Stream-of-Consciousness in Bontemps and Toomer

Last post, I wrote about a stylistic element in Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936) that I found interesting and similar to Gaines's description of the arrival of Gruesome Gertie into Bayonne in chapter 30 of A Lesson before Dying. Today, I want to briefly continue with that discussion by looking at a couple of section from Bontemps's novel where the third person narrator gives way to a stream-of-consciousness narration. This move, in many ways, reminds me of parts of Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) where we see inside the characters's heads. These sections occur mostly in the second and third sections of Toomer's novel and are punctuated like drama, providing the character's name then a period.


During the torrential storm that ultimately thwarts Gabriel's rebellion, Ben sits in the house with Marse Sheppard and thinks about their relationship, how much they understand one another and how satisfied they are together. All of this in the third person; until he begins to think about his freedom and what that means.

Then suddenly another thought shouted in his head.
Licking his spit because he done fed you, hunh? Fine nigger you is. Good old Marse Sheppard, hunh? Is he ever said anything about setting you free? He wasn't too good to sell them two gal young-uns down the river soon's they's old enough to know the sight of a cotton-chopping hoe. How'd he treat yo' old woman befo' she died? And you love it, hunh? Anything what's equal –
"Get the toddy bowl, Ben."
"Yes, suh." (94)

Here, the narration moves into Ben's head as he considers his relationship with Marse Sheppard and whether or not he should even think about freedom. Bontemps moves seamlessly from the third person narrator into Ben's head for a stream-of-consciousness section. Ben begins by asking himself questions regarding Sheppard's respect for him then moves into the past thinking about the way Sheppard treated his family, selling them when they were old enough to work in the fields. Ben's thoughts, however, get interrupted when Sheppard asks him for the "toddy bowl," and the narrator returns to third person, providing an overview of the action. Bontemps does this periodically throughout the novel, delving into the thoughts of multiple characters as he tells the story of Gabriel Prosser's failed insurrection.

In "Bona and Paul," Toomer incorporates interior monologue, delving into the character's thoughts to illuminate the action taking place. At the very beginning of the story, Bona watches Paul dance dance during class.

Bona: He is a candle that daces in a grove swung with pale balloons.
Columns of the drillers thud towards her. He is in the front row. He is in no row at all. Bona can look close at him. His red-brown face —
Bona: He is a harvest moon. He is an autumn leaf. He is a nigger. Bona! But dont all the dorm girls say so? And dont you, when you are sane, say so? That's why I love — Oh, nonsense. You have never loved a man who didnt first love you. Besides — (70)

The excerpt above shows a small sample of what Toomer does with stream-of-consciousness narration. Bona thinks about the way that Paul looks as he dances in front of her, and as she contemplates his appearance in relation to the moon and a leaf, she begins to drift back in to what others say about him. Her thoughts go from a metaphorical image of Paul to a depiction that hinges on what others say, and that tension can be seen in her thoughts. She abruptly stops twice, as indicated by the em-dashes. Bona moves from abstract, metaphorical images of Paul to examining him in relation to how her fellow dorm girls view him to wondering whether or not she actually loves him. This is just a brief example of stream-of-consciousness in Toomer's novel, there are more throughout the work.

What are some other novels that employ this technique? What is its purpose? How does this technique relate to modernism, which both authors were a part of? Let me know in the comments below.

Bontemps, Arna. Black Thunder. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Print.
Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright, 1975, Print.

Stylistic Elements in Bontemps's "Black Thunder"

1968 Beacon Press Edition

At the beginning of February, I did a few posts on Arna Bontemps and his relation to Ernest J. Gaines. Today, I want to look at another one of Bontemps's works, Black Thunder (1936), and briefly examine how it relates to Gaines's A Lesson before Dying stylistically. Black Thunder tells the story of a failed slave rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800. It chronicles the lead up to the revolt, the revolt itself, and Gabriel's capture and execution. When it appeared in 1936, the novel received favorable reviews; however, it did not garner much in regards to sales. In the introduction to the 1968 edition, Bontemps argues that "the theme of self-assertion by black men whose endurance strained to the breaking point was not one that readers of fiction were prepared to contemplate at the time" (xv). Gabriel's "self-assertion," and his survival with dignity even in the face of capture and execution, can be seen, thematically, in relation to Jefferson's "awakening" in A Lesson before Dying and his own "self-assertion" as a man at the end of that novel. I do not wish to explore this element today; instead, I want to briefly look at section right before the rebellion.

The final chapter in Book One "Jacobins," shows Criddle, Ditcher, a mulatto boy, Mingo, Blue, Old Catfish Primus, and Juba preparing to follow Gabriel and overtake Richmond. The chapter only constitutes about four pages, and each of the characters mentioned above gets his or her own little section within the chapter. They do not appear in the space; the third person omniscient narrator moves from one character to another showing each one's preparations. Criddle's movements begin the chapter. He enters Marse Prosser's stable at night, and no one pays any attention to him. He finds a loose board in the floor then removes a "hand-made cutlass" and begins to sharpen it. Next, Ditcher can be seen leaving his cabin and speaking with the moon and a neighbor about the upcoming events. Close to morning, a mulatto boy fishes by the creek and converses with his "mammy" about the upcoming rebellion. The free African American Mingo thinks about his position as a "free" man who owns his own business. However, his wife and children remain slaves. He locks up his shop and thinks back to his wife being whipped mercilessly. After working in the fields, Blue speaks with his mule and contemplates his impending freedom, daydreaming about "riding in a public stagecoach with a cigar in his mouth" and drinking freely in a tavern (79). Next, Old Catfish Primus speaks with another man about conjure and protection for the rebellion. Primus gives the man a "fighting 'hand'" (79). Juba, Gabriel's lover, concludes the chapter. She prepares Araby for the ride to come; Gabriel enters, checks to see if everything is ready, then leaves to prepare for the night ahead.

Gabriel Prosser

The above chapter reminds me a lot of chapter 30 in A Lesson before Dying. There, Gaines changes the point of view from first person (Garnt and Jefferson's Diary) to third person. The chapter details the entrance of Gruesome Gertie into Bayonne for Jefferson's execution. It chronicles citizens reactions to the truck entering town, the chair being removed from the truck, and the chair being set up. There are sections from the Sheriff and Paul, as well as sections from ordinary African American and white citizens. Some shopping in stores and some working in the courthouse. While the novel focuses on Grant's perspective, the shift in chapter 30 allows for a broadened view of how the community relates to the events surrounding Jefferson's execution. For me, this chapter has always been interesting because in the midst of Grant's narrative we see into the heads of others, not through Grant's eyes but through a detached narrator's perspective.

When I read that chapter in Black Thunder, I could not help but recall chapter 30 in Gaines's book. Both let us, as readers, see into the heads of characters as events unfold around them. This is nothing new, of course. What makes it unique, to me, is the fact that Gaines's novel switches its point of view for only one chapter, near the end, and that Bontemps's, while told in third person, takes the time to highlight character's thoughts and preparations for the upcoming rebellion.

For the next post, I want to look at another unique characteristic I picked up on in Black Thunder. As I said earlier, the novel is told from the third person perspective, but the narrator periodically moves in to characters' minds and shows how they think and perceive the events. This technique, which employs stream of consciousness, reminds me of some sections of Toomer's Cane.  

Do you see these stylistic elements in other modernist texts? In other texts in general? What are some examples? Let us know in the comments below.

Bontemps, Arna. Black Thunder. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Print.

The Migrant and Washington in Jean Toomer's "Cane"

"When one is on the soil of one's ancestors, most anything can come to one" (17). This line, from Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), immediately made me think of Ernest J. Gaines and the land he writes about. As I reread Cane last week, I couldn't help but think about the Toomer's descriptions the South and the North and Gaines's descriptions as well. I have written about Toomer and Gaines before, so I will not touch on that aspect in great detail here. Instead, I would like to take the time to write about two specific vignettes ("Seventh Street" and "Rhobert") from the Washington section of Toomer's masterpiece. These two sketches open up the second section of Cane and both highlight the hustle and bustle of the urban space that many African Americans encountered during the Great Migration.


"Seventh Street," a prose poem, begins and ends with a four line verse that sums up both the means of advancement and the speed within the urban landscape. Unlike the South, where "[t]ime and space have no meaning in a canefield," the North buzzes with people moving too and fro, always being propelled by money and time. The verse that opens and closes "Seventh Street" sums this up perfectly. Toomer writes,

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
Bootleggers in silken shirts,
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks. (39)

The languid, sonorous sounds that constitute the southern section of Cane give way at the opening of the northern section to movement through the sights and sounds of the metropolis. Farah Jasmine Griffin notes, "Assonance and consonance further enhance the sense of motion, but the repetition of the harsh double consonants gg and zz . . . speed the passage towards a swift conclusion" (65). These aspects of "Seventh Street" create an image of movement and harshness that does not appear in the southern section.

The vignette continues its movement through the cityscape by bringing the reader/migrant face to face with the underworld of the urban environment. "Seventh Street is," the reader hears, "a bastard of Prohibition and the War. A crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black red-dish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington" (39). These opening sentences ooze with numerous images of what an African American migrant to the North, around the time of World War I, would encounter. Prohibition, which of course led to crime, returning soldiers, and the proliferation of jazz all await the incoming migrant. Sexual verbs constitute the movement of the reader down "Seventh Street," words like thrusting, breathing, shed, pouring, etc. populate the space. Along with this imagery, the city also becomes infused with an African American presence. The narrator says that black and red blood thrust themselves into the "whitewashed wood of Washington." While the southern section ends with death in "Blood Red Moon," the northern section sees migrants rising from the blood-stained soil of the South to the promises, false or real, of the North.

The second vignette in the northern section, "Rhobert," comments on the materialistic, consumerist pull of the North to new migrants. "Rhobert" focuses on a man who becomes constricted and suffocated by his material possessions. The house resembles "a monstrous diver's helmet" that extricate the life out of him by continually constricting around his head (40). Rhobert's "house is a dead thing that weights him down" (40). It drags him into the mud where he wiggles to free himself but ultimately perishes. At the end of "Rhobert," the narrator says that after Rhobert sinks into the ground we should "build a monument and it in the ooze where he goes down," and the monument should be "of hewn oak" (41). The urban leads to Rhobert's demise, but he returns, figuratively in death, to the South. The monument is made of oak and his mourners sing "Deep River" as he perishes underneath the ground. Throughout the northern section, the characters reflect back to the South, continually returning figuratively to the space.

The North, and the drive to acquire material things like the house, subsume Rhobert and his life. Griffin points out that we should view "Rhobert" in relation to Leadbelly's "Bourgeois Blues," a song that chronicles the African American migratory experience to the North, and specifically to Washington. "Bourgeois Blues" epitomizes the struggles that African Americans endured when moving North, and it highlights the "Promised Land" of the North was not all it was cracked up to be. The narrator of the song attempts to find housing for him and his wife, but the white property owners turn them away. Even though America is "the land of the free and the home of the brave," no one will provide a place to stay. To acquire that space, the migrant must purchase it, and that creates other problems. "Rhobert" purchases a house, and that purchase drives him to death. There is more that could be said here, and I am not quite sure, at this point, what that may be. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

I would like to end this post with a video of Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson sing "Cane" (1978), a song based off of Toomer's novel and specifically off of "Carma" and "Karintha."

 
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. "Who set you flowin'?": The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.
Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright, 1975, Print.

  

The Two Ernests: Gaines and Hemingway

Picture of Ernest Hemingway
that hung in Ernest Gaines' office.

Ernest Gaines has continually pointed to Ernest Hemingway's writing as an inspiration for his own. One needs to only look at interviews where Gaines discusses authors who had and effect on him to see this. When discussing the title of his first novel, Catherine Carmier, with his editor, Gaines originally wanted the title to just be Catherine; however, the editor wanted more. Gaines did not want to change the title because the novel had already had numerous ones. He wanted to keep it as Catherine in part because he had just finished reading Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. He said:

I figured what was good for Hemingway was good enough for Ernie Gaines, so I said, 'What's wrong with Catherine?' My editor said he thought something else ought to go with it. All right, her last name is Carmier; call her that. Call her anything--as long as I don't have to think up another title. 

So, the book became Catherine Carmier. This is not the only influence that Hemingway has had on Gaines. Throughout his career, Gaines has acknowledged that Hemingway provided him with two very important lessons: how to write about characters who exhibit grace-under-pressure and the value of understatement.

When discussing grace-under-pressure in a 1976 interview with Charles Rowell, Gaines said:

These are things I tell a young writer he can learn from reading Hemingway's stories. Hemingway's characters are white, that's true, but we can learn how to write about our own black characters by reading what he has to say about his white characters--because, as I said, the theme that Hemingway uses is more related to our own condition than that of white Americans. Good examples of Hemingway's themes of grace under pressure can be found in "Fifty Grand," the story about a boxer, and in The Old Man in the Sea, where the character fights sharks and is defeated--physically defeated, but not spiritually defeated--when he loses his great fish. (91-92). 

You can even look at Lieutenant Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms and see the same theme that Gaines mentions in regards to Santiago's struggle with bringing the "great fish" back to shore. Henry, through everything he endures, doesn't falter under the pressure. Likewise, the characters in Gaines' work can be seen in the same light. Miss Jane remains strong from the beginning of her autobiography through the end. Jefferson, even though he begins the novel by being compared to a pig, rises up and displays grace under pressure by the end of the novel. Gaines mentions James' resolve in "The Sky is Gray" from Bloodline (1968). James, no matter how much his tooth hurts, never complains. No matter how cold or how hungry he gets, he never complains. James remains strong throughout.

The second item that Gaines draws from Hemingway is the value of understatement. Hemingway has the ability to talk around events without giving the specific event that occurs. Thinking about "The Sky is Gray" again, Gaines has stated that the only white people that Octavia and James come in contact with in the short story are polite and nice. However, the existence of racism and segregation permeate the text. even though it is not explicitly stated, Octavia and James must go to the back of town to eat because of their skin color, and while the white people they come in contact with are nice, there are those, who do not appear, that remain lurking off the margins of the page.

Hemingway, of course, is not Gaines' only influence; however, he has provided Gaines with two major aspects of his writing. These influences cannot be overlooked when talking about the legacy and work of Gaines or any author for that matter.  

Rowell, Charles. “That Louisiana Thing that Drives Me: An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines.” Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 86-98. Print.