Clarence Major and His Art.

Bernard W. Bell, ed. Clarence Major and His Art. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001. 281 pp. $49.95 cloth/$19.95 paper.

The last half-decade has seen Clarence Major receiving attention that his thirty-year career as a fictionist, poet, essayist, anthologist, lexicographer, and painter deserves. In 1994 African American Review devoted a special issue to his work. The fifth edition (1998) of The Norton Anthology of American Literature recognized his importance by adding his fiction to its canon, in the same year that an unexpurgated version of his first novel, All-Night Visitors, appeared (ironically restoring literary material originally trimmed to make the book seem more erotic), and an extensive selection of the author's poetry was published as Configurations. By this time Major's seminal dictionary of African American slang had been revised and enlarged as Juba to Jive in a widely available Penguin Books volume.

So it is appropriate that a critical and creative overview titled Clarence Major and His Art be taken. Bernard W. Bell, who edited the restored edition of All-Night Visitors and guest-edited the special issue of AAR, directs the project here. To the original AAR essays Bell adds more, three reprinted from other sources and three (including the introduction) newly written for this volume. What makes the collection especially valuable are Clarence Major's own contributions. There are key examples of his fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose, each referring to something discussed in one or more of the critical essays on the author's works. There are as well full-color reproductions of his paintings: sixteen of them in various media completed over the three decades of this career to date. A self-portrait in watercolor graces the cover, capturing the artist at work in portraying himself (the artwork's title is "The Mirror").

Although just two of the essays (by Linda Furgerson Seizer and Lisa C. Roney) discuss Major's painting in detail, having the broad selection of his canvasses on view makes it easier to see what scholars such as Nathaniel Mackey, Stephen F. Soitos, and Stuart Klawans are talking about in their more strictly literary pieces. In his introduction Bernard W. Bell has advised that Major's strength is his mastery of the "transgressive" in both voice and consciousness. By experimenting so boldly with a complex of vocal modes (from African American male to Southern matriarch and Zuni songstress) the author tests the limits of reception, while with his double consciousness on matters of race he challenges accepted understandings. As a result, his very strengths sometimes work to hold back the appreciation he deserves, for no one likes to have his own turf transgressed. But what can be difficult to accept in language makes easy sense in art. It is hard for something made of words to refer primarily to itself, but in twe ntieth-century painting, the triumph of abstract expressionism has shown how inappropriate distractions of presumed content can be set aside--indeed, have to be set aside before the work makes sense. it is by keeping Major's way of painting in mind that his fiction and poetry can for once receive their proper due.

Ideas and practices that run through both the examples of Major's writing and the critical essays about it sound a common theme with art. He is a Cubist, a collagist; his poems and narratives deconstruct the apparent in order to reestablish the imaginative in a way that lets readers experience the imaginative as real. Yes, there are recognizable forms in Major's world, but he uses them for parody as often as for representation. The factor that counts most in the world he portrays is that of expression--the action of his protagonist in existence, but most directly the action of his words upon the page. When his characters speak, it is often with a literary idiolect, a life that exists within words in which voice becomes song. He can represent people, places, and things, but without dominating them, as a conventional realist might do.

Turning from his selected poems and excerpts from the novels to the paintings--turning to them with the critical essays in mind--one learns how these same practices work on the canvas. Major's oils are rich and thick; brushstrokes dance, colors push and pull, but figures emerge as well. No single painting exists within a single school or tradition (remember Major's literary double consciousness and his desire to transgress): At any one time you can see elements from artists as diverse as Willem de Kooning, Archibald Motley, and Marc Chagall. As a painter Clarence Major reminds us that no good modem artist ever presumed to present a master vision of the world. But almost every one of them offers a new contribution to our visual vocabulary, a new way of seeing, or at the very least a fresh manner of extending our perception.

As Clarence Major perfects his own painting style by growing with the knowledge of the world of art that surrounds him, so has his writing taken advantage of such a wide range of literary experience and expression. No other author today displays so well, so naturally, the complex of strengths derived from an understanding and appreciation of themes and techniques used by white Americans, black Americans, native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and other groups on this continent as well as by Europeans and Africans. Well-traveled and deeply experienced, Major inhabits a culture by inviting it to inhabit him (for example, he was the first writer of his generation to grasp the special nature of Haiti and the people who live there). Bernard W. Bell's volume, by virtue of its own multi-dimensionality, is the ideal resource for exploring this man's work.