August Wilson (1945–2005)
“Fences” (1983)

Random number 2465, extremely high (the range is 1–2535), which means a very recent work (recent for Harold Bloom, anyway).

Oddly enough, the copy above had been gifted to Beth for her birthday just before this selection came up. Of all things. (Yeah, it happens to be a charmless rental-style printing and not the more normal-looking trade edition).

I read this a good many months ago, and as I’ve said before, plays are the lowest-impact of reading experiences, so my specific engagement has gotten pretty low by this point and I’m going to have to take a big-picture tack here. This may get ugly.

“Fences” is a black “Death of a Salesman.” You might ask: why did we need a black “Death of a Salesman”? Couldn’t “Death of a Salesman” be the black “Death of a Salesman”?

August Wilson answers you: “To mount an all-black production of a ‘Death of a Salesman’ or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans. It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large.” (1996)

(I should point out that the original context for this quote makes no actual mention of “Fences” — Wilson was just denouncing race-blind casting and used “Death of a Salesman” as his example. But it seems fair to assume that after 13 years of being told that “Fences” is just like “Death of a Salesman,” his choice of example was not arbitrary.)

Though I take issue with the victimized rhetoric — how can a play “deny us our own humanity”? It’s just a play, and there will be other plays. (Does “Stomp” deny me my humanity? Does “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”?) — his basic point makes some sense to me. A play dependent on “the specifics of white culture” (or any other culture) cannot be directly interpreted as applying to non-participants in that culture.

But he also says that such a play is essentially “an investigation of the human condition” through a specific culture, rather than an investigation of that culture. Which opens the door to the idea that perhaps a cultural translation can be achieved. Which is how “Fences” reads. This existentially frustrated patriarch might not be existentially frustrated in exactly the same way or for exactly the same reason as Willy Loman, but as far as the human condition goes (not to mention sheer dramaturgy), we’re on familiar ground.

In this interview with Believer Magazine, as elsewhere, Wilson begins by brushing aside any possibility of having been influenced by Arthur Miller: “I’m not sure what they say about Fences as it relates to Death of a Salesman. At the time I wrote Fences, I had not read Death of a Salesman, had not seen Death of a Salesman, did not know anything about Death of a Salesman.”

For various reasons, this claim of complete innocence is very hard to believe, and in its own way tends to trivialize his work. His protest-too-much fills me with empathetic discomfort; whatever the real story, it’s something touchy and defensive. Even if this is in fact the truth, it’s a touchy and defensive truth.

Later in the same interview, clearly feeling that he’s in some kind of guru groove, he comfortably says some questionable things:

BLVR: What’s your opinion, if any, of Eminem? Do you think he’s capable of mastering the black aesthetic of hiphop?

AW: Yeah. He’s imitatin, he ain’t creatin. There’s a very big distinction. He’s not an innovator. He can’t create in that style so everything he do is just imitatin. Anybody can imitate anybody.

BLVR: I’ve read someone say, “Sure, whites can box like Muhammad Ali, once they see him do it.”

AW: The same thing with jazz. Benny Goodman could play jazz, but they ain’t creatin no music, they not innovators. So the music, it’s gotta be there for you to step into it. I wanna see you create it; it would be something different. Different aesthetics at work. But you can be influenced by, you can imitate anything. Got some Japanese guys that play some great jazz. Man, they really good, too! It’s already been done, man.

I for my part find this kind of talk completely unsympathetic. But what’s important is that August Wilson really believes what he’s saying. This is the inalienably racialized perspective in Wilson’s own heart, the one he believes he must contend with in writing his plays. To compete with white playwrights on their own turf, he would seem to believe, is impossible, because it is their turf, and turf is racial. So his work can only be legitimately his own insofar as it is not actually a member of the same genus as a white play like “Death of a Salesman.” In his mind, the correct name of the art form to which that play belongs is “white theater.” Were he to write “white theater,” he would be merely imitatin, not creatin, something he clearly disdains. Hell, that’s like something some Japanese guys might do!

But this is an unliftable burden, since “white theater” unfortunately encompasses all aspects of theater; they got there first. The only thing he’s got that whites didn’t get to first is “black experience.” Definitionally. And so August Wilson needs to believe that “black experience,” both in content and in form, is not just a re-skin but an actual different species; that by writing “black theater” he has utterly broken away from “white theater,” which can never be his.

This seems to me quite obviously wrong-headed from an objective cultural standpoint. It’s the outgrowth of the psychology of second-class-dom, and it is self-destructive. In needing so desperately to keep Benny Goodman and his grubby mitts out of the club — because goddammit, jazz is ours, and you never shared anything with us so why should we? — he creates a notion of cultural property that effectively cedes ownership of everything else to the oppressor, and recognizes that ownership as legitimate. So someone like August Wilson, who wants to do something like playwrighting, which was part of the great cultural cession, now needs to demonstrate to himself (and his peers who think like him) that what he is doing is actually different territory, new territory, fundamentally BLACK territory.

The quote about “Death of a Salesman” really says: “That’s yours, NOT ours. It’s painfully humiliating for you to say that it’s ours too, because it’s not. Almost everything is yours. I insist on it.”

Much more constructive would be to say “Actually, racial ownership of ideas doesn’t exist. As it turns out, nothing is any more yours then ours, so excuse me while we do whatever we like.” But this idea isn’t psychologically available, because separating the impression of culture from the impression of an authoritative voice is nearly impossible. Just turning on the television I feel like I am contending with the will of some strange meta-being, who has particular ideas about me and my place in the world, none of them particularly kind or understanding. Certainly when I, a non-fan, see baseball or football broadcast on TV I have a strong sense that someone or something is telling me “this is ours, not yours.”

I gather that being black in America for many people means growing up with the sense that nearly everything is murmuring this. Realizing that there actually isn’t any meta-being whose voice the culture is, no actual unified will of the oppressor, is the ticket out, but it also feels like selling out one’s own authentic self, the one who felt it. Which isn’t really an option, especially when one is a professional artist or a thinker and has entered into a long-term contract with “the authentic self.”

Navigating the emotions of being a black intellectual in America is obviously very complicated and difficult. Understatement, I know. I can only imagine how incredibly tired and lonely someone like Cornel West is. I get that impression from August Wilson, too. The albatross of identity must be dragged through every action, through every day, without end; it cannot be distinguished from life itself. I can hardly stand to think about my “identity” for even a minute; to me real life only takes place when I’m freed from that kind of self-awareness. I really don’t know how they can bear it.

This is all a roundabout way of saying this play wasn’t really for me.

I have found it subtly unpleasant to write this, just as I found it subtly unpleasant to read the play, because I feel that I am up against an artistic impulse that is inextricably linked to a congealed bitterness, a kind of angst of deprivation. Is that racism on my part? Whenever a piece of work with an overt “identity agenda” bothers me, it’s usually for this reason; people don’t have identity agendas unless they feel misused by the world at large, and people who feel misused by the world at large are not the people I would hire to be my singers and storytellers. And as a consumer of culture is this not what I’m doing?

I don’t remember “Juno and the Paycock” so well at this point (good lord, five years!), but I think my feeling there, in what was ultimately a very similar work, was that the ethnography of it was more dispassionate if equally prominent. But maybe that’s just Sean O’Casey getting the benefit of the doubt that time (and my ignorance) brings. The grudges of generations past always eventually wilt away, no matter how bitter they may once have been. Perhaps in a hundred years the politics of today will have washed away from August Wilson and only the solid rock of the work itself will remain, a durable fossil.

But that’s where I came in. That really is how I read “Fences”: innocently. I’m just saying the rock is an old and familiar rock.

The better justification for such a work, I think, setting race etc. aside, is simply that there’s no reason for lots of people not to keep writing “Death of a Salesman” over and over, just like they make a zillion westerns, mysteries, etc. Why not Death of a Salesmans? It’s a resonant and rich scenario. We could stand to go back there. And we do, and lots of writers continue to retread this same ground over and over, and more power to them.

As Death of a Salesmans go this is, in fact, quite a fine one. What it says it says with vigor.

I will now call your attention to this depressing video. The first half is the play I read — “theatrical” in ways both good and bad, but confident and clear. The second half is something else. Does this hateful laughter need psychoanalysis? The burned-out hole where love should be is no longer recognizable in the character on stage because it now encompasses the entire audience. It is a pit into which we are all eagerly leaping.

————-

Now to quickly post something else so as to bury this one as fast as possible.

Inevitably in writing such a thing as this I feel wary of all the angry angry people out there who might appear at any moment, like avenging ghosts, to tell me I’ve done some kind of wrong here. Or more likely, that I AM some kind of wrong. I don’t know what good they think they’re doing. All I can say to appease those gods is that I am, as always, open to reason, persuasion, and education. Racism is a dogma, and I am not being dogmatic.

Facebook is depressing, among other reasons, because it reveals that many of one’s friends and acquaintances want to present themselves as avenging ghosts. This is our venue for social self-reinvention, and THIS is how people want to re-invent themselves, as self-righteous crusaders? Why would they want that? I truly don’t understand.