Signifying Nothing by D. G. Myers http://bit.ly/19N34c Originally published in the New Criterion 8 (February 1990): 61-64. The American universitys peculiar ability to breed radical innovation alongside t raditionalismoften in the same department, even in the same scholarhas rarely prod uced anything so extraordinary as The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates, Jr . Winner of last years American Book Award in criticism, it is the chief work to date by the man who, along with Houston A. Baker Jr., is the acknowledged leader of Afro-American literary criticism. Gates has become even more prominent since the books publication. He is the latest addition to the English department at Du ke University, where he joins such leading critics as Stanley Fish, Fredric Jame son, Frank Lentricchia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Jane Tompkins. The Signify ing Monkey, then, merits particular attention for at least a couple of reasons. At a moment when nearly every university in the country seems to be rushing to h ire specialists and arrange courses in Afro-American literature, the book is per haps the best summary of an influential movement in current literary thought. Wh ats more, it is an example of the sort of work that is now considered front-rank criticism and scoops up academic prestige. The Signifying Monkey takes its title from what Gates argues is the central meta phor, "the trope of tropes," in Afro-American literature. There is, according to Gates, an entire series of oral narrative poems about the "signifying monkey" i n the black tradition. In its general outlines, the monkeys story goes like this. Although the lion claims to be king of the jungle, everyone knows who the real king is: it is the elephant. The monkey, fed up with the lions roaring, decides t o do something about it. He insults the lion publicly and at lengthhis "mama" and his "grandmama, too"and when the lion grows angry, the monkey shrugs that he is merely repeating what the elephant has been saying. Furious, the lion heads out to challenge the elephant, who impassively trounces him. The monkey either gets away with his deception or does not (there are differing versions), but in any e vent he is a success at "signifying." It is this concept of signifying, Gates argues, that explains "what we might thi nk of as the discrete black difference" in literature written by blacks. Signify ing is both a rhetorical strategythat is, a method by which Afro-American writers discover what they have to say and in what orderand a principle of Afro-American literary history. Later writers can be seen to have "signified upon" earlier wr itersto have imitated them, but with a reversal of their strategy. The concept of signifying is made to do double duty: first, it enables Gates to create a system of principles for the interpretation of Afro-American literature by locating principles within the tradition of AftoAmerican literaturea system o f interpretation which is (to use his term) "indigenous." But secondly, it enabl es Gates to fix the tradition, the specific line of descent. What is the concept of signifying? Gates notes that "few scholars have succeeded in defining it as a full concept," and although he devotes twenty-five pages to the effort, it must be owned that he is little more successful. Gates is best a t gathering together other peoples definitions. To signify, according to the jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, is to "hint, to put on an act, boast, make a gesture." T he novelist Zora Neale Hurston defines signifying as "a contest in hyperbole car ried on for no other reason." In these conceptions, signifying sounds not too di fferent from the traditional category of rhetoric known as "epideictic," a term used for a display piece, a speech the sole purpose of which is to put the orato rs gifts on display (epideixis), and not with any practical intention. Yet to ass imilate black signifying to the "Eurocentric" tradition of classical rhetoric is to lose "what we might think of as the discrete black difference." And so Gates takes pains to track the concept to Africa instead. Gates discovers the origins of this manner of signifying in the practice of divi nation among the Fon and Yoruba peoples of West Africa. Although these peoples n

ever invented a system of writing, they possessed a sacred text (which was commi tted to memory by the priestly class and passed down orally) and a system for in terpreting it that was fully developed, which "stood as a readily accessible ins titutional critique" of the governmental structures of Europe, and acted as a me taphysical challenge to the European tradition of humanism. Gates condemns "seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European speculations on the absence of writing among Africans and its significance," but he engages in a re markably similar project. He speculates on the practice of divination among Afri cans and its significance for literary criticism. Upon examination, the African "discursive and hermeneutic universes," although they do not revolve around writ ing, turn out to be superior to the European: one is genderless, the other is no t; one is open-ended, the other is not; one does not insist upon determinate mea nings, the other does; one is not wedded to binary oppositions, to the notion of contradiction, but the other is. "The [African] system simply would collapse," Gates observes, "if it had not placed at its center the principle of interpretat ion as mediation, and as open-ended." The implication is patent: the African sys tem has remained intact, while the Western tradition has collapsed. None of this is surprising, given Gatess predilections. What comes as something o f a shock is to find that the African system of interpretation is the triumphant vindicationof deconstruction! The African concept of interpretation incorporates , Gates says, "a system of differences and traces" which leads to the "deferral of meaning." And as a consequence, the African system offers a hint of what is t o follow upon the collapse of the Eurocentric system of humanism: The ultimate indetermination of meaning [Gates says] does not lead the Yoruba to despair; rather, it leads them to return to the text of Ha [the sacred word of the gods], to consult it regularly, to wrestle with its play of differences, not to invent a meaning, but rather to process a meaning from among the differences , sacrifice to Esu [the gods interpreter] and the appropriate deity, only to retu rn to explore the process once more. Thus the function of criticism, as envisioned by Gates. It is an accident that the black English word signifying is also a common term i n the vocabulary of deconstruction. The signifier may be the same, as deconstruc tionists would say, but whats signified by it differs with each use. The terms ar e mere homonyms; their accidental sameness, though, betrays Gates into offering a deconstructionist account. Gates is to be praised for attempting to denote "bl ack difference" as an element of the writing in texts by blacksas "specific uses of literary language that are shared, repeated, critiqued, and revised." But he is less interested in explaining these "specific uses" in such a way as to make them available to modern authors than in accounting for them so as to prepare th em "for use in literary theory." Yet if it is true, as Jacques Derrida says on t he dust jacket of Gatess book, that signifying is an "idiom," it follows that the se "specific uses of literary language" can be mastered by writers who set thems elves to it, that they provide writers with a means of finding something to say. And the passages of dialogue that Gates quotes from Richard Wrights Lawd Today s uggest as much. The function of criticism, at this point, becomes the stating of the principles behind the practice. When I studied as an undergraduate with Ray mond Carver, for instance, he told the anecdote about a friend and fellow writerW illiam Kittredge, I believe it waswho asked Carver if he had ever noticed that in conversation people tend not to speak consecutively but to speak instead in non sequiturs. Stated like this, the notion gave Carver a new way to write dialogue . One can imagine a writer upon whom an account of signifying would act in much the same way. But not as described by Gates: Value, in this art of poeisis, lies in its foregrounding rather than in the inve ntion of a novel signified. We shall see how the nature of the rhyme scheme also stresses the materiality and the priority of the signifier. The sad fact is that Gatess intentions in The Signifying Monkey are mutually excl usive. Gates cannot specify principles of interpretation inside the black tradit ion without simultaneously upsetting the whole notion of "black difference" upon which the claim for a black tradition rests. For once a principle is stated it becomes literary, available to any number of writers and critics, and not merely

to blacks. Gates recognizes this. As a "principle of language use," he says, si gnifying is "not in any way the exclusive property of black people . . . ." To h is credit, then, Gates perceives that it would be an error to ascribe the unique characteristics of Afro-American literature to race. But he is not sure what el se to ascribe them to. His reasoning runs in circles. Black writers form a tradi tion. How do you know? They all use the "trope" of signifying. What makes this t rope distinctively black? All black writers use it. Now, one might object that the Afro-American literary tradition is an accomplish ed historical fact. The Signifying Monkey traces a line of descent through Ukaws aw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Quobna Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, and John Jea (auth ors of slave narratives), through Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Wa lkerwriters who have already written. It makes no claim about what may yet be don e. This makes the Afro-American tradition no less elusive, however. The Signifyi ng Monkey announces itself as a work of theory (not of history) and relies upon the frankly ahistorical method of "close reading" to establish the lineaments of the black tradition. It offers no historical argument for the existence of that tradition. The only reason that Gates has chosen to discuss these writers, from Gronniosaw to Walker, is that they are black. He presupposes the tradition, in other words, and then searches for something to bale it together. His argument r educes itself to the claim that a shared dialectblack Englishpresupposes the likel ihood that writers will share certain "tropes," though he never says (a) on what basis these writers, from several different periods of history and regions of t he country, can be said to share the same dialect, except on the basis of a phys ical similarity, or (b) how such similarities result in similar ways of writing. Secondly, however, any conception of an Afro-American literary tradition founded upon the belief in "black difference" is reactionary. Gates shows how such know -nothingism can come about in his report of the Sixties radical H. Rap Browns dis dain for the study of poetry. "[H]is teachers sought to teach him poetry, meaning poems from the Western tradition," Gates says, "when he and his fellows were mak ing poetry in the streets." What neither Brown nor Gates appears to have grasped is that the ignorance was manifest on both sides. Browns teachers failed to unde rstand that poetry is a living art, a body of techniques for producing original work; yet both Brown and Gates fail to understand that poetry is also a canon, a collection of texts that embody techniques which might assist street poets in m aking better poems. Either a tradition is a literary one, in which case it poten tially includes anything that can be done within the tradition, or it is a natio nal or racial one, in which case it excludes certain kinds of work. Gates is more concerned with classification, with identifying and labeling "trop es," than with the theoretical bases of what he is doing; but because he affects a theoretical diction he is considered a theorist. "Theory" for Gates, however, is neither what it is for the scientist (a set of broad propositions that lead to the framing of hypotheses which can be tested) nor for the philosopher (the d etailed knowledge of a subject when it is seen to comprise a separate, unified w hole). To theorize, for Gates, means simply to cast research findings into the j argon of deconstruction, a.k.a. theory. What Gates seems unaware of, though, is the extent to which his research into Af ro-American signifying belies the tenets of the very theory into which he hopes to convert it. Thus he grounds his arguments upon such concepts as the speakers i ntention (the correct or misprized inference of which is the key to the effect o f signifying), the sharing of knowledge by members of a speech community (or wha t E. D. Hirsch Jr. calls cultural literacy), the distinction between literal and figurative meanings, and a naive version of the doctrine of literature as an im itation of life. Yet each of these concepts is called into question by deconstru ction. This is no great matter, except that it reveals a confusion at the heart of Gatess work. When he attempts to give a coherent portrait of the Afro-American tradition, Gates argues from one set of assumptions. But when he tries to assim ilate the tradition to the categories of literary theory, he argues from another contradictory set. The effect is to leave all the assumptions in place. Nor is Gates to be much preferred as a practical critic. Although he bestows ext ended treatment upon Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God, Reeds Mumbo Jumbo, and

Walkers Color Purple, his thesis-mongering, his arduous effort to prove that the se books adopt the rhetorical strategy of "signifying," hardly makes them seem e nticing. Indeed, Gates has small concern for the critics traditional job of evalu ation. He has set his sights somewhat higher. "Let us hope," he says, "that the gradual erosion of those nationalistic presuppositions that are amply evident in traditional schemes of categorization of the academic study of literature will serve as a model for the abolition of racist and sexist presuppositions in liter ary studies as well." What Gates contributes to in The Signifying Monkey, howeve r, is the tendency to shore up these same presuppositions in the name of eroding them.