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Kamarck, Edward (ed.) / Arts in society: the arts and the black revolution
(1968)
Hill, Herbert
The negro writer and the creative imagination, pp. [244 and 245]-255
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Page 247
famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. This novel is peppered with headlines from newspaper clippings that Demby juxtaposes for dramatic effects and as a vehicle for his commentary. The headlines demonstrate the meaninglessness of what goes on in the "real" world, in contrast to the fictional world of the novel. But in either territory - fictional or non-fictional- absurdity runs rampant. Which absurdity is real and which has meaning is the question the author keeps asking. Demby, like others of his generation, is influenced by existentialism, by an awareness of modern man's estrangement from an absurd world and in The Catacombs Demby gives further proof of the rich literary imagination indicated in his first novel, Beetlecreek, published in 1950. William Demby was in that book, possessed with a powerful idea. The theme and material of Beetlecreek is the subject matter of great literature. However, the achievement of Beetlecreek lacks, finally, the full resonance of its subject. The material in the work of a mature writer reverberates back through experience so that what is evoked in the reader is more than the dimensions of what is written. What one could call, I suppose, the novel's fourth dimension, the commentary that is always greater than that which is described. Demby, for all of his achievement here, lacks the development to sound out the full potential of his sources. Both the writer and the book remain too close to youth, to promise, to beginning. But, Beetlecreek, although ignored by most critics, remains a significant contribution to contemporary American letters (and was recently republished in an Avon Library paperback edition). The obsession with race and violence and the brutality within American society have long been a major subject for some of America's most important writers, among them William Faulkner. Now young Negro writers, such as LeRoi Jones, in essays and fiction, are exploring these themes. In a short span of years, LeRoi Jones has written poetry, fiction, p'ays, essays, reviews, a full length study of jazz called Blues People (1963), followed by Black Music (1967), a series of essays on jazz music. His autobiographical novel, The System of Dante's Hell (1965), together with his collection of random essays collected in the volume entitled Home (1966) are perhaps most valuable in revealing his development not only as as writer but also as a spokesman for a generation of Negro youth who are not only bitterly angry at the racism of American society, but have chosen to disaffiliate from it and have also promised to destroy it. The essays in Home written during a five year period from 1960-65 are wide ranging, and although concerned with such disparate subjects as "The Dempsey- Liston Fight," the "Legacy of Malcolm X," "Soul Food" and "Street Protests" they are all bound together by two assumptions: first, that America remains basically a racist society in which little has changed for the great majority of black people, and secondly, that the victims of American racism, the 22 million people of color, have within themselves the potential to change not only their own lives, but also the power to change the whole American civilization. Repeatedly, in these essays, he warns us, however, that if these changes do not take place, and fast, too, there is very likely the possibility of a holocaust. The essays in Home demonstrate how the author has moved i 2 3 247 A 9 :]:
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/| Copyright, 1968, by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin.| For information on re-use, see http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Copyright