Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives by Stanley Crouch

Author:Stanley Crouch [Crouch, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, General
ISBN: 9780307554321
Google: izEkLpI7hQIC
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1999-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Surely inspired by the short list that Stephen Dedalus made in Portrait of the Artist, moving him from town to country to continent to planet to universe, Murray’s Negro American frame of refined experience is designed to be inclusive of (and in vital dialogue with) the arts, popular entertainment, sports, cuisine, society, education, politics, and so on. In brief, a world. Train Whistle Guitar is the first novel and it develops around the information gathered through two senses, the ear and the eye. Scooter learns almost everything either from hearing a tale told or from seeing something happen. When he begins reading children’s stories, the eye takes on a different function. In that first novel, we can easily see that Murray went in the opposite direction from what Diderot called, in visual art, “moral painting.” Diderot meant raising ordinary human events to the state of human tragedy. But when Murray takes the ordinary Southern Negro situation, which is often no more than some Negroes sitting around talking, he transforms it to the condition of human affirmation. Here arrives Murray’s ongoing polemical point, from novel to novel: being a good little boy and listening to the wisdom of the elders is the way one absorbs the fundamentals of an oral tradition as well as all the determination necessary to extend those fundamentals into a richer intellectual world but one that is no more human, finally, than where one began. Doing one’s work and playing by the rules when they’re right and planning to change them when they are wrong is the best way to go forward in this life.

Train Whistle Guitar is full of rhythm and syncopation, memories and many voices, each element used to realize the kind of jazz influence American novelists and short story writers have been periodically struggling to bring to the art of fiction since the 1920s. Superbly evocative and a poetic epic, the novel shows its hero discovering through the story of his forebears that he is obligated to make the high end of its aspirations come true through his own accomplishments. In ways that bring together the archetype and the plausible character, Murray invents figures who represent certain backgrounds and are composites of Negro American history in the flesh—ex-slaves, folk blues players and sophisticated jazzmen, World War I veterans, schoolteachers, and so on. This allows the boy to look history in the face and listen to what it has to say through the people who know what they know. So Scooter hears tell of many things, the broad lore of the omni-directional bloodline, and comes upon one man murdered in some bootlegging mixup, another stabbed to death by his girlfriend, and is told of yet another who has been done in by the down-home legend of barrelhouse piano, Stagolee DuPas. The latter scene might be a variation on a violent moment in Faulkner’s “Pantaloon in Black.” Stagolee has to put a concluding exclamation point to the deputy’s life because the redneck kicks the keys off

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