The State of Black Writing in 1988 : BEING & RACE : Black Writing Since 1970 <i> by Charles Johnson (Indiana University Press: $15.95; 123 pp.; 0-253-31165-9) </i>

I am of two minds regarding the enormously gifted writer Charles Johnson’s foray into literary criticism, “Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970.” A professor and director of creative writing at the University of Washington, he is the author of mystical, fabulist, profoundly philosophical novels and stories, among them “Oxherding Tale,” “Faith and the Good Thing” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

In the latter work, a collection of stories, he writes: “A Negro professor is . . . a kind of two-reeled comedy . . . . There like a thief come to table he hungrily grabs crumbs of thought from their genuine context . . . feeling his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two warring ideals in one dark body.” The literary allusion is, of course, to W. E. B. DuBois’ classic assessment of the cultural schizophrenia that afflicts black Americans, so long the object of hate in a place they have no alternative but to call home; but a home defined by both the culture of the master and the enslaved.

There is a certain conflicting duality about Johnson’s latest efforts in “Being & Race.” The first half contains his philosophical musings about the nature of being--identity, consciousness--in black writing, based primarily on his interpretations of phenomenology--”a philosophy of experience” as defined by its creator, mathematician Edmund Husserl, “as well as many other philosophers, Eastern and Western,” Johnson writes in his preface.

As phenomenology applies to his aim in “Being & Race,” Johnson tells us that “. . . many disciplines and fields of knowing rest on unclarified, naive assumptions that need to be brought forward if these fields are to achieve a securer foundation. Black American fiction, indeed the entire area of ‘creative writing’ has not seen its basic assumptions subjected to this form of discussion.” It’s his hope that his book will contribute to that dialogue.”

I don’t think so. It’s not that I believe Johnson to be the professor in the two-reeled comedy, but his philosophical analysis seems strained and confusing.

I have no objection to drawing on speculative thought from any cultural tradition that illuminates another, but I don’t see the light. I admit to a certain visceral dis-ease when he draws so heavily on European intellectual tradition to explain the nature of Afro-American literature. Certainly, the discourse on this literature--the product of a hybrid New World culture--should be critiqued using universally accepted criteria of excellence. But scholars of the tradition should be developing critical theories of their own, which become part of the broader discourse on the nature of being in literature.

Johnson does issue a kind of disclaimer, however, early on: “A novelist blundering into the field of literary criticism should first apologize to his colleagues who analyze fiction for a living . . . .” And in his preface he admits that his method of analysis is based on his “own quirky” variations of phenomenology and other philosophies. Those eccentricities account, I think, for a lack of systematic analysis in his critique.

I’d have to say that Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism,” published this year, is the more illuminating, and probably the most original critique of Afro-American fiction to date. Though academic and often ponderous, he traces the art of signifying--word play, “playing the dozens”--from West Africa to the Afro-American vernacular tradition and into the written language. The signifying monkey is a trickster figure who becomes the writer/creator of an intricate language of one-upmanship, with each generation of black writers embellishing, parodying, expanding on the works of their predecessors. For the Afro-American, literacy came to equal freedom, and from slavery to the present The Word was and has been the link in the Great Chain of Being, Gates tells us.

Having said that, I remain of two minds about Johnson’s work, because the second half of the book is good. His overall intent, he writes, is to provide a book that will be “useful not only to teachers and students of Afro-American literature but also to those in philosophy, creative writing and contemporary literature.”

His survey of significant male and female writers since 1970 is a helpful contribution to the field and quite accessible to the average reader interested in this vital area of American literature.

He surveys a crop of writers--some well known, others little known to the general public. This survey is important and will remain so for a long time as the canon of Afro-American writers continues to take shape. For as James Baldwin wrote, “Nobody Knows My Name.” That is hyperbole, and yet, true. And it’s not just the majority culture that remains generally unfamiliar with many of the finest Afro-American writers. There are African-Americans (frequently dwellers in the intellectual museum of cultural nationalism) who reject other black writers because they are not black enough. So many blacks have accepted externally and internally imposed stereotypes of “the black experience,” they don’t even know their name.

A case in point is the poet, novelist, free-lance journalist and musician Al Young, whose work is distinguished by a “gentle vision of black American life that is, at bottom, harmonious and spiritual.” I have heard Young say that other blacks don’t think his writing reflects the real black experience.

Young has exposed himself to the “universe of Eastern metaphysics” and “nothing of importance in the universe of global culture and consciousness” is lost on him, notes Johnson.

Young stands in contrast to the “angry school of black writing in the 1960s” that he criticized in his poem “A Dance for Militant Dilettantes,” writes Johnson.

But that “angry school” of the ‘60s, the period of the resurgence of black cultural nationalism and the Black Arts Movement, a period that bears the imprint of one of the Afro-American literary tradition’s great writers, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), provides the “shoulders” on which the black writing of the 1980s stands, Johnson tells us.

Johnson continues: “Nationalism in its various forms reminds . . . black people systematically written out of white history that . . . they ‘are somebody.’ And have value separate from their relatively recent involvement with whites. This is a crucial stage in the development of consciousness, one my wife and I insist our own children have, for how can they live authentically until they absorb in detail the history of slavery-- their history, with all its despair and fatalism; they must relive it imaginatively, play through the horrible scenarios in their minds, discover their ruins in every black life destroyed by racism and realize, as well, that the contemporary racial world is still a Divided Landscape.”

Johnson renders his readers a great service by attending to the work of a writer not given the wide recognition she deserves: Paule Marshall, the author of four books of fiction, beginning with “Brown Girl, Brownstones” (1959) and the most recent, “Praisesong for the Widow,” (1983). “Her art is distinctive for several reasons, not the least of which is her dual American and West Indian background,” Johnson says, and “her steady production of first-rate writing” is notable for its “spiritual balance and emotional maturity rare in much black fiction.”