The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism Reviews

• 
  Andrew

  It's impossible to understate the influence of Skip Gates on the American humanities. He kind of established what the African-American canon was, and then had enough clout to get it taught in schools. You can't make it through a freshman lit seminar without reading Olaudah Equiano, Phyllis Wheatley, and Zora Neale Hurston, and we can thank Mr. Gates for that. But a whole lot more people namecheck him than actually read him... I'm pretty sure the vast majority of pundits, scholars, and commentators who expressed strong opinions about his bullshit arrest back in Spring '09 have never so much as run their index fingers over a volume of Gates' dense, Barthes-influenced scholarship.
  
  To be sure, this isn't cozy bedside reading, but he makes a solid case. West African folklore, and more especially its monkey archetype, has, via diaspora, made its way into all Black literatures. What I brought from it is how this archetype has gone even further than Gates explicated, reverberating through all American literature, culture, and music, be it Black or White. See attached documents: The Velvet Underground, Shaft, Jack Kerouac, Ludacris.
• 
  Mark Bowles

  B. The Black English vernacular is not disappearing. In fact it is going its own way. This separate development reflects the larger social picture of segregated speech communities. Within this black vernacular the black person has encoded private, yet communal cultural rituals. This book explores the relationship between the black vernacular tradition and the African-American literary tradition. He wants to be a critic that uses black theory to understand black literature. Thus, he tries to define a theory of African-American criticism.
  C. To explore the black tradition, Gates relies on two signal tricksters, Esu-Elegbara (African) and the Signifying Monkey (African-American). The central place of both figures in their traditions is determined by their tendency to reflect on the uses of formal language.
  D. Structure: Three theoretical chapters, followed by 4 chapters of close readings or case studies.
  E. The black tradition is double-voiced. Black writers learn to write by reading white Western texts. So there written voice is Western. But they also come from a black vernacular tradition which gives them a second voice. This black tradition is based on Signifyin(g) or a repetition and revision with a signal difference. There are 4 types of double-voices textual relations that are examined in this book
  1. Tropological revision.
  a) This is the way in which a trope is repeated, with differences, between two or more texts. There are many recurring tropes in the African-American literary tradition. The descent underground, the vertical ascent from the South to the North, and the double consciousness (Bigger’s double consciousness). This is the first mode of Signifyin(g) as repetition and difference in the Anglo-African narrative tradition.
  b) The “trope of the Talking Book” in several slave narratives. This is the ur-trope (the first trope) of the African-American tradition. It is here that the double-voiced discourse comes most clearly through. The Talking Book is the attempt to make the white written text speak with a black voice. The trope is used as a way to argue for the importance of black thought in a white world and other authors all deal with this idea of freedom. This trope began in James Gronniosaw’s slave narrative and was the first example of Signifyin(g) as repetition and difference as other authors used this trope.
  2. The speakerly text. The novels black speech and the standard English of the narrator come together to form a third term, a double-voiced narrative mode. The Russian Formalists call this ‘skaz’ when a text aspires to the status of oral narration. An example is Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God. She proves that a text can be written in a black dialect.
  3. Talking texts. Black texts ‘talk’ to other texts or intertextuality. These are texts like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo which responds to, challenges, and amplifies upon multiple precursor texts. Ellison employs this in Invisible Man. He draws on Wright, Du Bois, Douglass, Washington, while also drawing on Melville and Whitman.
  A. Rewriting the speakerly. These are texts that directly engage and revamp the styles and narrative strategies of an earlier text. An example is Alice Walker’s The Color Purple ‘rewriting’ the Hurston book. This is like jazz musicians getting together to play each others songs. Walker rewrites Hurston’s text to criticize but to pay homage.
  
• 
  UptownSinclair

  invaluable literary criticism.
• 
  Markus

  no this is pretty good actually
• 
  Christy

  The central idea that Henry Louis Gates, Jr., provides in this text is to be found in his analysis of black literature's emphasis on and use of Signification. Signifyin(g) is a technique that essentially amounts to repetition with a crucial difference, a way of commenting on other writers and their ideas through various sorts of parody and pastiche. This idea sheds new light on the seeming repetition in some black artists' work and on the literary evolution of black writers. Frequently accused of being merely imitative and not original, Gates echoes Zora Neale Hurston's idea that "what we really mean by originality is in fact masterful revision," that "imitation is the Afro-American's central art form." Furthermore, he continues, "For Hurston, the distinction between originality and imitation is a false distinction, and for the black writer to suffer under the burden of avoiding repetition, revision, or reinterpretation is to succumb to a political argument that reflects a racist subtext" (118).
  
  Gates' idea of Signifyin(g) on literary precursors is not entirely unlike Harold Bloom's idea of the "anxiety of influence"; however, where Bloom sees primarily pressure and anxiety in the relation between a poet and his/her precursors, born from the need to distinguish him/herself and do something new and original, Gates sees creativity and possibilities for connections in the relation between a writer and his/her precursors. Whether the writer wishes to counter or affirm the ideas and style of a writer who has had an influence on him/her, in Gates' world of literary Signifyin(g), the countering or affirming will be a creative process in itself. Achieving striking originality and separating oneself from the pack is less important than is finding one's place--through Signification's playful, shifting processes--in the world of literary ancestors and relatives. These literary ancestors and relatives may or may not be other black writers. Gates is careful to avoid essentialism here, instead arguing that "shared experience of black people vis-a-vis white racism is not sufficient evidence upon which to argue that black writers have shared patterns of representation of their common subject for two centuries--unless one wishes to argue for a genetic theory of literature, which the biological sciences do not support. Rather, shared modes of figuration result only when writers read each other's texts and seize upon topoi and tropes to revise in their own texts" (128). Signification thus is a part of the creation of literary traditions, as Signifyin(g) revision "alters fundamentally the way we read the tradition, by defining the relation of the text at hand to the tradition" (124). Traditions are not static, neither are they handed down in a neat package to the next generation of writers; instead, each writer creates his/her own traditions and his/her own place in those traditions by reading and then by Signifyin(g) upon meaningful texts.
• 
  Gail

  This book, the theory behind the Signifyin' Monkey, and the way that it pushes against traditional film theory, and theorists like de Saussere was essential for the completion of my masters thesis on subversive narrative. Gates is a master at explaining the difficult, the trying, and the intentions of language, myth, and thought across race.
• 
  Ryan

  I read a select few essays from this book junior year in college, but recently felt the urge to finish it in its entirety. Wow, stunning clarity, compelling arguments, and a vast array of knowledgeable texts. HLG definitely reshaped a few lenses here.
• 
  Justin

  Very strange. I was confused when we started off talking about African mythology, but then it made more sense when we got to the connection between Esu and the Signifyin(g) Monkey, but then it stopped making sense again when we got to all the rhetorical tropes. Part of my confusion may result from 1) only partial familiarity with the literary texts under consideration and 2) only partial familiarity with the rhetorical tropes, but, with that caveat, I really felt by the end that the argument became anything that references something else is an example of Signification. It just seems like such a stretch to go from these Signifying Monkey tropes to The Color Purple as if it's all part of one chain. The only connection seems to be that all the texts use rhetorical tropes and contain references to previous works, but pretty much everything that's ever been written or said contains some sort of rhetorical trope, which means the only real glue is the references.
  For my money, the presence/absence thing was the most interesting, but only for the implications for expansion.
  I kind of sort of see why this text is considered foundational, but I'm really not sure what to do with it.
• 
  Angie

  Major Field Prep: 52/133
  Henry Louis Gates’s text, The Signifying Monkey, responds to the perseverance of black vernacular in the African American literary tradition. Gates “attempts to identify a theory of criticism that is inscribed within the black vernacular tradition and that in turn informs the shape of the Afro-American literary tradition” (xix). Signifying, repetition and revision, and the trope of voicing and doubling, is the main point of analysis. He begins with a history and discussion of the two signal trickster figures, Esu-Elegbara rooted in Africa and its diaspora, and the Signifying Monkey of African American cultural tradition and lore. He traces the legacy of the meta-discursive tradition in the trope of the Talking Book in slave narratives, where “the very concept of ‘book’—constituted a silent primary text, a text, however, in which the black man found no echo of his own voice. The silent book did not reflect or acknowledge the black presence before it” (136). Gates identified Hurston as Signifyin(g) on the Talking Book in her speakerly text Their Eyes Were Watching God, as the collapsing of mimesis and diegesis into a third narrative voice of the simultaneous narrator/protagonist “bivocal utterance” in free indirect discourse. Ishamel Reed, in contrast, Signifies on the tradition of AfAm literature (namely Hurston, Wright, and Ellison) in Mumbo Jumbo that is about writing itself, focused on doubling and a postmodern self-reflexivity: “It is indeterminacy, the sheer plurality of meaning, the very play of the signifier itself, which Mumbo Jumbo celebrates” (235). Finally, Gates turns to Alice Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple as Signifyin(g) Hurston and Rebecca Cox. The epistolary form, the first Gates knows of in the tradition, allows Celie to write herself into being as Hurston’s Janie spoke herself into being. Through the fully diegesis text, Celie performs similar free indirect discourse in her representation of other voices in recalling and recording conversation and allows Celie “to write a progressively better-structured story of herself” (249).
  
  
• 
  Becka

  So, as difficult as this highly technical piece of literary criticism was to get through, I found it extremely fascinating. Now, as I sit in grad class and we discuss aspects of African-American writings, I feel that much more educated and "clued in" to various tropes and contexts! Plus, this has proved to be an awesome resource for further research I have been doing. Three cheers for the Signifying Monkey!
• 
  James Carroll

  I read this in grad school and it literally propelled me through a number of papers. I will always always remind my students that Signifyin[g] is "repetition with a signal difference": James Brown crying "Please, Please"; Amiri Baraka repeating "Oh wow!" with each iteration implying something new; etc. It's a simple but powerful concept.
• 
  Ednisha Riley

  i remember my teacher introducing us to this book..."Skip" she called him ... i remember when I said to my uncles to "stop signifyin" and the look on their faces that I knew what it meant :)
• 
  Julie Bowerman

  Fascinating literary critique that is decidedly not easy to read.
• 
  Brad McKenna

  I picked this book up for its Trickster info. That part was really, really, good. But then he went into a deep reading of a few books and lost me. Here are my notes:
  
  (8) “In Yoruba Mythology, Esu is said to limp as he walks, precisely because of his mediating function, his legs are different lengths because he keeps one anchored in the realm of the gods while the other rests in this, our human world.”
  
  (23) "the architect of interpretation" Can you use that as a kenning.
  
  (23) "the primal god of the Fon is a Janus figure; one side of its body is female and is called Mawu, well the other side is male and just called Lisa. Mawu's eyes form the Moon Lisa's eyes form the sun accordingly Lisa rules the day in Mawu rules the night. the seventh son of Mawu-Lisa is Legba"
  Seventh Son is blues song by Willie Dixon.
  
  (26) The oral tradition of the Yoruba means each time a story is told it varies slightly.
  
  (26) Yoruba and Fon tricksters love to play with language.
  Legba is the Fon trickster
  Fa is the Fon writing system (I think)
  
  (29) Esu “is at once both male and female”
  This, “despite his remarkable penis feats” which makes them the first non-exclusively trickster figure I’ve come across.
  
  (66) High schoolers in WInston-Salem, nc wanted revenge on McGraw-Hill and their Iowa Test of Basic Skills. So they created the In Your Face Test of No Uncertain Skills. The McGraw Folks scored but Cs and Ds. One question: Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb. A: Your mama. This is very trickstery. It subverts expectations but having the answer be a non-sequitur to the question.
  
  (71) One, possible, origin of The Dozens is the 18th century verb “dozen” which meant “to stun, stupefy, daze.”
  
  (72) H. Rap Brown made poetry on the streets with rap (hence his name) and The dozens, yet white people don’t think that’s poetry because poetry equals Western Tradition.
  
  (73) The majority of Brown’s rap is in the Bo Diddly version of “Who Do You Love”
  
  (73) Signifying can build someone up, too.
  
  (97) Mules and Men by Hurston is the first appearance of the word “Signifying”.
  
  (97) The Dozens could have been so named because it’s rumored to refer to 12 sex acts each said with a word that rhymed with the numbers 1-12.
  
  
  (113) David Hume said that poet Francis Williams (a Cambridge educated, Latin writing poet) didn’t prove abolitionists’ point that black people are equal because he was like a parrot, only able to say a small amount of stuff well. This led to the Mockingbird School of poetry, where any black poets accomplishments were chalked up to being able to write a little but not with the breadth of whiteys.
  
  (114) Some poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar, basically admit defeat because they have no literary black giants on whose shoulders they may stand.
  
  (117) Even the unofficial first novel by a black man is signifying. Charles Chestutt wrote The “Passing of Grandison” in 1899 but it seems to be a response to William Wells Brown’s My Southern Home (1880), specifically chapter 13. Chestnutt didn’t see Brown’s work as a novel and thus he saw himself as the first black novelist.
  
  (132) The Talking Book Trope is awesomely meta. It’s 1st appearance was (perhaps) in James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s “A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and African Prince As Related by Himself”. On a ship he heard a book talking to the captain but when he tried to have it talk to him, it was silent. So the book didn’t speak to him. Is that pun or a metaphor or both? It’s a great trope no matter what.
  
  
  (171) “If slavery had been an immoral institution, it had also been a large, fixed target; once abolished, the target of racism splintered into hundreds of fragments, all of which seemed to be moving in as many directions. Just as the ex-slaves wrote to end slavery, so too did free black authors write to redres the myriad forms that the fluid mask of racism assumed between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Jazz Age.”
  And I’d contend they continue to do today.
  
  The book then went into a deep literary criticism of first, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston, then “Mumbo Jumbo” by Ishmeal Reed, then something else but by then I was done. I picked it up for the trickster signifying monkey but there wasn’t much of that. “Mumbo Jumbo” was so packed with layers that it reminds me of Mody Dick. Perhaps I’m too far removed from my English degree (almost 20 years now) or perhaps Mr. Gates writing just didn’t connect with me but I couldn’t read any more.
  
• 
  Marissa Kessenich

  Skip Gates writes an impressively lucid (though at times repetitive) history of the Black literary tradition, focusing mostly on African American literature. His idea of a literature characterized by “Signifyin(g),” a form of linguistic play deeply entrenched in Black culture, is very compelling and well-articulated. His argument looks ahead to Sundquist’s discussion of a biracial American literature, but also affords due attention to the ways in which Black literature developed through repetition and difference—a tradition of revision, both of white Western forms and of Black language, texts, and ideas.
  
  I particularly enjoyed his discussion of Hurston’s innovative rhetorical techniques (the development of a “speakerly” text) and her influence on Walker’s creation of one of the only Black epistolary novels (a vernacular style that is emphatically textual). The discourse Gates draws out with these texts sheds light on the ways that Black writing constantly molds and recreates Western forms of expression in ways that allow for the representation of Black life THROUGH Black authors and Black narrators. If Signifyin(g) concerns itself with suspended and displaced meaning, it is also a metaphor for a literary tradition that developed in spite of negations of Black subjecthood.
• 
  Matt Sautman

  After having read excerpts from this book multiple times over the course of the past year, I finally had the opportunity to read Signifying Monkey cover to cover. A blend of myth, semiotic analysis, and literary criticism, Gates provides an interrogation of African and African American oral culture and its parallels in African American literature. His exploration unveils a tradition in African American culture that runs parallel to Western tradition and demonstrates the richness this tradition has to offer. His interrogation of the Talking Book trope in relation to Signifyin(g) and the evolution of the Speakerly Text across Hurston, Reed, and Walker are exceptionally interesting for any Americanist.
• 
  Donald Quist

  Found parts of myself in these pages! This text was a great resource in drawing connections between cultural traditions across the African Diaspora and my own critical & creative contributions to the fields of African-American/Transnational Literature.
• 
  Patrick Anthony

  Not my favorite literary manifesto, but a solid read by one of contemporary America's foremost authorities on African and African American culture, particularly where literature is concerned.
• 
  ػᶈᶏϾӗ

  Of course this is a masterpiece of American critical theory, but it was never given to me in any class. Most other theorists and articles I read hardly make mention of it. Maybe people think, like they always seem to think, that it doesn't have any significance or bearing on "other" topics because it's "only" African-American. Critical theory is so damn segregated. Even more than literature is.
  
  Has no one seen here the potential for informing the dialectic? Only time and more research will tell, I guess, before I can see if I have to do that kind of work myself (ack!).