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The Dialect in/of Modernism: Pound and Eliot's Racial Masquerade

Author(s): Michael North


Source: American Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 56-76
Published by: Oxford University Press
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in/of
The
Dialect
Modernism: Pound
and
Racial
Eliot's
Masquerade
Michael North

WhenEzraPound firsttaggedT. S. Eliotwith the nickname


Possum, he no doubt meant to mock his friend'sreserve,but
he also used the name, which he had found in Joel Chandler
Harris'sUncle Remus, to recast Eliot's timidity as subversion.
In acting out his nickname, Eliot was to mimic what Alain
Locke once called the "'possum play' of the Negro peasant"
(qtd. in Hemenway 179), to use the traditionalstrategyof the
powerless, assuming a bland conformity that conceals an explosivecharge.In so doing,Eliotwouldbecome a milder,subtler
version of the tricksterfrom whom Pound had taken his own
nickname, BrerRabbit (Carpenter22, 414). Eliot acceptedhis
nickname and, at least for a time, the role it implied, and he
even introducedhis own variations,offeringat one point to play
Uncle Tom to Pound's Little Eva, at another point sending a
postcard to Pound signed Tar Baby (Letters 350; Carpenter
414).
With these nicknames and the roles they implied came a
language,the strange,distorteddialect that Harrishad popularized.When, in the courseof a quarrelwith LadyRothermere
about the Criterion,Pound advised his ruffledfriend to play
possum, he did so, appropriately,in dialect: "Dear ole SON.
You jus set and hev a quiet draw at youh cawn-kob" (Eliot,
Letters 590). Later, when Eliot needed to calm Pound, he responded in kind: "So chaw yore old corn cob & think of God
& Maise Huffer"(Letters612-13). This dialect became in their
correspondencean intimate code, a languageof in-jokes and
secretslike the one to which Pound alluded in 1922: "Dere z
also de stoorey ob the poker game, if you hab forgotten it"
(Eliot, Letters505). In the late thirties,Pound dubbedthis private dialect "epistolary," and he distinguished it from the
Queen'sEnglish,the languageof publicpropriety(SelectedLetters 303). As a violation of StandardEnglish, dialect became

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AmericanLiteraryHistory 57

the sign of Pound and Eliot's collaborationagainstthe London


literary establishment and the literatureit produced. Dialect
became, in other words, the private double of the modernist
poetry they werejointly creatingand publishingin these years.
The few bits and pieces of dialect embeddedin the PoundEliot correspondencethus reveal more than might be expected
about the relationshipbetween modernismand the literatureit
challenged.Pound suggestedas much, in form and in substance,
when he told a correspondentin the mid-thirties:"I wuz riz
among nigguhs/ the uneven forms of the camp meetin ... dos
jes get rightdown into my blood / regularstrophesBOREME"
(qtd. in Flory 76). In this crude and offensiveway, Pound ties
defiance of the standardlanguage,presentedhere as an essentially blackhabit,to the literaryexperimentationof modernism.
Black dialect is a prototype of the literaturethat would break
the hold of the iambic pentameter,an example of visceralfreedom triumphing over dead convention. The dialect in modernism is a model for the dialect of modernism, since black
speech seems to Pound the most prominentprior challengeto
the dominance of received linguisticforms.
Eliot also confessedthe hold of black speechover his imagination, but in an entirely differentway. Just two years after
signinghimselfas TarBaby,Eliotwroteto HerbertRead:"Some
day, I want to write an essay about the point of view of an
American who wasn't an American, because he was born in
the South and went to school in New Englandas a small boy
with a niggerdrawl, but who wasn't a Southernerbecause his
people were northernersin a borderstate and looked down on
all southernersand Virginians,and who so was never anything
anywhere..." (Read 15). What Pound paradeswith such bluster, the influence of black speech on his own language, Eliot
confesses as a dirty secret. For Eliot, black dialect is a flaw, a
speech impediment that clogs his languageand blocks his attempts to link his own individualtalent with tradition.
The two poets seem almost to be speakingtwo different
dialects,one earthyand natural,at one with sensation,the other
inarticulateand inauthentic. Indeed, Pound finally turned the
private language the two once shared against Eliot, who had
become so much more successful-"Waaal Possum, my fine
ole MarseSupial.. ."- punningon the old nicknameto suggest
that his friend had gone over to the masters (SelectedLetters
306). But this contrast may be more apparentthan real, for
Pound was hardly free of the sort of racial anxiety Eliot confessedto Read. It was Pound who said, "The decline of human
liberty in the States may quite possibly date from the year of

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58

The Dialect in/of Modernism

the emancipationproclamation,"thus dramatizingthe drastic


contrastbetweenhis own politicalcalendarand that of the race
he liked to imitate ("Revolt" 106). Pound'sversionof the racial
masquerademay be so full of insurrectionaryblusterprecisely
becauseit concealedan anxietyeven deeperthan Eliot's.In any
case, the language and the roles the two poets adopted from
UncleRemus are obviouslyshot throughwith ambivalenceand
contradiction.The proximityof blackspeechto theirown seems
to Pound and Eliot both an opportunityto be seized and an
afflictionto be regretted.1
It may be no mere coincidence,then, that the assumption
of Uncle Remus's languageby these white American poets is
synchronizedwith its repudiationby black American writers.
In 1921,just as Pound and Eliot werechoosingnicknamesfrom
Uncle Remus, James Weldon Johnson remarked"a tendency
to discarddialect" and the traditionalsubjectmatterof dialect
poetry,including" 'possums,watermelons,etc" ("Preface"40).
Johnson saw this as a positive trend because dialect poetry of
the time sufferedfrom rigid and shallow conventions such as
"mere mutilation of Englishspellingand pronunciation,"conventions that he very tactfully suggestswere imposed on African-Americanwriters"from without" (42).2In short, the language Pound and Eliot assume as part of their attack on
convention is itself a convention;the linguistictool they use to
mock the literaryestablishmentis in fact part of that establishment. On close examination,the dialect adoptedby these early
modernistsproves to be of a very peculiarkind, one that confirmsthe standardeven in deviatingfrom it. Indeed,one of the
advantagesof this dialect for writerslike Eliot and Pound may
be that it can contain and at least in part conceal their deeply
mixed feelings about race, language,and the social authority
that links them.
2
According to Malcolm Cowley, the creators of the first
modernist works were members of a generation"divested of
their local peculiarities,taught to speak a standardAmerican
Englishand introducedto the world of internationallearning"
(5). What Cowley says could obviously be generalizedbeyond
America. The linguisticestrangementto which Eliot confesses
in his letter to Read must have been all the more dauntingfor
Joyce, splayedbetween StandardEnglishand the languagesof
Ireland,and more so yet for Conrad,who was never to speak

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AmericanLiteraryHistory 59

Englishwithout a marked accent (Joyce 189; Najder 222-23,


357).
In fact,the linguisticanxietiesof the membersof this movement may be a typical effect of economic and political modernization.As RaymondWilliamssays,the increasingmobility,
dislocation, and centralizationof this centuryappear"to convert what had been an experienceof small minoritiesto what,
at certainlevels, and especiallyin its most active sites and most
notably in the United States, could be offeredas a definitionof
modernityitself' (78-79). If Williams is right, then the shock
Eliot felt when he firstheardhis own "drawl"againstthe standard syllablesof an academic languagemay be a paradigmatically moder experience.As the standardizationindispensable
to a smoothly runningmoder economy extends itself farther
and fartherover the globe and deeper and deeper into industrializedsociety, it awakensspeakersto the particularcharacter
of their own languagesjust as these peculiarities are extinguished.
Transatlanticmodernism, notoriously the work of exiles
and emigres, may be the literatureof this emergingworld minority and for that reasonit may be, even in its most influential
phases, what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaricall a "minor
literature."If a minor literatureis producedby a writerwho is
"a nomad and an immigrantand a gypsy in relationto [his or
her] own language"(Kafka 19), then the modernism of Eliot,
Pound, Joyce, and Conrad seems, at least on the face of it, to
fit the description.In fact, the tactics that Eliot and Pound use
in accentuatingthe differencesbetween American Englishand
British,using Harris'sdialect to emphasizetheir distancefrom
the British literarynorm, are just those Deleuze and Guattari
use to define a minor literature.Located "within the heart of
whatis calledgreat(orestablishedliterature),"and yet separated
from it by differencesof region, ethnicity, or class, a minor
literaturemakes use of its alienation "to oppose the oppressed
quality of this languageto its oppressivequality, to find points
of nonculture or underdevelopment,linguistic Third World
zones by which a language can escape ..." (Kalka 27).3

For Eliot and Pound, the world of Uncle Remus is such a


"ThirdWorld zone," yet it is clear from Johnson'scomments
that the same dialectthat signifiedPound and Eliot'sopposition
to the normsof BritishEnglishreinforcedfor African-American
writersother normsjust as oppressive.Thoughthis might seem
to suggestthat Pound and Eliot violatethe definitionestablished
by Deleuze and Guattari,it may be that this paradoxputs them
all the more squarelywithin it. The very terminology of "es-

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60

The Dialect in/of Modernism

cape" into "linguistic Third World zones" suggests that the


theory can apply only to those born outside the Third World
but anxious to identify with it. Deleuze and Guattari'sown
workis full of such cross-identifications,includingthis one from
Nijinsky:"I am a red Indian. I am a Negro. I am a Chinaman.
I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner,a stranger"(Anti-Oedipus
77). One of theirmost importantprecursorsis Rimbaud,whose
"deliberate,stubbornmaterialwill to be 'of a race inferiorto
all eternity'" they cite in Anti-Oedipus(86). In this book and
in A ThousandPlateaus, Deleuze and Guattariappreciatively
quote the end of Rimbaud's "Mauvaissang"--"I am a beast,
a Negro" (105; ThousandPlateaus 379).
The very use of Rimbaud's beastly metaphor, however,
shows the dangersof "becomingminor," as Deleuze and Guattari term it, by fancifulidentificationwith a minority.Deleuze
and Guattariare not immune to these dangersthemselves, as
is almost comically revealedby their own appropriationof dialect in the influential"Rhizome"chapterof A ThousandPlateaus, which they end with a verse from "01' Man River."For
the avant-gardewriterto become minor without changingany
of the dominant definitionsof what that "minority"means is
covertly to supportwhat he or she claims to attack. It might
even be said that racialcross-identificationof the kind so common in Deleuze and Guattari'sworkcounteractsthe subversive
effects of a minor literatureby allowing the sort of romantic
fantasyopen only to those who have some claim to be "major."
Thus the racial crossThus the racialcross-identificationsof writerslike Pound,Eliot,
identificationsof writers and Rimbaud may be a kind of involved defense against "belike Pound, Eliot, and
coming minor," againstthe very dislocationsof languagethat
Rimbaudmay be a
rise to their most challengingwork.4
give
kind of involveddefense
and Pound are in some ways the most instructive
Eliot
against "becomingmiof
"
nor, against the very
examples this conflict. When the two poets first met, Eliot
dislocationsof language still had what Wyndham Lewis called a "ponderous,exactly
that give rise to their
articulateddrawl" (qtd. in Ackroyd 56), and Pound was roumost challengingwork.
tinely mockedby the Englishliteratiforhis "nasaltwang"(Read
14). These divergentaccents werejust the most obvious manifestations of deeper and more troubling variations. Pound's
tenuous linguistic position, even in the years of his greatest
success, is exemplifiedby his abject grovelingbefore Thomas
Hardy over Homage to Sextus Propertius.Pound apologized
for usinghomage,"not an Englishwordat all," and he explained
himself by saying, "I come from an American suburb-where
I was not born-where both parents are really foreigners,i.e.
one from New York and one from Wisconsin.The suburbhas
no roots, no centre of life" (qtd. in Davie 46-47).5 In this, his

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AmericanLiteraryHistory 61

version of Eliot's letter to Read, Pound rushesto confirmwhat


the Englishsuggestedby mocking his twang, that as an American he had only secondaryrightsto the Englishlanguage.
If Eliot had felt linguisticallyanomalous at Harvard,how
much more so in Londonitself,wherethe arrivalof transatlantic
modernismcoincidedwith a movement to defendand advance
the standardizationof English.The Newbolt Reportand George
Sampson's English for the English, both published in 1921,
hoped to make English into a truly "national language," a
guarantorof racial homogeneity and social harmony (Crowley
236-50). To do so, they opposed local dialects and class variations in favor of a standard,common languagethat was supposed to representthe Englishethos. In this atmospherePound
and Eliot could be denouncedas denationalized"riff-raff imperilingthe social health and harmonyof England(Ricks 198).6
Yet such attacks really expressedno more than what the two
poets felt themselves,that their languagebrandedthem as cultural interlopers. Even late in his life, when he might have
seemed quite comfortablyEnglish,Eliot referredto himself as
a "metic," a foreigner,but in his early years in London this
feelingwas so stronghe confessedthe fearthat he might "simply
prove to be a savage"(Letters318; Gordon 208).
As Eliot's languageshows, this feeling of culturaland linguistic insufficiencyis inevitably transposedinto racial terms,
a transpositionthat does allow the poet to findthose "linguistic
Third World zones" that Deleuze and Guattari mention and
to make of them a moderniststrategy.The fact that at the very
time Eliot was disclosinghis fear of savageryhe was also claiming in print that the artist "is more primitive,as well as more
civilized, than his contemporaries"(Tarr 106), that at the very
time he confessed his uneasinessabout his "niggerdrawl" he
was playingTar Baby with Pound, shows how closely the racial
role combined defensivenessand militancy. The same factors
combined even more explosivelyin the case of Pound, who was
able to transformhis embarrassmentat having grown up in a
suburbinto the crude boast that moder artistsare "the heirs
of the witch-doctorand the voodoo" (Ezra Pound 181-82).
At the same time, of course,these roles feed the very prejudices from which Pound and Eliot had originallysuffered.The
preemptivemimicry of blacksis a traditionalAmericandevice
allowing whites to rebel against English culture and simultaneously use it to solidify their domination at home. Robert C.
Toll suggeststhat minstrel shows gained in popularityduring
the antebellum period because they both fed and fed upon
American culturaldefensiveness.On one hand, minstrelshows

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62

The Dialect in/of Modernism

in all their crudity offeredan outlet for egalitariansentiments


outragedby the conventionalEnglishstage.On the otherhand,
minstrel shows offeredthe white American common man an
example even he could feel superiorto, the black American
common man, who was used to exemplifyjust those qualities
white Americanswere most nervousabout (270-72).7 Minstrel
shows allowed white audiencesto have it both ways, to mock
tradition,aristocracy,Europeanculture,by comparingthem to
somethingearthier,more natural,more "American,"while simultaneouslydistancingall these qualitiesin a figureto which
even the commonest white audience could condescend.
Accordingto the account given by ConradAiken, dialect
played such a role for Eliot long before he met Pound and
became the Possum. As Aiken tells it in Ushant,his pseudonymous autobiography,the main question that he and Eliot
debated as students at Harvard was "whetherone could, or
should, lay siege to one or another of the Europeancountries,
or cultures,and with what prospectsof success .. ." (143). The
two were obviously hauntedby "the shadow of the Old Country"(135), a shadowthat cast such gloom over the new country
as to make it seem impossible for art. But the two students
resistedthe dismal conclusionof HenryJames,insistingin protest that "a new language,the languageof a new biologicaland
social continent, a new biological and social climate, was this
minute in its most fascinatingstage.. ." (137). Evidenceof this
?newemerginglanguagewas to be foundin movies, comic strips,
and smutty stories:"The very languageof the streethad genius
in it" (137).8

Aiken and Eliotthus assumethe traditionalAmericanpose,


that of vital, new, raw, egalitarian,common men as againstthe
gray cultural authoritiesestablishedin Europe, and they also
remodel it so that it can become a component of literarymodernism.All the convictionforthis pose is drawnfromthe American dialect of social classes and situations far removed from
Harvard.Like Eliot and Pound a few years later, the two positionthemselvesas classoutlaws,defyingthe standardlanguage
as a way of breakingthe grip of the standardliterature.And
yet the one specific example of this new languagethat Aiken
gives is a racial epithet: "Hadn'tthe Tsetse [Eliot]and D. [Aiken], just the moment before, been revellingin the latest slang
wordfor Negro, 'dinge'--? Could one findin Englandany comparablefecundity?"(Ushant 137).9SuddenlyAiken's account
of the new languagesplits open to reveal an irony as old and
shopwornas the minstrelshow. By affrontingEnglishpropriety,

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AmericanLiteraryHistory 63

this language appears natural and unaffected,but it achieves


this effect only by mocking blacks. These white Harvardians
can approach the lower depths by slumming in slang while
simultaneouslysolidifyingtheir position as whites by using racial slurs.
Yet even as they enjoyed such language,Aiken and Eliot
were also reimaginingthemselves as racial aliens. "Was it for
nothing," Aiken continues, "that William Blackstonehad left
the banks of the Cam for those of the Charles,to be alone with
his books, and the Indians, and his own concepts of goodness
and truth, and above all for his own invention of freedomand
innocence-freedom from the enslavingbonds of society, and
hierarchy in society?" (137). Cultural rebellion of this kind
seems almost synonymouswith a shift in racial allegiance,but
this shift is attended by certain ironies. In Aiken's account,
Blackstone repudiatesEnglish culture in two ways, by living
alone and by joining the Indians,but Aiken perceivesno contradiction here because he is quite capable of imagining life
among the Indians as life alone. He considers the Indians as
mere context or landscape,like the trees of the forest in which
Blackstone hides. Aiken is similarly unaware of any irony in
his speakingagainstslaveryand hierarchyjust afterhaving enjoyed the word "dinge."Identificationwith anotherraceis Aiken's way of freeinghimself from the authorityof Europe, but
his individual freedom requiresthe suppressionand even the
nullificationof the other race. Though his fantasiestake him
out of the orbit of conventional white culture, they simultaneously show how deeply implicated in it he remains.
Yearslater,in a celebratoryvolume on Eliot, Aiken would
repeat this account almost verbatim. "How delightedwe were
withthe word'dinge'fornegro,"he recalled,andthen continued,
"This rich native creativenesswas to be reflected,of course, in
[Eliot's]poetry,notablyin Prufrock.. ." ("KingBolo" 21). The
unintendedirony speaksvolumes about the dialect of modernism. By "rich native creativeness"Aiken means the American
language that refused to abide by English standards,the languagethat was to make the earlyworksof modernisman affront
to conventionallinguisticpropriety.Yet it is also true that Aiken's unfortunatetaste in epithetsis reflectedin Eliot'swork and
in that of Pound. One might almost say that in this way Aiken
has capturedin a single word one of the most basic ironies of
modernism, which used the language of race to strike down
restrictivelinguisticboundariesand social conventions and simultaneouslyto solidify boundarieswhose loss both Eliot and

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The Dialect in/of Modernism

Pound deeply feared.Dialect, which was to signifythe subversive freedomof the modernist,also marksthe languageof modernism with this fear.
3
A good example of these ironies is one of the poems Eliot
wrote in Frenchin 1916, a poem so close to Deleuze and Guattari it might have been writtento illustrateboth the rangeand
the limits of their theory. "MelangeAdultere de Tout" takes
its title and its tone from Corbiere and its conclusion from
Rimbaud, perhaps from the very text quoted twice in AntiOedipus.10The basic theme is deracination,which the poem
definesin threedifferentbut relatedways. The speakerwanders
fitfullyfrom place to place, and the recurrentconceit on which
the poem is built is that this movement through space means
alterationof personalityas well: "En Amerique, professeur;/
En Angleterre,jouraliste" (CompletePoems 28). Finally, the
poem expressesinstability of place and identity by variations
in language.Writtenin French about an American much like
Eliot himself, the poem includes German terminology,American place-names, French slang, and sheer nonsense like "tra
la la," to which Eliot gives the emphasis of rhyme. The poem
rubs familiarnames like "Omaha"up againstthe exotic: "De
Damas jusqu'a Omaha." It holds "Emporheben"and "Tra la
la" at an equal, if opposite, distance,definingits own idiom by
the vast differencebetween them. The very idea of linguistic
decorum, of a single standardof diction or tone, is mocked by
the easy movement between these extremes.In short, the language of the poem is what Deleuze and Guattaricall "a schizophrenicmelange,a Harlequincostume in which verydifferent
functions of languageand distinct centersof power are played
out, blurringwhat can be said and what can't be said ..."
(Kafka26).
As such, Eliot's "Melange"representsperfectlythe process
Deleuze and Guattari call deterritorialization,for the protagonist's movements from country to country unsettle identity
and languageat once, so that Omaha can seem as distant as
Damascus and sound as foreign as Emporheben.The natural
goal of this deterritorializingprogressabout the globe is, of
course, Africa, and the final version of the harlequincostume
is a savageskin robe: "Je celebraimon jour de fete / Dans une
oasis d'Afrique/ Vetu d'une peau de giraffe"(CompletePoems
29). Thus Eliot's speakerbecomes William Blackstone,albeit

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AmericanLiteraryHistory 65

in Africaratherthan the wilds of America.His restlesslinguistic


peregrinationcomes to rest in the savage desert, where racial
cross-dressingrepresentshis independenceand solitude.
Preciselybecausehe is waywardand free,the speakergravitates toward Africa, which is in this poem the place of placelessness.'In the same way, the African role is the vacant center
around which the other roles play, the empty epitome of the
speaker's lack of consistent identity. Tending toward Africa
frees the speaker from restrictivelinguistic and psychological
standards,liberatinghim into a state very much like the schizophreniaDeleuze and Guattaricelebrate,but this tendencyalso
leads toward the grave. The poem ends: "On montreramon
cenotaphe / Aux c6tes brulantesde Mozambique." The cenotaph implies that even after death the body continues to perambulate the globe. The African oasis is itself this cenotaph,
markingthe speaker'shabit of alwaysbeingelsewhere,a quality
this poem makes typicallymodem and necessarilyAfrican.An
adulteratemixture, an internationalpolyglot, the modernistas
Africanis symbolizedby his empty grave,which is the opposite
of everythingdefinite. The empty, silent grave is both the conclusion and a negative inversion of the rest of the poem. Its
dazzling linguistic variety drains away to nothing down this
hole in the sand, and mute absence alone remains where the
speakerhad once displayedhis many colors.
The peculiartone of the poem comes from the jaunty way
its speakeraccepts, even courts, this self-extinction.A number
of modernist theories about impersonality,including Eliot's,
could be illustratedby this poem, with its magic sleightof hand,
its removal of veil after veil to reveal at last an empty tomb
wherethe protagonistshould be. But the Africancenotaphalso
revealsa deep and very personalfear, the exact fear Eliot confessed to Read, that of a "small boy with a niggerdrawl,"who
was not a Southerneror a Northerneror a Midwesterner"and
who so was never anythinganywhere...." Eliot felt himself to
be just such an adulteratemixture, and his fear of that placelessness,that lack of identity, is expressedin the letter to Read
and in the poem by the fantasy of being black.11As suave as
the poem is, the choice is really rather stark, for being black
means to Eliot eitherto be everythingor to be nothing,to have
the freedom and the power of the cosmopolitan modernist or
to be locked alone in utter darkness.Three years after writing
"Melange,"Eliot sketched out the "impersonaltheory of poetry"in a letterto MaryHutchinson.It was a theory he seemed
apt to illustratehimself until he confesseda naggingfear:"But
I may simply prove to be a savage"(Letters318).

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The Dialect in/of Modernism

Given the many obvious similaritiesbetween "Melange"


and The WasteLand, which is also a restlessperegrinationand
a melange, one might expect to find a tendencytowardAfrica
in the later poem as well. Such a tendency did exist, most
notoriously in the original epigraph from Conrad'sHeart of
Darkness, but all examples of it ended up, like that epigraph,
on the cutting-roomfloor.The originalopeningscene, scribbled
over in the preservedmanuscripts,took a group of partygoers
reelingaroundBoston to the combined tunes of a host of popular songs. For this scene Eliot toyed with lines from a number
of songs suggestingminstrelshows. "Meet me in the shadowof
the watermelonvine / Eva Iva Uva Emmaline" combines, as
ValerieEliot'snotes say, lines from "By the WatermelonVine"
and "My Evaline."The first of these was, as the title suggests,
a "Negro song," and the second was part of a vaudeville extravaganzathat included the traditionalminstrel olio and at
least one dialect number:"RagtimeWill Be Mah Finish."'2
These lines are the firstexamplesin the draftof the famous
techniquesof quotationandjuxtaposition,andtheirprovenance
suggestsan unexpected prototype for Eliot's experiments:the
minstrel show.'3 "Meet me in the shadow of the watermelon
vine" is also, however, a blackface version of a line that had
haunted Eliot for years with its primal complex of temptation
and threat: "Come under the shadow of this grey rock." For
The WasteLand, it seems, Eliot intendedto take this line, the
firstline of "The Death of Saint Narcissus,"datingfrom 1915,
and mergeit with the minstrelsong, "Bythe WatermelonVine"
(Waste Land 95, 129n). "Meet me in the shadow of the watermelon vine" combines sexual temptation, the allure of the
sensual black stereotypewith its promise of releasefrom guilt
and convention, and the dread of spiritual annihilation that
appearsin the final draft,whereall that is found in the shadow
underthe rock is "fearin a handfulof dust." Both possibilities,
releaseand annihilation,seem associatedin Eliot's mind with
another race and what he fancies is the languageof that race.
Even as he workedon The WasteLand, however,Eliot turned
to something even more revealing.
4

In 1922, while workingon the draftsof The WasteLand,


Pound respondedto Eliot's scathingreviewof GilbertMurray's
Euripides by trying to find a livelier language into which to
translatethe classics:"I twisted, turned,tried every elipsis and

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AmericanLiteraryHistory 67

illumination.I made the watchmantalk nigger.. ." (Guide93).


Though the attempt failed, it did produce one odd dividend,
for in the same letterin which he confesseshis own failurewith
Euripides,Poundrespondsto Eliot'snewsthat he is now reading
Aristophanes by saying, "Aristophanesprobably depressing,
and the native negrophoque melodies of Dixee more calculated
to lift the ball-encumberedphallus of man .. ." (Eliot, Letters
505).14This suggestion evidently helped Eliot to produce his
"Fragmentsof an AristophanicMelodrama,"otherwiseknown
as SweeneyAgonistes,which Eliot also titled in a late typescript
"Fragmentof a Comic Minstrelsy."'sIn this work, Eliot accomplishes the combination of the Greek classics and black
dialect that Pound had tried but failed to achieve.
The result is an especially extreme example of deterritorialization, one that BarbaraEverett suggestsEliot is able to
managebecause of his own "dislocationbetweentwo available
traditions"(251). She argues, against the prevailingview that
the protagonistsare clearlyEnglish,that their speech is at least
partiallyAmerican.The title given to the firstpublishedversion
of "Fragmentof an Agon" was "Wanna Go Home, Baby?"
which is, as Everett insists, self-consciouslyAmerican (246).
And yet there is a good deal in the speech of Dusty and Doris
that is equally self-consciousof being English. Dusty uses the
phrase "ringup" (CompletePoems 76), which is, as Eliot observedratherpedanticallyin correctingJamesJoyce, not American but English(Letters455).
At one or two points in the play, the differencebetween
American and English is thrown into relief by the characters
themselves. Dusty says to Pereiraover the phone, "Yes, this is
Miss Dorrance'sflat-" (CompletePoems 75). The italics apparentlysignifysarcasticemphasison the Englishterm for what
Americans call an apartment.If Dusty is herself English, this
would mean perhapsthat Pereirais a foreignertrying unsuccessfully to appear English. If she is American, she may be
mocking the English idiom. In either case, the italics focus
suspicion on the most innocuous words, exposingculturaldistinctions within them. The result is that the characterscannot
be securelyplaced. They are deterritorializedas much as their
speech is and thus they stand in living mockery of the idea of
cultural homogeneity. In this way, Eliot breaks down the distinction betweenwhat GeorgeSampsonwas callingat this very
moment "Englishfor the English"and the English spoken by
the restof the world.It is perhapseffectslike thesethatprompted
Henry Louis Gates to hold up Sweeneyas a positive model for
black writersof the exploitation of slang (Figures289).

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68

The Dialect in/of Modernism

Yet this ability to cross back and forth over linguistic


boundariesalso appearsthematicallyin the text as a debilitating
alienation.WhenDoris readsthe cards,they predict"A quarrel.
An estrangement.Separationof friends"(CompletePoems 76).
Though the women look forward to a party and dream of
weddings,the cards predict the very opposite: separationand
finally death. This message of absence and alienation read in
the cardsgovernsthe dramaof the firstof Eliot'stwo surviving
fragments,"Fragmentof a Prologue," which is almost completely concernedwith argumentsabout home and homelessness. "Are you at home in London?"is the implicit question
that underliesthe conversationwith Klipsteinand Krumpacker,
the Americans. "Sam of course is at home in London," says
Krumpacker,emphasizingthe word to underscorehis own status as a mere visitor. But Sam is a former lieutenant of the
CanadianExpeditionaryForce and so is no more "at home"
than anyone in this ominous fragment.It may be, then, that
no one is truly at home, that everyone suffers from the estrangementand separationpredicted by the cards, the awful
end of which is foretold when Doris turns up the card that
stands for the coffin.
The tension between Eliot's deliberatedeterritorialization
of languageand the threat of estrangementis even greaterin
the second fragment,"Fragmentof an Agon." The centerpiece
of "Fragmentof an Agon" is a distortedversionof "Underthe
Bamboo Tree," written in 1902 by the team of Bob Cole,
Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson,with the last
responsiblefor the lyrics (Levy 86).16 There is a certain irony
in Gates's suggestionthat Sweeneymight serve as a model for
black writers,since the tone of that work depends at least to
some extent on Johnson, who was advisingAfrican-American
writersto abandon dialectjust as Eliot borrowedit from him.
Eliot's use of the song makes it clear why Johnson was
wary. Though the song was received by the white press as "a
prettycoon ballad,"Johnsonwas proud of the way it departed
from the conventions of the standard"coon song" of the time
(Levy 88-90). The dialect contained only minimal distortion,
andthe situationactuallysuggestedthat a Zuluman andwoman
might feel for one another an emotion recognizableas human
love and not the mere randinessof minstrelcliche. In Sweeney,
however, Eliot imprisons the song once again in the minstrel
tradition,arrangingto have it sungby "SWARTSAS TAMBO.
SNOW AS BONES"(CompletePoems 81). Tambo and Bones
are the two players, one on tambourine,the other on bones,
who take seats opposite one another during the main part of

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AmericanLiteraryHistory 69

the minstrelshow. These "endmen"were usuallymore heavily


made-up than the other performers,used a more exaggerated
dialect, and were called upon to perform more ludicrousand
demeaninggyrations(Mates85; Toll 54). Eliotgiveshis endmen
names, Swarts and Snow, that suggest this sort of blackface
comedy, and he stoops to the obnoxious device of predicting
their arrivalwith the Knave of Spades (CompletePoems 77).
Eliot adapts Johnson's lyrics to put the whole play into a
complex, ambivalentblackface:
Under the bamboo
Bamboo bamboo
Under the bamboo tree
Two live as one
One live as two
Two live as three
Under the bam
Under the boo
Under the bamboo tree. (CompletePoems 81)
This lyric is the central example of the repetitiveand disintegrative languageof the whole fragment,the languagespoken,
for example, by Sweeney when he becomes a mock cannibal:
"I'll convert you! / Into a stew. / A nice little, white little,
missionarystew" (CompletePoems 80). Such languagedoes fit
the definitionGates gives of the African-Americanidiom, "paradigmatic(y-axis)substitutionsdeterminedby phonetic rather
than semantic similarity"(Signifying100). In fact, Eliot pushes
this exploitation of phonetic similarity so far as to eliminate
the syntagmaticaxis altogether, reducing the poem to a few
chanted nonsense syllables. "Bam" and "Boo" finallybecome
"Ha" and "hoo" to form the conclusion of the drama: "Hoo
ha ha / Hoo ha ha / Hoo / Hoo / Hoo" (CompletePoems 85).
If this seems like mere fooling, it should be remembered
how cruciala role is played in The WasteLand by the syllable
"Da." The reduction of language to its barest elements, especially when these are associatedwith culturesoutside of Europe, representsa radicalchallengeto the primacy of conventional Europeanculture. As Deleuze and Guattarinote, this is
one of the common strategiesof a minor literature,to produce
a "languagetorn from sense, conqueringsense, bringingabout
an active neutralization of sense," a language that puts the
purelyphatic, materialsound in the way of the usual linguistic
order(Kafka21). These final lines also seem a perfectexample
of what Houston Bakercalls the "deformationof mastery,"the

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70

The Dialect in/of Modernism

purposefulexaggerationand display of what seem to the outsider inarticulatehoots (50-52).


Thematically,however,"Fragmentof an Agon" is nothing
more than "Melange"broughtup to date. Beginningwith Sweeney's offerto carryDoris off to a cannibalisle and endingwith
his odd exposition of the psychologicalstate of a man who has
killed a girl, the fragment illustratesa dual transgression.In
"Eeldropand Appleplex,"Eliot saysthat the man who murders
his mistresshas "crossedthe frontier"(9). Sweeneyis the story
of that crossing,which is both psychologicaland geographical.
To commit murder is to cut oneself off in utter savagery,to
cross the riverto the cannibalisle. Crossingthis boundaryalso
dislocateslanguage:
I gotta use words when I talk to you
But if you understandor if you don't
That's nothing to me and nothing to you (Complete
Poems 84)
Languagebecomes null, as if each word were a mere "hoo" or
"ha." This nullity is the dead end of one kind of deterritorialization, as the reductionof languageto its bare elements goes
too far and resultsin dumb stupidity.Life on the cannibalisle
is the epitome of this state since it is nothing but the universal
negation of everythingoutside it:
There'sno telephones
There'sno gramophones
There'sno motor cars ... (CompletePoems 80)
Sweeney'schantpiles up nothingsline afterline until he reaches
the climax: "Nothing at all but three things ...

Birth, and

copulation,and death"(CompletePoems 80). As in "Melange,"


the savage life is an utter absence, a death marked only by a
cenotaph.
Thus Sweeneydoes, as Gates suggests,presenta powerful
model of the deploymentof slangagainstthe standardlanguage.
Eliot is able to use his anomalous position, the position that
seems to have causedhim such anguish,as a vantagepoint from
which to lever one kind of languageagainstanotherand in so
doing move all language a few inches off its pedestal. Eliot's
fear that he may sound black appearsin this poem as the assumption of a black voice to remakethe Englishlanguage.Yet
that fear also appears in itself when Eliot remakes Johnson's
song to force it back into minstrel stereotypes.This seems the

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AmericanLiteraryHistory 71

reaction of a writer for whom conventional racial boundaries


were necessary to avoid moral chaos and disintegration.In
Sweeney,as in so much of the work from this period,blackness
is both freedom and servitude, opportunity and obstruction,
variety and a blank absence. As such, it reveals what Pound
and Eliot implicitly called upon it to conceal, the duplicity of
modernism.
5
Eliot publishedthe two fragmentsof his Aristophanicmelodrama in 1926-27, about a year before sending the letter to
Read about his estrangingchildhood.Of course,Eliotwas about
to resolve these doubts about his properplace in the world by
becoming English and Anglican. The uneasiness of his letter
stands in marked contrast to the bluff confidence with which
he delivered, only a year later, his famous tripartiteself-definition: "classicistin literature,royalist in politics, and anglocatholicin religion."This seemsto leave no room forambiguity,
and, in fact, Eliot says in the prefacethat containsthis formula
that he gives it "to refuteany accusationof playing 'possum'"
(For Lancelotvii). Does this signifyEliot'swithdrawalfrom the
modernistproject,from subversiveteamworkwith Pound?Does
it mean that Eliot is attemptingto put asidewith his modernism
the black role so closely identifiedwith it? If so, it is also significant that even in defining himself as English, Eliot has recourse to an American idiom, and there certainlyseems to be
a privatejoke here, since Eliot was Possum and continued to
be Possum even as he became a classicist, a royalist, and an
anglo-catholic.
Even the famouslyhollow voice retainedsome evidenceof
the original Possum.17Despite Eliot's conviction that he had
lost his St. Louis drawlin Boston, EdwardBrathwaiteclaimed
that "[i]n that dry deadpan delivery, the riddims of St. Louis
(though we didn't know the source then) were stark and clear
for those of us who at the same time were listening to the
dislocations of Bird, Dizzy and Klook." According to Brathwaite, Eliot's voice "subvertedthe Establishment"and "made
the breakthrough"for CaribbeanAnglophonepoets like himself
who were moving from "standardEnglishto nation language"
(30-31).18 Is there some cunning in history after all that the
voice that so embarrassedEliot at Harvardshould return,despite all his efforts,to inspire a new generationof poets to use
their own idiom against standardization?Brathwaite'stesti-

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72

The Dialect in/of Modernism

mony suggeststhat, even afterEliot thoughthe had put dialect


aside, the racial irony of modernism had another turn left in
it, as if, having once let dialect in, Eliot could not control its
effects or the extent of its influence.
Notes
1. For a study of the role of race in twentieth-centurywhite American
poetry, see Nielsen 49-101.
2. Such objectionshad been made to the conventionalrepresentationsof
blackdialect since the 1890s. See Gates,Signifying176-77 and Figures16795. Among these could be included the objections in The New Negro by
ArthurHuffFauset (Locke 239) and Alain Locke (xii and 48), which fall at
about the same time as Johnson'sfirstpreface.However, in the prefaceand
elsewherein his work,Johnson spoke of UncleRemus as "the greatestbody
of folk lore that America has produced"(10). See also Autobiography63.
In the preface to later editions of The Book of American Negro Poetry,
Johnsonacknowledgedthat writerssuch as SterlingBrownhad freeddialect
from its questionablepast and made it a possible languagefor poetryagain.
3. For practicalapplicationsand theoreticaldiscussions of this work, see
Renza 29-38 and Lloyd, Nationalism 23-25. Lloyd states that the theory
of a minor literatureapplies only to "the negative critical aspect of modernism," from which he excludes Eliot, Pound, and Yeats because of "the
claims to transcendingdivision and differencethat constantlyinform their
works." For a discussion of "minor literature"and the literatureof "minorities," see Lloyd, "Genet."
4. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly warn against such a situation: "It is
certainly not by using a minor languageas a dialect, by regionalizingor
ghettoizing,thatone becomesa revolutionary.. ." (ThousandPlateaus106).
Yet this is a case where the examples and metaphorsthey use undermine
the explicit messageof the text. It is also the case that they pay insufficient
attention to the situation of those for whom "becoming minoritarian"is
not a free choice: "Non-white:we all have to become that, whetherwe are
white, yellow, or black"(ThousandPlateaus 470). Thoughsuch statements
might serve againstessentialismor certainlimited kinds of culturalnationalism, they also reveal that for Deleuze and Guattariactual political and
social distinctions between the races do not matter:"[T]hereis no way to
draw a firm distinction between the oppressorsand the oppressed"(Kafka
59). Such statements seem to reveal that the whole concept of "becoming
minor" begins from a securely"majoritarian"point of view.
5. Davie's suggestionthat in Homage Pound is dramatizingthe colonial
relationshipof his own American English to English English and of that
Englishto Latin is a most useful one (43-61).
6. For a discussion of this whole issue as it concerns Eliot, see Ricks's
chapter"An EnglishAccent" (154-203).

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AmericanLiteraryHistory 73

7. See also Rourke'sdiscussion of the simultaneousgrowthof the "Yankee" role and the black minstrel stereotype(70-90); Huggins244-301; and
Ostendorf80.
8. Evidence that Eliot would have concurredin Aiken's account of their
feelingsis provided in "Eeldropand Appleplex,"which is generallyheld to
be aboutthe collaborationof Eliot and Poundbut which also bearsa number
of close similarities to the relationship of Eliot and Aiken. For example,
Eeldropand Appleplexrushout wheneverthereis a disturbancein the street
so that Eeldropcan listen to the lower ordersand register"in his mind their
oaths, their redundanceof phrase,their various mannersof spitting."
9. See also the account in "King Bolo" 21. As Aiken's title suggests,the
infamous King Bolo poems were supposed to be part of this modernist
affrontto literaryand scholarlyrespectability,and of course, they too depended heavily on racist slurs and stereotypes.
10. For brief discussions of this poem, not much noticed in the criticism
on Eliot, see Smith 35 and Moody 57.
11. Note the revealinguse of the word adulteratein AfterStrange Gods:
"The populationshould be homogeneous;wheretwo or more culturesexist
in the same place they are likely either to be fiercelyself-consciousor both
to become adulterate"(20).
12. "By the WatermelonVine" is listed as "NegroSong"in Sears41, and
under "Minstrel" in Stecheson 237. Valerie Eliot gives its date of first
performanceas 1904, but both Lax and Mattfeld give the date as 1914,
suggestingthat Eliot might have heard it close to the time when the earliest
shardsof The WasteLand were assembled.For informationon the original
performanceof "My Evaline" in 1901, see Bloom 1529.
13. Sandershas suggestedthat in draft form The WasteLand resembled
the traditionalminstrelshow form, with the last four sectionscorresponding
to the olio and Tiresias as Mr. Interlocutor.
14. This line has been excised from the severely bowdlerizedversion of
this letter printed in Selected Letters 171-72. There is no room here to
investigate the intricate relationshipbetween Pound's racial masking and
the convoluted cross-sexual role he casts himself in in these letters. The
latter has been investigatedby Koestenbaum.
15. See the discussion of this typescript, on deposit with the Hayward
bequest in the libraryof King's College, Cambridge,in Sidnell 263-65. I
am indebted to Ronald Bush for this reference.For a useful discussion of
Sweeney in light of Eliot's interest in the primitive, see Crawford.
16. "Under the Bamboo Tree" was one of the most popular American
songs of the period, selling 400,000 copies in less than a year. Yale undergraduatesturned it into a football fight song (Levy 89), and it became so
prevalentamong black audiencesthat childrenin Washington,DC, used an
adaptationof it as a mildly obscene street chant (Toomer 51).

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The Dialect in/of Modernism

17. Eliothimselfsaid at aboutthis time, "I lost my southernaccentwithout


ever acquiringthe accent of the native Bostonian ..." ("Preface"xiii-xiv).
Many listeners would agree that Eliot's voice remainedpeculiarlywithout
character(Ricks 182-85).
18. I am indebted for this referenceto Houston Baker.

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