To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance.

Jon Woodson. To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 218 pp. $45.00 cloth/$18.00 paper.

It would take a Gurdjieffian, literary modernist and African American historian to review To Make a New Race properly. This is but an appreciation by neither a stranger nor an adept. Familiarity with the paraphernalia of Blake's "mental travel," Yeats's "mystic geometry," and the theosophical systems of A. P. Sinnett and H. P. Blavatsky prepared me for the sentiment but not the strategy of the abstruse metaphysics of G. I. Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson that Jon Woodson deems necessary for comprehending the esoterica underpinning the fiction of the Harlem group. Thought critically exhausted by many, these works are read anew by Woodson as "reduced version[s] of Beelzbub's Tales." And in this audacious, sometimes frustrating, and convincing study, he demonstrates that Gurdjieff's worn path led straight through Harlem.

Aimed at the uninitiated, Woodson's daunting and valuable introduction to Gurdjieffian recondite systems of reference and knowledge risks offending those for whom esotericism itself represents the ersatz in spirit and intellect. Woodson, aware of the prejudice, attacks the problem historically, placing Gurdjieff, Jean Toomer, and A. R. Orage in a vortex of spiritualism and literary enlightenment that is at once familiar and strange. Gurdjieff, while not unprecedented, was certainly original in his remapping of allegorical and spiritual traditions. Derived from a host of visionary tenets (Sufism and Zoroastrianism, Christianity, neo-Platonism, and gnosticism), his modes of instruction emphasized the quest, not the answer--"Take the understanding of the East,/and the knowledge of the West--/and then seek." Though mumbo jumbo to some, this protean recipe has for others liberated, awakened, and redirected their human potential.

Woodson deftly choreographs parables, injunctions, encryptions, and other manifestations of Gurdjieff's system with an eye to Harlem's modifications. Rich in anecdotes, the introduction energizes the dated-though-cosmopolitan world of the "Harlem-in-Vogue" crowd, complicating the assumptions of such "folk"-obsessed scholars as J. Martin Favor and David G. Nicholl. Woodson's proof for the pervasive and profound influence of Gurdjieff (extending beyond the Harlem group to such literary sponsors as Carl Van Vechten) comes not, as some might wish, from newly discovered transcripts of secret meetings (names, dates, times) but from the literature itself. Woodson's most controversial and potentially valuable insight is a seeming tautology: "The work" (Gurdjieff's contraction for "the group's work") was their work (their writing), and their work is "the work." His primary critical concern is the literary enactment of this redundancy.

Toomer's tailoring of Gurdjieff's teaching provides Woodson's starting point. Identifying scholars who have uncritically relied upon Langston Hughes's selective autobiographical account, Woodson critiques Nellie McKay's characteristic "dependency on Hughes's autobiography [that] encourages critics to disregard Toomer's introduction of Gurdjieff's system to the Harlem writers." Toomer manuscripts--"The Crock of Problems" and "A New Group, 1926"--reveal a committed disciple of Gurdjieff and Orage who shaped their teachings into a conundrum of local circumstance: "African-Americans had to disidentify themselves as African-Americans, yet remain conscious that they were African-Americans." The result was a body of literature that would "exploit African-American culture as a means to enforce the view that race is an illusion."

Wallace Thurman occasions a foray into Gurdjieffian method: an "attack on reading" that illumines a "self-destroying text designed to collapse in such a way that reading it exposes the underlying 'objective' structure of the subtext." Reading between the lines, deciphering intertexts, and breaking encryptions expose esoteric substrata to The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring. Woodson emphasizes that these novels are "tapestr[ies] of wordplay" in which names are intended to be read as ciphers. Toomer's visionary goal of "raceless individuality" adumbrates this novel-as-manifesto rendering of Infants of the Spring, "the only published account of the Harlem group's plan to create a body of 'objective' literature."

Equating Rudolph Fisher's short stories and detective novel with Gurdjieff's "teaching stories," Woodson moves from decoding the esoteric subtexts to broader claims for the movement in Harlem: "Although it is clear that the narrative level of The Walls of Jericho presented a case against race and color discrimination, without Fisher's ciphered message, the reader would remain unaware of the African-American Gurdjieffians who were organizing to change the structure of American culture." The Conjure-Man Dies, generically and esoterically, presents demanding self-referential problems for the writer and the reader of such hermeneutic texts. In the person of an African chieftain, the "psychist" N'Gana Frimbo, Fisher risks an indirect representation of Gurdjieff that is signaled descriptively ("the deep-set eyes still held their peculiar glow") and anagrammatically ("Frimbo" as anagram..."which can be recognized as a Gurdjieffian exhortation to 'form [the] Big I'").

In "The Anatomy of 'Sleep,'" George Hutchinson, Thadious Davis, and Deborah McDowell supply the critical matrix against which Woodson reads Quicksand and Passing. Each critic has produced, despite ignorance of Gurdjieffian topography, readings that chart an indescribable "otherness" in Nella Larsen's writings. But these critical apprehensions may not prepare them to consider (or accept) the transvestite, transgender, Gurdjieffian "riddles" (Quicksand's Mrs.Hayes-Rore and Passing's Gertrude Martin) Woodson posits here. These are not simply critical substitutions of one fixity (the "Gurdjieffian) for another (lesbian or feminist). They are, if we are persuaded by Woodson's "blueprint" for reading, essential stylistic devices common to the entire group. Scholars wedded to normative identity politics may be vexed or flummoxed by these critical sleights of hand. Larsen's systematic attack on race results in the Ultimate Gurdjieffian goal: the requisite mental freedom to shed such "socially prescribed roles [as] wi fe, woman, man, white man, mother, Negro, father, husband."

George Schuyler inspires this study's boldest inquiry into the language of art and scholarship. Schuyler is Gurdjieffian in his "sense of power and mastery over other people"--as well as in the certainty brought to that identity. Slaves Today and Black No More complicate the attack on racialism by considering specific aspects of period addleheadedness: the pseudoscientific discourses of eugenics and racist anthropology exemplified, for example, by Lothrop Stoddard in his Rising Tide of Color. Even the critical dialogue of this chapter--between Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and John C. Gruesser--asks tough questions about literary and critical risks when dealing with extraliterary concerns. Gates, impatient with or unaware of the Gurdjieffian subtexts, dismisses Schuyler as a "literary schizophrenic ... fragmented self"; Gruesser, at the nexus of intuition and empiricism, concludes that Schuyler was a "black writer who responded to white racism and the pressure to toe the line within the black community by creating a variety of personae for himself." Gruesser's uninitiated attentiveness to factual detail inadvertently yields a Gurdjieffian reading that would seem independently to corroborate Woodson.

Zora Neale Hurston occasions little here in the way of critical overview. The study's concluding chapter concerns itself with the culminating philosophy of the Gurdjieff movement in Harlem. Less encumbered by the jargon, didactic purpose, and obtrusive narrative tricks of Toomer and his colleagues, Hurston is secure in the literary and anthropological roots of her allegorical and mythological tales. With their "highly refined ... attacks on reading," Jonah's Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the Mountain, and Seraph on the Suwanee contribute to our evolving understanding of the "important but unfashionable figure of the superman." Through aesthetically and philosophically complex characters, Hurston limns a Gurdjieffian world of "supermen [who] embody the preeminence of compassion, psychological insight, and a visionary perception of human possibilities."

Though To Make a New Race seldom disappoints intellectually, it will annoy those unwilling to follow authors (and scholars) to the brink of absurdity. Its rigid and prescriptive readings, in keeping with the "system" it examines, will baffle those indifferent to the language, methods, and strictures common to such human-potential movements; its wordplay and circularity will thwart those anxious for incontrovertible evidence that these clandestine "attacks on race" were part of a grand and coherent movement; its insensibility to the complex and competing cultures of 1920s New York will irk those eager for cultural comparison (between, for example, Thurman's sozzled Harlemites and F. Scott Fitzgerald's stewed Long Islanders--all debilitated by a mutual fondness for near-fatal concoctions of gin and ice cream).

Few scholars would have risked such sincere examination of this awkward, poorly understood, and scantily documented world. To Make a New Race will be bunk for some, revelation for others; all will remember this work. The Gurdjieffian masquerade that drew these Harlem acolytes into successive, provisional, and probational reformulations of race, identity, and America describes its social ambition--and its aesthetic limitation. Woodson has written the essential introduction to the fabulous world of Gurdjieff in Harlem and has fore-grounded a complex literary society that rewrites William Blake's visionary social equation: "Vision or Imagination Is a Representation of what Eternally exists, Really and Unchangeably."