The Columbia History of the American Novel

was exhilarating, because they were free to explore the new and the modern within themselves and society. A Gertrude Stein deshy; coding the psychology of language, a Sherwood Anderson examining sexual repression, an F. Scott Fitzgerald heralding the 'Jazz Age,' a Djuna Barnes exploring gender boundaries, an Ernest Hemingway testing the limits of masculinity, all were stimulated by societal reshy; arrangements. For others, like the Fugitives and later Agrarians in Nashville, the transformations were troubling, because they could neither easily nor quickly replace their sense of past, of tradition, of -408- stability. For still others, like the 'New Negroes' in Harlem, the fluidity meant that they could assume for the first time an authorishy; tative space in the literary landscape.

One aspect of identity that reconfigured differently during this period was that of race. Not only was race construed as a marker of individual identity, but it was also a way of representing transforshy; mations in the larger society. For some writers, authentic and meanshy; ingful American experience could best be approached through an understanding of the 'other,' and more typically a racialized other. Though the United States was becoming more multiracial and mulshy; tiethnic with increased immigration from Asia, Central and South America, two racial groups, and the two most oppressed in American society, became the center of these representations. Native Americans and African Americans, both largely marginalized in literature as in the political and social economies, functioned as racialized embodishy; ments of the modern, of the traditional, or of the primitive, and of the contradictions and tensions among them. In the face of dramatic changes and mechanization, the existence of Native Americans was conflated to represent an unchanging simplicity, an untroubled comshy; munication with nature and the spirit. Oliver La Farge, born in the Northeast and a Harvard graduate who studied and taught anthroshy; pology and ethnography, received a Pulitzer Prize for his novel of Navajo life, Laughing Boy (1929). Mabel Dodge Luhan encouraged attention to Native American subjects in her New York salon and later at Taos, New Mexico. Racialized others represented one way of countering the perceived failure of the dominant group to sustain a fixed center of existence.

Even more than Native Americans, African Americans became symbolic of otherness. Their increased visibility outside of the closed South, their continuance of folk customs, practices, and beliefs, and their contribution to the rhythmic 'new music' of jazz and its acshy; companying dances attracted some writers to their potential as litershy; ary subject. The early modern writer Gertrude Stein in Melanctha (Three Lives [1909]) had rendered the subjectivity of an African American female in a text devoted to the psychology of three working-class women. Following Stein's groundbreaking, but brief, attention to the African American, Sherwood Anderson considered the race one of the richest sources of subject matter for the American -409- literary artist, as he put it in 'Notes Out of a Man's Life': 'If some white artist could go among the negroes [sic] and live with them much beautiful stuff might be got. The trouble is that no American white man could do it without self-consciousness. The best thing is to stand aside, listen and wait. If I can be impersonal in the presence of black laborers, watch the dance of bodies, hear the song, I may learn something.'

Anderson, like others of his generation who had attained adultshy; hood before World War I, perceived that motion, the fast pace of contemporary life, mobility, and the increased ease of traveling far from home combined with the knowledge of mechanical power and impersonal destruction to produce individual fragmentation and spirshy; itual malaise. From the perspective of an Anglo-American from the Midwest, Anderson observed in the novel Dark Laughter (1925) a 'consciousness of brown men, brown women coming more and more into American life.' With this consciousness of 'the dark, earthy,' America in Anderson's formulation could return to an elemental conshy; nection with the earth, nature, human feelings and emotions, and thereby stave off the debilitating emotional complexity of the postwar modern world or what he perceived as 'the neuroticism, the hurry and self-consciousness of modern life.' Anderson was seeking a means to represent continuity and essence in the face of enormous changes in the conception of a 'good Life.' Anderson attempted, as did others, to distill an essential difference between peoples on the basis of racial characteristics. Though not suggesting a racial hierarshy; chy on the basis of right, power, or intellect, he relied upon a pershy; ceived and inescapable difference attenuating emotional complexity in whites and blacks. African Americans for him were the extreme other yet unsoiled by modern complex civilization. Though he figured the other as positive, he did not examine the stereotypical assumpshy; tions beneath the surface: the African as primitive, simple, sexual.

Carl Van Vechten, who like Anderson was a Midwesterner and a novelist during the 1920s, also appropriated the experience of the African American other to symbolize not merely the perceived failshy; ures of modernity but the contradictions and contradictory impulses of emergent areas of expressive culture. While Anderson sought a black folk essence in rural settings, Van Vechten explored the newly urbanized African American's assimilation into a blandly homoge-410- nized society with the complicating difference of an African heritage that he construed as rhythmic, sexual power. In New York, Van Vechten observed the growth of the black population from 152,467 in 1920 to 327,709 in 1930, and as a music and drama critic he witnessed the development of a 'Negro Vogue' in Manhattan, particularly after the arrival of the musical revue Shuffle Along on Broadway in 1922. From that point on, Van Vechten promoted and cultivated the talent and the difference within black New York. He helped launch the careers of novelists Walter White, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. In his own novel Nigger Heaven (1926), he ventured into the cabarets of black New York, where music and dance marked freedom and abandon from everyday constraints. Basically, he delved into the 'primitive' underside of an emerging black middle class concerned with propriety, morality, and upward mobility. The ground for his representation of a larger societal problem, however, functioned not only to stratify and offend the vulnerable African American community but also to codify and extend the negative implications of an uncivilized racial other lurking beneath the veneer of finery, education, and manners. Van Vechten, who was a supporter of African Americans, did not fully appreciate the dangers of attributing racial characteristics to one side of the warring impulses of modernity.

Despite the well meaning of sympathetic observers, such as Van Vechten or Anderson, the exploration of the racial other was not necessarily contingent upon concern for the subordinate position of minorities in society or upon a belief in the desirability of increased racial understanding or harmony. C. Vann Woodward has remarked that the post-World War I years witnessed the 'greatest stratification of the races and widespread enactment of ' Jim Crow' laws.' Segregationist practices hardened into fresh restrictive codes and laws designed to delimit the position of African Americans within the society, and with the tacit approval of the presidential administration of Woodrow Wilson these modern segregation laws became widespread throughout the nation, not merely in the South where old grievances against African Americans as responsible for the region's economic woes surfaced in overt efforts to keep African Americans in their 'place' (which meant keeping them subordinate to whites in the social and economic structures). As Lillian Smith, one observer of the -411- rigidity and intent of segregation in the South, recalled an African American woman saying to her: 'We cannot ride together on the bus, you know. It is not legal to be human down here.' In the aftermath of World War I, returning African American veterans, by and large, refused to accept racist practices restricting their humanity and their participation in a world they had fought to keep safe for democracy. Much of white America, however, was not yet willing to concede a new era in race relations. During the summer of 1919, twenty-five race riots occurred across the nation, in urban and rural areas, such as Washington, D.C., Chicago, Omaha, Longview, Texas, and Elaine, Arkansas. By the end of the summer, eighty-three African Americans had been lynched and scores of others injured. Race relations deteriorated, and conditions generally worsened for all people of color.

Race, in both its positive and negative implications, was posited as a way of focusing cultural issues in literary, social scientific, popular, and scholarly discourses. It was more persistently visible in writings about the American South, perhaps because implicit in the burgeoning of racial matter in literature is a focus on region, on understanding and representing the land, the people, the customs and manners, the history that together distinguish one part of the nation from another. In the South, though clusters of Native Americans still lived in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia and though smaller tribal groups were dispersed from Mississippi to Florida, the primary racedefined peoples were Caucasians and African Americans. These two, interconnected in history and culture because of the existence of chattel slavery until after the middle of the nineteenth century, were long familiars in the region and antagonists on the issue of race. Thus, it is not surprising that during the first fifty years of the twentieth century, according to Howard Odum's study of Southern culture and writing, 800 nonfiction works on African American life, 400 on nature and the folk, and 100 on socioeconomic studies appeared. Simultaneous to being prominent in writings about the South, race has been an insistent, though not always audible or explicit, presence in texts emanating from other regions, in multiple forms of expressive culture, and, most often, in