Blasphemous Modernism by Pinkerton Steve;
Author:Pinkerton, Steve;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2017-05-15T00:00:00+00:00
You see, Myra, as Jesus, it was the desire of God, my Father, that I, by my deaths, expiate the sins of the worldâ¦â. God had me sin, and die, that I might be born again from the womb of the woman with whom I sinnedâ¦â. To me was it a great thing that the hands that caressed me on that cross between thieves should give sensations that were the loving hands of a mother with her just-born babeâ¦â. And always was I afraid that at some time would I love a woman and in procreation die again. Always I knew that I could not suffer alone. And that is the way in which I atone for the sins of the world. (151â52)
Christâs story, transplanted onto this parodic figure of the messianic poet, becomes an erotic tale of love and death through countless generations. The saviorâs own âsinâ begets his next incarnation in this irreverent conflation of mother-love, Agape, and sexual desire. At the end of Gentleman Jiggerâs Part Iâwhich corresponds to the story told in Thurmanâs Infants of the SpringâAeon dies in a âterrible traffic accidentâ (161). One wonders, though, whether the real cause of his death was his âsinâ with Myra, the love that would cause Aeon âin procreation [to] die againââand it remains unclear what sort of redemption, if any, he achieves. Whereas Lockeâs anthology cast Toomer as the most likely candidate for the messianic New Negro, Nugent makes Toomer a figure of the doomed, failed messiah: one more likely to be crushed by an oncoming car than to redeem his race through literature. Likewise, while Thurmanâs Infants cites Toomer as the only African American artist with âthe elements of greatness,â it also portrays him as one of the many âNegroes of talent [who] were wont to make one splurge, then sink into oblivionâ (221, 62).
Thurmanâs and Nugentâs separate invocations of Toomer as the model, yet failed, Negro redeemer are particularly telling, because by the time Infants of the Spring was published, Toomer had not only apparently failed to make good on the promise heâd exhibited in Cane nearly a decade earlier; he had also repudiated any racial affiliation with âNegroes,â let alone New Negroes. If he was to be a messiah, he wanted to herald the dawn, not of a new day in the black race, but of a brand-new âAmericanâ race at whose coming he had already hinted in Cane.32 In their satirical treatments of Toomer, Infants of the Spring and Gentleman Jigger both participate in the tradition established by The New Negro of heralding Caneâs author as The One. But given all that had changed since 1925, their appropriations of Toomer take on a decidedly cynical and disillusioned flavor. By the early 1930s, these novels suggest, the elusive New Negro had come to seem less âmorning starâ than dying starâand one that refused to be tethered to any racial program, let alone a sacred African American calling. Gentleman Jigger takes the implicit commentary a
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