Two Takes on Minstrelsy

Two unpublished pieces from Professor Jolliffe's Rhetoric class, UIC Feb. 27 and March 16, 1990:

MINSTRELSY AS RHEORICAL SITUATION

"Entertainment," particularly the American mass entertainment industry, has rarely been considered a field ripe for rhetorical analysis.  If, however, there is a sense in which all art is propaganda, the various forms of mass commercial entertainment ought to provide a veritable blueprint of the means by which mass opinion is molded and influenced.  By way of illustration, I wish to investigate the typical rhetorical features of the industry's great forebear, the American minstrel show, as it existed from the mid-1840s into the early years of the Twentieth Century.

One knotty problem to be addressed at the outset is that of exigence, without which a rhetorical situation cannot exist.  Audiences, as a rule, do not patronize the entertainment media to be instructed or persuaded, as we usually understand these terms; they do so to be "entertained," for the sake of pleasure.  Yet instruction and persuasion, as I will try to show, are very much built into the structure of entertainment, hidden, as it were, behind the laughter and sentiment of performance.  In the case of the American minstrel show, as one scholar has noted:

By addressing themselves to race in the decades when white Americans had to come to grips with what the position of blacks would be in America, while at the same time producing captivating, unique entertainment, blackface performers quickly established the minstrel show as a national institution, one that more than any other of its time was truly shaped by and for the masses of average Americans.  (Toll 26)

The exigence at issue, in fact, was nothing less than the future relationship between the white and black races in America.  Although minstrel shows never posed this question explicitly, it was nonetheless imbedded within the reciprocal relationship between minstrel entertainers and their mass audience.  Upon this foundation, we can draw some rhetorical generalizations about the genre and its descendants in American popular culture.

The mass entertainment market in America was in its formative stages in the years following the War of 1812.  Even in its earliest years, it showed signs of an incipient bifurcation into highbrow and lowbrow cultures.  The cultured elite, with their Shakespearean theaters, symphony orchestras, and ballet and opera companies, were content to ape European fashions.  The growing mass audience in the cities reacted with scorn, and sometimes with violence, to such fare and demanded dramatic heroes of their own in melodrama, variety shows, the circus, and minstrelsy.

The existence of blackface entertainment on the American stage has been documented to Independence, and it achieved popularity well before the advent of the standard minstrel format.  Until 1812, Negro characters were "either comic buffoons or romanticized noble savages" (Toll 26), but in the following decades they began to resemble one of the prototypical American Everyman characters, that of the bragging, wisecracking backwoodsman best exemplified by the legend of Davy Crocket.  "Ethiopean Delineators" (as white actors in blackface came to bill themselves) appeared in the 1820s as solo acts.  To audiences in Northern cities, most of whom had never seen a black person, they were taken to be authentic, faithful interpreters of Negro humor, song, and dance.  Although there was sometimes some truth to the claim of authenticity, if only in a highly distorted amalgamation of African American folk materials, the "Negro" songs they sang were usually Irish or English folk or popular melodies garbed in dialect.

By the early 1840s, troupes of two and three blackface performers were entertaining New York audiences comprised of all social classes in American society, from the elite in their plush boxes to the poor in their faraway gallery.  It was nascent Middle America in the pit area, however, to whom blackface entertainers learned to address themselves.  The basic features of the American minstrel show, form and content, were "hammered out in the interaction between performers and the vocal audiences they sought only to please"  (Toll 25).  In February, 1843, the Bowery Amphitheatre debut of the (fictitiously named) Virginia Minstrels, whose professed aim was to portray the oddities, peculiarities, eccentricities, and comicalities of that "Sable Genus of Humanity," established a format that was to dominate American entertainment for half a century.  By the following year, the Virginia Minstrels undertook a European tour and another troupe, the Ethiopian Serenaders, entertained at the White House, as minstrels would continue to perform there under the administrations of Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, and Pierce.  The two decades prior to the Civil War saw an enormous proliferation of professional and amateur minstrel troupes, mostly local performers in the larger Northern cities, where they often enjoyed decade-long runs in theaters and regional circuits to small towns above the Mason-Dixon Line.  By the mid-1840s, the ideal minstrel blend had been achieved, a balance of earthy comedy and robust music (the Virginia Minstrel style) with sentimental escapism (the Stephen Foster style).

To understand the rhetorical features of the minstrel show, it is perhaps best to begin with a discussion of its rhetors. interlocutor and end men, the dual specialty roles which came to define the minstrel format.  Although not the character who attracted minstrelsy's large public, the most crucial role rhetorically was that of the interlocutor, since part of his function was to evaluate audience response moment to moment and orchestrate the show to its particular taste.  By a variety of means, the discourse between interlocutor and end men served to reassure the white urban audience of its "middle" social status.

With a precise if somewhat pompous command of the language, an extensive vocabulary, and a resonant voice, the interlocutor personified dignity, which made the raucous comedy of the end men even funnier.  When the end men mocked his pomposity, audiences could indulge their anti-intellectualism and antielitism by laughing at him.  But when he patiently corrected the ignorant comedians with their malaprop-laden dialects, audiences could feel superior to stupid "niggers" and laugh with him.  (Toll 52-53)

Significantly, the interlocutor nearly always got the worst of these exchanges, yet he never lost his dignity.  Nevertheless, the jokes were usually at his expense, as Paskman observes:  "Whenever an end man scores a point, he is joined in boisterous laughter by his balancing colleague at the opposite end, and often by the entire troupe."  (24-25)  The same author perceives further that the "give-and-take between the centre and ends of the semicircle has in it the necessary element of contrast, which brings the minstrel show almost to the level of actual drama."  (24)

Originally as performed by the Virginia Minstrels, the interlocutor was one of four roles known collectively as the "burnt cork circle," which occupied four chairs arranged in a semicircle.   The end positions to [the interlocutor's] right and left were occupied by characters known, after the instruments they played, as Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, who wore "absurd and elaborate farce costumes" Paskman 89) and sometimes made special entrances with comic business.  In the earliest days of minstrelsy, the middle chairs would seat a banjoist and a fiddler, but in the years to come the shows would become more elaborate, adding more instrumentation (horns, string bass, flutes, etc.), sitting chorus roles assigned to tenor, baritone, and bass voices, and doubling the number of end men.  By the apogee of its popularity, minstrelsy would feature companies of up to forty in lavish, expensive productions.

The costumes , exaggerated make-up, and dialect of minstrel shows, before an audience that believed (or at least wanted to believe) in their authenticity, functioned in the same manner as the enthymeme and paradigm of Aristotle's rhetorical system.  It may be useful, in fact, to borrow from film theory the term "icon," denoting the recurrent visual images that define the standard film genres.  One genre theorist, Colin McArthur, cites a "continuity over several decades of patterns of visual imagery, of recurrent objects and figures in dynamic relationship" leading to genres as "profilmic arrangements of sign-events" taken up and transformed by cinema from cultural codes already in circulation (cited in Cook 60, 86).  In like fashion, minstrelsy gathered up and projected on a national scale most of the stereotypes of blacks that have permeated American mass culture and popular consciousness to this day:  in Donald Bogle's terminology, the Coon, the Tom, the tragic Mulatto, and the Mammy (the vicious black "Buck" character was not given mass expression until  D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation arrived at the crest of national race hysteria in 1915.  Minstrelsy's cardinal rule was never to present blacks as a threat to whites, but rather to assure whites that blacks were happiest in a position of servitude).

In the ten-year evolution of the standard minstrel text, the genre came to draw on a variety of sources, from both Afro- and Euro-American folk culture, and thoroughly amalgamated them into a mass, popular culture.  Beyond this transmuted lexicon of folk sources, minstrelsy was built virtually from the ground up:

[Minstrelsy] had no characterization to develop, no musical score, no set speeches, no subsidiary dialogue-- indeed no fixed script at all.  Each act-- song, dance, joke, or skit-- was a self-contained performance that strived to be a highlight of the show.  This meant that minstrels could adapt to their specific audience while the show was in process (Toll 34).

The text of the minstrel show consisted of two rudimentary parts, the first of which "had a definite technique to which all minstrel men were unswervingly loyal, and which has been consistently observed throughout its history (Paskman 21).  Typically the opening curtain would reveal the company of minstrels standing in position behind their chairs.  The interlocutor, at exact center, would begin with a ceremonial "Gentlemen, be seated!" and then announce an instrumental overture. The interlocutor would then resume by establishing repartee with one of the end men:  "Good evening, Mr. Bones."  Then would ensue, in Paskman's description,

a running dialogue between the middle man... and the two end men...  This dialogue was interrupted at regular intervals by set songs, ponderously and portentously announced by the Interlocutor, with the whole company frequently joining in the chorus.  In fact, the whole machinery of jokes and pompous persiflage existed chiefly for the sake of introducing these set numbers (21).

The song material fell into two general categories, both of which have entered deeply into the consciousness of succeeding generations of Americans.  First came exuberant, happy-go-lucky songs on the order of "Dixie" (originally "I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land," written by Dan Emmett of the original Virginia Minstrels in 1859), "Zip Coon" (a.k.a. "Turkey in the Straw"), "Clar de Kitchen," "Lucy Song," "Such a Gettin' Up Stairs," "Gumbo Chaff," "Sittin' on a Rail," and many others.   The other category, greatly stimulated by the  popular success of Negro Spirituals as performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, was comprised of sentimental ballads of contented Negroes on idealized, pastoral plantations.  Between these songs would run a seemingly endless stream of jokes, based principally upon puns, malapropisms, conundrums, and physical humor.

Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway (1941)

The First Part of the minstrel show would generally end with a "walk-around" by the entire troupe, which rose

to a frenzied pandemonium of rhythmic sound.  Bones and Tambo, leaning at an angle of forty-five degrees, and holding their noise makers high in the air, sustain the climax as long as body and soul can stand the strain.  One final triumphant chord from the band, and the curtain drops on the First Part (Paskman 28)

While the stage was being set for the Second Part, individual members of the troupe would perform specialty acts in an "olio" that included burlesques and parodies of well-known dramatic scenes, buck and wing dancing, instrumental performers, and satirical "stump speeches."  The olio counterpoised a sort of free fantasy to the rigid structure of the First Part.  "Here technique is thrown to the winds, and formulas of every kind are forgotten (Paskman 83)."

The Second Part proper (often called the "afterpiece") sometimes presented a complete drama, either a wild farce or a tearful melodrama, as changing fashions and the social climate dictated.  In both forms, the Second Part was often built upon a romantic triangle, with a featured female impersonator in the "nigger wench" role.  In its heyday after the Civil War, minstrelsy thus seemed to be responding to a new exigency, the "woman question," again from a white male point of view.

The full impact of minstrelsy upon future popular entertainment genres lies beyond the scope of this paper.  My emphasis upon its rhetorical function, however, entitles us to observe, along with Robert Toll, that minstrelsy was not only "the first indication of the powerful influence Afro-American culture would have on the performing arts in America," but also "the first example of the way American popular culture would exploit and manipulate Afro-Americans and their culture to please and benefit white Americans" (51).  Because it was presented in the guise of entertainment, however, the implicit rhetoric of minstrelsy was seldom apparent to its nineteenth-century audiences, or even to its twentieth-century chroniclers.   Writing in 1928, Paskman could still write longingly and unblushingly of the days when the "shuffling old darky" served for stage entertainment, and Doubleday could publish such commentary without fear of an outcry.  So drastic a shift has our discourse on race taken that what was once acceptable, even "natural," stage entertainment can now appear only a barbaric vestige of a past most of us would rather forget.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Bogle, Donald.  Toms, Coons, Mammies, Mulattoes, & Bucks.  New York:  Viking, 1973.
Cook, Pam, ed.  The Cinema Book:  A Complete Guide to Understanding the Movies.  New York:
     Pantheon, 1985.
Engel, Gary D.  This Grotesque Essence:  Plays from the American Minstrel Stage.  Baton Rouge:              
     Louisiana State UP, 1978.
The Entertainer:  Everybody's Favorite Series No. 10.  New York:  Amsco Music Sales Co., ca. 1935.
Haverly, Jack.  Negro Minstrels:  A Complete Guide.  Upper Saddle River NJ:  Literature House/
     Gregg Press, 1969.
Paskman, Dailey.  "Gentlemen, Be Seated!"  A Parade of the American Minstrels.  New York:
     Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1976.  Original publication:  New York:  Doubleday, 1928, with co-
     author Sigmund Spaeth.
Roorbach, O.  Minstrel Gags and End Men's Handbook.  Upper Saddle River NJ:  Literature
     House/ Gregg Press, 1969.
Toll, Robert C.  Blacking Up:  The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America.  New York:
     Oxford UP, 1974.
Wittke, Carl.  Tambo and Bones:  A History of the American Minstrel Stage.  New York:  Greenwood
     P, 1968.

THREE MINSTREL PIECES IN SEARCH OF A RHETORICAL HEURISTIC

Perhaps nothing proves the usefulness of Edward P. J. Corbett's characterization of rhetorical criticism as a bridge between "inside" textual analysis and "outside" historical reality better than a study of American minstrelsy.  While Corbett conceives rhetorical analysis proceeding outward from the text, however, it might be better in this case to insist upon a rhetorical "commutative principle" and also stress the priority of the diachronic material world over the static synchronicity of any given minstrel text.  We must first realize that this bit of text represents the process, as well as the product, of countless thousands of interactive performances, changing constantly over a period of more than fifty years.

For this reason, the selections I append here, although they were chosen to reflect the triptych construction of standard minstrel performances, can not be considered "typical."   Bits of gags, songs, and stage business performed by white "nigger minstrels" in blackface before a white audience at the Bowery Theatre in the 1840s may well have worked for quite different rhetorical ends than the same bits performed by black "colored minstrels" before a black audience in Alabama in the 1880s.  We have to know context before we can handle text.

The frontispiece from Roorbach (Appendix A) might be the best place to begin, since it underlines the central premise of minstrelsy, offering whites an imaginary privileged look at the secret life of blacks.  As in any theatrical performance, a suspension of disbelief is required on the part of the audience, but in the case of minstrel performances, the desired illusion depends upon a most peculiar sort of doublethink:  purportedly "authentic" black characters are being portrayed by white "delineators" of Negro life as an entertainment.  LeRoi Jones's comment that black music before jazz, in its successive appropriations of older white and black styles, "was almost like the picture within a picture, and so on, on the cereal package" (110), could pointedly be extended to include both the musical and non-musical elements amalgamated into minstrelsy many years before.

1.  "How Bones Became a Minstrel"  (Appendix B)

The First Part of a minstrel performance consisted of a set series of songs separated by comic dialogue between end men and interlocutor.  Like most other extant texts of such dialogue, the tale Bones narrates here is characterized by its seeming randomness:  before it can reach its destination, it is continually sidetracked into a verbal jungle of puns and malapropisms.  It is a series of miscommunications somehow adding up to a punchline.  A great deal of its humor depends upon an effective rendering of Negro dialect.  In language, no less than costume, burnt-cork makeup, music, and dance styles, the Negro is defined by his deviations from the audience's standards, and as such he becomes a target for ridicule.

The interlocutor is present to give dramatic expression to the "common sense" values of the white audience, but his "whiteness" is altogether ambiguous, for the end man most often has the last laugh at the interlocutor's expense.  Minstrelsy carves out a comfortable middle position, so that the audience may be assured of its superiority to both ignorant slaves and sanctimonious, highfalutin professors.  The prototypical straight man and fool roles crystalized within minstrelsy thus represent a socially sanctioned rhetoric of largely unconscious social processes under the guise of commercial entertainment.

The "logic" of minstrelsy as rhetoric is therefore muted and entirely subordinated to the ethos of the characterizations and the audience's belief in their authenticity.  Pathos meanwhile remains a separate component, entirely absent from the comic repartee but concentrated within the sentimental songs that punctuate it, as if to balance the cruelty of the humor.  The curious pattern of minstrelsy is to strictly separate the head from the heart.

"Jim Crow"

2.  The First White Man"  (Appendix C)

"Stump speeches" were a specialty act that quickly became an indispensable staple of the "olio," or entr'acte portion of the minstrel show, performed in front of the curtain that divided the First and Second parts.  This particular example is a mock sermon, a variation of the typical send-up of politicians and pastiche of current events, though in either case the principle object of ridicule was the black orator, perhaps even the idea that blacks were capable of oratory.

The usual stump speech carefully preserved the historical forms and flourishes of oratory while reducing them to utter nonsense, but "The First White Man" never collapses into this sort of incoherence.  Its point of departure is a satire upon black religion, a standard component of the black stereotype lurking in the American unconscious, and its first premise is the assertion that Adam and Eve were Negroes.  At a time when it was widely held, and "scientific" studies endeavored to prove, that blacks and whites were not of the same species, such an assertion must have appeared the most preposterous idea possible.

Interestingly, the last laugh here appears to be on the white man, unfavorably cast as a frightened black man.  Thematically then, the story resembles Afro-American folk tales of the "Massa John" stripe, wherein the slave relies on his own cunning to outwit the master, and the basic narrative may very well have been of black origin.  Although it was not uncommon for minstrels to appropriate black folk materials indiscriminately in order to subject them to ridicule, such ambiguity as that which occurs here, probably unnoticed by performers and audiences alike, must have been rare.

3.  "Old Zip Coon" (Appendix D)

The title character of this Second Part sketch (often called the Afterpiece of the minstrel show) originated in the 1840s in the song of the same title, which became one of the genre's early smash hits  and went on, in instrumental form, to enter the consciousness of subsequent generations as "Turkey in the Straw."  The term "coon," which Webster defines as a "vulgar term of prejudice and contempt," possibly originated with this stock minstrel character.

Returning to Jones's "cereal box" analogy with which I began, it is difficult to tell whether this sketch a black burlesque of white culture or a white parody of low black culture.  "Nigger will be nigger," drawls Cuff, a blacked-up white actor in front of a romantic backdrop of a South that never was, addressing his remarks to audiences who, for the most part, have never seen actual black people.  The sketch introduces the additional stereotypes of an Italian immigrant and a female impersonator in the "yaller gal" role.  Built upon a romantic love triangle, as were most Second Part pieces of the minstrel era, " "Zip Coon" dances its way around the emotional powderkeg of miscegenation, but the only resulting explosion is laughter.

At certain periods in the history of minstrelsy, particularly in the 1850s when the the sectional conflict was waxing in the United States, the farce and burlesque of the Second Part gave way temporarily to sentimental melodramas of "old folks at home," which established the fortunes of Edwin P. Christy and Stephen Foster.  But the years of reaction in the 1870s brought back the raucous comedy with which minstrelsy had begun.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Corbett, Edward P. J.  Introduction, Rhetorical Analyses of Literary Works.  New York:  Oxford UP,
     1969, pp. xi-xxviii.
Engle, Gary D.  This Grotesque Essence:  Plays from the American Minstrel Stage.  Baton Rouge:
      Louisiana State UP, 1978.
The Entertainer:  Everybody's Favorite Series No. 10.  New York:  Amsco Music Sales Co., ca. 1935.
Haverly, Jack.  Negro Minstrels:  A Complete Guide.  Upper Saddle River NJ:  Literature House/
     Gregg Press, 1969.
Jones, LeRoi.  Blues People.  New York:  Morrow, 1963.
Roorbach, O.   Minstrel Gags and End Men's Handbook.  Upper Saddle River NJ:  Literature
     House/ Gregg Press, 1969.


APPENDIX A:

APPENDIX B:  "HOW BONES BECAME A MINSTREL"

Interlocutor.  You promised, Mr. Bones, that you would one day tell us all the facts connected with your adoption of the stage as a profession.   There's no time like  the present, so if you are in the mood--

Bones.  Oh, yes; anything to oblige.  You see it was in de good old "hard cash" times dey speaks of, when gold and silver was so plenty dat all de buttons on our coats was made of ten dollar pieces and nobody cared enough to carry it in his pocket, dat Pete Simmons and me come up on de steamboat from Natchez in search of a job.  We'd worked our way along, and dere wasn't a picayune in our pockets we land upon de levee.

Int.  But where were the ten dollar buttons you spoke of-- why did you not use them?

Bones.  Why, you seem bossy, we would, if it hadn't been for one ting-- we hadn't.  Well, as I was sayin' me and Pete make our first 'pearance on de landing, widout a picayune in our pockets, and den we conclude dat it was 'bout time  to make a levy ourselves.

Int.  That was sensible.  Well, what did you then, sir?

Bones.  De fustest man dat cum along was a chap dat was a little de wuss for licker.  "Bossy," says I, "we's bofe on us dead gone broke; gib us a lift."  "I'll gib you a lift," says he, and wid dat he made a grab for me, but I up and tap him on de snoot and down he go like a log;  got de deadfall on him, sure!  "Spar' me," says he, I'se only a flat boatman."  Den I histe him, and he go away quite sober. Den I skedaddled in a panic.  When I had got out of sight, "Pete," says I, "we's in a corner now;  money all gone, and no credit nudder.["]  Just den we come to a broker's office.  A bright idear struck me.  I went in.  "Do you give discount here?" says I.  "Certainly," says he.  "Well, den," says I, "just discount me a twenty."  "All right," says he, "fork over.  Where's your twenty?"  "O," says I, "I'll gib dat to you after I've turned dis over."  "Not on discound," says he, " and dis aint de place for your kind o' operations rudder.  Just you take dis banjo and go out on de side walk and gib us a song and a broke down, and de banjo's yours and all you can make by it."  Dat was enuff, so I took de banjo and I go out on de sidewalk and begin to play and caper; and pooty presently a crowd cum along, and I gub  all de songs and jigs I was quainted did, and de money it come rollin' in by de handful, while Pete carried roun' de hat.  When I'd 'bout got tired I start to go, but jus den a gemman come up and tap me on de shoulder.  "You're my meat," says he.  "I want a good jiggist for my minstrel show.  State your price and come along;" and dat's de way I got into de burnt cork bisness.

Int.  You were just then like a pugilist when he knocks his opponent out of time.

Bones.  How's dat?

Int.  You made a decided hit.

Bones.  O, I become werry popular after dat and day engage me as todder end man at de show.  and de oder todder end man was so jealous dat he gib me jaw and I hit him, and he challenge me; but, somehow, we both of us fought shy of each oder, and de papers got up a conundrum about it.  Says one feller, says he, "Why am de projected 'fair of honor tween two well known burnt corkers in dis city like do predicament of a family dat finds it difficult to pay expenses?"  And what do you tink de answer was?  "'Cause it is hard to make both 'ends' meet."

APPENDIX C:  "THE FIRST WHITE MAN"

"'Strate am de road an' narrow am de paff which leads off to glory!'  Brederen Blevers:  You am 'sembled dis night in coming to hear de word and have splained and 'monstrated to you; yes youbisnand I tender to splain it as lite ob de liven day.  We am all wicked sinners hea below-- it's a fack, my brederen' and I tell you how it cum.  You see

'Adam was de fust man.

Ebe was de tudder,

Cane was de wicked man

'Kase he kill his rudder.'

Adam and Eve were bofe black men, and so was Cane and Abel.  Now I s'pose it seems to strike yer understanding how de fust white man cum.  Why, I let you know.  Den you see when Cane kill his brudder de massa cum and say, 'Cane, whar's your brudder Abel?'  Cane say, 'I don't know, massa.'  But de nigger node all de time.  Massa now get mad and cum agin; speak mighty sharp dis time.  'Cane, whar's your brudder Abel, yu nigger?'  Cane now git frightened and he turn white; and dis de way de fust white man cum upon dis earth!  And if it had not been for dat dar nigger Cane we'd nebber been troubled did de white trash 'son de face ob dis yer circumlar globe.  De quire will sing de forty-eleventh him, tickler meter.  Brudder Bones pass round de passer."

APPENDIX D:  "OLD ZIP COON, An Ethiopian Eccentricity, In One Scene

CHARACTERS

ZIP COON

CUFF CUDLIP

ITALIAN MUSIC MASTER

SALLY

SCENE:--  The common room of Zip Coon's house on the Old Plantation, opening on the verandah-- the cotton and cane field beyond-- the Mississippi in the distance.

(ZIP, elegantly dressed, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar, with his feet on a table on which are decanters and glasses.  White boy presenting a huge mint julip.)

ZIP.  Dere, clar you'self!  (drinks)  Dis brandy isn't so good as de last; (smacking his lips) shall hat to discharge my wine merchant if he don't improve, for sartin.  Maybe it's my taste, but somehow 'taint half so good as de ole Jamaica massa used to gib us to wash de hoe cake down with.  It's mighty comfortable to be rich, to be sure, but it's debblish tiresome to hab to keep up de dignity all de time.  O, for one good old-fashioned breakdown, like we used to has when massa run de old plantation for us, and all we had to do was play de banjo and loaf.  (looking right and left)  Nobody looking!  Maybe 'taint genteel, but here goes for a try.  (walks around and sings)

Long time ago we hoe de cotton.

     Grub among de canebrake, munch de sugar cane.

Hunt coon and possum by de ribber bottom,

     Past and gone de happy days-- nebber come again!

Ho, hi!  How de moments fly!

     Get up and do your duty

While de time am passin' by!

(breakdown, throws off his coat)

Dere we knock de banjo, make de sheepskin talk,

     Shout until de rafters to de chorus ring;

If de massa see us, make him walk his chalk.

     Trabel libely, o'er de boards, cut de pigeon wing.

          Ho, hi! etc.  (Break)

(CUFF CUDLIP, with a small bundle on his shoulder and in a ragged suit, peeps in and softly enters.  Throws bundle down and joins in breakdown)

CUFF.  Hoe it down libely, here's nobody to fear,
     De gate am off de hinges, no overseer dere;
No one in de cornfield, all de coast is clear,
     Here de bell a-ringin', step up and pay your fare!

BOTH.  Ho, hi! etc. (break)

CUFF.  Hy'a!  it's no use talking-- nigger will be nigger!  (puts his bundle on table and takes chair)

ZIP.  (slipping into his coat)  I'll hat you know daters aint no niggahs now.  I belongs to de upper crust.   You'm main' yourself mighty comfortable anyhow.  'Spose you couldn't be hired to refuse a drink?

CUFF.  Don't press me.  (puts bottle to his mouth, takes a swig, spits it out)  Bah!  What sort o' stuff dat?  Hoss medicine?

ZIP.  Hoss medicine, you ignoramus dark, you!  Dat's de genuine Otard.

CUFF.  If dat's "old tod"  I don't want none of it.  But, say,  Zip, you look as if you took de world easy; can't you gib us a job.

ZIP.  You wouldn't degrade you'self by workin, would you?  Well, go out dere among de white trash, den.

CUFF.  I say-- I see a gran pianner dere, but what's de ole banjo-- where's de ole cremonum?

ZIP.  O, dem ain't fashionable, now.  You 'member when we lib in de old quarter and I took a shine to Sal Beeswax, de master's cook?  Hy'a!  Well-- de masa's goned away and I got his property and married Sal, and we got a darter-- black one side de fact an' white todder-- an' she won't touch nuffin' short of a piannum, and dat brings all de high-toned darkies round her, and-- and de white trash dey come round her thick as flies in a 'lasses hogshead.

CUFF.  Does any of 'em git stuck?

ZIP.  You bet!  Here come de gal, golly, look at dat hool.

(Enter SALLY, with music and an Italian master)

MASTER.  (sings)  O, dulce anima de mi con amore da poca.

SAl.  "O dull seems the time unto me when I want to play poker."

MASTER.  Costa Diva mi figelia, la croche se ha ben travato,--

SAL.  "Casta Diva."  I'm sure I'd not sing if I wasn't "obligato".  (aside, seeing Zip) My fader! (puts her arms about his neck)

ZIP.  My darter!  (embraces her)  Here's old Cuff Cudlip-- don't you 'member Cuff!  (Cuff attempts to embrace her too.  She curtsies and passes under-- he embraces Zip instead, and is slapped.)

SAL.  (sings)  What magic's stealing o'er me, that mein, that nobel brow!
     O, how my heart is thumping against my corsets now
If this is what de crazy chaps call "love" in poetry,
     I'se ready to frow up de sponge, for a good coon am I!  (goes to to piano with master)

CUFF.  (sings)  Now my heart with remebrance is a'wharming,
And lub all its outposts is sto-horming,
New hopes in my bosom am fo-horming,
     O, how like a belas' I sigh!
I feel like a chap-fallen lover
Dat a big garden roller's past over;
I'd consider myself in clover
     For to catch but a glance of her eye!

ZIP.  (pulling on his kids)  Put on your airs!
Here comes de company in pairs--

CUFF.  O, yes, by twos and threes they come;
I'll let them see that I'm at home  (takes black coat out of bundle, and puts on coat and large white kids)

SAL.  (as enter company of both sexes, white and black)  Walk along, stalk along!  Daddy's got de gout;
Take him by de elbow, make him shake it out!  (sits at piano and plays to chorus)

AIR

CUFF.  O, clap de kitchen, niggers,

     Your music can't begin,

Pull off your coats and spencers,

     Take your gloves off and sail in;

Listen to de banjo

     While de old ting am in tune,

Incline your ears and listen,

     And I'll gib you "Old Zip Coon!"

Taking banjo suddenly from bundle, plays-- dance changed to the old melody-- Sal leaves the piano and dances alternately with Zip and Cuff.  She and they become more enthusiastic, all the rest nearly frantic, till Sal faints in the arms of Cuff, and

CURTAIN

IN MY ROTATION


Lightly and Politely

• Woody Shaw, Bemsha Swing (Blue Note, 1986)

One of Shaw's last great recordings, this is a perfect example of his mature lyricism.  Recorded live at Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, the set brings together the local rhythm section of the young pianist Geri Allen, bassist Robert Hurst, and drummer Roy Brooks.  All four solo extensively throughout.

The program is heavy on tunes by Thelonious Monk, beginning with the title song and adding "Well You Needn't" (annotator Bob Blumenthal notes that Shaw uses Miles Davis's simplified version of the bridge), and "Nutty," and Brooks's own tribute to Monk by the rhythm section only, "Theloniously Speaking" to end the set.  Shaw himself contributes "Ginseng People" and "In a Capricornian Way." Allen's solo here recalls McCoy Tyner,  while she herself  provides the gentle ballad "Eric."   The group also performs Wayne Shorter's "United," with which Shaw titled one of his 1980s LPs for Columbia, which the trumpeter proceeds to turn inside-out.  Likewise, Woody tears up the only standard included here, "Star Eyes."

• The Jimmy Giuffre 3, Trav'lin Light Collectables/ Atlantic, 1958)

In addition to the leader, this trio includes the indispensable Jim Hall and Bob Brookmeyer to create my favorite Giuffre "chamber jazz" formation.  My disc is a CD-R burn from a Collectables set that also included a performance by Mabel Mercer, which I removed to make room for additional Giuffre material.  The remainder of my CD-R is filled with earlier Capitol material.

"The Swamp People"

• Groucho Marx et al. The Mikado (Columbia, 1960.

Groucho as the Lord High Executioner is an inspired choices in this shortened tv version of the beloved operetta.   I think of his playing similar roles in  the Marx Brothers' early movies, and those who wrote their movie scores undoubtedly had a love for Gilbert and Sullivan at their roots.

I had this disc in the stack and finally played it a month ago.  It's the only version of The Mikado I own, but it's enough, a pleasure to hear.

• Various Artists, The New Wave in Jazz (Impulse, 1965)

I'm sure I once owned, in the '60s, a vinyl copy, but I sprang for this CD a while back.  This digital rerelease adds Albert Ayler to the mix but subtracts "Plight" "Ayler's Holy Ghosts"and "The Intellect," I suppose to allow room for unedited versions of tracks from the original.  The liner notes indicate that the concert also included performances by Betty Carter  and Sun Ra, but were unfortunately not recorded.

It's all from a live concert benefit in March 1965 for the Black Arts Repertory Theatre... LeRoi Jones, that is.

First up is the John Coltrane Quartet  on the weird-ass Evan Ahbbez standard "Nature Boy"; Trane & Co. render the tune a mere exercise in intervals, as they take it out to God-knows-where.

But waiting in the wings is the Archie Shepp Septet,  with Marion Brown on alto, Fred Pirtle, baritone sax, and trumpeter Virgil Jones.  The band also featured Ashley Fennell, trombone; the estimable Reggie Johnson on bass; and Roger Blank on drums.  Many names here are rarely spoken of, but boy-o-boy.    The crown jewel of the entire disc is their thrilling version of Shepp's "Hambone," an utterly cosmic set of variations on multiple themes and a chorus to raise the hairs on one's neck.  Masterful.

"Hambone"

The disc then introduces the Charles Tolliver Quintet, featuring James Spaulding, Bobby Hutcherson, Cecil McBee and Billy Higgins.

Theirs was undoubtedly the first version I ever heard of Monk's "Brilliant Corners," a slyly marvellous rendition.   Their set also features Tolliver's "Plight."

The Whole Shebang, 74 minutes

• Ornette Coleman, Ornette at 12 and Crisis (Impulse/ Real Gone Music, 1968 and 1969)

• John Lewis, The Golden Striker and Jazz Abstractions (Atlantic/ Collectables, 1960 and 1961)

• The Yardbirds,  BBC Sessions (Rhino/ WB, 1965-1969)

• Gary Peacock, Tales of Another (ECM, 1977)

• The Beach Boys, Little Douce Coupe  and All Summer Long (Capitol, 1963 and 1964)

OUR CAR CLUB

• Lee Morgan, Take Twelve (Jazzland, 1962)

Lee Morgan - trumpet

Clifford Jordan - tenor saxophone

Barry Harris - piano

Bob Cranshaw - bass

Louis Hayes - drums

1. "Raggedy Ann" - 6:46
2. "A Waltz for Fran" - 4:55
3. "Lee-Sure Time" - 8:27
4. "Little Spain" (Jordan) - 7:45
5. "Take Twelve" (Elmo Hope) - 4:55
6. "Second's Best" - 7:08
7. "Second's Best" [alternate take] - 7:29 Bonus track on CD reissue

• All compositions by Lee Morgan except as indicated

NEXT:  

The Secret Agent

NOTE:  An unpublished ms submitted to Prof. Sorenson, Fall 1987.  Perusing it now, what with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent War on Terror, it seems particularly apt as a contemporary critique.  The fanciful title must have been suggested by some good weed.

THE HERMENEUTIC HEURETICS OF CONRAD'S SECRET AGENT

In principle what one of us may or may not know as to any given fact can't be a matter for inquiry to the others.  --The Professor (Chapter 4)

A bit of newspaper with a few lines of print on the suicide of a nameless woman twists its way through the gusting dust and debris of a desolate Soho street:  "An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang over this act of madness and despair."  (Chapter 13)  A week earlier, while the headlines shrieked at every street corner of a powerful explosion in Greenwich Park, two men, a "Doctor" and a "Professor,"getting drunk within the din of the Silenus, likewise had to admit  "some mystery" amid the debris:  a charred hole at the root of a tree, a man's body blown to pieces.  "The rest's mere newspaper gup," one of them says.

These men are distinguished from the average gup-consumer by the fact that they are intellectuals;  they believe they know something others don't.  One of them, in fact, had provided the chemical device for the explosion, while the other was the erstwhile comrade of the man who plotted its detonation.  They think of themselves, moreover, as active participants-- agents-- in the historical flow, unlike the faceless crowd:

... the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers... numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror, too, perhaps.  (Chapter 5)

This mass of mankind sustains itself on mass-media "treacle," and it is most often seen milling about  street-corner ideology troughs, the news vendors.  As it happens the two intellectuals are continuing a debate, posed a month ago, which they will attempt to settle at a third meeting ten days from now.  The subject of their discussion, the central issue of the novel, is precisely the efficacy of propaganda-- more properly, of Science-- upon human history.

The terms of the argument cover the gamut of radical theory.  At one extreme lies the non-consequent, passive historical determinism of the "ticket-of-leave apostle" and former apprentice locksmith, Michaelis, who views humanity as the object of the material world:

History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads.  The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events.  (Chapter 3)

At the opposite pole stands the anarchist Professor, a student chemist and a pathetic, a human bomb whose cosmos consists exclusively of his own, self-obsessed subject.  (The "old terrorist" Karl Yundt holds a similar position, but lacks the "force" to undergo the refinement of such an utter break with the human race.)  Finally, somewhere near the apex of the argument, the Doctor, a failed medico, imagines a synthesis between the subjective and objective factors of history.

Lately the news has been full of an International Conference on terrorism to be held in Milan.  This is to be a great tribunal of public opinion, the fulcrum for the actions of secret agents, including the nominal Agent Delta, alias "Mr. Verloc," who mutters that he is "in the habit of reading the daily papers" and even fancies that he understands what he reads.  Yet his superior-- and nemesis-- Mr. Vladimir contemplates an act "of destructive ferocity as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable  as a lever to rally corpulent, bourgeois, "natural-born British subjects," the very likenesses of Mr. Verloc himself, to the defense of European Civilization.

The text most of these characters inhabit and perceive is black and white, arranged in straight lines, uncomplicated causes and predetermined effects.  Grey, however, is an ominous uncertainty, a lack of clarity, a chimera.  Mr. Vladimir regards from his disdainful distance "a grey sheet of printed matter" with its "F.P." logo and crude hammer-pen-torch imagery.  "A charabia every bit as incomprehensible as Chinese," he sneers.  "Isn't your society capable of anything else but printing this prophetic bosh in blunt type on this filthy paper?"  (Chapter 2)

The society "F.P." to which he refers is the Future of the Proletariat, of which Mr. Verloc is vice-president and whose grey propaganda rag is edited by the same Doctor who will presently be arguing  a point of political theory with the Professor, over a red-and-white tablecloth at the Silenus.  To the Professor, the laws of history are motivated not by propaganda, but by another sort of "F.P." altogether:  the Force of Personality.  Curiously, neither of them appears to think remarkable a certain pink hue in the pages of the daily newspaper lying open in front of them both; in a world perceived in cool blacks, whites, and grey, only the trashy mass media appear to reflect the heat of living events.

The Mystery:  a finely-shaded detective story, an essay on epistemology, frames the text of The Secret Agent.  Paradoxically, the more the text seems to solve this mystery, the more it appears to lose its grip upon the solution. At one point, text "explodes" in a simultaneous constructing and deconstructing, yet for the most part it is static, talky, and cluttered with everyday peculiarities.  On its surface we are allowed to witness only one "extraordinary" event, the anticlimactic murder of "Adolf Verloc," narrated in a strange, matter-of-fact fashion; the rest is perceived through other media:  news reports, dialogue, interior monologue, and a certain amount of authorial second-guessing.  As a result, we are paradoxically intimate with the Secret of each character, but at the same time distant enough to view all of them as the objective components-- victims, as well as agents-- of a process we are privileged to contemplate at much wider vantage.  In effect, we are scientists examining the results of an experiment.

Naturalism in red and shades of grey:  The Secret Agent is a social experiment gone awry, for there are really no straight lines here.  A multiplicity of parallel correspondences dissolves at the point of infinity into a circle as perfect as a woman's gold wedding ring.  There are only circles , from absolutism through capitalism to anarchy and back to absolutism.  The social machine generates its own doom, a Secret Agent, who/ which touches off an explosion that cracks the very structure of the text, causing it to redouble violently upon itself.

The most obvious dislocation is the creation of a time warp:  the explosion is enacted twice, redoubling its force, in the public scene with the Doctor and Professor and again with Inspector Heat's intrusion into the privacy of the Verloc home.  Within each character, shards of memory are jarred loose in flashbacks (e.g., Verloc's in Chapter 2, Heat's in Chapter 5, the Assistant Commissioner's in Chapter 6, etc.).  The text flashes in unmistakable parallelisms, systemic repetitions, and reversals of character and scene.  Its suborbital systems are unstable, eccentric, endlessly repetitive mirror image within the slivers of text sent flying by the explosion at the root of a Tree at the edge of pastoral eternity, the threshold of of knowledge.  Everything and everyone is turned inside-out, base and superstructure,  subject and object, police and criminal, yet the text remains within the larger pattern of the fabric of historical reality; nothing is really out of control here.

Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage, a  retitling of Conrad's novel 

"... The mind and the instincts of burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer...  Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same.   

-- Chief Inspector Heat, Chapter 5

The Machine of the Secret Agent is a mechanistic world of cogs and wheels spinning inexorably toward a shattering explosion.  It is a universe of tinny player pianos, purring gas jets, ticking clocks, carving knives set carelessly upon kitchen tables, bells jangling over shop doors, and whirling galaxies refracted through the lens of the Greenwich Observatory.  Its inhabitants are secret agents and secret police simultaneously, taking blind stabs into the mystery of history; they both cause and react to the movement of their cosmos, but their observations of events are bizarrely distorted, refracted through the lens of personality.  While they sometimes perceive intimations of the Machine's heuristic depths, its fundamental truths, they do so only sporadically, at odd moments, unwillingly.  We see this in Mr. Vladimir's pungent remark, "Unhappy Europe!  Thou shalt perish by the moral insanity of thy children."  Of a fateful back-alley encounter between the Professor and Chief Inspector Heat, the narrating voice insists, "It was in reality a chance meeting."  Later on, in a universe where nothing-- and thereby everything-- is left to chance, Inspector Heat grimaces sardonically at the vagaries of fate as a bit of charred cloth conceals itself within his mind.  Again and again, the ritual of recognition is enacted and effaced.

Life..., in this connection, is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex organized fact open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked.  My superiority is evident.

--The Professor, Chapter 4

From our "readerly" vantage beyond the rim of the hermeneutic circle, within which all points of view are transparent, we behold the Professor's "superiority" as the reverse image of his sense of physical and social inferiority.  Unaware of his own inner psychological pinball, he is nonetheless a shrewd "outside" observer oppressed and revolted by the crush of humanity.  Prophet of "the perfect detonator," thumb on his ill-concealed pneumatic squeeze-bulb, the Professor is indeed a padlocked pantry of explosives in an anonymous one-room flat.

The source of his power, he realizes, is that his psychopathology is completely open to the guardians of law and order, for his is the philosophically pure anarchism of the raging id.  A déclassé intellectual, the "mad dog" spawn of Western Civilization, the Professor posits the Force of Personality to explode the façade of conventional morality, order, and rationality.  He anticipates happily the day when citizens will be shot on the street in an open police state.  He is the Hammer of our hermeneutic.

The Professor's functional counterpart is Mr. Vladimir, the renegade aristocrat, who primes the entire narrative sequence leading to the social explosion.  He is linked to the Professor in the causal chain, but only indirectly, as by a mysterious black box:  Agent Delta (not the sort of detonator he had in mind).  Mr. Vladimir, too, is the victim of paranoid delusions of grandeur:

Descended from generations victimized by the instruments of an arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally, and individually afraid of the police.  It was an inherited weakness, altogether independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his experience.  He was born to it.  But that sentiment... did not stand in the way of his immense contempt for the English police.  (Chapter 10)

Two-faced Mr. Vladimir is truly a split personality (a "Hyperborean swine... what you might call a gentleman"); a clean-shaven "dogfish... a noxious, rascally-looking, altogether detestable beast").  His public charm at the Great Lady's salon conceals the vile heart that beats within his inner chamber at the embassy.  Confessing his secret loathing of the nation and class whose hospitality sustains him, Mr. Vladimir nevertheless takes it upon himself to act as their historical proxy by plotting an attack on rationality itself, by exploding the bourgeois belief in the democratic sacred cow of Science.  He, like the Professor at the other end of the social spectrum, is that stranger in our midst, the savage end-product of civilization.

Nothing that happened to [Michaelis] individually had any importance.  He was like those saintly men whose personality is lost in the contemplation of their faith.  His ideas were not in the nature of convictions.  They were inaccessible to reasoning.  (Chapter 6)

The role opposite the Hammer is played by patient (in both senses) Michaelis, the author cum celebrity cum hermit.  The Pen in our equation, he is ironically unable to write the language of "consecutive thought."  His utopian idealism ("Capitalism has made socialism, and [its laws] are responsible for anarchism...  Then why indulge in prophetic phantasies?")  renders itself precisely into a "prophetic fantasy," an act of pure contemplation, because it lacks a Subject, a conscious historical agency.

At the beginning of his political career, the locksmith's arrest produced a bunch of skeleton keys, a heavy chisel, and a short crowbar (but no hammer!)  The "ticket-of-leave" apostle remains the perpetual prisoner of innocence, a still, small voice from the country wilderness.  As a disconnected superego, he occupies a small upstairs room above the orphan Stevie on the morning of the explosion, an ironic counterpart to the brutal "lost" father.

Stevie, still an ego in formation, becomes the Torch in the F.P. hermeneutic.  The departure of Mother to the invalid home leaves him with surrogate parents, the Verlocs.  "Poor Stevie" is left alone to solve the mystery of the cosmos with pencil and paper in "coruscations of innumerable circles suggesting chaos and eternity" on Mother's kitchen table (down two steps from the cozy parlor walled off from the sleazy shop opening onto the mysterious world of the street.)  Within the Verloc family, life poses no mystery at all; there is "good," there is "poor," and there is "beastly," as long as he can keep these categories distinct and pristine in his mind, Stevie can be at peace within himself.   Outside the circle of the family, however, the identity "Stevie" does not exist:  to all but Winnie, he is a mere cipher, a fair-haired lad, a degenerate, a smoldering address label among scattered bits of flesh and bone.  At the textual center of The Secret Agent the Verloc family self-destructs in the successive disappearances of "Stevie," "Winnie," and "Adolf."

From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama.  

                                                                  -- Assistant Commissioner (Chapter 10)

"Stevie," as we have seen, is exploded into space:  "No. 32 Brett Street."  Further along in the familial chain-reaction, "Winnie" explodes into time, transformed into the anonymous anniversary date, "24 June, 1879" inscribed within her wedding ring.  The central presence of ersatz Agent Delta, however, expires in stages:  "Adolf" ceases to exist as his blood spatters upon the floor beneath his parlor sofa.  "Mr. Verloc" goes next:  his bank account, the only thing that matters about him in the end, belongs to the fictional "Mr. Prozor."  The remaining corpse therefore bears no "real" identity.  "Agent Delta" must, for diplomatic reasons, remain an "open secret" between the House of Lords and a certain embassy.

Preventor/ detonator Secret Agent Delta (orthographically an upside-down V, a counter to himself and to Mr. Vladimir; in chemical formulae, the symbol of Heat as the catalyst in a reaction) is the most conventional bourgeois gentleman, the corpulent Mr. Verloc.   Mr. Vladimir is constitutionally compelled to humiliate such a man.  In turn, we witness the agony of "Adolf," whose oppressive days and fevered nights are lived in a necessary and inevitable obsession with his alter-ego, the face of whom appears in the very conjugal window of his soul.  This absence of identity is the Force Of Personality with a vengeance, for "Adolf" emerges, after all, as the "perfect detonator."

Identities are not stable entities within the historical dialectic of the text.  They are deceptive, sardonic subterfuges ("Professor," "Doctor"), generic or honorific titles of function ("Great Lady," "Assistant Commissioner"), formal sobriquets of relationship ("Mother," Comrade Ossipon"), and terms of endearment and / or entreaty ("Tom," Adolf).  Finally, there is the problematic identity of "Joseph Conrad," who wishes to call attention to this whole sticky business of names.

All the novel's positive values-- decency, culture, stability, humanism-- lie with the Old Regime of "the empire on which the sun never sets," the order personified by the Great Lady (who champions the ruined ex-convict Michaelis) and Sir Ethelred, the "Great Personage" who sponsors the nationalization of fisheries in the House of Lords "("the house par excellence, in the minds of many millions of men").  The gentry appear here as historical anachronisms.  There is "Toodles," Sir Ethelred's innocent squire (unpaid) who imagines his own identity as something which can endure "unchanged," and who, upon the whole believes this earth to be "a nice place to live on."  Sir Ethelred himself, the political counter to Mr. Vladimir, perceives himself a mover and shaker of the empire.  Yet he directs his efforts at "sprat" (of the herring family, the red variety), instead of "dogfish."  He does not wish to be bothered with details.  The Great Lady likewise is content to view the "surface currents" of social life, the sort who swim through her salon.  None of them care to risk their bearings in unplumbed depths.  The shattering penalty to be exacted upon the perfidious Vladimir, after all, shall be the suspension of his honorary membership privileges at the Explorers Club.  "They'll have to get a hard rap over the knuckles over this affair," Sir Ethelred proclaims.

The character most interested in getting to the bottom of this fathomless business is the nameless Assistant Commissioner.  A former colonial officer of the same empire, he prefers the well-drawn boundaries (white and black) between civilization and heathen insurrection to the endless stream of bureaucratic intrigue and paperwork of the bourgeois metropolis.  His relationship with Annie, his own "domestic drama," provides the secret impetus for his entry into the affair of the Secret Agent.  From the outset, he pursues the mystery, apparently disinterested, with "excellent hopes of getting behind it and finding there something else than individual freak of fanaticism."  In the end, however, he is forced to report, "What I mainly came upon was a psychological state," rather than the "logical" plot he had set out to find.  In the meantime, the "truth" of Agent Delta's secret confession is slipping into time and out of history.

"You revolutionists... are the slaves of social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in the defense of that convention.  Clearly you are, since you want to revolutionize it."  --The Professor (Chapter 4)

The final chapter concludes the debate between the Doctor and Professor, and the Force Of Personality seems to have the last word, counterposed to the vision of Michaelis of "a world planned out like an immense and nice hospital" governed by the tenets of Faith, Hope, and Charity.  The Doctor, who now knows the scoundrel within his skin, is forced to yield to the Professor's prophecy, a world of "madness and despair":  "Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world."  Yet in the coda that follows, as they separate to pursue their private demons, the Professor is no more certain of his argument than the humbug Doctor:  "He had no future."

We are left with a sort of sociopolitical Heisenberg Principle:  certainty dissolves, and the historical subject remains a mystery.   The social explosion ends in social paralysis.  We remind ourselves of La Belle Epoch and its literary lions, the Edwardian prophets of irony and pessimism in the entr'acte before the Great War, but we must also recall these years as a time of retreat for the international workers' movement with its fierce debates and isolated explosions, particularly in the failed Russian Revolution of 1905.  Hindsight permits us to see that event as a dress-rehearsal for the historic drama of 1917, but Conrad, in the last analysis, could not foresee the Future of the Proletariat stretching forward into this century.  The terms of his debate are those of Plekhanov and Bakunin, not Lenin or Fidel, who have had a great deal to say about the subjective factor in human history.

It comes as no surprise then that the working class itself appears so seldom in the text.  When not part of the passive, undifferentiated mass, workers appear only as greatly stereotyped figures, chiefly the casual (and slightly sinister) contacts made by the idiot Stevie:  the anonymous cabman and Mrs. Neale are portrayed as brutalized drudges, petty thieves, and chronic alcoholics.  Hence Conrad foresaw only continuous historical stalemate, the futility of class struggle.  For him the Future of the Proletariat awaits the initiative of an outside Secret Agent, a historical "accident" to obliterate the present and recreate it endlessly.

IN MY ROTATION:

a couple of items from a recent package I received from Hamilton Books/ Music:

• Captain Beefheart, Plastic Factory (GoFaster Records, 1966-73)

The first nine tracks were recorded from a radio broadcast from the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, June 17, 1966.  Bonus tracks include broadcasts from various dates and places, from 1967 and 1968 (post- Safe As Milk, pre- Trout Mask Replica).  The final track consists of a Beefheart interview with John Peele in the U.K.

Sun Ra, The Early Albums Collection, 1956-1963 (Enlightenment 4-CD box)

Caveats:  As usual, there is no session or personnel information.  The year of release given here is often at variance with the information given in the Wikipedia entries, and many of Sun Ra's albums released during this period have been omitted.  The graphics here sometimes fail to match those that Wiki displays, no doubt because of the many reissues on different labels the albums have undergone.

All that being said, for me this is a worthwhile collection consisting mostly of music I've never heard.   More detailed comments appear beside each album included here.

• Jazz by Sun Ra aka Sun Sound (Sonet, 1956)

• Sound of Joy (Delmark, 1957)

• Super-Sonic Jazz (Saturn, 1957)

• Interstellar Low Ways (Saturn, 1959)

• Jazz in Silhouette (Saturn, 1958)

• The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra (Saturn, 1961)

 

• When Sun Comes Out (Saturn, 1963)

Sun Ra, "Brother from Another Planet"

• The Singles (Saturn/ Evidence compilation, 1955-1960)

lightly and politely:

• Sun Ra, Strange Celestial Road (Rounder, 1979)

• Various artists, Delmark:  55 Years of Jazz

The track listing below almost says it all.  Bob Koester

OUR CAR CLUB

KINKS BONANZA!  I replaced some rock items from the ELANTRA COLLECTION with these little masterpieces.

• The Kinks, Face to Face/ Something Else by the Kinks (Pye/ Reprise, 1966, 1967)

The Kinks, Lola Versus Power Man and the Moneygoround /Percy (Pye/ Reprise, 1970, 1971)

• The Kinks, Arthur (Pye/ Reprise, 1969)

NEXT:  Blackface Minstrelsy And The Birth Of American Mass Entertainment