Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary
Criticism by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Review by: Kenneth Warren
Source: Modern Philology , Nov., 1990, Vol. 88, No. 2 (Nov., 1990), pp. 224-226
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/438217
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224 Modern Philology (November 1990)
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
Henry Louis Gates, Jr./New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. xxvii+290.
In order to appreciate the drama enacted in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying
Monkey one must keep in mind the characterizations of the text's two central
antagonists. On the one hand is a figure emerging from the Black Arts movement
preaching a gospel of a black cultural essence that is necessarily incompatible with
white literary standards; and on the other is an avatar of Euroamerican post-
structuralist theory with its attendant attack on referentiality and its valorization of
intertextuality and indeterminacy. These two figures have crossed words if not
swords in much of Gates's work, for The Signifying Monkey is a pastiche of new
and previously published material as well as the second part of a projected trilogy
on African-American literature. Gates's task in this conflict has been to stage his
drama so that the hero does not end up either uttering a mealy-mouthed cultural
nationalism-convinced of the reality of black difference but too steeped in deconstructive
thought to say so plainly-or expounding an eviscerated deconstructive critique
that debunks everything except the sanctity of the black textual space.
So enter Ishmael Reed's freewheeling, satiric fiction, Mumbo Jumbo, which
Gates points to as "the text-specific element from which my theory arose" (p. 218).
Readily acknowledging that his efforts to explicate Mumbo Jumbo both prompted
and shaped The Signifying Monkey (indeed the acknowledgment of black textual
antecedents is the key refrain of Gates's text), Gates uses Reed's parodic novel as a
means of sidestepping the binary opposition of "white" critical theory and "black"
fictional text. Mumbo Jumbo's parody of other African-American texts, its critique
of the Black Arts Movement, and its linguistic playfulness underscore for Gates
that one need not import self-reflexiveness and theorizing into the black tradition,
because all of these features are always already there.
Then taking his cue from Reed, Gates argues in the first section of The
Signifying Monkey that theorizing and critique are not merely indigenous to but
come to define the black tradition in letters. Constructing a myth of origins around
the trickster figures of Esu-Elegbara from Yoruban mythology and the signifying
monkey from New World black vernacular traditions, Gates maintains that the
black vernacular celebrates figurative language and ambiguity rather than literal
interpretations and determinate meanings. To buttress this claim he draws upon a
body of mythic literature-folk tales and lyrics-as well as the studies of linguists
and anthropologists.
The vernacular term that comes to stand for figurative language use is "Signi-
fyin(g)"-a word encompassing a variety of rhetorical practices, including lying,
speaking indirectly, and playing the verbal game of exchanging insults, called "The
Dozens." Gates parenthesizes the g at the end of the term to indicate that in the
spoken vernacular the final consonant is usually not pronounced. Most significant
for Gates is that Signifyin(g), in black vernacular usage, revises and critiques both
the standard English usage of signification and the structuralist conception of the
sign, as represented by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. In the first case,
Signifyin(g), rather than denoting the meaning of the word, replaces meaning with
rhetorical figures; rhetoric ousts semantics. Second, Gates claims that in marking its
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Book Reviews 225
critique of standard meanings by punning on "signification," the black vern
stands in analogous relation to the critiques of Saussure offered by Jacques
and Mikhail Bakhtin. The vernacular term corresponds with Derrida's coinage of
differance to signal his revision of structuralism's "difference." More important for
Gates, where structuralism had denied the human subject a role in determining the
relationship between signifier and signified, Signifyin(g) arises from a vernacular
origin. Like Bakhtin's location of novelistic discourse within an interplay of social
languages that produces "double-voiced" utterances, Gates's identification of the
vernacular origin of Signifyin(g) restores to literary analysis the social text that
structuralism had expunged from its linguistic universe.
However, unlike the broad range of languages, dialects, and jargons included
by Bakhtin, the "social" for Gates centers chiefly on the fact that black writers read
and revise the works of other black writers. This focus on a literary tradition creates
in Gates's work a style of critique that moves abruptly from claims based on the
determinations of linguistic structure, tradition, or literary form to those based on
authorial intention. For example, Gates readily employs a logic of cultural necessity
to argue that theories of narrative held by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright,
and Ralph Ellison "comprise a matrix of issues to which subsequent black fictions,
by definition, must respond" (p. 184). At other times, however, Gates's language
seems to grant individual writers the discretion to define their relationship to other
authors: "While most, if not all, black writers seek to place their works in the larger
tradition of their genre, many also revise tropes from substantive antecedent texts
in the Afro-American tradition" (p. 122). The oscillation between structural and/or
cultural determinations on the one hand and assertions of authorial autonomy on
the other suggests that Derrida and Bakhtin are overshadowed by the figure of
Harold Bloom, who appears only briefly on the set of Signifying Monkey to pro-
vide some key rhetorical terms. These brief appearances notwithstanding, one can
read The Signifying Monkey as Gates's rewriting of Bloom's oedipal drama for the
black tradition in which psychology gives way, once again, to rhetoric, and "Sig-
nifyin(g)" replaces "anxiety." Thus, while for Bloom "strong poets make [poetic]
history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves"
(The Anxiety of Influence [New York, 1973], p. 5), for Gates "Signifyin(g) revision
serves, if successful, to create a space for the revising text" (p. 124). Bloom's
allegory of textual revision functions for Gates as a means of bending Derrida and
Bakhtin to his own ends.
Clearly, the revisions here are intended to clear a space for Gates's text in the
firmament of theory. The rapid movements from theory to theory are intended less
to work through the problems created by such juxtapositions than to suggest a
means of negotiating among the gaps and fissures separating theoretical universes.
By using the terminology of one theory to revise and redeploy the terms of another,
Gates occasionally overlooks apparent contradictions in methodology and implica-
tions in order to proclaim (quite provocatively) that theory is nothing more than
strategies of language use inferred from the texts that one attends to. Writers of
theory, like their counterparts in fiction, simply produce ways of Signifyin(g) on
other writers.
By rewriting theorizing as Signifyin(g), Gates articulates in the first section of
his book an intriguing counterargument to the claim that theory is somehow
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226 Modern Philology (November 1990)
foreign to the black tradition: to theorize is to do nothing that black writers have
not done for centuries. And even if one does not assent fully to this argument,
Gates's demonstrated ability to suggest relations among black-authored fictions
may help lay to rest the tiresome charges that attention to figurative language and
literary form is inherently at odds with African-American literary practice.
In addition, the first section of The Signifying Monkey sets the stage for
theoretical readings of black texts, samples of which constitute the second half of
the book. Here the evaluation of Gates's performance must be more mixed, in large
part because the readings of slave narratives, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes
Were Watching God, Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple
seem curiously univocal for a work which locates itself in a textual milieu that
includes not only Reed's irreverent satire but the scatological poetry of the signify-
ing monkey, earthy jazz lyrics, and the verbal play of poststructuralism.
Gates's first move is to trace the revisions of a trope called "the talking book"
in a series of slave narratives. The trope derives from the claims made by early
black writers that before they learned to read they believed that books actually
talked to men. Gates argues convincingly that the recurrence of this trope is more a
marker of intertextual revision than a reference to the personal experiences of each
writer. In fact, Gates's version of intertextuality, which he describes as books
talking to other books, is itself a revision of this trope. But the point of all this
tracing is rather to illustrate that these writers read and revised each other than to
exemplify the potential Signifyin(g) as a critical practice. That is, neither Gates's
elucidation of tropes and rhetorical figures nor, for example, his argument that
Hurston's "free, indirect discourse" mediates between standard narrative voice and
vernacular speech seems to depart from standard critical practices. When Gates tells
us that his close reading of Hurston is a form of the vernacular practice of
"specifying" (p. 198), there is simply not enough felt tension between a standard
close reading and Gates's revision to give the claim much meaning.
And even the quite engaging reading of Walker's The Color Purple (which
includes the clever tactic of allowing Walker's chapter to follow hard on the heels of
the chapter on Ishmael Reed, thus tacitly giving Walker the last signifyin[g] word in
the recent debate between the two authors) seems to hold back at critical moments.
For example, Gates observes that Walker's epistolary style creates a "tyranny of the
narrative present" (p. 247), allowing Celie to control not only her own speech but
everyone else's as well. In Gates's reading, however, this rhetorical tyranny is never
permitted to menace any other aspect of what Gates otherwise describes as a
liberating text. Rather than probe this tyranny as a potential contradiction within
Walker's text, Gates views Walker's rhetorical strategy as a self-consistent response
to her textual ancestors. To be fair, since Gates conceives of The Signifying
Monkey as a "theoretical prologue" to what he envisions as "a detailed account of
the Afro-American literary tradition" (p. xxii), even the individual readings of The
Signifying Monkey are doing their work in the larger argument of claiming a
tradition; and in this claim, The Signifying Monkey is a formidable achievement.
Still, one wonders whether Gates's need to keep an eye to tradition-indeed, in his
words, to "protect" that tradition (p. 256)-will enable him in his prospective work
to play freely with the texts which it comprises.
Kenneth Warren/ Northwestern University
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