Urbane Revolutionary by Rosengarten Frank;

Author:Rosengarten, Frank;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2008-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

PART 3

LITERATURE AND SOCIETY

CHAPTER 9

Poetry and Truth in C. L. R. James’s Fictional Writings

James’s work as a fiction writer and as a literary critic is intertwined with the issues and aims that occupied him as a revolutionary political thinker and activist. It would be misleading to base an approach to his writings primarily on distinctions of genre. The Black Jacobins is a historical work, yet its narrative sweep and underlying conception of human character and fallibility are literary to the core, and require not only some acquaintance with James’s Trotskyism but also an appreciation of how he makes use of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, as expounded in the Poetics. It isn’t difficult to find pages of The Black Jacobins that rival stylistically anything James ever wrote as a novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, or literary critic. Nicole King puts this point nicely when she notes “James’s affinity for fiction and narrative in nearly everything he wrote,” remarking that even in texts far removed from fiction, “he seemed to like nothing better than to tell a story” (King 2001, xiii).

But there is a facet of James’s personality that does come through much more vividly in his novel and short fictions than in any of his other writings, and that is his flair for reproducing the vernacular English spoken by his mainly proletarian and plebian characters. These fictional works, which belong to the same period that produced The Life of Captain Cipriani and the essays in the Beacon, bespeak an intimate knowledge and enjoyment of popular culture—religious beliefs, curious and sometimes funny superstitions, songs and proverbs, sex and sexism as practiced in the barrack yards of Port-of-Spain, and such fundamental aspects of daily life as marriage, family, fashion, food, and cooking.

In addition to these aspects of James’s fictional world, two other traits take vivid form: an unusual degree of concentration on the lives of women characters, and a sharp eye for differences of class, caste, and skin color. A twenty-year-old middle-class young man is the protagonist of James’s novel, Minty Alley, but women are its most combative and expressive characters, on whom the lifeblood of the narrative depends. Two of his short stories, “Triumph” and “La Divina pastora,” have women protagonists. These women belong to a community of have-nots, of “ordinary people” coping with survival on the most elementary level. Paul Buhle reports that in reaction to James’s “straightforward” descriptions of slum life “many letters poured in [to the Beacon office] denouncing obscene material” (Buhle 1989, 27).

Two interrelated questions have come up repeatedly in studies of James’s life and work: (1) Did he see his primary role as that of a writer? (2) What exactly is the place that literature occupies in his scheme of things?

James’s natural bent in all phases and spheres of his life was to see in language the best and most enduring instrument for examining the basic problems of human existence. For James, it was through the process of literary creation in all its forms, whether as fiction or

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