SOURCE: "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol," in Callaloo, Vol. 10, No. 1, Winter, 1987, pp. 29-54.

[In the following essay, Mackey analyzes writings by Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, and Wilson Harris—in whose work music is an important element—largely basing his analysis on the ideas about music expressed in Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment, in which music is associated with loss and social dislocation, and Victor Zuckerkandl's Sound and Symbol, in which music is accorded mystical significance.]

Senses of music in a number of texts is what I'd like to address—ways of regarding and responding to music in a few instances of writings which bear on the subject. This essay owes its title to two such texts, Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression and Victor Zuckerkandl's Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World. These two contribute to the paradigm I bring to my reading of the reading of music in the literary works I wish to address.

Steven Feld is a musician as well as an anthropologist and he dedicates Sound and Sentiment to the memory of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus. His book, as the subtitle tells us, discusses the way in which the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea conceptualize music and poetic language. These the Kaluli associate with birds and weeping. They arise from a breach in human solidarity, a violation of kinship, community, connection. Gisalo, the quintessential Kaluli song form (the only one of the five varieties they sing that they claim to have invented rather than borrowed from a neighboring people), provokes and crosses over into weeping—weeping which has to do with some such breach, usually death. Gisalo songs are sung at funerals and during spirit-medium seances and have the melodic contour of the cry of a kind of fruitdove, the muni bird. This reflects and is founded on the myth regarding the origin of music, the myth of the boy who became a muni bird. The myth tells of a boy who goes to catch crayfish with his older sister. He catches none and repeatedly begs for those caught by his sister, who again and again refuses his request. Finally he catches a shrimp and puts it over his nose, causing it to turn a bright purple red, the color of a muni bird's beak. His hands turn into wings and when he opens his mouth to speak the falsetto cry of a muni bird comes out. As he flies away his sister begs him to come back and have some of the crayfish but his cries continue and become a song, semiwept, semisung: "Your crayfish you didn't give me. I have no sister. I'm hungry …" For the Kaluli, then, the quintessential source of music is the orphan's ordeal—an orphan being anyone denied kinship, social sustenance, anyone who suffers, to use Orlando Patterson's phrase, "social death," the prototype for which is the boy who becomes a muni bird. Song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal, where in back of "orphan" one hears echoes of "orphic," a music which turns on abandonment, absence, loss. Think of the black spiritual "Motherless Child." Music is wounded kinship's last resort.

In Sound and Symbol, whose title Feld alludes to and echoes, Victor Zuckerkandl offers "a musical concept of the external world," something he also calls "a critique of our concept of reality from the point of view of music." He goes to great lengths to assert that music bears witness to what's left out of that concept of reality, or, if not exactly what, to the fact that something is left out. The world, music reminds us, inhabits while extending beyond what meets the eye, resides in but rises above what's apprehensible to the senses. This coinherence of immanence and transcendence the Kaluli attribute to and symbolize through birds, which for them are both the spirits of the dead and the major source of the everyday sounds they listen to as indicators of time, location and distance in their physical environment. In Zuckerkandl's analysis, immanence and transcendence meet in what he terms "the dynamic quality of tones," the relational valence or vectorial give and take bestowed on tones by their musical context. He takes great pains to show that "no material process can be co-ordinated with it," which allows him to conclude:

Certainly, music transcends the physical; but it does not therefore transcend tones. Music rather helps the thing "tone" to transcend its own physical constituent, to break through into a nonphysical mode of being, and there to develop in a life of unexpected fullness. Nothing but tones! As if tone were not the point where the world that our senses encounter becomes transparent to the action of nonphysical forces, where we as perceivers find ourselves eye to eye, as it were, with a purely dynamic reality—the point where the external world gives up its secret and manifests itself, immediately, as symbol. To be sure, tones say, signify, point to—what? Not to something lying "beyond tones." Nor would it suffice to say that tones point to other tones—as if we had first tones, and then pointing as their attribute. No—in musical tones, being, existence, is indistinguishable from, is, pointing-beyond-itself, meaning, saying.

One easily sees the compatibility of this musical concept of the world, this assertion of the intrinsic symbolicity of the world, with poetry. Yeats's view that the artist "belongs to the invisible life" or Rilke's notion of poets as "bees of the invisible" sits agreeably beside Zuckerkandl's assertion that "because music exists, the tangible and visible cannot be the whole of the given world. The intangible and invisible is itself a part of this world, something we encounter, something to which we respond." His analysis lends itself to more recent formulations as well. His explanation of dynamic tonal events in terms of a "field concept," to give an example, isn't far from Charles Olson's "composition by field." And one commentator, to give another, has brought Sound and Symbol to bear on Jack Spicer's work.

The analogy between tone-pointing and word-pointing isn't lost on Zuckerkandl, who, having observed that "in musical tones, being, existence, is indistinguishable from, is, pointing-beyond-itself, meaning, saying," immediately adds: "Certainly, the being of words could be characterized the same way." He goes on to distinguish tone-pointing from word-pointing on the basis of the conventionally agreed-upon referentiality of the latter, a referentiality writers have repeatedly called into question, frequently doing so by way of "aspiring to the condition of music." "Thus poetry," Louis Zukofsky notes, "may be defined as an order of words that as movement and tone (rhythm and pitch) approaches in varying degrees the wordless art of music as a kind of mathematical limit." Music encourages us to see that the symbolic is the orphic, that the symbolic realm is the realm of the orphan. Music is prod and precedent for a recognition that the linguistic realm is also the realm of the orphan, as in Octavio Paz's characterization of language as an orphan severed from the presence to which it refers and which presumably gave it birth. This recognition troubles, complicates and contends with the unequivocal referentiality taken for granted in ordinary language:

Each time we are served by words, we mutilate them. But the poet is not served by words. He is their servant. In serving them, he returns them to the plenitude of their nature, makes them recover their being. Thanks to poetry, language reconquers its original state. First, its plastic and sonorous values, generally disdained by thought; next, the affective values; and, finally, the expressive ones. To purify language, the poet's task, means to give it back its original nature. And here we come to one of the central themes of this reflection. The word, in itself, is a plurality of meanings.

Paz is only one of many who have noted the ascendancy of musicality and multivocal meaning in poetic language. (Julia Kristeva: "The poet… wants to turn rhythm into a dominant element… wants to make language perceive what it doesn't want to say, provide it with its matter independently of the sign, and free it from denotation.")

Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan, to its tenuous kinship with the things it ostensibly refers to. This is why in the Kaluli myth the origin of music is also the origin of poetic language. The words of the song the boy who becomes a muni bird resorts to are different from those of ordinary speech. Song language "amplifies, multiplies, or intensifies the relationship of the word to its referent," as Feld explains:

In song, text is not primarily a proxy for a denoted subject but self-consciously multiplies the intent of the word.

… Song poetry goes beyond pragmatic referential communication because it is explicitly organized by canons of reflexiveness and self-consciousness that are not found in ordinary talk.

The uniqueness of poetic language is unveiled in the story of "the boy who became a muni bird." Once the boy has exhausted the speech codes for begging, he must resort to another communication frame. Conversational talk, what the Kaluli call to halaido, "hard words," is useless once the boy has become a bird; now he resorts to talk from a bird's point of view.… Poetic language is bird language.

It bears emphasizing that this break with conventional language is brought about by a breach of expected behavior. In saying no to her brother's request for food the older sister violates kinship etiquette.

What I wish to do is work Sound and Sentiment together with Sound and Symbol in such a way that the latter's metaphysical accent aids and is in turn abetted by the former's emphasis on the social meaning of sound. What I'm after is a range of implication which will stretch, to quote Stanley Crouch, "from the cottonfields to the cosmos." You notice again that it's black music I'm talking about, a music whose "critique of our concept of reality" is notoriously a critique of social reality, a critique of social arrangements in which, because of racism, one finds oneself deprived of community and kinship, cut off. The two modes of this critique which I'll be emphasizing Robert Farris Thompson notes among the "ancient African organizing principles of song and dance":

suspended accentuation patterning (offbeat phrasing of melodic and choreographic accents); and, at a slightly different but equally recurrent level of exposition, songs and dances of social allusion (music which, however danceable and "swinging," remorselessly contrasts social imperfections against implied criteria for perfect living).

Still, the social isn't all of it. One needs to hear, alongside Amiri Baraka listening to Jay McNeely, that "the horn spat enraged sociologies," but not without noting a simultaneous mystic thrust. Immanence and transcendence meet, making the music social as well as cosmic, political and metaphysical as well. The composer of "Fables of Faubus" asks Fats Navarro, "What's outside the universe?"

This meeting of transcendence and immanence I evoke, in my own work, through the figure of the phantom limb. In the letter which opens From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate N. begins:

You should've heard me in the dream last night. I found myself walking down a sidewalk and came upon an open manhole off to the right out of which came (or strewn around which lay) the disassembled parts of a bass clarinet. Only the funny thing was that, except for the bell of the horn, all the parts looked more like plumbing fixtures than like parts of a bass clarinet. Anyway, I picked up a particularly long piece of "-pipe" and proceeded to play. I don't recall seeing anyone around but somehow I knew the "crowd" wanted to hear "Naima." I decided I'd give it a try. In any event, I blew into heaven knows what but instead of "Naima" what came out was Shepp's solo on his version of "Cousin Mary" on the Four for Trane album—only infinitely more gruffly resonant and varied and warm. (I even threw in a few licks of my own.) The last thing I remember is coming to the realization that what I was playing already existed on a record. I could hear scratches coming from somewhere in back and to the left of me. This realization turned out, of course, to be what woke me up.

Perhaps Wilson Harris is right. There are musics which haunt us like a phantom limb. Thus the abrupt breaking off. Therefore the "of course." No more than the ache of some such would-be extension.

I'll say more about Wilson Harris later. For now, let me simply say that the phantom limb is a felt recovery, a felt advance beyond severance and limitation which contends with and questions conventional reality, that it's a feeling for what's not there which reaches beyond as it calls into question what is. Music as phantom limb arises from a capacity for feeling which holds itself apart from numb contingency. The phantom limb haunts or critiques a condition in which feeling, consciousness itself, would seem to have been cut off. It's this condition, the non-objective character of reality, to which Michael Taussig applies the expression "phantom objectivity," by which he means the veil by way of which a social order renders its role in the construction of reality invisible: "a commodity-based society produces such phantom objectivity, and in so doing it obscures its roots—the relations between people. This amounts to a socially instituted paradox with bewildering manifestations, the chief of which is the denial by the society's members of the social construction of reality." "Phantom," then, is a relative, relativizing term which cuts both ways, occasioning a shift in perspective between real and unreal, an exchange of attributes between the two. So the narrator in Josef Skvorecky's The Bass Saxophone says of the band he's inducted into: "They were no longer a vision, a fantasy, it was rather the sticky-sweet panorama of the town square that was unreal." The phantom limb reveals the illusory rule of the world it haunts.

Turning now to a few pieces of writing which allude to or seek to ally themselves with music, one sense I'm advancing is that they do so as a way of reaching toward an alternate reality, that music is the would-be limb whereby that reaching is done or which alerts us to the need for its being done. The first work I'd like to look at is Jean Toomer's Cane. Though Cane is not as announcedly about music as John A. Williams's Night Song, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, or any number of other works one could name, in its "quieter" way it's no less worth looking at in this regard. First of all, of course, there's the lyricism which pervades the writing, an intrinsic music which is not unrelated to a theme of wounded kinship of which we get whispers in the title. Commentators have noted the biblical echo, and Toomer himself, in notebooks and correspondence, referred to the book as Cain on occasion. His acknowledged indebtedness to black folk tradition may well have included a knowledge of stories in that tradition which depict Cain as the prototypical white, a mutation among the earlier people, all of whom were up to that point black: "Cain he kill his brudder Abel wid a great big club … and he turn white as bleech cambric in de face, and de whole race ob Cain dey bin white ebber since." The backdrop of white assault which comes to the fore in "Portrait in Georgia," "Blood-Burning Moon," and "Kabnis" plays upon the fratricidal note struck by the book's title.

Indebted as it is to black folk tradition, Cane can't help but have to do with music. That "Deep River," "Go Down, Moses," and other songs are alluded to comes as no surprise. Toomer's catalytic stay in Georgia is well-known. It was there that he first encountered the black "folk-spirit" he sought to capture in the book. Worth repeating is the emphasis he put on the music he heard:

The setting was crude in a way, but strangely rich and beautiful. I began feeling its effects despite my state, or, perhaps, just because of it. There was a valley, the valley of "Cane," with smoke-wreaths during the day and mist at night. A family of back-country Negroes had only recently moved into a shack not too far away. They sang. And this was the first time I'd ever heard the folk-songs and spirituals. They were very rich and sad and joyous and beautiful.

He insisted, though, that the spirit of that music was doomed, that "the folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert" and that Cane was "a swan-song," "a song of an end." The elegiac weariness and weight which characterize the book come of a lament for the passing of that spirit. In this it's like the music which inspired it, as Toomer pointed out in a letter to Waldo Frank:

… the Negro of the folk-song has all but passed away: the Negro of the emotional church is fading… In my own … pieces that come nearest to the old Negro, to the spirit saturate with folk-song … the dominant emotion is a sadness derived from a sense of fading.…The folk-songs themselves are of the same order: the deepest of them, "I aint got long to stay here."

So, "Song of the Son":

Pour O pour that parting soul in song,
O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,
Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night,
And let the valley carry it along.
And let the valley carry it along.

O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,
Now just before an epoch's sun declines
Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee,
Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.

In time, for though the sun is setting on
A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;
Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet
To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.

O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare
One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes

An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery.

Cane is fueled by an oppositional nostalgia. A precarious vessel possessed of an eloquence coincident with loss, it wants to reach or to keep in touch with an alternate reality as that reality fades. It was Toomer's dread of the ascending urban-industrial order which opened his ears to the corrective—potentially corrective—counterpoint he heard in Georgia. In the middle section of the book, set in northern cities, houses epitomize a reign of hard, sharp edges, rectilinear pattern, fixity, regimentation, a staid, white order: "Houses, and dorm sitting-rooms are places where white faces seclude themselves at night." The house embodies, again and again, suffocating structure: "Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver's helmet, on his head.… He is sinking. His house is a dead thing that weights him down." Or: "Dan's eyes sting. Sinking into a soft couch, he closes them. The house contracts about him. It is a sharp-edged, massed, metallic house. Bolted." Compare this with Kabnis's fissured, rickety cabin in the south, through the cracks in whose walls and ceiling a ventilating music blows:

The walls, unpainted, are seasoned a rosin yellow. And cracks between the boards are black. These cracks are the lips the night winds use for whispering. Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering … Night winds whisper in the eaves. Sing weirdly in the ceiling cracks.

Ventilating song is what Dan invokes against the row of houses, the reign of suffocating structure, at the beginning of "Box Seat":

Houses are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street. Upon the gleaming limbs and asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger. Shake your curled wool-blossoms, nigger. Open your liver lips to lean, white spring. Stir the root-life of a withered people. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.

Dark swaying forms of Negroes are street songs that woo virginal houses.

Thirty years before the more celebrated Beats, Toomer calls out against an airtight domesticity, a reign of "square" houses and the domestication of spirit that goes with it, his call, as theirs would be, fueled and inflected by the countering thrust of black music.

Not that the beauty of the music wasn't bought at a deadly price. Its otherworldly reach was fostered and fed by seeming to have no home in this one ("I aint got long to stay here"). What the night winds whisper is this:

White-man's land.
Niggers, sing.
Burn, bear black children
Till poor rivers bring
Rest, and sweet glory
In Camp Ground.

The singing, preaching and shouting coming from the church near Kabnis's cabin build as Layman tells of a lynching, reaching a peak as a stone crashes in through one of the windows:

A shriek pierces the room. The bronze pieces on the mantel hum. The sister cries frantically: "Jesus, Jesus, I've found Jesus. 0 Lord, glory t God, one mo sinner is acomin home." At the height of this, a stone, wrapped round with paper, crashes through the window. Kabnis springs to his feet, terror-stricken. Layman is worried. Halsey picks up the stone. Takes off the wrapper, smooths it out, and reads: "You nothern nigger, its time fer y t leave. Git along now."

Toomer put much of himself into Kabnis, from whom we get an apprehension of music as a carrier of conflicted portent, bearer of both good and bad news. "Dear Jesus," he prays, "do not chain me to myself and set these hills and valleys, heaving with folk-songs, so close to me that I cannot reach them. There is a radiant beauty in the night that touches and … tortures me."

Cane's take on music is part and parcel of Toomer's insistence on the tragic fate of beauty, the soul's transit through an unsoulful world. This note gets hit by the first piece in the book, the story of "Karintha carrying beauty," her soul "a growing thing ripened too soon." The writing is haunted throughout by a ghost of aborted splendor, a spectre written into its much-noted lament for the condition of the women it portrays—woman as anima, problematic "parting soul." These women are frequently portrayed, not insignificantly, singing. The mark of blackness and the mark of femininity meet the mark of oppression invested in music. Toomer celebrates and incorporates song but not without looking at the grim conditions which give it birth, not without acknowledging its outcast, compensatory character. "Cotton Song," one of the poems in the book, takes the work song as its model: "Come, brother, come. Lets lift it; / Come now, hewit! roll away!" Like Sterling Brown's "Southern Road," Nat Adderley's "Work Song," and Sam Cooke's "Chain Gang," all of which it anticipates, the poem excavates the music's roots in forced labor. Music here is inseparable from the stigma attached to those who make it.

This goes farther in fact. Music itself is looked at askance and stigmatized in a philistine, prosaic social order: "Bolted to the endless rows of metal houses.… No wonder he couldn't sing to them." Toomer's formal innovations in Cane boldly ventilate the novel, a traditional support for prosaic order, by acknowledging fissures and allowing them in, bringing in verse and dramatic dialogue, putting poetry before reportage. This will to song, though, is accompanied by an awareness of song's outlaw lot which could have been a forecast of the book's commercial failure. (Only five hundred copies of the first printing were sold.) Cane portrays its own predicament. It shows that music or poetry, if not exactly a loser's art, is fed by an intimacy with loss and may in fact feed it. This comes out in two instances of a version of wounded kinship which recurs throughout the book, the thwarted communion of would-be lovers. Paul, Orpheus to Bona's Eurydice, turns back to deliver an exquisitely out-of-place poetic address to the doorman, then returns to find Bona gone. Likewise, the narrator holds forth poetically as he sits beside Avey in the story which takes her name, only to find that she's fallen asleep. A play of parallel estrangements emerges. His alienation from the phantom reign of prosaic power—the Capitol dome is "a gray ghost ship"—meets her detachment from and immunity to prepossessing eloquence:

I talked, beautifully I thought, about an art that would be born, an art that would open the way for women the likes of her. I asked her to hope, and build up an inner life against the coming of that day. I recited some of my own things to her. I sang, with a strange quiver in my voice, a promise-song. And then I began to wonder why her hand had not once returned a single pressure.… I sat beside her through the night. I saw the dawn steal over Washington. The Capitol dome looked like a gray ghost ship drifting in from sea. Avey's face was pale, and her eyes were heavy. She did not have the gray crimson-splashed beauty of the dawn. I hated to wake her. Orphan-woman.…

Beauty apprised of its abnormality both is and isn't beauty. (Baraka on Coltrane's "Afro-Blue": "Beautiful has nothing to do with it, but it is.") An agitation complicates would-be equanimity, would-be poise. "Th form thats burned int my soul," Kabnis cries, "is some twisted awful thing that crept in from a dream, a godam nightmare, an wont stay still unless I feed it. An it lives on words. Not beautiful words. God Almighty no. Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words." The tormenting lure of anomalous beauty and the answering dance of deformation—form imitatively "tortured, twisted"—also concern the writer I'd like to move on to, William Carlos Williams. The harassed/harassing irritability which comes into the "Beautiful Thing" section of Paterson recalls Kabnis's "Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?" In black music Williams heard the "defiance of authority" he declares beauty to be, a "vulgarity" which "surpasses all perfections."

Williams's engagement with black music was greatly influenced by his sense of himself as cut off from the literary mainstream. At the time the two pieces I'd like to look at were written Williams had not yet been admitted into the canon, as can be seen in the omission of his work from the Modern Library Anthology of American Poetry in 1945, at whose editor, Conrad Aiken, he accordingly takes a shot in Man Orchid, the second of the two pieces I'll discuss. His quarrel with T. S. Eliot's dominance and influence doesn't need pointing out, except that it also comes up in Man Orchid. Seeing himself as a victimized poet, Williams celebrated the music of a victimized people. In a gesture which has since been overdone ("the white negro," "the student as nigger," analogies between "women and blacks"), he saw parallels between their lot and his own. This can also be seen, though in a slightly more subtle way, in the first of the two pieces I'd like to turn to, "Ol' Bunk's Band."

Both pieces grew out of Williams's going to hear New Orleans trumpeter Bunk Johnson in New York in 1945. A revival of interest in Johnson's music was then going on and Williams caught him during a 3 1/2-month gig at the Stuyvesant Casino on the lower east side. He soon after wrote "01' Bunk's Band," a poem whose repeated insistence "These are men!" diverges from the dominant culture's denial of human stature to black people. He goes against the grain of accepted grammar in such things as the conscious "vulgarity" of the triple negative "and / not never / need no more," emulating a disregard for convention he heard in the music. The poem in full:

These are men! the gaunt, unfore-sold, the vocal,
blatant, Stand up, stand up! the slap of a bass-string.
Pick, ping! The horn, the hollow horn
long drawn out, a hound deep tone—
Choking, choking! while the treble reed
races—alone, ripples, screams slow to fast—
to second to first! These are men!

Drum, drum, drum, drum, drum, drum, drum! the
ancient cry, escaping crapulence eats through
transcendent—torn, tears, term town, tense,
turns and back off whole, leaps up, stomps down,
rips through! These are men beneath
whose force the melody limps—to
proclaim, proclaims—Run and lie down,
in slow measures, to rest and not never
need no more! These are men! Men!

The "hound deep / tone," reminding us that Johnson played in a band known as the Yelping Hound Band in 1930, also conjures a sense of underdog status which brings the orphaned or outcast poet into solidarity with an outcast people. The repeated assertion "These are men!" plays against an implied but unstated "treated like dogs."

Threaded into this implicit counterpoint are the lines "These are men / beneath / whose force the melody limps," where "limps" reflects critically on a crippling social order. The musicians do to the melody what's done to them, the social handicap on which this limping reports having been translated and, in that sense, transcended, triumphed over. Williams anticipates Baraka's more explicit reading of black music as revenge, sublimated murder. Looking at Paterson, which hadn't been underway long when "01' Bunk's Band" was written, one finds the same complex of figures: dogs, lameness, limping. In the preface to Book 1 the image conveyed is that of a pariah, out of step with the pack:

Sniffing the trees,
just another dog
among a lot of dogs. What
else is there? And to do?
The rest have run out—
after the rabbits.
Only the lame stands—on
three legs.…

This leads eventually to the quote from John Addington Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets which ends Book 1, a passage in which Symonds comments on Hipponax's choliambi, "lame or limping iambics":

… Hipponax ended his iambics with a spondee or a trochee instead of an iambus, doing thus the utmost violence to the rhythmical structure … The choliambi are in poetry what the dwarf or cripple is in human nature. Here again, by their acceptance of this halting meter, the Greeks displayed their acute aesthetic sense of propriety, recognizing the harmony which subsists between crabbed verses and the distorted subjects with which they dealt—the vices and perversions of humanity—as well as their agreement with the snarling spirit of the satirist. Deformed verse was suited to deformed morality.

That Williams heard a similar gesture in the syncopated rhythms of black music is obvious by Book 5, where, after quoting a passage on Bessie Smith from Mezz Mezzrow's Really the Blues, he makes his well-known equation of "satiric" with "satyric":

            a satyric play!
                       All plays
were satyric when they were most devout.
            Ribald as a Satyr!

Satyrs dance!
           all the deformities take wing.

This would also be a way of talking about the "variable foot," less an aid to scansion than a trope—the travestied, fractured foot.

Williams here stumbles upon, without naming and, most likely, without knowing, the Fon-Yoruba orisha of the crossroads, the lame dancer Legba. Legba walks with a limp because his legs are of unequal lengths, one of them anchored in the world of humans and the other in that of the gods. His roles are numerous, the common denominator being that he acts as an intermediary, a mediator, much like Hermes, of whom Hipponax was a follower. (Norman 0. Brown: "Hipponax, significantly enough, found Hermes the most congenial god; he is in fact the only personality in Greek literature of whom it may be said that he walked with Hermes all the days of his life.") Like Hermes's winged feet, Legba's limp—"deformities take wing"—bridges high and low. Legba presides over gateways, intersections, thresholds, wherever different realms or regions come into contact. His limp a play of difference, he's the master linguist and has much to do with signification, divination, and translation. His limp the offbeat or eccentric accent, the "suspended accentuation" of which Thompson writes, he's the master musician and dancer, declared first among the orishas because only he could simultaneously play a gong, a bell, a drum, and a flute while dancing. The master of polyrhythmicity and heterogeneity, he suffers not from deformity but multiformity, a "defective" capacity in a homogeneous order given over to uniform rule. Legba's limp is an emblem of heterogeneous wholeness, the image and outcome of a peculiar remediation. "Lame" or "limping," that is, like "phantom," cuts with a relativizing edge to unveil impairment's power, as though the syncopated accent were an unsuspected blessing offering anomalous, unpredictable support. Impairment taken to higher ground, remediated, translates damage and disarray into a dance. Legba's limp, compensating the difference in leg lengths, functions like a phantom limb. Robert Pelton writes that Legba "transforms … absence into transparent presence," deficit leg into invisible supplement.

Legba's authority over mix and transition made him especially relevant to the experience of transplantation brought about by the slave trade. The need to accommodate geographic and cultural difference placed a high premium on his mediatory skills. He's thus the most tenaciously retained of the orishas among New World Africans, the first to be invoked in vodoun ceremonies, be they in Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, or elsewhere. There's little wonder why Williams's work, concerned as it is with the New World as a ground for syncretistic innovation, would be paid a visit by the African bridge between old and new. What he heard in Bunk Johnson's music was a rhythmic digestion of dislocation, the African genius for enigmatic melding or mending, a mystery of resilient survival no image puts more succinctly than that of Legba's limping dance.

Legba has made more straightforward appearances in certain works written since Williams's time, showing up, for example, as Papa LaBas (the name he goes by in New Orleans) in Ishmael Reed's novels. Or as Lebert Joseph in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, a novel whose third section is introduced by a line from the Haitian invocation to Legba and in which one comes upon such passages as: "Out of his stooped and winnowed body had come the illusion of height, femininity and power. Even his foreshortened left leg had appeared to straighten itself out and grow longer as he danced." One of his most telling appearances in the literature of this country, though, is one in which, as in Williams's work, he enters unannounced. In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man one finds adumbrations of Legba which, bearing as they do on the concerns addressed here, deserve more than passing mention.

Invisible Man, like Cane, is a work which draws on black folk resources. While collecting folklore in Harlem in 1939 for the Federal Writers' Project, Ellison was told a tale which had to do with a black man in South Carolina who because he could make himself invisible at will was able to harass and give white people hell with impunity. This would seem to have contributed to the relativizing thrust of the novel's title and its long meditation on the two-way cut of invisibility. On the other side of invisibility as exclusion, social death, we find it as revenge, millenarian reversal. The prominence of Louis Armstrong in the novel's prologue brings to mind Zuckerkandl's discussion of the case music makes for the invisible, as invisibility is here both social and metaphysical. The ability to "see around corners" defies the reign of strict rectilinear structure lamented in Cane by going outside ordinary time and space constraints. Louis's horn, apocalyptic, alters times (and, with it, space):

Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis' music.

This different sense of time one recognizes as Legba's limp. It leads to and is echoed by a later adumbration of Legba, one in which Ellison hints at a similarly "offbeat" sense of history, one which diverges from the Brotherhood's doctrine of history as monolithic advance. Early on, Jack describes the old evicted couple as "already dead, defunct," people whom "history has passed … by," "dead limbs that must be pruned away." Later "dead limbs" plays contrapuntally upon Tarp's contestatory limp, a limp which, as he explains, has social rather than physiological roots. It was caused by nineteen years on a chain gang:

You notice this limp I got? … Well, I wasn't always lame, and I'm not really now cause the doctors can't find anything wrong with that leg. They say it's sound as a piece of steel. What I mean is I got this limp from dragging a chain … Nobody knows that about me, they just think I got rheumatism. But it was that chain and after nineteen years I haven't been able to stop dragging my leg.

Phantom limb, phantom limp. Tarp goes on, in a gesture recalling the protective root Sandy gives Frederick Douglass in the latter's Narrative, to give Invisible Man the broken link from the leg chain he dragged for nineteen years. Phantom limb, phantom limp, phantom link: "I think it's got a heap of signifying wrapped up in it and it might help you remember what we're really fighting against." This it does, serving to concentrate a memory of injustice and traumatic survival, a remembered wound resorted to as a weapon of self-defense. During his final confrontation with the Brotherhood, Invisible Man wears it like a set of brass knuckles: "My hand was in my pockets now, Brother Tarp's leg chain around my knuckles."

"The trouble has been," Olson writes, "that a man stays so astonished he can triumph over his own incoherence, he settles for that, crows over it, and goes at a day again happy he at least makes a little sense." Ellison says much the same thing towards the end of Invisible Man when he cautions that "the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived." This goes for both societies and individuals, he points out. Legba's limp, like Tarp's leg chain, is a reminder of dues paid, damage done, of the limbs which have been "pruned away." It's a reminder of the Pyrrhic features every triumph over chaos or incoherence turns out to possess. The spectre of illusory victory and its corollary, the riddle of deceptive disability or enabling defeat, sit prominently among the mysteries to which it witnesses. "No defeat is made up entirely of defeat," Williams writes in Paterson.

In Man Orchid, the second piece which grew out of Williams's going to hear Johnson's band, the stutter plays a significant role. What better qualification of what can only be a partial victory over incoherence? What limping, staggering, and stumbling are to walking, stuttering and stammering are to speech. "To stammer and to stumble, original stumelen, are twin words," Theodore Thass-Thienemann points out. "The use of the one and the same phonemic pattern for denoting these two different meanings is found in other languages too. Stammering and stuttering are perceived as speech im-pedi-ments." The stutter enters Man Orchid largely because of Bucklin Moon, the author of a novel called The Darker Brother. Moon was at the Stuyvesant Casino on the night of 23 November 1945, the second time Williams went to hear Johnson's band. He ended up joining Williams and his friends at their table, among whom was Fred Miller, editor of the thirties proletarian magazine Blast and one of the coauthors of Man Orchid. Because of his novel and his knowledge of black music, Moon was incorrectly taken by them to be black, though Miller asked Williams in a letter two days later: "Would you ever think that Bucklin Moon was a Negro, if you passed him—as a stranger—in the street? He looks whiter than a lot of whites." Moon evidently spoke with a stutter whenever he became nervous and unsure of himself, which was the case that night at the Stuyvesant Casino. Miller goes on to offer this as a further peculiarity: "a stuttering or stammering Negro is a pretty rare bird indeed: your darker brother is articulate enough, when he isn't too frightened to talk." Like Legba's limp, Moon's stutter would come to symbolize a meeting of worlds, a problematic, insecure mix of black and white.

At the Stuyvesant Williams suggested that he and Miller publish an interracial literary magazine. Miller was enthusiastic at the time but soon lost interest. He suggested within a couple of weeks, however, that he and Williams collaborate on an improvisatory novel which was to be written as though they were musicians trading fours: "You write chap. I, send it to me, I do the 2d Chap., send mess back to you, you do 3—and so on." Williams liked the idea and Man Orchid was launched. They spent the next year working on it, off and on, bringing in a third collaborator, Lydia Carlin, in March. The work was never completed and what there is of it, forty pages, remained unpublished until 1973. It's going too far to call it a novel and outright ludicrous to call it, as Paul Mariani does, "Williams's black novel," but the piece is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of them being its anticipation of the bop-inspired attempts at collaborative, improvisatory writing which became popular among the Beats a decade later.

Wray Douglas, Man Orchid's black-white protagonist, is based in part on Bucklin Moon and intended to embody America's yet-to-be-resolved identity. As Williams writes: "To resolve such a person would be to create a new world." But other than his presumed black-white mix and his stutter not much of Moon went into the figure. Wray Douglas is clearly his creators' alter ego, the narrated "he" and the narrator's "I" in most cases the same. Want of resolution and the stubborn problematics of heterogeneity are what Man Orchid most effectively expresses, the latter symptomized by the solipsistic quality of the work and the former a would-be flight from the resolute self (false resolution) which the solipsism indulges even as it eschews. Two white writers sit down to create a black protagonist whose model is another white writer. The ironies and contradictions needn't be belabored.

The stutter thus becomes the most appropriate, self-reflexive feature of an articulation which would appear to be blocked in advance. Williams's and Miller's prose in Man Orchid both stutters and refers to stuttering. Here, for example, is how Williams begins Chapter 1:

Is it perchance a crime—a time, a chore, a bore, a job? He wasn't a musician—but he wished he had been born a musician instead of a writer. Musicians do not stutter. But he ate music, music wrinkled his belly—if you can wrinkle an inflated football. Anyhow it felt like that so that's what he wrote (without changing a word—that was his creed and always after midnight, you couldn't be earlier in the morning than that). All good writing is written in the morning.

Is what perchance a crime? (One) (or rather two) He ate and drank beer. That is, he ate, he also drank beer. A crime to be so full, so—so (the thing the philosophers hate) poly. So p-p-poly. Polypoid. Huh?

Thinking, perhaps, of the use of singing in the treatment of stuttering, Williams identifies writing with the latter while looking longingly at music as the embodiment of a heterogeneous wholeness to which his writing will aspire, an unimpeded, unproblematic wholeness beyond its reach. Miller's contribution to Man Orchid is likewise touched by a sense of writing's inferiority to music. Early on, referring to Bessie Smith's singing, he asks: "What were the little words chasing each other like black bits of burnt leaves across the pages he held—[compared] to that vast voice?" Two pages later he answers:

More printed words like black bits of burnt leaves. They had the right keyhole, those guys, but the wrong key. The only words that could blast like Bunk's horn or smash like John Henry's hammer were the poet's, the maker's, personal, ripped out of his guts: And no stuttering allowed.

Throughout Man Orchid, however, the writer's emulation of the musician causes rather than cures the stutter. Imitating the spontaneity of improvisatory music, Williams and Miller approach the typewriter as a musical keyboard on which they extemporize "without changing a word." Wrong "notes" are left as they are rather than erased, though the right ones do eventually get "played" in most cases. This results in a repetitiveness and a halting, staccato gesture reminiscent of a stutterer's effort to get out what he wants to say. Thus Williams: "American poetry was on its way to great distinction—when the blight of Eliot's popular verse fell pon—upon the gasping universities—who hadN8t hadn8T hadn't tasted Thames water for nearly a hundred years." By disrupting the fluency and coherence available to them Williams and Miller attempt to get in touch with what that coherence excludes, "the chaos against which that pattern was conceived." This friendly relationship with incoherence, however, constitutes a gesture towards but not an attainment of the otherness to which it aspires, an otherness to which access can only be analogically gotten. Man Orchid, to give the obvious example, is a piece of writing, not a piece of music. Nor, as I've already noted, is the color line crossed. The stutter is a two-way witness which on one hand symbolizes a need to go beyond the confines of an exclusionary order while on the other confessing to its at best only limited success at doing so. The impediments to the passage it seeks are acknowledged if not annulled, attested to by exactly the gesture which would overcome them if it could.

One measure of Man Orchid's flawed embrace of otherness is the prominence in it of Williams's all too familiar feud with Eliot, a feud into which he pulls Bunk Johnson. Johnson's music is put forth as an example of an authentic American idiom, "the autochthonous strain" whose dilution or displacement by "sweet music" paralleled and anticipated that of a genuine "American poetry [which] was on its way to great distinction" by The Waste Land:

Eliot would not have been such a success if he hadn't hit a soft spot. They were scared and rushed in where he hit like water into the side of a ship. It was ready for it a long time. Isn't a weak spot always ready to give way? That was the secret of his success. Great man Eliot. They were aching for him, Aiken for him. He hit the jackpot with his popular shot.

But long before that, twenty years earlier ol' Bunk Johnson was all washed up. Sweet music was coming in and jazz was through. But I mean THROUGH! And when I say through, I mean through. Go ahead, quit. See if I care. Take your band and go frig a kite. Go on back to the rice swamps. See if I care. Sell your ol'd horn. See if I care. Nobody wants that kind of music any more: this is a waste land for you, Buddy, this IS a waste land! I said Waste Land and when I sez Waste land I mean waste land.

… Thus American poetry, which disappeared about that time you might say, followed the same course New Orleans music had taken when sweet music displaced it about in 1906 or so.

Fraternity with Johnson is less the issue than sibling rivalry with Eliot, a literary quarrel in which Johnson has no voice but the one Williams gives him. What it says is sample: "Black music is on Williams's side." (The Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite provides interesting counterpoint, picturing Eliot and black music as allies when he notes the influence of Eliot's recorded readings in the Caribbean: "In that dry deadpan delivery, the riddims of St. Louis … were stark and clear for those of us who at the same time were listening to the dislocations of Bird, Dizzy and Klook. And it is interesting that on the whole, the Establishment couldn't stand Eliot's voice—far less jazz!")

The possibility that otherness was being appropriated rather than engaged was recognized by Miller and for him it became an obstacle to going on. When he began to voice his misgivings Williams brought in Lydia Carlin, who not only added sexual otherness to the project but a new form of ethnic otherness as well, in that, though she herself was English, one of the two chapters she contributed was about a Polish couple, the Czajas. Her two chapters are much more conventional, much less improvisatory than Williams's and Miller's and tend to stand apart from rather than interact with theirs. Her taking part in the project did nothing to solve the problem and as late as Chapter 7 Miller is asking:

Now returning to this novel, Man Orchid. Why the orchid?—to begin with. There's the old, tiresome and at bottom snobbish literary assumption that the Negro in America is an exotic bloom. Negro equals jungle. Despite the fact that he has been here longer than the second, third, even ninth generation Eurp European—Negro equals jungle. Then why doesn't the ofay bank president of German descent equal Black Forest? The Rutherford doctor of Welsh descent equal the cromlechs? or Welsh rarebit?

As bad if not worse is the fact that the choice of that particular orchid because of its phallic appearance plays upon a stereotypic black male sexuality. The distance from this to Norman Mailer's "Jazz is orgasm" isn't very great, which is only one of a handful of ways in which The White Negro bears upon this predecessor text.

Miller, though he could agonize as above, was no more free than Williams was of stereotypic equations. To him Johnson and his music represent a black essence which is unselfconscious and nonreflective: "Only the Bunks're satisfied to be Bunks, he told himself enviously. Their brain don't question their art. Nor their left hand their RIGHT. Their right to be Bunk, themself." The vitiation of "black" non-reflective being by "white" intellectuality is largely the point of his evocation of Wray Douglas and the trumpeter Cholly Oldham. The latter he describes as having "too much brain for a musician." Oldham stutters when he plays and wants to be a painter:

There was between Cholly and Bunk—what? a difference of thirty, thirty-five years in age, no more. But the difference otherwise! Hamlet son of Till Eulenspiegel. Showing you what the dry rot of intellectuality could do to the orchid in one generation. Progress (! Up from Slavery. That night-colored Hamlet, he wants to paint pictures now.

Black is nonreflective, white cerebral. So entrenched are such polarizations as to make the notion of a black intellectual oxymoronic. In May, Miller wrote to Williams that it had been a mistake to model their protagonist on Bucklin Moon: "I don't know enough about him and his special type, the colored intellectual (although I've been acquainted with and 've liked lots of ordinary Negro folk, laborers, musicians et al)." Small wonder he questioned the idea of an interracial magazine by writing to Williams:

Is there sufficient Negro writing talent—of the kind we wd. have no doubts about, AS talent, on hand to balance the white talent? I don't believe any more than you that publishing second-rate work with first-rate intentions would serve any cause but that of bad writing.

To what extent was being looked upon as black—as, even worse, that "rare bird," a black intellectual—the cause of Moon's nervousness that night at the Stuyvesant? Could a sense of distance in Williams's and Miller's manner have caused him to stutter? Miller's wife recalls in a letter to Paul Mariani:

Moon began with easy speech and there was talk at first of the interracial magazine but Moon soon took to stammering. To me Williams was always a warm congenial person, but he would become the coldly analytical surgeon at times and the effect it had on those around him at such a time was quite devastating.

That "coldly analytical" scrutiny would seem to have been disconcerting, making Williams and Miller the agents of the disarray about which they would then go on to write—as good an example as any of "phantom objectivity," the social construction of Moon's "mulatto" self-consciousness.

What I find most interesting about Man Orchid is that it inadvertently underscores a feature which was then coming into greater prominence in black improvised music. With the advent of bebop, with which neither Williams, Miller, nor Carlin seem to have been much engaged, black musicians began to assume a more explicit sense of themselves as artists, conscious creators, thinkers. Dizzy Gillespie would don a beret and a goatee, as would, among others, Yusef Lateef, who would record an album called Jazz for the Thinker. Anthony Braxton's pipe, wire-rim glasses, cardigan sweater, and diagrammatic titles are among the present-day descendants of such gestures. The aural equivalent of this more explicit reflexivity would come at times to resemble a stutter, conveying senses of apprehension and self-conscious duress by way of dislocated phrasings in which virtuosity mimes its opposite. Thelonious Monk's mock-awkward hesitancies evoke an experience of impediment or impairment, as do Sonny Rollins's even more stutterlike teasings of a tune, a quality Paul Blackburn imitates in "Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five Spot":

There will be many other nights like
me standing here with someone, some
one
someone
some-one
some
some
some
some
some
some
one
there will be other songs
a-nother fall, another—spring, but
there will never be a-noth, noth
anoth
noth
anoth-er
noth-er
noth-er
         other lips that I may kiss,
but they won't thrill me like
         thrill me like
                 like yours
used to

        dream a million dreams
but how can they come
when there         never be
a-noth—

Though Williams and Miller insist that Bunk Johnson doesn't stammer, the limp he inflicts on the melody is ancestral to the stutter of Monk, Rollins, and others.

As among the Kaluli, for whom music and poetry are "specifically marked for reflection," the black musician's stutter is an introspective gesture which arises from and reflects critically upon an experience of isolation or exclusion, the orphan's or the outsider's ordeal, the "rare bird's" ordeal. Like Tarp's leg chain, it symbolizes a refusal to forget damage done, a critique and a partial rejection of an available but biased coherence. Part of the genius of black music is the room it allows for a telling "inarticulacy," a feature consistent with its critique of a predatory coherence, the cannibalistic "plan of living" and the articulacy which upholds it. Man Orchid, where it comes closest to the spirit of black music, does so by way of a similar frustration with and questioning of given articulacies, permissible ways of making sense. In Chapter 6 Williams attempts to make racial distinctions meaningless, the result of which is part gibberish, part scat, part wisdom of the idiots ("the most foolishest thing you can say … has the most meaning"). His inability to make sense implicitly indicts a white-dominated social order and the discourse of racial difference by which it explains or makes sense of itself:

Not that black is white. I do not pretend that. Nor white black. That there is not the least difference is apparent to the mind at a glance. Thus, to the mind, the eye is forever deceived. And philosophers imagine they can have opinions about art? God are they dumb, meaning stupid, meaning philosophers, meaning schools, meaning—learning. The limits of learning are the same as an egg to the yolk. The shell. Knowledge to a learned man is precisely the sane—that's good: sane for same—the same as the egg to the hen. No possibility of interchange. Reason, the shell.

No matter how I try to rearrange the parts, to show them interchangeable, the result is always the same. White is white and black is the United States Senate. No mixing. Even if it was all black it would be the same: white. How could it be different?

The very effort to talk down the difference underscores the tenacity of the racial polarization Man Orchid's liberal mission seeks, to some degree, to overcome—a tenacity which is attested to, as we've seen, in other ways as well, not the least of them being the authors' preconceptions.

The play of sense and nonsense in Wilson Harris's The Angel at the Gate is more immediately one of sensation and nonsensation, a complex mingling of endowments and deprivations, anesthetic and synesthetic intuitions. One reads, for example, late in the novel:

Mary recalled how deaf she had been to the voice of the blackbird that morning on her way to Angel Inn and yet it returned to her now in the depths of the mirror that stood beside her. Half-reflected voice, shaded sound, silent echo. Was this the source of musical composition? Did music issue from reflections that converted themselves into silent, echoing bodies in a mirror? Did the marriage of reflection and sound arise from deaf appearance within silent muse (or was it deaf muse in silent appearance) from which a stream of unheard music rippled into consciousness?

In dialogue with and relevant to such a passage is a discussion in Harris's most recent critical book, The Womb of Space, a discussion which touches upon Legba as "numinous shadow." Harris writes of "metaphoric imagery that intricately conveys music as the shadow of vanished but visualised presences": "Shadow or shade is alive with voices so real, yet strangely beyond material hearing, that they are peculiarly visualised or 'seen' in the intricate passages of a poem. Visualised presence acquires therefore a shadow and a voice that belongs to the mind's ear and eye." Music described in terms pertaining to sight is consistent with inklings of synesthetic identity which run through The Angel at the Gate. It's also part and parcel of Harris's long preoccupation, from work to work, with an uncapturable, ineffable wholeness, a heterogeneous inclusiveness evoked in terms of non-availability ("silent echo," "unheard music") and by polysemous fullness and fluency ("a stream … rippled").

The Angel at the Gate's anesthetic-synesthetic evocations recapitulate, in microcosm, the translation between media—aural and visual, music and writing—it claims to be. The intermedia impulse owns up to as it attempts to advance beyond the limits of a particular medium and is a version of what Harris elsewhere calls "a confession of weakness." The novel acknowledges that its particular strength can only be partial and seeks to "echo" if not enlist the also partial strength of another art form. Wholeness admitted to be beyond reach, the best to be attained is a concomitance of partial weaknesses, partial strengths, a conjunction of partial endowments. This conjunction is facilitated by Legba, upon whom The Womb of Space touches as a "numinous frailty" and a "transitional chord." In Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness, an earlier novel which likewise leans upon an extraliterary medium, the painter da Silva's advertisement for a model is answered by one Legba Cuffey, whose arrival infuses paint with sound: "The front door bell pealed it seemed in the middle of his painting as he brooded on past and future. The sound of a catch grown sharp as a child's cry he thought in a line of stroked paint." In this case painting, like music in The Angel at the Gate, is an alternate artistic arm with which the novel extends or attempts to extend its reach. "So the arts," Williams writes in Man Orchid, "take part for each other."

Music figures prominently at the end of Harris's first novel, Palace of the Peacock, where Legba's limp, the incongruity between heaven and earth, is marked by the refractive obliquity and bend of a passage from one medium to another. The annunciation of paradise takes the form of a music which issues through the lips of Carroll, the black namesake singer whose father is unknown but whose mother "knew and understood… [that his] name involved … the music of her undying sacrifice to make and save the world." The narrator notes a discrepancy between the sound Carroll's lips appear to be making and the sound he hears: "Carroll was whistling. A solemn and beautiful cry—unlike a whistle I reflected—deeper and mature. Nevertheless his lips were framed to whistle and I could only explain the difference by assuming the sound from his lips was changed when it struck the window and issued into the world." The deflection from apparent sound reveals not only the insufficiency of the visual image but that of any image, visual, acoustic or otherwise. Heaven is wholeness, meaning that any image which takes up the task of evoking it can only fail. Legba's limp is the obliquity of a religious aspiration which admits its failure to measure up to heaven, the bend legs make in prayer. As in the Paradiso, where Dante laments the poem's inability to do heaven justice by calling it lame, the narrator's evocation of Carroll's music is marked by a hesitant, faltering gesture which whenever it asserts immediately qualifies itself. It mimes the music's crippling, self-correcting attempts to register as well as redeem defects. The music repeatedly breaks and mends itself—mends itself as a phantom limb mends an amputation:

It was an organ cry almost and yet quite different I reflected again. It seemed to break and mend itself always—tremulous, forlorn, distant, triumphant, the echo of sound so pure and outlined in space it broke again into a mass of music. It was the cry of the peacock and yet I reflected far different. I stared at the whistling lips and wondered if the change was in me or in them. I had never witnessed and heard such sad and such glorious music.

This is the ongoingness of an attempt which fails but is repeatedly undertaken to insist that what it fails to capture nonetheless exists. Legba's limp is the obliquity of a utopian aspiration, the bend legs make preparing to spring.

Inability to capture wholeness notwithstanding, Palace of the Peacock initiates Harris's divergence, now into its third decade, from the novel's realist-mimetic tradition. The accent which falls upon the insufficiency of the visual image is consistent with the novel's earlier suggestions of an anesthetic-synesthetic enablement which displaces the privileged eye: "I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye." And again: "I had been blinded by the sun, and saw inwardly in the haze of my blind eye a watching muse and phantom whose breath was on my lips." That accent encapsulates Harris's quarrel with the cinematic pretense and the ocular conceit of the realist novel, a documentary stasis against which he poses an anesthetic-synesthetic obliquity and rush. This obliquity (seeing and/or hearing around corners, in Ellison's terms) is called "an angled intercourse with history" in The Angel at the Gate, the medium for which is the Angel Inn mirror, described at points as "spiritual" and "supernatural." Mary Stella is said to perceive the world "from a meaningfully distorted angle in the mirror," a pointed subversion of the mirror's conventional association with mimesis. Angularity cuts with a relativizing edge: "How unreal, yet real, one was when one saw oneself with one's own eyes from angles in a mirror so curiously unfamiliar that one's eyes became a stranger's eyes. As at the hairdresser when she invites one to inspect the back of one's head."

Late in the novel Mary Stella's "automatic codes" are said to have "propelled her pencil across the page of a mirror"—clear enough indication that the novel sees itself in the Angel Inn mirror, that reflection and refraction are there the same. Angled perception is a particular way of writing—writing bent or inflected by music. The Angel at the Gate is said to be based on Mary Stella's automatic writings and on notes taken by her therapist Joseph Marsden during conversations with her, some of which were conducted while she was under hypnosis. In the note which introduces the novel mention is made of "the musical compositions by which Mary it seems was haunted from early childhood," as well as of "a series of underlying rhythms in the automatic narratives." Like the boy who became a muni bird, Mary Stella, an orphan from the age of seven, resorts to music in the face of broken familial ties—those with her parents in the past and in the present her troubled marriage with Sebastian, for whom she's "the same woman broken into wife and sister." Louis Armstrong's rendition of "Mack the Knife," the song her mother frequently sang during her early childhood, animates a host of recollections and associations:

… the music returned once again coming this time from an old gramophone her mother possessed. It was "Mack the Knife" sung and played by Louis Armstrong. The absurdity and tall story lyric, oceanic city, were sustained by Armstrong's height of trumpet and by his instrumental voice, hoarse and meditative in contrast to the trumpet he played, ecstatic cradle, ecstatic childhood, ecstatic coffin, ecstatic grieving surf or sea.

… Stella was shivering. The fascination of the song for her mother was something that she grew up with. Mack was also the name that her father bore. Mack was her mother's god. And her mother's name? Guess, Stella whispered to Sebastian in the darkened studio. Jenny! It was a random hit, bull's eye. It struck home. Jenny heard. She was weeping. It came with the faintest whisper of the sea, the faintest whisper of a flute, in the studio. Mack's women were the Sukey Tawdreys, the sweet Lucy Browns, of the world. Between the ages of four and seven Stella thought that the postman was her father. Until she realized that he was but the middleman between her real father and Jenny her mother. He brought the letters from foreign ports with foreign stamps over which Jenny wept. On her seventh birthday the last letter arrived. Her father was dead, his ship sunk. It was a lie. It drove her mother into an asylum where she contemplated Mack clinging for dear life to sarcophagus-globe even as she vanished into the arms of god, bride of god.

Stella was taken into care by a Social Welfare Body and placed in an orphanage in East Anglia.

Mary Stella's automatic narratives, prompted by her thirst for connection and by "her longing to change the world," instigate patterns of asymmetric equation into which characters named Sukey Tawdrey, Mother Diver, Lucy Brown, and so forth enter. The song, it seems, populates a world, an alternate world. Her music-prompted hand and its inscription of far-flung relations obey intimations of unacknowledged wholeness against a backdrop of social and psychic division. "To be whole," we're told at the end, "was to endure … the traffic of many souls."

The novel's concern with heterogeneous wholeness invokes Legba repeatedly—though, significantly, not by that name. As if to more greatly emphasize Legba's association with multiplicity, Harris merges him with his trickster counterpart among the Ashanti, the spider Anancy, tales of whose exploits are a prominent part of Caribbean folklore. An asymmetric equation which relates deficit leg to surplus legs, lack to multiplicity, brings "a metaphysic of curative doubt" to bear on appearances. Apparent deficiency and apparent endowment are two sides of an insufficient image. When Sebastian discovers Mary Stella's attempt at suicide "his legs multiplied," but later "there was no visible bandage around his ankle but he seemed nevertheless as lame as Anancy." Other such intimations occur: Marsden described as a cane on which "something, some invisible presence, did lean," Sebastian asking of the jockey who exposed himself to Mary Stella, "Did he, for instance, possess a walking stick?," and Jackson, Mary Stella's "authentic messenger," falling from a ladder and breaking his leg. The most sustained appearance occurs when Mary Stella happens upon the black youth Anancy in Marsden's study. The "funny title" of a book has brought him there:

… He turned his eyes to the desk. "The door was open and I saw the funny title of that book." He pointed to the desk.

"Sir Thomas More's Utopia," said Mary, smiling against her fear and finding her tongue at last. "I put it there myself this week." His eyes were upon hers now. "I put it …" she began again, then stopped. "I brought you here," she thought silently. "Utopia was the bait I used." The thought came of its own volition. It seemed irrational, yet true. There was a ticking silence between them, a deeper pull than she could gauge, a deeper call than she knew, that had sounded long, long ago, even before the time when her father's great-great-grandmother had been hooked by an Englishman to bear him children of mixed blood.

Mary Stella's pursuit of heterogeneous relations carries her out as well as in. She discovers an eighteenth-century black ancestor on her father's side. That discovery, along with her perusal, in Marsden's library, of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century parish accounts of money spent to expel children and pregnant women, several of them black, arouses her desire for a utopian inclusiveness, the "longing to change the world" which "baits" Anancy. The world's failure to comply with that desire leads her to distance herself from it, to practice a kind of cosmic displacement. Her schizophrenia involves an aspect of astral projection, as she cultivates the "capacity to burn elsewhere" suggested by her middle name: "Ah yes, said Stella, I am a mask Mary wears, a way of coping with truth. We are each other's little deaths, little births. We cling to sarcophagus-globe and to universal cradle."

Displacement and relativizing distance account for the resonances and agitations at work in the text, an animated incompleteness whose components tend towards as well as recede from one another, support as well as destabilize one another. The pull between Mary Stella and Anancy is said to arise from "a compulsion or infectious Cupid's arrow…related to the target of unfinished being." Some such pull, together with its other side, aversion, advances the accent on relationality which pervades the novel and has much to do with Harris's distinctive style. The sought-after sense of dispersed identity makes for staggered equational upsets and elisions in which words, concepts, and images, like the characters, are related through a mix of contrast and contagion. The musicality of Harris's writing resides in its cadences, imaginal concatenations and poetic assurance, but also in something else. The Angel at the Gate offers a musical conception of the world whose emphasis on animate incompleteness, "unfinished being," recalls Zuckerkandl's analysis of tonal motion:

A series of tones is heard as motion not because the successive tones are of different pitches but because they have different dynamic qualities. The dynamic quality of a tone, we said, is a statement of its incompleteness, its will to completion. To hear a tone as dynamic quality, as a direction, a pointing, means hearing at the same time beyond it, beyond it in the direction of its will, and going toward the expected next tone. Listening to music, then, we are not first in one tone, then in the next, and so forth. We are, rather, always between the tones, on the way from tone to tone; our hearing does not remain with the tone, it reaches through it and beyond it … pure betweenness, pure passing over.

A mixed, middle ground which privileges betweenness would seem to be the realm in which Harris works. He alludes to himself as a "no-man's land writer" at one point and later has Jackson say, "I must learn to paint or sculpt what lies stranded between earth and heaven." An "attunement to a gulf or divide between sky and earth" probes an estrangement and a stranded play in which limbs have to do with limbo, liminality, lift:

The women were dressed in white. They carried covered trays of food and other materials on their head. There was a statuesque deliberation to each movement they made, a hard-edged beauty akin to young Lucy's that seemed to bind their limbs into the soil even as it lifted them very subtly an inch or two into space.

That lift was so nebulous, so uncertain, it may not have occurred at all. Yet it was there; it gave a gentle wave or groundswell to the static root or the vertical dance of each processional body.

What remains to be said is that to take that lift a bit farther is to view the outsider's lot as cosmic, stellar. Social estrangement is gnostic estrangement and the step from Satchmo's "height of trumpet" to Sun Ra's "intergalactic music" is neither a long nor an illogical one. In this respect, the film Brother from Another Planet is worth—in what will serve as a closing note—mentioning briefly. That it shares with The Angel at the Gate a theme of cosmic dislocation is obvious enough. That the Brother's limp is the limp of a misfit—the shoes he finds and puts on don't suit his feet—is also easy to see. An intermedia thread is also present and bears on this discussion, especially the allusions to Dante (the Rasta guide named Virgil) and Invisible Man (the Brother's detachable eye), where it would seem the film were admitting a need to reach beyond its limits. What stronger suggestion of anesthetic-synesthetic displacement could one want than when the Brother places his eye in the drug dealer's hand? Or than the fact that the movie ends on a seen but unsounded musical note as the Brother gets aboard an "A" train?