Fetch The Signifying Monkey: A Theory Of African American Literary Criticism Fabricated By Henry Louis Gates Jr. Publication

the one hand this book is about a very narrow, academical topic but considered more broadly, it sheds light on so much of American rhetoric and discourse and not only discourse “about race” that its really an amazing journey to take.
I picked this book up for its Trickster info, That part was really, really, good, But then he went into a deep reading of a few books and lost me, Here are my notes:

“In Yoruba Mythology, Esu is said to limp as he walks, precisely because of his mediating function, his legs are different lengths because he keeps one anchored in the realm of the gods while the other rests in this, our human world.
”

"the architect of interpretation" Can you use that as a kenning,

"the primal god of the Fon is a Janus figure one side of its body is female and is called Mawu, well the other side is male and just called Lisa.
Mawu's eyes form the Moon Lisa's eyes form the sun accordingly Lisa rules the day in Mawu rules the night, the seventh son of MawuLisa is Legba"
Seventh Son is blues song by Willie Dixon,

The oral tradition of the Yoruba means each time a story is told it varies slightly,

Yoruba and Fon tricksters love to play with language,
Legba is the Fon trickster
Fa is the Fon writing system I think

Esu “is at once both male and female”
This, “despite his remarkable penis feats” which makes them the first nonexclusively trickster figure Ive come across.


High schoolers in WInstonSalem, nc wanted revenge on McGrawHill and their Iowa Test of Basic Skills, So they created the In Your Face Test of No Uncertain Skills, The McGraw Folks scored but Cs and Ds, One question: Who is buried in Grants Tomb, A: Your mama. This is very trickstery. It subverts expectations but having the answer be a nonsequitur to the question,

One, possible, origin of The Dozens is theth century verb “dozen” which meant “to stun, stupefy, daze, ”

H. Rap Brown made poetry on the streets with rap hence his name and The dozens, yet white people dont think thats poetry because poetry equals Western Tradition.


The majority of Browns rap is in the Bo Diddly version of “Who Do You Love”

Signifying can build someone up, too.


Mules and Men by Hurston is the first appearance of the word “Signifying”,

The Dozens could have been so named because its rumored to refer tosex acts each said with a word that rhymed with the numbers.



David Hume said that poet Francis Williams a Cambridge educated, Latin writing poet didnt prove abolitionists point that black people are equal because he was like a parrot, only able to say a small amount of stuff well.
This led to the Mockingbird School of poetry, where any black poets accomplishments were chalked up to being able to write a little but not with the breadth of whiteys.


Some poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar, basically admit defeat because they have no literary black

giants on whose shoulders they may stand,

Even the unofficial first novel by a black man is signifying, Charles Chestutt wrote The “Passing of Grandison” inbut it seems to be a response to William Wells Browns My Southern Home, specifically chapter, Chestnutt didnt see Browns work as a novel and thus he saw himself as the first black novelist,

The Talking Book Trope is awesomely meta, Itsst appearance was perhaps in James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaws “A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and African Prince As Related by Himself”.
On a ship he heard a book talking to the captain but when he tried to have it talk to him, it was silent, So the book didnt speak to him, Is that pun or a metaphor or both Its a great trope no matter what,


“If slavery had been an immoral institution, it had also been a large, fixed target once abolished, the target of racism splintered into hundreds of fragments, all of which seemed to be moving in as many directions.
Just as the exslaves wrote to end slavery, so too did free black authors write to redres the myriad forms that the fluid mask of racism assumed between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Jazz Age.
”
And Id contend they continue to do today,

The book then went into a deep literary criticism of first, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston, then “Mumbo Jumbo” by Ishmeal Reed, then something else but by then I was done.
I picked it up for the trickster signifying monkey but there wasnt much of that, “Mumbo Jumbo” was so packed with layers that it reminds me of Mody Dick, Perhaps Im too far removed from my English degree almostyears now or perhaps Mr, Gates writing just didnt connect with me but I couldnt read any more,
B. The Black English vernacular is not disappearing, In fact it is going its own way, This separate development reflects the larger social picture of segregated speech communities, Within this black vernacular the black person has encoded private, yet communal cultural rituals, This book explores the relationship between the black vernacular tradition and the AfricanAmerican literary tradition, He wants to be a critic that uses black theory to understand black literature, Thus, he tries to define a theory of AfricanAmerican criticism,
C. To explore the black tradition, Gates relies on two signal tricksters, EsuElegbara African and the Signifying Monkey AfricanAmerican, The central place of both figures in their traditions is determined by their tendency to reflect on the uses of formal language,
D. Structure: Three theoretical chapters, followed bychapters of close readings or case studies,
E. The black tradition is doublevoiced, Black writers learn to write by reading white Western texts, So there written voice is Western, But they also come from a black vernacular tradition which gives them a second voice, This black tradition is based on Signifying or a repetition and revision with a signal difference, There aretypes of doublevoices textual relations that are examined in this book
, Tropological revision.
a This is the way in which a trope is repeated, with differences, between two or more texts, There are many recurring tropes in the AfricanAmerican literary tradition, The descent underground, the vertical ascent from the South to the North, and the double consciousness Biggers double consciousness, This is the first mode of Signifying as repetition and difference in the AngloAfrican narrative tradition,
b The “trope of the Talking Book” in several slave narratives, This is the urtrope the first trope of the AfricanAmerican tradition, It is here that the doublevoiced discourse comes most clearly through, The Talking Book is the attempt to make the white written text speak with a black voice, The trope is used as a way to argue for the importance of black thought in a white world and other authors all deal with this idea of freedom.
This trope began in James Gronniosaws slave narrative and was the first example of Signifying as repetition and difference as other authors used this trope.

. The speakerly text. The novels black speech and the standard English of the narrator come together to form a third term, a doublevoiced narrative mode, The Russian Formalists call this skaz when a text aspires to the status of oral narration, An example is Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes were Watching God, She proves that a text can be written in a black dialect,
. Talking texts. Black texts talk to other texts or intertextuality, These are texts like Ishmael Reeds Mumbo Jumbo which responds to, challenges, and amplifies upon multiple precursor texts, Ellison employs this in Invisible Man, He draws on Wright, Du Bois, Douglass, Washington, while also drawing on Melville and Whitman,
A. Rewriting the speakerly. These are texts that directly engage and revamp the styles and narrative strategies of an earlier text, An example is Alice Walkers The Color Purple rewriting the Hurston book, This is like jazz musicians getting together to play each others songs, Walker rewrites Hurstons text to criticize but to pay homage,
I read this in grad school and it literally propelled me through a number of papers, I will always always remind my students that Signifying is "repetition with a signal difference": James Brown crying "Please, Please" Amiri Baraka repeating "Oh wow!" with each iteration implying something new etc.
It's a simple but powerful concept, This book, the theory behind the Signifyin' Monkey, and the way that it pushes against traditional film theory, and theorists like de Saussere was essential for the completion of my masters thesis on subversive narrative.
Gates is a master at explaining the difficult, the trying, and the intentions of language, myth, and thought across race, Major Field Prep:/
Henry Louis Gatess text, The Signifying Monkey, responds to the perseverance of black vernacular in the African American literary tradition, Gates “attempts to identify a theory of criticism that is inscribed within the black vernacular tradition and that in turn informs the shape of the AfroAmerican literary tradition” xix.
Signifying, repetition and revision, and the trope of voicing and doubling, is the main point of analysis, He begins with a history and discussion of the two signal trickster figures, EsuElegbara rooted in Africa and its diaspora, and the Signifying Monkey of African American cultural tradition and lore.
He traces the legacy of the metadiscursive tradition in the trope of the Talking Book in slave narratives, where “the very concept of bookconstituted a silent primary text, a text, however, in which the black man found no echo of his own voice.
The silent book did not reflect or acknowledge the black presence before it”, Gates identified Hurston as Signifying on the Talking Book in her speakerly text Their Eyes Were Watching God, as the collapsing of mimesis and diegesis into a third narrative voice of the simultaneous narrator/protagonist “bivocal utterance” in free indirect discourse.
Ishamel Reed, in contrast, Signifies on the tradition of AfAm literature namely Hurston, Wright, and Ellison in Mumbo Jumbo that is about writing itself, focused on doubling and a postmodern selfreflexivity: “It is indeterminacy, the sheer plurality of meaning, the very play of the signifier itself, which Mumbo Jumbo celebrates”.
Finally, Gates turns to Alice Walkers epistolary novel The Color Purple as Signifying Hurston and Rebecca Cox, The epistolary form, the first Gates knows of in the tradition, allows Celie to write herself into being as Hurstons Janie spoke herself into being.
Through the fully diegesis text, Celie performs similar free indirect discourse in her representation of other voices in recalling and recording conversation and allows Celie “to write a progressively betterstructured story of herself”.


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