanLiterary LitForum2 (1977), 79-82; Houston A. Baker,Jr., Blues, Ideology,and Afro-American erature(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984); and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey(New York:Oxford UP, 1988). 3. LawrenceLevine, BlackCulture andBlackConsciousness (Oxford:OxfordUP, 1977); Keith Byerman,Fingering theJagged Grain, (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985); John CallaGrain(Urbana:U of Illinois P, 1988): and EricSundquist, han, In theAfricanAmerican The Hammers of Creation,(Athens: U of Georgia P, 1992). HumanAgencyand Language 4. Gerald Prince, Dictionaryof Narratology: (Lincoln: U of NebraskaP, 1987) Chapter One. 5. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1971) 1346. Charles Taylor,The Ethicsof Authenticity (Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1991) 66. 7. Marvin E. Olsen, "Power as a Social Process," Power in Societies (New York: Macmillan, 1970) 7. - Sort Of," 8. Quoted in Veronica Chambers, "The Invisible Woman Reappears Newsweek(16 February1998) 68.