588
PARTISAN REVIEW
Perhaps Daniel Aaron expressed most succinctly the discomfort many
felt with Howe's argument when he suggested that it was not the black
writer who was imprisoned by his execrable past, but Irving Howe and
like-minded others, who were fettered to the belief that black wri ters
could not go the route of other ethnic American writers in passing from
"hyphenation" to "dehyphenation," from the margins to the center of
American literary life. "Even the well-wishers of the Negro, it seemed,
were imprisoned by their liberal stereotypes, asserting unequivocally that
all Negroes had identical experiences, bore the same psychic wounds, suf–
fered the same slights and irritations," Aaron wrote.
In
fairness, it is reasonable to conclude that Howe was indeed a "well–
wisher" of blacks, and his position on black literature should not be
misunderstood as an attempt to hold black writers to second-tier literary
status, a disposition that John Cuddihy, in his surly and provocative 1974
book
The Ordeal
if
Civility,
suggested was typical of social-climbing Jewish
critics. For Howe the moral and social condition of black Americans was
simply so grave that it had to impinge on artistic output and, in fact, Howe
felt rather horrible about saying so. "To say this," wrote Howe, "is not to
propose the condescension of exempting Negro writers from moral judge–
ment, but to suggest the terms of understanding, and still more, the terms
of hesitation for making a judgement."
After the emergence of the Black
Arts
movement in the mid-1960s,
which favored a nationalist and separatist style in black writing, Ellison's
color-blind point of view fell out of vogue. "The Black Arts Movement is
radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his
conununity," wrote Larry Neal, the spokesperson for the new Black aesthet–
ic, which insisted on the wedding of politics and art. Even Howe sheepishly
acknowledged victory in the debate, but conceded that his own view had
been n1ired in indecisiveness, "a token of equivocation, if not worse."
Nevertheless, today Ellison's insistence on the autonomy of the black
writer appears to have taken on a new urgency. Pron1inent black academics
and critics, frustrated with the literary racial preferences implied by Howe
and other critics like Richard Gilman, who suggested in the late 1960s that
white critics engage in a moratorium onjudging black writing, now strug–
gle
to
throw off the shackles of racial essentialism. Calling the Black Arts
movement's sanctification of a single "authentic" black experience an
understandable but largely ineffective response to historic white stereo–
types, black critics like bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston
Baker,Jr., Angela Davis, Paul Gilroy, and Isaac Julien condemn it for its
conservative and masculine character, repudiate the uni tary idea of a
black communi ty, and espouse a black identi ty internally divided by class,
sexuali ty, gender, age, ethnici ty, economics, and poli tical consciousness.
