Literary Influence and African American Writers: Collected Essays.

Reviewed by

George Hutchinson University of Tennessee, Knoxville

According to Tracy Mishkin's introduction, this volume aims to recuperate the value of literary "influence study" from its negative connotations - the notion that it is out-of-date, having been supplanted by authorless intertextuality, and the notion that anxiety and conflict are the primary modes of literary influence. Noting how feminist and African American critics have in various ways challenged such formulations, Mishkin pushes on to insist that influence can be positive and non-conflictual even when it involves relationships between black and white authors: "It is time to stop taking overgeneralized, negative approaches for granted and, instead, to listen to what the authors have to say" (10). What Mishkin presents - in her introductory essay as well as in the somewhat miscellaneous contents of this book - is less a "theory" of literary influence in African American writing than a pragmatic critique of the overgeneralizations implicit in other theories.

The book is composed of thirteen essays grouped into four sections: "The Nineteenth Century," "African American and Irish Literature," "Early to Mid-Twentieth Century," and "Contemporary." Most of the essays examine crosscultural or interracial literary relationships (often two-way exchanges), and half of them are reprints or modified versions of earlier publications. Some will already be well-known to many readers. For example, more than one-fourth of the volume is comprised of Shelley Fisher Fishkin's "Break-Dancing in the Drawing Room: Mark Twain and African American Voices" (excerpted from her well-known Was Huck Black?) and Richard Yarborough's "Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel," originally published in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, edited by Eric Sundquist. These essays are the two best in the volume. The best of what remains is, for the most part, also reprinted, often readily accessible in its original form; indeed, only about one-third of the volume is new.

Certainly, several fine pieces are here - in addition to Yarborough's and Fishkin's, I would single out, for example, those on the interplay between African American and Irish literature by Brian Gallagher (the first to give this issue concentrated attention, in an article on the Irish and Harlem Renaissances), George Bornstein, and Tracy Mishkin. Alas, all of this work has appeared previously or, in Mishkin's case, is forthcoming elsewhere. On the other hand, Mark Jeffreys's "Irony without Condescension: Sterling A. Brown's Nod to Robert Frost," is a solid and interesting new essay on a variety of ways in which Brown and Frost can be read together profitably. And Richard Hardack's "Swing to the White, Back to the Black: Writing and Sourcery in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo," reprinted from Arizona Quarterly, makes a strong and provocative argument that Reed owes more allegiance to the American Renaissance (Emerson in particular) than to the Harlem Renaissance, despite his own claims. Rather than being a bad black aesthetician, Reed is "an eclectic reappropriator," his work "an unacknowledged parody of and homage to Emerson's works" (286-87). Pointing out the similarities between Reed's Jes Grew and Emerson's "universally accessible" abstractions, Hardack does not fail to bring up, at the same time, the shadow of the racial "other" in Emerson's Pan.

Literary Influence and African American Writers does not ignore the importance of racial difference and antagonism in relations between black and white authors. A case in point is Alicia Ostriker's" 'Kin and Kin': The Poetry of Lucille Clifton" (a revised version of an essay from American Poetry Review), an illuminating appreciation and close reading that shows "how spiritually complicated an apparently 'easy' poet can be" as well as "the kind of emotional responses she provokes" (301) - particularly in a sensitive white and feminist poet/admirer such as Ostriker herself. Ostriker sets Clifton's work in relation to a variety of precursors and contemporaries while addressing honestly, as well, the racial chasm she feels between herself and the black poet - partly insisted upon by Clifton. Peter Erickson's essay - "Shakespeare's Naylor, Naylor's Shakespeare: Shakespearean Allusion as Appropriation in Gloria Naylor's Quartet" - combines and revises two earlier essays of his from Kenyon Review and his Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves. This is a strong study of how, with constant allusion to Shakespeare as a representative of mainstream Western literary tradition, Naylor's novel series "dramatizes . . . the conflict between established and emergent traditions" (327). Naylor critically rewrites Shakespeare and lays to rest the "myth of Shakespeare's inexhaustibility": "Shakespeare does not assimilate Naylor; Naylor assimilates Shakespeare" - in a way that suggests difference more than continuity and kinship (347). The concluding original essay by Reggie Young, who wrote a novel for his dissertation, for the most part recounts a familiar story of African American culture and literature from Phyllis Wheatley to the present, with personal reflections of the author on how the slave narrative, in particular, served him as precursor and inspiration in completing his own narrative. The essay also reminds one of that time, not long ago, when African American literature as a field had almost no credibility within "white" academe.

In the end, one puts this volume down with a general sense of a trajectory suggesting the increasing self-mastery of the African American literary tradition over time - a self-mastery in no way compromised by widely varying, complex interrelations with other traditions of whatever "race" or nationality. The material and institutional relations between black and white authors or the relation of black authors to the mechanisms of literary production remains outside the concerns of this volume and would undoubtedly complicate the issues it addresses. Surely Mishkin is right, however, in her intertwined contentions that "interracial influence means not that a black canon is not self-sufficient but that it did not grow in a vacuum" (15), and that we need "a more balanced view of the many types of interaction between authors, adding cooperation to castration, innervation to enervation" (16).