SOURCE: Gates, Henry-Louis, Jr. “Binary Oppositions in Chapter One of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave Written by Himself.” In Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, edited by Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto, pp. 212-32. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1979.

[In the following essay, Gates discusses the way in which Douglass's narrative participated in contemporary literary conventions by setting up such binary oppositions as black/white, slave/free, ignorance/knowledge, and nature/culture.]

I was not hunting for my liberty, but also hunting for my name.

—William Wells Brown, 1849

Whatever may be the ill or favored condition of the slave in the matter of mere personal treatment, it is the chattel relation that robs him of his manhood.

—James Pennington, 1849

When at last in a race a new principle appears, an idea,—that conserves it; ideas only save races. If the black man is feeble and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve, and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization; for the sake of that element, no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. … I esteem the occasion of this jubilee to be the proud discovery that the black race can contend with the white: that in the great anthem which we call history, a piece of many parts and vast compass, after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment, they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with effect and take a master's part in the music.

—Emerson, 1844

The white race will only respect those who oppose their usurpation, and acknowledge as equals those who will not submit to their rule. … We must make an issue, create an event and establish for ourselves a position. This is essentially necessary for our effective elevation as a people, directing our destiny and redeeming ourselves as a race.

—Martin R. Delany, 1854

Autobiographical forms in English and in French assumed narrative priority toward the end of the eighteenth century; they shaped themselves principally around military exploits, court intrigues, and spiritual quests. As Stephen Butterfield has outlined, “Elizabethan sea dogs and generals of the War of the Spanish Succession wrote of strenuous campaigns, grand strategy, and gory battles. The memoirs of Louis XIV's great commander, the Prince of Condé, for example, thrilled thousands in Europe and America, as did the ‘inside stories’ of the nefarious, clandestine doings of the great European courts. The memoirs of the Cardinal De Retz, which told the Machiavellian intrigues of French government during Louis XIV's minority and of the cabal behind the election of a Pope, captivated a large audience. Even more titillating were personal accounts of the boudoir escapades of noblemen and their mistresses. Nell Gwyn, Madame Pompadour, and even the fictitious Fanny Hill were legends if not idols in their day. More edifying but no less marvelous were the autobiographies of spiritual pilgrimage—such as the graphic accounts of Loyola, John Bunyan, and the Quaker George Fox. Their mystical experiences and miraculous deliverances filled readers with awe and wonder.” It is no surprise, then, that the narratives of the escaped slave became, during the three decades before the Civil War, the most popular form of written discourse in the country. Its audience was built to order. And the expectations created by this peculiar autobiographical convention, as well as by two other literary traditions, had a profound effect on the shape of discourse in the slave narrative. I am thinking here of the marked (but generally unheralded) tradition of the sentimental novel and, more especially, of the particularly American transmutation of the European picaresque. The slave narrative, I suggest, is a “countergenre,” a mediation between the novel of sentiment and the picaresque, oscillating somewhere between the two in a bipolar moment, set in motion by the mode of the Confession. (Indeed, as we shall see, the slave narrative spawned its formal negation, the plantation novel.)

Claudio Guillén's seminal typology of the picaresque,¹ outlined as seven “characteristics” of that form and derived from numerous examples in Spanish and French literature, provides a curious counterpoint to the morphology of the slave narratives and aids remarkably in delineating what has proved to be an elusive, but recurring, narrative structure.

The picaro, who is after all a type of character, only becomes one at a certain point in his career, just as a man or woman “becomes” a slave only at a certain (and structurally crucial) point of perception in his or her “career.” Both the picaro and the slave narrators are orphans; both, in fact, are outsiders. The picaresque is a pseudo-autobiography, whereas the slave narratives often tend toward quasi-autobiography. Yet in both, “life is at the same time revived and judged, presented and remembered.” In both forms, the narrator's point of view is partial and prejudiced, although the total view “of both is reflective, philosophical, and critical on moral or religious grounds.”² In both, there is a general stress on the material level of existence or indeed of subsistence, such as sordid facts, hunger, and money. There is in the narration of both a profusion of objects and detail. Both the picaro and the slave, as outsiders, comment on if not parody collective social institutions. Moreover, both, in their odysseys, move horizontally through space and vertically through society.

If we combine these resemblances with certain characteristics of the sentimental novel, such as florid asides, stilted rhetoric, severe piety, melodramatic conversation, destruction of the family unit, violation of womanhood, abuse of innocence, punishment of assertion, and the rags-to-riches success story, we can see that the slave narrative grafted together the conventions of two separate literary traditions and became its own form, utilizing popular conventions to affect its reader in much the same way as did cheap, popular fiction. Lydia Child, we recall, was not only the amanuensis for the escaped slave, Harriet Jacobs, but also a successful author in the sentimental tradition. (That the plantation novel was the antithesis or negation of the slave narrative becomes apparent when we consider its conventions. From 1824, when George Tucker published The Valley of the Shenandoah, the plantation novel concerned itself with aristocratic, virtuous masters; beast-like, docile slaves; great manor houses; squalid field quarters; and idealized, alabaster womanhood—all obvious negations of themes common to the slave narratives. Indeed, within two years of the publication in 1852 of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, at least fourteen plantation novels appeared.)

It should not surprise us, then, that the narratives were popular, since the use of well-established and well-received narrative conventions was meant to ensure commercial and hence political success. By at least one account, the sale of the slave narratives reached such profound proportions that a critic was moved to complain that the “shelves of booksellers groan under the weight of Sambo's woes, done up in covers! … We hate this niggerism, and hope it may be done away with. … If we are threatened with any more negro stories—here goes.” These “literary nigritudes” [sic], as he calls them, were “stories” whose “editions run to hundreds of thousands.”³ Marion Wilson Starling recalls Gladstone's belief that not more than about five percent of the books published in England had a sale of more than five hundred copies; between 1835 and 1863, no fewer than ten of these were slave narratives.⁴ So popular were they in England that a considerable number were published at London or Manchester before they were published in America, if at all. Nor should it surprise us that of these, the more popular were those that defined the genre structurally. It was Frederick Douglass' Narrative of 1845 that exploited the potential of and came to determine the shape of language in the slave narrative.

Douglass' Narrative, in its initial edition of five thousand copies, was sold out in four months. Within a year, four more editions of two thousand copies each were published. In the British Isles, five editions appeared, two in Ireland in 1846 and three in England in 1846 and 1847. Within the five years after its appearance, a total of some thirty thousand copies of the Narrative had been published in the English-speaking world. By 1848, a French edition, a paperback, was being sold in the stalls. Littells Living Age, an American periodical, gave an estimate of its sweep in the British Isles after one year's circulation: “Taking all together, not less than one million persons in Great Britain and Ireland have been excited by the book and its commentators.”⁵

Of the scores of reviews of the Narrative, two, especially, discuss the work in terms of its literary merits. One review, published initially in the New York Tribune and reprinted in The Liberator, attempts to place the work in the larger tradition of the narrative tale as a literary form.

Considered merely as a narrative, we have never read one more simple, true, coherent, and warm with genuine feeling. It is an excellent piece of writing, and on that score to be prized as a specimen of the powers of the black race, which prejudice persists in disputing. We prize highly all evidence of this kind, and it is becoming more abundant.⁶

Even more telling is the review from the Lynn Pioneer reprinted in the same issue of The Liberator; this review was perhaps the first to attempt to attach a priority to the Narrative's form and thereby place Douglass directly in a major literary tradition.

It is evidently drawn with a nice eye, and the coloring is chaste and subdued, rather than extravagant or overwrought. Thrilling as it is, and full of the most burning eloquence, it is yet simple and unimpassioned.

Although its “eloquence is the eloquence of truth,” and so “is as simple and touching as the impulses of childhood,” yet its “message” transcends even its superior moral content: “There are passages in it which would brighten the reputation of any author,—while the book, as a whole, judged as a mere work of art, would widen the fame of Bunyan or De Foe.”⁷ Leaving the matter of “truth” to the historians,⁸ these reviews argue correctly that despite the intention of the author for his autobiography to be a major document in the abolitionist struggle and regardless of Douglass' meticulous attempt at documentation, the Narrative falls into the larger class of the heroic fugitive with some important modifications that are related to the confession and the picaresque forms (hence, Bunyan and Defoe), a peculiar blend that would mark Afro-American fiction at least from the publication of James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.

These resemblances between confession and picaresque informed the narrative shape of Afro-American fiction in much the same way as they did in the English and American novel. As Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg maintain

The similarity in narrative stance between picaresque and confession enables the two to blend easily, making possible an entirely fictional narrative which is more in the spirit of the confession than the picaresque, such as Moll Flanders and Great Expectations.

But this same blend makes possible a different sort of sublime narrative, “one that is picaresque in spirit but which employs actual materials from the author's life, such as [Wells's] Tono-Bungay.” Into this class fall slave narratives, the polemical Afro-American first-person form the influence of which would shape the development of point of view in black fiction for the next one hundred years, precisely because

By turning the direction of the narrative inward the author almost inevitably presents a central character who is an example of something. By turning the direction of the narrative outward the author almost inevitably exposes weaknesses in society. First-person narrative is thus a ready vehicle for ideas.⁹

It is this first-person narration, utilized precisely in this manner, that is the first great shaping characteristic of the slave narratives. But there is another formal influence on the slave narratives the effect of which is telling: this is the American romance.

Like Herman Melville's marvelous romance, Pierre, the slave narratives utilize as a structural principle the irony of seeming innocence. Here in American society, both say, is to be found as much that is contrary to moral order as could be found in pre-revolutionary Europe. The novelty of American innocence is, however, the refusal or failure to recognize evil while participating in that evil. As with other American romantic modes of narration, the language of the slave narratives remains primarily an expression of the self, a conduit for particularly personal emotion. In this sort of narrative, language was meant to be a necessary but unfortunate instrument merely. In the slave narratives, this structuring of the self couples with the minute explication of gross evil and human depravity, and does so with such sheer intent as to make for a tyranny of point. If the matter of the shaping of the self can come only after the slave is free, in the context of an autobiographical narrative where he first posits that full self, then slavery indeed dehumanizes and must in no uncertain terms be abolished, by violence if necessary, since it is by nature a violent institution. The irony here is tyrannically romantic: Illusion and substance are patterned antitheses.

As with other examples of romance, the narratives turn on an unconsummated love: The slave and the ex-slave are the dark ladies of the new country destined to expire for unrequited love. Yet the leitmotif of the journey north and the concomitant evolution of consciousness within the slave—from an identity as property and object to a sublime identity as a human being and subject—display in the first person the selfsame spirit of the New World's personal experience with Titanic nature that Franklin's Autobiography has come to symbolize. The author of the slave narrative, in his flight through the wilderness (re-created in vivid detailed descriptions of the relation between man and land on the plantation and off), seems to be arguing strongly that man can “study nature” to know himself. The two great precepts—the former Emersonian and the latter Cartesian—in the American adventure become one. Further, as with the American symbolists, the odyssey is a process of becoming: Whitman, for instance, is less concerned with explorations of emotion than with exploration as a mode of consciousness. Slave narratives not only describe the voyage but also enact the voyage so that their content is primarily a reflection of their literary method. Theirs is a structure in which the writer and his subject merge into the stream of language. Language indeed is primarily a perception of reality. Yet, unlike the American symbolists, these writers of slave narratives want not so much to adopt a novel stance from which the world assumes new shapes as to impose a new form onto the world. There can be no qualification as to the nature of slavery; there can be no equivocation.

Stephen Butterfield explicates¹⁰ this idea rather well by contrasting the levels of diction in the slave narrative The Life of John Thompson¹¹ with a remarkably similar passage from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

The first is from Thompson:

The harpoon is sharp, and barbed at one end, so that when it has once entered the animal, it is difficult to draw it out again, and has attached to its other end a pole, two inches thick and five feet long. Attached to this is a line 75 to 100 fathoms in length, which is coiled into the bow of the boat.

Melville follows:

Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing about it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the landsman they seem as festooning their limbs.

There is a difference here of rhetorical strategies that distinguishes the two. Melville's language is symbolic and weighted with ambiguous moral meanings: The serpentine rope allows for no innocence; “all the oarsmen” are involved, even those who have nothing to do with coiling it in the tub; the crew lives with the serpent and by the serpent, necessarily for their livelihood, unaware of the nature of the coil yet contaminated and imperiled by its inherent danger. Melville thus depicts the metaphysical necessity of evil.

John Thompson's language is distinguished formally from the concrete and symbolistic devices in Melville. Thompson allows the imagery of a whaling voyage to carry moral and allegorical meanings, yet he means his narration to be descriptive and realistic; his concern is with verisimilitude. There can be nothing morally ambiguous about the need to abolish slavery, and there can be little ambiguity about the reason for the suffering of the slave. “The slave narrative,” Butterfield concludes, “does not see oppression in terms of a symbol-structure that transforms evil into a metaphysical necessity. For to do so would have been to locate the source of evil outside the master-slave relationship, and thus would have cut the ideological ground from under the entire thrust of the abolitionist movement.”¹² Thompson means not so much to narrate as to convey a message, a value system; as with the black sermon, the slave's narrative functions as a single sign. And the nature of Frederick Douglass' rhetorical strategy directly reflects this sentiment through the use of what rhetoricians have called antitheses and of what the structuralists have come to call the binary opposition.

In the act of interpretation, we establish a sign relationship between the description and a meaning. The relations most crucial to structural analysis are functional binary oppositions. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle argue in Fundamentals of Language that binary oppositions are inherent in all languages, that they are, indeed, a fundamental principle of language formation itself.¹³ Many structuralists, seizing on Jakobson's formulation, hold the binary opposition to be a fundamental operation of the human mind, basic to the production of meaning. Levi-Strauss, who turned topsy-turvy the way we examine mythological discourse, describes the binary opposition as “this elementary logic which is the smallest common denominator of all thought.”¹⁴ Levi-Strauss' model of opposition and mediation, which sees the binary opposition as an underlying structural pattern as well as a method for revealing that pattern, has in its many variants become a most satisfying mechanism for retrieving almost primal social contradictions, long ago “resolved” in the mediated structure itself.¹⁵ Perhaps it is not irresponsible or premature to call Levi-Strauss' contribution to human understanding a classic one.

Frederic Jameson, in The Prison-House of Language, maintains that

the binary opposition is … at the outset a heuristic principle, that instrument of analysis on which the mythological hermeneutic is founded. We would ourselves be tempted to describe it as a technique for stimulating perception, when faced with a mass of apparently homogeneous data to which the mind and the eyes are numb: a way of forcing ourselves to perceive difference and identity in a wholly new language the very sounds of which we cannot yet distinguish from each other. It is a decoding or deciphering device, or alternately a technique of language learning.

How does this “decoding device” work as a tool to practical criticism? When any two terms are set in opposition to each other the reader is forced to explore qualitative similarities and differences, to make some connection, and, therefore, to derive some meaning from points of disjunction. If one opposes A to B, for instance, and X to Y, the two cases become similar as long as each involves the presence and absence of a given feature. In short, two terms are brought together by some quality that they share and are then opposed and made to signify the absence and presence of that quality. The relation between presence and absence, positive and negative signs, is the simplest form of the binary opposition. These relations, Jameson concludes, “embody a tension ‘in which one of the two terms of the binary opposition is apprehended as positively having a certain feature while the other is apprehended as deprived of the feature in question.’”¹⁶

Frederick Douglass' Narrative attempts with painstaking verisimilitude to reproduce a system of signs that we have come to call plantation culture, from the initial paragraph of Chapter i:

I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday, they seldom come nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time. A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege. I was not allowed to make any inquiries of my master concerning it. He deemed such inquiries on the part of a slave improper and impertinent, and evidence of a restless spirit. The nearest estimate I can give makes me now between twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age. I come to this, from hearing my master say, some time during 1835, I was about seventeen years old.¹⁷

We see an ordering of the world based on a profoundly relational type of thinking, in which a strict barrier of difference or opposition forms the basis of a class rather than, as in other classification schemes, an ordering based on resemblances or the identify of two or more elements. In the text, we can say that these binary oppositions produce through separation the most inflexible of barriers: that of meaning. We, the readers, must exploit the oppositions and give them a place in a larger symbolic structure. Douglass' narrative strategy seems to be this: He brings together two terms in special relationships suggested by some quality that they share; then, by opposing two seemingly unrelated elements, such as the sheep, cattle, or horses on the plantation and the specimen of life known as slave, Douglass' language is made to signify the presence and absence of some quality—in this case, humanity.¹⁸ Douglass uses this device to explicate the slave's understanding of himself and of his relation to the world through the system of the perceptions that defined the world the planters made. Not only does his Narrative come to concern itself with two diametrically opposed notions of genesis, origins, and meaning itself, but its structure actually turns on an opposition between nature and culture as well. Finally and, for our purposes, crucially, Douglass' method of complex mediation—and the ironic reversals so peculiar to his text—suggests overwhelmingly the completely arbitrary relation between description and meaning, between signifier and signified, between sign and referent.

Douglass uses these oppositions to create a unity on a symbolic level, not only through physical opposition but also through an opposition of space and time. The Narrative begins “I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland.” Douglass knows the physical circumstances of his birth: Tuckahoe, we know, is near Hillsborough and is twelve miles from Easton. Though his place of birth is fairly definite, his date of birth is not for him to know: “I have no accurate knowledge of my age,” he admits, because “any authentic record containing it” would be in the possession of others. Indeed, this opposition, or counterpoint, between that which is knowable in the world of the slave and that which is not, abounds throughout this chapter. Already we know that the world of the master and the world of the slave are separated by an inflexible barrier of meaning. The knowledge the slave has of his circumstances he must deduce from the earth; a quantity such as time, our understanding of which is cultural and not natural, derives from a nonmaterial source, let us say the heavens: “The white children could tell their ages. I could not.”

The deprivation of the means to tell the time is the very structural center of this initial paragraph: “A want of information concerning my own [birthday] was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood.” This state of disequilibrium motivates the slave's search for his humanity as well as Douglass' search for his text. This deprivation has created that gap in the slave's imagination between self and other, between black and white. What is more, it has apparently created a relation of likeness between the slave and the animals. “By far,” Douglass confesses, “the large part of slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs.” This deprivation is not accidental; it is systematic: “it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.” Douglass, in his subtle juxtaposition here of “masters” and “knowledge” and of “slaves” and “ignorance,” again introduces homologous terms. “I do not remember to have ever met a slave,” Douglass emphasizes, “who could tell of his birthday.” Slaves, he seems to conclude, are they who cannot plot their course by the linear progression of the calendar. Here, Douglass summarizes the symbolic code of this world, which makes the slave's closest blood relations the horses and which makes his very notion of time a cyclical one, diametrically opposed to the master's linear conception: “They [the slaves] seldom come nearer to [the notion of time] than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time.” The slave had arrived, but not in time to partake at the welcome table of human culture.

For Douglass, the bonds of blood kinship are the primary metaphors of human culture.¹⁹ As an animal would know its mother, so Douglass knows his. “My mother was named Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter of Isaac and Betsey Bailey.” Both of whom were “colored,” Douglass notes, “and quite dark.” His mother “was of a darker complexion” even than either grandparent. His father, on the other hand, is some indefinite “white man,” suggested through innuendo to be his master: “The opinion was also whispered,” he says, “that my master was my father.” His master was his father; his father his master: “of the correctness of this opinion,” Douglass concludes, “I know nothing,” only and precisely because “the means of knowing was withheld from me.” Two paragraphs below, having reflected on the death of his mother, Douglass repeats this peculiar unity twice again. “Called thus suddenly away,” he commences, “she left me without the slightest intimation of who my father was.” Yet Douglass repeats “the whisper that my father was my master” as he launches into a description of the rank odiousness of a system “that slave-holders have ordained, and by law established,” in which the patrilinear succession of the planter has been forcibly replaced by a matrilinear succession for the slave: “the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers.” The planters therefore make of the “gratification of their wicked desires,” spits Douglass, a thing “profitable as well as pleasurable.” Further, the end result of “this cunning arrangement” is that “the slave-holder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father.” “I know of such cases,” he opens his sixth paragraph, using a declaration of verisimilitude as a transition to introduce another opposition, this one between the fertile slave-lover-mother and the planter's barren wife.

The profound ambiguity of this relationship between father and son and master and slave persists, if only because the two terms “father” and “master” are here embodied in one, with no mediation between them. It is a rather grotesque bond that links Douglass to his parent, a bond that embodies “the distorted and unnatural relationship endemic to slavery.”²⁰ It is as if the usually implied primal tension between father and son is rendered apparent in the daily contact between father-master-human and son-slave-animal, a contact that occurs, significantly, only during the light of day.

Douglass' contact with his mother (“to know her as such,” he qualifies) never occurred “more than four or five times in my life.” Each of these visits, he recalls, “was of short duration,” and each, he repeats over and over, took place “at night.” Douglass continues: “[My mother] made her journey to see me in the night, travelling the whole distance,” he mentions as if an afterthought, “on foot.” “I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother,” he repeats one sentence later, “by the light of day. She was with me in the night” (emphasis added). Always she returned to a Mr. Stewart's plantation, some twelve miles away, “long before I waked” so as to be at the plantation before dawn, since she “was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise.” The slaves, metaphorically, “owned” the night, while the master owned the day. By the fourth paragraph of the narrative, the terms of our homology—the symbolic code of this world—are developed further to include relations of the animal, the mother, the slave, the night, the earth, matrilinear succession, and nature opposed to relations of the human being, the father, the master, the daylight, the heavens, patrilinear succession, and culture. Douglass, in short, opposes the absolute and the eternal to the mortal and the finite. Our list, certainly, could be expanded to include oppositions between spiritual/material, aristocratic/base, civilized/barbaric, sterile/fertile, enterprise/sloth, force/principle, fact/imagination, linear/cyclical, thinking/feeling, rational/irrational, chivalry/cowardice, grace/brutishness, pure/cursed, and human/beastly.

Yet the code, Douglass proceeds to show, stands in defiance of the natural and moral order. Here Douglass commences as mediator and as trickster to reverse the relations of the opposition. That the relation between the slave-son and his master-father was an unnatural one and even grotesque, as are the results of any defilement of Order, is reflected in the nature of the relation between the plantation mistress and the planter's illegitimate offspring. “She is ever disposed to find fault with them,” laments Douglass; “she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash.” Indeed, it is the white mistress who often compels her husband, the master, to sell “this class of his slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife.” But it is the priority of the economic relation over the kinship tie that is the true perversion of nature in this world: “It is often the dictate of humanity for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers,” Douglass observes tellingly. Here we see the ultimate reversal: For it is now the mistress, the proverbial carrier of culture, who demands that the master's son be delivered up to the “human flesh-mongers” and traded for consumption. Douglass has here defined American cannibalism, a consumption of human flesh dictated by a system that could only be demonic.

Douglass' narrative demonstrates not only how the deprivation of the hallmarks of identity can affect the slave but also how the slaveowner's world negates and even perverts those very values on which it is built. Deprivation of a birth date, a name, a family structure, and legal rights makes of the deprived a brute, a subhuman, says Douglass, until he comes to a consciousness of these relations; yet, it is the human depriver who is the actual barbarian, structuring his existence on the consumption of human flesh. Just as the mulatto son is a mediation between two opposed terms, man and animal, so too has Douglass' text become the complex mediator between the world as the master would have it and the world as the slave knows it really is. Douglass has subverted the terms of the code he was meant to mediate: He has been a trickster. As with all mediations the trickster is a mediator and his mediation is a trick—only a trick; for there can be no mediation in this world. Douglass' narrative has aimed to destroy that symbolic code that created the false oppositions themselves. The oppositions, all along, were only arbitrary, not fixed.

Douglass first suggests that the symbolic code created in this text is arbitrary and not fixed, human-imposed not divinely ordained in an ironic aside on the myth of the curse of Ham, which comes in the very center of the seventh paragraph of the narrative and which is meant to be an elaboration on the ramifications of “this class of slaves” who are the fruit of the unnatural liaison between animal and man. If the justification of this order is the curse on Ham and his tribe, if Ham's tribe signifies the black African, and if this prescription for enslavement is scriptural, then, Douglass argues, “it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers,” he repeats for the fourth time, are “most frequently their own masters.”

As if to underscore the falsity of this notion of an imposed, inflexibly divine order, Douglass inverts a standard Christian symbol, that of the straight and narrow gate to Paradise. The severe beating of his Aunt Hester, who “happened,” Douglass advises us parenthetically, “to be absent when my master desired her presence,” is the occasion of this inversion. “It struck me with awful force,” he remembers. “It was the blood-stained gate,” he writes, “the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was,” he concludes, “a most terrible spectacle.” This startling image suggests that of the archetypal necromancer, Faustus, in whose final vision the usual serene presence of the Cross is stained with warm and dripping blood.

Douglass has posited the completely arbitrary nature of the sign. The master's actions belie the metaphysical suppositions on which is based the order of his world: It is an order ostensibly imposed by the Father of Adam, yet one in fact exposed by the sons of Ham. It is a world the oppositions of which have generated their own mediator, Douglass himself. This mulatto son, half-animal, half-man, writes a text (which is itself another mediation) in which he can expose the arbitrary nature of the signs found in this world, the very process necessary to the destruction of this world. “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” Douglass writes at the structural center of his Narrative, “you shall see how a slave was made a man.”²¹ As with all mediation, Douglass has constructed a system of perception that becomes the plot development in the text but that results in an inversion of the initial state of the oppositions through the operations of the mediator himself, as indicated in this diagram:

With this narrative gesture alone, slave has become master, creature has become man, object has become subject. What more telling embodiment of Emersonian idealism and its “capacity” to transubstantiate a material reality! Not only has an idea made subject of object, but creature has assumed self and the assumption of self has created a race. For, as with all myths of origins, the relation of self to race is a relation of synecdoche. As Michael Cooke maintains concerning the characteristics of black autobiography:

The self is the source of the system of which it is a part, creates what it discovers, and although (as Coleridge realized) it is nothing unto itself, it is the possibility of everything for itself. Autobiography is the coordination of the self as content—everything available in memory, perception, understanding, imagination, desire—and the self as shaped, formed in terms of a perspective and pattern of interpretation.²²

If we step outside the self-imposed confines of Chapter i to seek textual evidence, the case becomes even stronger. The opposition between culture and nature is clearly contained in a description of a slave meal, found in Chapter v.²³ “We were not regularly allowanced. Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied.” The slave, we read, did not eat food; he ate mush. He did not eat with a spoon; he ate with pieces of shingle, or on oyster shells, or with his naked hands. Again we see the obvious culture-nature opposition at play. When the slave, in another place, accepts the comparison with and identity of a “bad sheep,” he again has inverted the terms, supplied as always by the master, so that the unfavorable meaning that this has for the master is supplanted by the favorable meaning it has for the slave. There is in this world the planter has made, Douglass maintains, an ironic relation between appearance and reality. “Slaves sing most,” he writes at the end of Chapter ii, “when they are most unhappy. … The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.”

Finally, Douglass concludes his second chapter with a discourse on the nature of interpretation, which we could perhaps call the first charting of the black hermeneutical circle and which we could take again as a declaration of the arbitrary relation between a sign and its referent, between the signifier and the signified. The slaves, he writes, “would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, [then] in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other.”²⁴ Douglass describes here a certain convergence of perception peculiar only to members of a very specific culture: The thought could very well be embodied nonverbally, in the sound if not in the word. What is more, sound and sense could very well operate at odds to create through tension a dialectical relation. Douglass remarks: “They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. … They would thus sing as a chorus to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves.” Yet the decoding of these cryptic messages did not, as some of us have postulated, depend on some sort of mystical union with their texts. “I did not, when a slave,” Douglass admits, “understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs.” “Meaning,” on the contrary, came only with a certain aesthetic distance and an acceptance of the critical imperative. “I was myself within the circle,” he concludes, “so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.” There exists always the danger, Douglass seems to say, that the meanings of nonlinguistic signs will seem “natural”; one must view them with a certain detachment to see that their meanings are in fact merely the “products” of a certain culture, the result of shared assumptions and conventions. Not only is meaning culture-bound and the referents of all signs an assigned relation, Douglass tells us, but how we read determines what we read, in the truest sense of the hermeneutical circle.

Notes

1. Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 71-106 and esp. pp. 135-58.

2. Guillén, [Literature as System,] p. 81.

3. George R. Graham, “Black Letters; or Uncle Tom-Foolery in Literature,” Graham's Illustrated Magazine of Literature, Romance, Art, and Fashion, 42 Feb. 1853, p. 209.

4. Starling, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American Literary History, Diss. New York Univ. 1946, pp. 47-48.

5. “Narrative of Frederick Douglass,” Littell's Living Age, 1 April 1846, p. 47.

6. New York Tribune, 10 June 1845, p. 1, col. 1; rpt. in Liberator, 30 May 1845, p. 97.

7. Lynn Pioneer; rpt. in Liberator, 30 May 1845, p. 86.

8. See esp. John Blassingame, “Black Autobiography as History and Literature,” Black Scholar, 5:4 (Dec. 1973-Jan. 1974), 2-9; and his Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977).

9. Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 76.

10. Black Autobiography in America (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1974), p. 36.

11. Thompson, The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave, Containing His History of Twenty-Five Years in Bondage and His Providential Escape (Worcester: n.p., 1856), p. 113.

12. Butterfield, [Black Autobiography,] p. 37.

13. Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 4, 47-49.

14. Totemism (New York: Penguin, 1969), p. 130.

15. What has this rather “obvious” model of human thought to do with the study of mundane literature generally and with the study of Afro-American literature specifically? It has forced us to alter irrevocably certain long-held assumptions about the relation between sign and referent, between signifier and signified. It has forced us to remember that we must not always mean what we say; or to remember what queries we intended to resolve when we first organized a discourse in a particular way. What's more, this rather simple formulation has taught us to recognize texts where we find them and to read these texts as they demand to be read. Yet, we keepers of the black critical activity have yet to graft fifty years of systematic thinking about literature onto the consideration of our own. The study of Afro-American folklore, for instance, remains preoccupied with unresolvable matters of genesis or with limitless catalogs and motif indices. Afraid that Brer Rabbit is “merely” a trickster or that Anansi spiders merely spin webs, we reduce these myths to their simplest thematic terms—the perennial relation between the wily, persecuted black and the not-too-clever, persecuting white. This reduction belies our own belief in the philosophical value of these mental constructs. We admit, albeit inadvertently, a nagging suspicion that these are the primitive artifacts of childish minds, grappling with a complex Western world and its languages, three thousand years and a world removed. These myths, as the slave narratives would, did not so much “narrate” as they did convey a value system; they functioned, much like a black sermon, as a single sign. The use of binary opposition, for instance, allows us to perceive much deeper “meanings” than a simplistic racial symbolism allows. Refusal to use sophisticated analysis on our own literature smacks of a symbolic inferiority complex as blatant as were treatments of skin lightener and hair straightener.

16. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 113; 35, citing Troubetskoy's Principes de phonologie. See also Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 93, 225-27; Roland Barthes, S/Z, An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 24.

17. Narrative (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), p. 1. All subsequent quotes, unless indicated, are from pp. 1-7.

18. There is overwhelming textual evidence that Douglass was a consummate stylist who, contrary to popular myth, learned the craft of the essayist self-consciously. The importance of Caleb Bingham's The Columbian Orator (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1797) to Douglass' art is well established. John Blassingame is convinced of Douglass' use of Bingham's rhetorical advice in his writing, especially of antitheses. (Personal interview with John Blassingame, 7 May 1976.) For an estimation of the role of language in the political struggle of antebellum blacks see Alexander Crummell, “The English Language in Liberia,” in his The Future of Africa (New York: Scribners, 1862), pp. 9-57.

19. See also Nancy T. Clasby, “Frederick Douglass's Narrative: A Content Analysis,” CLA Journal, 14 (1971), 244.

20. Clasby, p. 245.

21. Douglass, p. 77.

22. “Modern Black Autobiography in the Tradition,” in Romanticism, Vistas, Instances, and Continuities, ed. David Thorburn and Geoffrey Hartman (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), p. 258.

23. Douglass, pp. 13-15.

24. Douglass, p. 30.