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English professor Betsy Huang and student Johnny Siever explore the racial and ethnic tensions revealed in the works of American writers Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Sherman Alexie. |
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Ralph Ellison's Offense of Laughter
Huang, Betsy, Ralph Ellison's Offense of Laughter. Paper presented at the 2000 Modernist Studies association (MSA) Conference, Philadelphia, PA. September 2000. Copyright Betsy Huang.
Dream-singers,
Story-tellers,
Dancers,
Loud laughers in the hands of Fate-
My people.
--Langston Hughes
I laughed and I trembled, and gained thereby
a certain wisdom.
--Ralph Ellison
In "An Extravagance of Laughter," Ralph Ellison gives an extended explanation of his very public, very long, and very disruptive laugh at a production of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road he attended in New York City in 1936. During a scene in which two characters, "swept up by a forbidden sexual attraction so strong that, uttering sounds of animal passion, they . . . went into their bizarre choreography of sexual 'frustrabation,'" Ellison cracked up. "I was reduced to such helpless laughter," he confesses, "that I distracted the entire balcony and embarrassed both myself and my host." [1] This simple response to a comical scene, however, suddenly became an expression burdened with the weight of racial politics. For while he was laughing, he was keenly aware of the offense his disruptive laughter was committing; it caused quite a stir in within the predominantly white audience, who were "catching fire and beginning to howl and cheer the disgraceful loss of control being exhibited by a young Negro." [2] The laugh concerned Ellison because it was predictably being construed as yet another confirmation of prevailing black stereotypes, another demonstration of black buffoonery. But Ellison was also conscious of another, more subtle effect produced by his laughter. There seems something inherently disturbing-and dangerous-about a black man who dared to laugh loudly and publicly. What could it mean when a member of the oppressed class chooses laughter over lamentation? Ellison understands that within the context of black/white relations, a laugh does not remain just a simple laugh. From this apparently innocent bout of laughter, he expounds on the relationship between laughter and self-consciousness, and the social fears black laughter (in the double sense of the ironic laughter of "black humor" and the laughter of African Americans) produces.
With his tongue in his cheek, Ellison speculates that his laughter is probably perceived by whites as "a peculiar form of insanity suffered exclusively by Negroes, who in light of their social status and past condition of servitude were regarded as having absolutely nothing in their daily experience which could possibly inspire rational laughter."[3] The idea that black folks have nothing to be happy about, and thus have no grounds for laughter, reflects a narrow understanding of the diverse functions of laughter. Laughter in Ellison's writings is never genial nor pleasant; it is not humor that seeks to delight. Rather, it is always incisive and double-edged. Langston Hughes had warned against literal interpretations of laughter in "Minstrel Man":
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think
I suffer after
I have held my pain
So long?
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter,
You do not hear
My inner cry?
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing,
You do not know
I die? [4]
Such laughter is what Linda Hutcheon calls "painful laughter," a laugh whose mocking intent conveys the refusal to conform to an unjust social order. [5] Such ironic laughter, Hutcheons explains, "'disarms' and therefore offers access to material that is not, in fact, very funny at all;" [6] these potentials lead Michael Fischer to see ironic laughter as "a 'survival skill, a tool for acknowledging complexity, a means of exposing or subverting oppressive hegemonic ideologies, and an art for affirming life in the face of objective troubles." [7] For Ellison, as it had been for many of his African American literary predecessors, laughter is an act of resistance against the injustices, indignities, and double binds endured daily by African Americans, as well as a demonstration of self-knowing and conscious agency. Every instance of laughter in Ellison's writings serves as a cue for us to see the absurdities in a charged situation, to expose the hidden politics that inform the discomfort of the moment.
"Humor is essentially anarchic," Berys Gaut tells us, [8] and expressions of humor by those who should find no amusement in their situation are particularly so. The alarming quality of laughter issuing from the mouths of the disempowered arises from the notion that apparent demonstrations of joy or pleasure are incongruent with the undesirable social circumstances in which they live. When they laugh, they are essentially acting inappropriately, and the act is thereby interpreted as a deliberate refusal to "stay in their place." The laughing-barrel joke Ellison tells in "An Extravagance of Laughter" illustrates this specious interpretation of behavior; the joke involves "some small Southern town in which Negro freedom of expression was so restricted that its public square was marked by a series of huge whitewashed barrels labeled FOR COLORED, and into which any Negro who felt a laugh coming on was forced--pro bono publico--to thrust his boisterous head." [9] The ridiculousness of the image conjured by "a bunch of negroes with their laughing heads stuck into the interiors of a batch of old whitewashed whiskey barrels" [10] notwithstanding, the joke betrays the equally ridiculous fear that the stability of the social order would be compromised by such laughter. Yet the notion that such "inappropriate" laughter must be contained and suppressed is an implicit acknowledgment of laughter's potential to upset normalized power relations. Thus "black" laughter is a trickster strategy which allows the disempowered to "pleasurably [exploit] their knowledge of the official 'rules of the game' in order to identify where these rules could be mocked, inverted, and thus used to free those they were designed to discipline." [11] Attuned to the disruptive effects of laughter, Ellison sees that "A Negro laughing in a laughing-barrel simply turned the world upside down and inside out. And in so doing, he in-verted (and thus sub-verted) tradition and thus the preordained and cherished scheme of Southern racial relationships was blasted asunder." [12] Laughter becomes an offensive maneuver, effecting a power reversal--albeit a temporary one-in which the laughed-at usurps the position of the laugher and briefly disrupts the order of a white-dominated society.
Exposing the dangers of a deceptive reality and the illusions of a realist narrative is the quintessentially modernist project of Invisible Man, in which laughter functions as a principle means to achieve this end. The moments of laughter that punctuate the novel's narrative ring with menacing and disruptive force. One of the most famous and memorable laughs in modern
literature, one that reverberates with so much terrifying knowingness, is the laugh of the invisible man's grandfather. The laugh comes at the conclusion of the battle royal episode, when the invisible man is naively basking in his self-congratulation for having performed exactly as the white men at the battle royal had expected of him, and momentarily bursts the bubble of his illusory triumph. The grandfather's laughter is the first of a series of disruptive laughter throughout the novel that will eventually lead to the invisible man's rude awakening. Laughter here leads to the dawning of self-consciousness and agency; asserting the deceit in his actions, the grandfather turns his lifetime's worth of complicitous submissions into acts of conscious agency and exhorts his son to do the same:
I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open. [13]
When the invisible man is banished from his college for naively showing a white trustee the "wrong side" of the local black community, the black veteran he meets on the bus out of town--a patient from the local insane asylum and a reincarnation of his grandfather's voice--tells him to "play the game, but don't believe in it." [14] The vet laughs heartily at the invisible man's willingness to believe in the project of racial uplift for which his college stands, "that great false widsom taught slaves and pragmatists alike." [15] Through his laughter, "the irony of the Southern Negro college, the irony of its very existence, is revealed. Its function is not to educate but to indoctrinate with a myth." [16] The invisible man will be the object of mocking laughter many times over, all of which will eventually shake him out of his unconscious complicity to programs dictated by others. The process continues until the very end when the invisible man, realizing that he "was never more hated than when [he] tried to be honest" and was "[becoming] ill of affirmation, of saying 'yes' against the nay-saying of [his] stomach," finally learns to laugh. "I laughed all the way back to my hole," he says in the concluding pages of the novel, because he has realized that "all life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd." [17]
Ironic laughter is a defining characteristic of Ellison's artistic consciousness; it is the means to the ethical end of his artistic production. While many modernists found it offensive to burden art with politics, Ellison had ceaselessly attempted to find a way to fulfill what he thought to be his political and artistic responsibilities. He has written that American writing, "for all its technical experimentation [is] nevertheless an ethical instrument, and as such it might well exercise some choice in the kind of ethic it prefers to support." [18] The ethic he chooses to support is the modernist ethic of demystification and self-knowing, and he achieves these by laughing at and exposing the absurdities suffered by African Americans--a burden that art cannot easily disregard. Kenneth Burke had said that we can "win by capitalizing on our debts, by turning our liabilities into assets, by using our burden as a basis of insights," [19] and laughter is precisely what Ellison uses to convert burden into insight. As a coping strategy, laughter provides comic relief against absurd injustices; as political rhetoric, it exposes and challenges those injustices. Thus laughter is Ellison's most favored defensive AND offensive gesture.
Yet Ellison holds no illusions about laughter's political impact or efficacy, and remains painfully aware that laughter still leaves the larger problem of racism and white domination intact. In "An Extravagance of Laughter" he tells another anecdote about the brutal beating of a very dark- skinned Tuskegee student named Whyte by two white Phenix City cops, and the subsequent comic retelling of the event by other student witnesses. The retelling was filled with exaggerations through which the raconteurs "mocked [the cops'] modes of speech and styles of intimidation, and teased one another as we parodied our various modes of feigning fear." [20] Ellison calls the comic exaggerations "violence transcended with cruel but homeopathic laughter, and racial cruelty transformed by a traditional form of folk art." Yet he is keenly aware of the fact that the parodic humor "did nothing to change the Phenix City police, and probably wouldn't have even if they heard the recitation." [21] Ellison is ultimately ambivalent about the long-term political effectiveness of ironic laughter even as he extols its empowering effects: "My problem was that I couldn't completely dismiss such experiences with laughter. I brooded and tried to make sense of it beyond that provided by our ancestral wisdom." [22] No matter how biting and subversive, laughter "didn't cancel out the unpleasantness or humiliation." [23] Ellison also knows that certain horrifying events remain beyond the pale of black laughter. I'll conclude with these words from Ellison on the unbearable dreadfulness of lynchings and leave the question of laughter's political and aesthetic impact for our further contemplation.
Yes, but for the group thus victimized, such sacrifices are the source of emotions that move far beyond the tragic conception of pity and terror and down into the abysmal levels of conflict and folly from which arise our famous American humor. Brother, the blackness of Afro-American "black humor" is not black, it is tragically human and finds its source and object in the notion of "whiteness." [24]
Works Cited
Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941.
Ellison, Ralph. "An Extravagance of Laughter." In Going To the Territory. 1986. New York: Vintage, 1995: 145 - 197.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Ellison, Ralph. "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity." In Shadow and Act. 1964. New York: Vintage, 1995: 24 - 44.
Fischer, Michael M. J. "Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts of Memory." In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Fiske, John. Reading the Popular. London: Routledge, 1989.
Gaut, Berys. "Just Joking: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Humor." Philosophy and Literature 22.1 (1998): 51 - 68.
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Hutcheon, Linda. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1994.
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