罗伯特 • 巴特勒 | 将音乐融入文学批评：史蒂文 • 特雷西的美国非裔文学研究（英文）

作者简介

罗伯特 • 巴特勒（Robert Butler）是纽约布法罗凯尼休斯学院的英语教授，主讲美国文学、美国非裔文学和现代文学。著有《土生儿子：新黑人英雄的出现》、《对理查德 • 赖特的批评性回应》、《当代美国非裔文学：公开的旅程》和《拉尔夫 • 埃利森评论》。他与杰瑞 • 沃德合著了《理查德 • 赖特百科全书》，并与白谷善信合著了《美国非裔文学中的城市》和《日本的美国非裔作家评论》两部著作。

内容摘要：史蒂文 • 特雷西对美国非裔音乐、理查德 • 赖特、拉尔夫 • 埃利森以及詹姆斯 • 鲍德温表现出浓厚的学术兴趣。本文对特雷西教授毕生的文学批评进行了全面考察，涵盖其从关于兰斯顿 • 休斯、拉尔夫 • 埃利森、詹姆斯 • 鲍德温等艺术家的个案研究到关于美国非裔文学的宏观研究等不同方面。本文通过不同参数分析，认为特雷西堪称文学通才，他的研究涉及人类学、民间传说、历史、语言学、表演研究和妇女研究。本文认为特雷西同时也是世界一流的布鲁斯演奏家，并分析了他的音乐实践对其文学批评的融入与渗透。

关键词：美国非裔文学；史蒂文特雷西；美国黑人音乐；文学批评

Integrating Music into Literary Criticism: A Perspective into Steven Tracy’s Scholarship

During his distinguished career Steven Tracy has established himself as the foremost authority on how African American folk art and music have profoundly influenced American culture and also shaped both black and mainstream American literatures. An accomplished literary scholar and cultural historian, he is also a highly skilled, seasoned blues and jazz musician who has used these unique skills to probe aspects of literature which very few other critics are able to do. As a result, he has produced over a long period of time a large body of highly original, pioneering studies which focus sharply on important literary trends as well as the writing of a broad range of important literary figures. A remarkably prolific writer, he has published seven books, over fifty scholarly articles and has edited or co-edited seven important collections of essays. As a result, he has helped to transform our way of examining and evaluating American and African American literatures.

Tracy’s early career focused intensively on the work of Langston Hughes, beginning with a series of scholarly articles published in MELUS and CLA Journal during the early 1980’s which examined the influence of blues on Hughes’s poetry and the folk roots of his Jesse B. simple stories. His 1988 book, Langston Hughes and the Blues, was a comprehensive, detailed study of how Hughes’s work was deeply rooted in the deep rich soil of black folk art and music. It argued convincingly that Hughes was a major American poet in the tradition of Walt Whitman and remains today the most authoritative study of its kind.

Over the years Tracy has continued to make important contributions to Hughes studies, publishing a series of penetrating examinations of his poetry and fiction. In 2003 he edited A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes an important collection of essays by major Hughes scholars which place Hughes’s writing in a broad cultural context.

Tracy’s foundational work with Hughes enabled him to broaden his scholarly range and focus on how black music also helped to shape the writings of other major African American writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and August Wilson. His elaborate studies of Ellison’s fiction are of special importance. Although much had been previously published on Ellison’s literary uses of black music, none of these studies probe this vitally important matter in as much depth and complexity as Tracy’s critical work. His nuanced and broad understanding of blues and jazz as well as his sophisticated skills as a performing musician enabled him to see things which previous scholars were blind to.

For example, in “Beauty is in the Ear of the Beholder: Eliot, Armstrong, and Ellison” Tracy’s intimate knowledge of the history of the blues and his skills as a seasoned musician enabled him to probe in careful detail how these three artists were connected. In this highly original essay he submits specific musical performances to close technical analysis, demonstrating how Eliot, Armstrong, and Ellison artfully employed improvisational styles to capture the fluidity of American life and the complex diversity and hybridity of modern experience. Eliot and Armstrong are seen as “brothers under the skin” (169) who were able to combine a wide variety of cultural sources as a way of creating new forms of American and modern expression. They served as important models inspiring Ellison’s own work.

Tracy’s “A Delicate Ear, a Retentive Memory, and the Power to Weld Fragments”, likewise, argues that African American music was of central importance to Ellison’s art because it not only provided him with artistic techniques but also helped him to develop his cultural vision. Blues offered him “a repository for folk wisdom” (107) and jazz helped him to “develop a vision which was both uniquely African American” and which could also “erase boundaries and create democratic communal space” (110). By giving full expression to the individual soloist while also harmonizing him with the group, jazz was for Ellison a way of imagining American society as a vital, ongoing process in which fragments could be welded into a dynamic whole, producing a “triumph of the individual and group” (98). Black music, therefore, is “a central means of establishing identity” (95) for both the country and the individual citizen.

In “How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take to Screw a Blues Singer” Tracy examines how jazz gave Ellison a form of “transgressive performance” (294) which helped him to explore “revolutionary ideas” (295) that are central to modern and post modern experience. The “heterogeneity, hybridity, and impurity” of twentieth century life finds powerful expression in the spontaneity and eclecticism of jazz. Louis Armstrong is regarded as “the most revolutionary jazz figure of his era” (300). He became an important model for Ellison, an “ancestor” (309) who transformed jazz from “jungleistic entertainment” (309) to a potent form of political expression which could artfully expose the injustices of American society. A special feature of this essay is Tracy’s brilliant recreation of Armstrong’s performance of Andy Razaf’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” in which he transforms a weak lament into a “racially confrontational” (307) indictment of American justice.

Tracy has also written incisively of how two of Ellison’s contemporaries, Richard Wright and James Baldwin, have made important uses of African American music. In “A Wright to Sing the Blues: King Joe’s Punch” Tracy explores Wright’s long time interest in the blues and how this strongly influenced both the styles and themes of his fiction. The blues cultures of Mississippi, Chicago, and New York which Wright was exposed to are examined in detail as is “King Joe” a blues song about Joe Louis which Wright wrote and had performed by Count Basis and Paul Robeson. Tracy stresses that Wright’s works, like the blues, “express the contradictions, difficulties, celebrations, and successes of African American lives” (210).

In “Sonny in the Dark: Jazzing the Blues Spirit and Gospel Truth in James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny Blues’” Tracy studies how blues, jazz and gospel music were important cultural resources for Baldwin as he described not only the pain of black life but also the spiritual and psychological powers blacks could draw upon to cope with and transcend the ravages of American racism. As the major and minor characters of this story experience black secular and religious music, they undergo personal healing as well as kinship and community. The essay concludes with a penetrating analysis of the story’s concluding epiphany with Tracy describing in sensitive detail Sonny’s powerful performance of the jazz standard, “Am I Blue?”.

“The Holy-istic Blues of Seven Guitars” explores how August Wilson’s work, particularly Seven Guitars, makes “deft use of African American vernacular music, especially blues and gospel music” (51). Tracy begins the essay by surveying Wilson’s own views on the importance of African American music in black culture, stressing that he regards it as “the book of black people” that contains “the African American’s cultural response to the world” (50). As such, it probes both the racial injustices of black life and the heroic resistance to these injustices. For this reason, Wilson envisions black music as “life-affirming” (50).

After describing how a wide variety of specific blues and gospel songs are intricately woven into the texture of Wilson’s play as a way of dramatizing its central theme, Tracy characterizes the play as an extended musical performance. Its seven characters are presented as “guitars” playing solos which describe their “clashes” with “the dominant culture” (51). But underneath the play’s “polyvalence” (53) are the communal resources which tie the characters together and provide them with the moral and spiritual values which enable them to lead meaningful, even heroic, lives.

Tracy’s 2004 essay “The Blues Novel”, which was included in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel, studies the rich tradition of black American fiction which drew its inspiration from the techniques and visions of blues music. Tracy describes blues as a musical form arising from black vernacular life which is grounded in “individual experience that reflects communal interests” (122). It is centered in “an assertion of autonomy” (122) and selfhood against a social world designed to deny both to black people. It articulates a complex double vision, both dramatizing the pain of living in a racist society while also affirming the “hope and perseverance” (125) of black people. The blues therefore are both “celebratory”(123) and critical.

Tracy identifies a wide assortment of specific works as “blues novels,” including Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar. Such works make elaborate uses of black vernacular, allude significantly to particular blues lyrics, and feature characters who embody blues values. Most importantly, blues novels express a richly dualistic vision, recording both the pain and beauty of black life.

Tracy’s many years of careful study of the relationship between African American music and literature is brought to an impressive culmination with his masterful book, Hot Music, Ragmentation, and The Bluing of American Literature. In this highly original and ambitious study he broadens the scope of his research to include how African American music has profoundly shaped not only black literature but also mainstream American literature and culture.

The book examines the period from the late nineteenth century to the onset of the Great Depression when “hot music” (ragtime, blues, and jazz) emerged as a major force in American music and exerted strong influence on both African American and American literatures. Tracy begins with an extremely detailed and nuanced history of the music, carefully explaining how it developed and why it became such an important literary influence. An early chapter on the Chicago Renaissance focuses on how poets Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay pioneered the uses of jazz techniques and blues themes, and, in the process, played an important role in the development of Langston Hughes’s poetry. Tracy then studies how “lost generation” poets e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, were inspired by jazz improvisation and blues language to rebel against Victorian literary norms and create a radically new kind of American poetry. (Ironically, Eliot and Pound were able to do this in spite of their consciously held racist attitudes which, fortunately, did not interfere with their literary judgements.) The book then investigates how Harlem Renaissance figures such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston transformed African American literature by centering it in a black folk tradition grounded in the blues and jazz. Hot Music concludes with a discussion of how playwrights of the 1920’s such as Eugene O’Neill, Paul Green, and Howard Lawson were inspired by black music and folklore as they laid the foundations for a truly modern American theatre.

Tracy’s deep and comprehensive knowledge of blues music produced another significant literary achievement with the reprinting in 2006 and 2007 of Rainbow Round My Shoulder and Wings On My Feet, two novels centering on a blues picaro which was originally published in the 1920s by Howard Odum. Tracy’s extensive introduction to these novels, which are thematically grounded in African American blues and folk stories, are important because of their ability “to blend the folk with the literary with startling success” (Wings, XV). The central character, John Wesley Gordon, is a Black Ulysses (Wings, XXXIX) whose narration ranges from his early life to his experiences in the U.S. Army in World War One. (Wings On My Feet is one of the very few novels focusing on African American involvement in that war.) Tracy also points out that these novels, which make elaborate literary uses of blues and folk art, “anticipate…the work of a number of African American authors whose depictions of African American folk figures have been justly celebrated” (Wings, XXXI). Such work includes Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, Sterling Brown’s “Odyssey of a Big Boy”, and Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Since 2001 Tracy has also edited four important collections of essays which have deepened and broadened our understanding of major African writers and literary movements. In 2001 he published The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Works for Children and Young Adults which provided an in-depth study of this critically neglected dimension of Hughes’s work.

Although relatively little critical attention has been devoted to Hughes’s extensive writings for young audiences, he regarded them as an important part of his work. Tracy pays full justice in his introduction to their importance and beauty. He stresses that Hughes’s entire career was enclosed by such writing when he contributed to the children’s magazine, The Brownies’s Book in 1921 and at the time of his death he was hard at work on Black Misery which was published posthumously in 1969. Throughout his entire career Hughes published a wide assortment of books for children, including The Dream Keeper (1932), The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Rhythms (1954) and The First Book of Jazz (1955).

Tracy astutely connects Hughes’s long time interest in writing for and about children with his own troubled childhood which was characterized by isolation and insecurity caused by his being raised by a series of relatives and having no stable relationship with either a mother or a father. This problem was further complicated by his being uprooted constantly as he was passed along to various relatives. It is no coincidence, therefore, that his stories make abundant references to the spirituals which depict “motherless” children in search of “homes.” 

Tracy offers sensitive, detailed analyses of all of Hughes’s books for children and young adults, pointing out how they challenge the formulaic narratives and racial stereotypes of mainstream children’s literature which is invariably about white people. Hughes’s stories, in contrast, are richly human portraits of black children and describe in detail the many important contributions which African Americans have made to American and world cultures. And they celebrate the extraordinary richness and beauty of black folk art and music.

In his A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes (2003) Tracy challenges the conventional view that Hughes does not merit attention as a major writer because his work is “too simple, too obvious, too shallow” (3). He traces this misconception to the “aesthetics of high modernism” (4), especially the work of the new critics who put such a high premium on literature that was technically complex and saw modern life as irreducibly ironic and ambiguous. Tracy argues instead that a great strength of Hughes’s writing is its directness and simplicity which can dramatize ordinary life in extremely lucid, powerful ways.

Tracy regards Hughes’s aesthetic as firmly rooted in the poetry of Walt Whitman which avoided conventional “poetic diction” and “elevated” subjects in favor of celebrating common, distinctively American life, using the language of the vernacular. Hughes also shares Whitman’s faith in American democracy and models his poetry on Whitman’s revolutionary use of open form. Furthermore, Tracy claims that Hughes’s work was strongly influenced by Mark Twain whose writings used folk stories and dialect to produce literature of great power and depth.

The essays in The Historical Guide to Langston Hughes features biographical, historical, and critical work by a variety of outstanding scholars. Joyce Anne Joyce analyzes racial and gender issues in Hughes’s writing, R. Baxter Miller provides a brief and incisive biography of Hughes, and Tracy explores how Hughes’s poetry employs the themes and techniques of black music. James Smethurst studies Hughes’s changing political commitments and Dolan Hubbard supplies a detailed and astute survey of the critical responses to Hughes’s work.

Tracy’s A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison appeared just a year later. Tracy’s introduction envisions Ellison as a “canonical writer who forced alterations in the canon” (6); that is, he was a black writer who both operated within the traditions of mainstream literature and who changed and enriched those traditions by infusing them with uniquely African American perspectives, themes, and cultural forms. His work is characterized by “prodigious technique and discipline” (16) and is grounded in a vision of life characterized by “American ideals and possibilities” (6) which harmonize strong individualism with democratic values.

The seven essays in the collection are written by important scholars of African American literature and explore a wide variety of topics. Maryemma Graham and Jeffrey Mack provide a brief biography of Ellison while James Smethurst explores gender and sexuality in Ellison’s fiction. Alan Nadel carefully examines how Invisible Man signifies on classic texts from American, English, and European traditions, emphasizing the especially strong influences of Joyce, Eliot, Melville, and Douglass. William Maxwell studies Ellison’s political development from a leftist radical in the 1930s to his embracing more moderate centrist views in the 1950s and 1960s which affirm American pluralism and democracy. Robert Butler concludes the collection with a bibliographic essay analyzing the critical response to Ellison’s work.

Tracy’s Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (2011) is a much-needed broad study of an important phase of African American literature which has never been adequately appreciated, the flowering black literature in Chicago from “the late 1930s through the 1950s” (1). This probably is due to the more “prominent” (1) Harlem Renaissance which has received much more extensive discussion.

Tracy’s introduction connects the two periods, stressing that they were characterized by “avant-garde political, social, and artistic thinking” (2). They also produced new publishing outlets, newspapers, and literary manifestoes. But he also notes significant differences between the two periods, noting that Chicago writers, operating within the cultural crises of the Great Depression and World War Two, produced a “more jaded, bitter outlook” (2) centered in various forms of radical political protest.

Tracy also makes important connections with the writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance with an earlier phase of mainstream Chicago writers emerging at the turn of the twentieth century which featured the work of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg. Each of these white writers exerted a strong influence on many later black Chicago writers, most notably Richard Wright, William Attaway, and Willard Motley.

The book contains chapters on 25 writers as well as important aspects of the Black Chicago Renaissance such as the Federal Theatre Project, the Chicago School of Sociology, the John Reed Clubs, and the black press. Detailed biographical and critical studies are given for major writers such as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks and Lorraine Hansberry as well as minor figures like Frank Yerby, Marita Bonner, and Frank Marshall Davis.

In his copious interdisciplinary work, Tracy has thrown down the gauntlet to future scholars, not only of African American literature, but American literature, and indeed literature in general, to dig deeply into many disciplines in order to understand the worlds represented by the literary arts. Moreover, Tracy treats vernacular arts with the same care and reverence as he does literature, bringing orature into the realm of the seriously-studied products of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work touches the disciplines not only of literature, but folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology, music, history, and politics; but we see him not putting together divergent disciplines, but discerning their natural connections. Steve Tracy’s work is not simply extremely valuable: it is necessary. In his lifetime, Tracy has won prize recognition for only one work. In response to the situation, a prominent scholar was overheard saying recently, paraphrased here, “Yes, but wait until you are dead!” With characteristic folk humor, laughing to keep from crying, Steve responded, “I can wait.”

END

罗伯特 • 巴特勒，将音乐融入文学批评：史蒂文 • 特雷西的美国非裔文学研究，《外国语文研究》2021年第1期。为适应微信风格，删除了注释。

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