Chronopolitics and Race, Rag-Time and Symphonic Time in "The Autobiography of an ExColored Man" Author(s): Bruce Barnhart Source:

African American Review, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 551-569 Published by: St. Louis University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40027389 . Accessed: 20/11/2013 16:24
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Chronopoliticsand Race,Rag-timeand Symphonic Time in TheAutobiographyof an Ex-Colored Man

the centerof JamesWeldon Johnson's1912novel lies the relationshipbetween the nameless narratorand the equalnameless who pays the narratorto serve as a living ly "patron" The patronhires the narratorto accompanyhim phonograph.1 throughoutEurope,where the narrator'sonly duty is to be available to performragtimefor the patronwhenever he demands.2 Indeed, during their time in Europe,the patronfalls into the habit of waking the narratorup in the middle of the night to perform for him. Unsurprisingly,the narratorfinds this habit more than a little burdensome;in recallinghis struggle with fatigue during these sessions, the narratordescribesthe patron as "a grim, mute, but relentlesstyrant,possessing over me a supernaturalpower which he used to drive me on mercilesslyto exhaustion"(121). Johnson'slanguage here suggests a sharp similaritybetween the position of the patronand the position of 18th-and 19th-century slave masters.Certainlythe patron'slack of hesitationin waking the narratorin the middle of the night to performfor him shows time that is reminiscentof slave an attitudetoward the narrator's owners' attitudestowards slaves' time. As one slave owner phrasedit: "Ihave ever maintainedthe doctrinethat my Negroes have no time whatever;that they are always liable to my call without questioningfor a moment the proprietyof it; and I adhereto this on the grounds of expediency and right"(Mullin 255). What stands out in Johnson'sscene of nocturnalragtimeperformanceis the importanceof the categoryof time. The patron time;moreover,his use of the narrator's tyrannizesthe narrator's reveals the extent to which the patronhimself feels tyranragtime nized by time. Accordingto the narrator,the patronviews ragtime as "a means of disposing of the thing which seemed to sum up all in life that he dreaded- time." "Toescape, to bridge over, to blot out" time: thus the patron attemptsto use the narrator's music (143).(Eventually,the patrondoes succeed in blotting out time is at time, but only by ending his own life.) The narrator's the service of the patron,the patronattemptsto use it to escape the force of time, and sounding in the narrator'sragtimeis a form of time cunningly aware of the patron'spower and predicament, and slyly resistantto both. Music is the most eminently temporal of forms, and it is my contentionthat Johnsonuses music in The to critiquethe role of time in the racialformations Autobiography and expectationsof the early twentieth century.Music is central to Johnson'snovel and to its narratoras he attemptsto negotiate the racializedlandscape of his era. A key part of the narrator's movement from his childhood with his black mother to his existence as a "white"real estate speculatoris his passage from
African American Review, Volume 40, Number 3 2006 Bruce Barnhart

Bruce Barnhart is Visting

Assistant Professor of 20thcentury American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His current book project examines the between jazz and exchanges the modernist novel and the role that these exchanges play in the reconfiguration of early 20th-century American culture.

551

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improvising ragtimeperformerto classical composer,a markerof his shift in allegiancefrom one conceptionof time to another. Specifically,Johnsonuses the counterpointbetween two different musical traditions(ragtimeand classical music) to meditate on the political valence of two differentforms of time. If art is, as AlbertMurrayasserts,"the ultimate extension, elaboration,and refinementof the ritualsthat re-enact the primarysurvival technology ... of a given people in a given time, place, and circumstance" (111)and if, as Emile Durkheimwrites, "the foundation of the categoryof time is the rhythmof social life" (20),then each form of music should give shape to quite differenttemporalconceptions. Ragtimeand classicalmusic each embody distinctmodes of time-consciousness and of temporalbeing-inthe-world. Coloured Man, classicalmusic stands for a conceptionof time that revolves aroundnecessity, calculability,and the expected. This progressive,sublimating time imagines temporalmovement as movement away from embodiment, a correlativeof a movement through social space organized in such a way as to present no impediment to the will of subjectsfigured as white or to the prerogatives of capital. Opposed to this conceptionis the time that emanatesfrom the narrator's pianisticimprovisations,a repetitive, polyphonic time of entanglementand imbrication.3 This conceptionof time emerges from a strong sense of the interrrelatedness of space and time and aware of always every time's provenance in a specific social space. Unlike the logicized, formaltimelessness of the patron'stime, this time is dynamic in the full etymological sense of the term. To be dynamic is to be built out of a clash of forces, and the rag-time that the narratorplays is intimately familiarwith the link between force and time.
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In TheAutobiographyof an Ex-

In the hands of Johnson,the observation that differentforms of music are relatedto differentrhythmsof social existence is no mere academicinsight, but speaks of the very politics of racial existence in a social landscapewhere the lynching that the narratorwitnesses is a hauntingly constantpossibility. WhatJohnsonlays bare in his novel are the brutalchronopoliticsof race and culture,and the way in which an AfricanAmericanperformativetradition responds with a chronopoliticsof its own. I take the term "chronopolitics" from JohannesFabian'sTimeandthe which argues that "Time Other, belongs to the politicaleconomy of relationsbetween individuals, classes and nations"and that "thereis a 'Politicsof Time' " (x). ForFabian,time is always politicalbecause it governs the envisioning of otherness;the way that it has traditionallydone so in Westernsociety is by imposing an apparentlyinsurmountableconceptual barrierbetween subjectand object, exercisingwhat Fabianrefersto as an that "epistemologicaldictatorship" licenses oppressionby creatingand catelegitimatingfixed hierarchical which the of most are, gories, pressing for us, those of race.Fabianlabels this a conceptualoperation"allochronism," denial of the dialecticalrelationship between subjectand objectthat divests the objectof knowledge (whetherperson, body, art form, culture,or race)of the ability to act in and occupy the same temporalspace as the observing subjectof knowledge. Fabian'sconclusion is that "a clearconceptionof allochronismis the prerequisiteand framefor a critiqueof racism"(182). Johnson'snovel precedes Fabianin its critiqueof allochronismand of the attendantpracticesof racism.Johnson shares Fabian'sbelief that where there are temporalpractices,there are power relationsand constructionsof otherness. He highlights the extent to which the narrator'sallianceof himself first with ragtime,then with a particular form of classicalmusic is part of his negotiation of the racialand temporal

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politics that shape his movements. In Johnson'shands, these musics appear not as detached aestheticpracticesbut as technologiesof temporaland subjective shaping that are heavily invested in the struggle over the proper shape of Americancultureand not without their own relationshipto political and institutionalpower. Johnsonsets these two Although musics and these two conceptions of time against each other,they are not polar opposites. The division at work here is not like the distinction that MirceEliadeand others make between linear and cyclicaltime.4The two times operativein Johnson'snovel are perhapsbest thought of as official and vernaculartime. They depend on each other for their constitution;official time a reificationof vernaculartime, and vernaculartime shaping itself in the intersticesof officialtime. Both times emerge out of a specific positionality within a complex of social and economic conditions and practices,not out of any fixed culturalor biological essence. Thus, while classicalmusic is a traditionhaving its provenancein Europe,and ragtimeis a music unimaginablewithout the forced historicalyoking of Africansubjectsand Americangeography,neitherform corresponds absolutelyto the racialformations dividing the Americanpolity. Ragtimeis a music with a complex provenance,emerging as it did out of both an AfricanAmericanperformance traditionrife with Africanisms,and out of a culturalsituationcharacterized by an insistent give and take between and AfricanAmerican Euro-American forms and culturaltraditions.5 Exemplaryhere is the way that the great stride pianist JamesP. Johnson plundered the Europeanclassicaltradition for techniquesthat he used to heighten his pianistic animationsof Harlemrent parties; Renaissance-era Eileen to Southern,"Johnson according spent many hours listening to recordings of Europeanpiano compositions,

so that he could use 'concerteffects' in his playing of jazz piano" (390). Thus, the time-conceptionregnant in the music of figures like JamesP. Johnsonand JamesWeldon Johnson's narratoris indebted to the form of Africantime kept alive in the ringshout tradition,but is in no way reducibleto it. In BluesPeople, his seminal work on the sociological significance of jazz and other forms of AfricanAmericanmusic, LeroiJoneslater Amiri Baraka- contends that "the African,because of the violent differences between what was native and what he [or she] was forced to in slavery, developed some of the most complex ideas about the world imaginable" (7). Time is one of these ideas, and the complexity of the time-conceptionat work in ragtimemeans that the opposition Johnsonsets up between classical music and ragtimecan not be a simple one. Ragtimeimprovises through the distinctionbetween Europeanand Africanculturewith a brillianceperhaps best capturedby JamesSnead's essay "Repetitionas a Figureof Black Culture."Snead defines black culture as a culturebuilt on acknowledgment of repetitionand of time's social basis. In his formulation,however, European culture does not (and cannot)eschew repetition;it merely tries to suppress its implications.He concludes that there are "elementsof black culture alreadythere [in Europeanculture]in latent form"and "thatthe separation between the cultureswas perhaps all along not one of nature,but of force" (75).Snead capturesthe complex interplay at work in black music's rhythmic shaping of repetitionwithout ever losing sight of the fact that this music is the product of black culture and that it aims, in JamesBaldwin's words, "to checkmatethe Europeannotion of the world" (87). Critiquingallochronismis a key part of checkmatingthe Europeanconceptionof the world, and in critiquingwhat I am calling "official time,"Johnsonallies himself with the imperativesof the music that his narrator ultimately abandons.
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marksmy essay's depar- and performancesof time are mainture from previous criticismis tained more through ideological rather its focus on this allianceand on the than physical force. The narrator'sconscriptioninto the importanceof the categoryof time in Johnson'snovel. While several critics patron'sconceptionof time occursin have commentedon the centralityof an argumentbetween the two, an argumusic to the novel, to my knowledge ment that follows on the heels of the none have highlighted the way late night ragtimesessions and that Johnson's use exposes the of music is underpinnings The repetitive, polyphonic time linked to of the patron's and imbrication of and entanglement strategies conceptionof time and the of conceptions conceptualized in implicatemporality.6 I The larger Autobiography emerges from tions of his examine the desire to "blot a strong sense of the conception of time implicit in out" time. and motivating interrelatedness of space and time; Tellingly,the the narrator's it exhibits an awareness of argumentconclassical procerns the narratime's provenance in every and then desire to tor's ject, a specific social space. turn to the transformhimself from a ragway ragtime this to evade to a classical time into attempts temporality composer. pianist propose an alternativeorganizationof He wants to leave the patron'semploy time and of social interaction.I read and returnto the United Statesto comthe argumentbetween the narratorand pose a symphony "on Negro themes."7 the patron concerningthe narrator's Having heard the theme of one of his desire to compose a work on "Negro ragtimecompositionstransposedinto themes,"and then move to the narra- "classicalform"by a Germanguest of tor's behaviorin the Southbefore becomes poshis patron's,the narrator returningto considerthe late night rag- sessed by the idea of "makingragtime time sessions that precedeboth scenes. classical."But when he tells the patron In the late night confrontation of his plans, of his desire "to voice all between the narrator'sperformanceof the joys and sorrows,the hopes and ragtimeand the patron'ssimultaneous ambitions,of the AmericanNegro, in command of, and willed deafness to, classic musical form"(148),he is met the music, Johnsongives us a scene of by a "cynical"smile. The patronhas chronopoliticalstruggle. In exertinghis nothing but scorn for the narrator's power over the narrator'stime and in planned returnto America,and refers to it as "thisidea of making a Negro refusing to heed the kinetic imperatives of his music, the patronmakes out of yourself"(145).This scorn is a use of the prerogativesof an official manifestationof the patron'sconceptime divorced from participation.Yet tion of time and his indifferenceto the ultimatelymore powerful is the past;like a good modernisthe envisions the past as a dead force void of patron'sability to articulatepersuahis time to the narof sively conception consequencefor the present and the rator.The patron'sattemptto use rag- future.8He sees the narrator's artistic time to "blotout" time is doomed to plans as an endorsementof the racial failure,but his attemptto conscriptthe divisions of US society, divisions that narratorinto allegianceto his view of he disdains as much as the narrator time is much more successful.With the does. To the patron,race is something success of this argument,Johnson that one assumes ratherthan someemphasizes that dominant conceptions thing one is born into;he finds it ludi554 AFRICAN REVIEW AMERICAN

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crous that the narrator's experience might inspire his desire to work with "Negrothemes/' and the patron can see this desire as nothing more than a free and irrationalchoice,based as it is on a seemingly unnecessaryexposure of the narratorto prejudiceand violence. Unlike Johnson,the patron cannot see that divisions based on racial identity are both irrationallyarbitrary andproductiveof a culturalheritage that has a differentvalue or weight for individuals of differentracialidentities. He cannotunderstandthat the race of the narratoris not just a function of decisions and categoriesin the present,but is producedby the weight of the past on the present,both the past of the narratorand the past of the people who have produced the "Negro themes"that the narratoris so eager to get his hands on. Concomitantwith the patron'sblindness to the past is his theory of art, a theory perhapsbest understood as a 'free market'theory of art.In his continuingattemptsto dissuade the narrator from his intended course of action,the patronargues that "Musicis a universalart;anybody's music belongs to everybody;you can't limit it to race or country"(144).When the patronspeaks, he speaks the language of capital;art is attachedonly to those who can appreciateand pay for its value. The possibility of art functioning as an expressionof national or racial ideals is as meaningless to him as the narrator's plan to "makea Negro" out of himself. The universalityof art that the patronespouses envisions an art unattachedto and untaintedby the conditionsof its making, free to circulate beyond the bounds of race and nation. In this construction,artbears none of the responsibilityto community that is so importantto both Johnson and his narrator. We should recognize here the conditionsof the circulationof its propagation jazz that characterized in the period book ended by the two release dates of Johnson'snovel, as well as the conditions of the narrator's presencein Europe.The narrator's detachmentfrom the place where he

learnedthe music that endears him to the patronmakes him liable to the financialarrangementthat binds him to the patron and allows him to circulate throughoutEurope.His very situation is an exemplificationof his patron'stheory of art, an exemplification that the unbinding from responsibility to race or nation is a binding to the dictatesof capital.In his passage through the capitalsof Europeanculture, the narratormust indulge every whim of the patron and is prohibited from playing without the patron's mandate.What the patronimagines as the "universality" of art is the replacement of one set of constraintsfor another,the severing of the ties to the past that the demands of racialand nationalidentity constitutereplacedby a "free"contractualagreementpredicated on the patron'sability to continue to pay for the narrator'scomplete allegiance. Although the patronis ultimately unable to convince the narratorto drop his plan to returnto America,the nature of the narrator'srebuttalsshow that he has partiallyadopted the patron'slogic of detached self-interest. The strengthof the patron'sargument forces the narratorto extend his deliberationsfor a couple of weeks, and when he finally makes his decision, he assertsthat he "settledthe question on purely selfish grounds, in accordance with my millionaire'sphilosophy" (147).He puts his concluding argument to himself in the following form: "Iargued that music offered me a better future than anything else I had any knowledge of, and, in opposition to my friend's opinion, that I should have greaterchancesof attractingattention as a colored composer than as a white one" (147).The narratorwins his argument with the patron and with himself, but only by proving the merit of his plan in the patron'sterms. The narrator's inabilityto confound the patron's logic leaves the patron'svoice ringing in his head and indicates the extent to which his admirationfor his millionaire "friend"continues to influencehis
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thinking even afterhe has left him. The patron'seffect on him is present in the musical very shape of the narrator's project.In his intentionto translate AfricanAmericancontent into "classic musical form,"the narratorperpetuates the patron'sphilosophy and hierarchyof values as much as he will in his later life as "anordinarilysuccessful white man" (211).In other words, despite his physical breakwith the patron,his returnto the US engages him in a projectthat treatsthe music that he sees as materialfor his symphony in a mannerremarkablysimilarto the way that his patronhad treated him and his music.9 The narratorwrites: "Igloated over the immense amount of materialI had to work with, not only modern ragtime, but also the old slave-songsmaterialwhich no one had yet touched"(142-43).In looking forward to his trip to the US South to gather materialfor his project,the narrator sees the music that he will encounteras a form of raw materialremarkableas much for its being untouched by other hands as for any intrinsicmusical character.10 At anotherpoint, the narrator describesthe musical richnessof a "big meeting"(a kind of stationaryreligious camp-meeting)as "a mine of material" (173).The use of a mining metaphor here tellingly indicates the narrator's adoption of what I have describedas the patron's"freemarkettheory of art."The narratorimagines his trip to the South as a mining expedition in which he aims his headlamp at the obscurebackwatersof small southern communitiesin searchof the most valuable veins of musical ore to chisel out of their surroundings.These musical "nuggets"clearlywill be taken far from their originalsettings and contexts, for the narratorrepeatedly expresses his urgent desire to "get to some place where [he] might settle down and work" (182).He views the social setting of the music that he makes his materialas no fit place for the kind of artisticconstructionthat he has in mind. Instead,he imagines a
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solitaryworkshop where he can run his newly acquiredmaterialthrough "the alembic"of his genius, distilling and purifying it into a form fit for expressionin classicalmusic form.11 the The narratorcharacterizes artisticprocess as follows: "nothing great or enduring,especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedentedfrom the brain of any master;the best that he gives to the world he gathersfrom the heart of the people, and runs it throughthe alembic of his genius" (100).The metaphor used here is a revealingone. An alembic is a heat-resistantlaboratoryvessel in which solid materialis refined or transformedinto gas; it is a key instrument in the chemicalprocess known as sublimation.The narratorreferences the alembicto describethe creative process as a purificationin which impure folk materialsare refined into a more ethereal,and less material,finished product.12 Notably, this metaphorcompares to the rhetoricthat the patronemploys in attemptingto dissuade the narrator from leaving him and returningto the US: "Perhapssome day, through study and observation,you will come to see that evil is a force, and, like the physical and chemicalforces,we cannot annihilateit; we may only change its form"(145-46).Here the patronsuggests that, if the narratorthinks "rationally" about the world- that is, if he apprehendsit through "study and observation,"notpracticeand experience-the passage of time will, almost of its own accord,bring the narratorto see the world as the patrondoes. For the patron,time is a force that may errorsof opinion, purge the narrator's but it cannot deliver him anywherebut to the intellectuallocation that the patron alreadyinhabits.The narrator can only catchup with the patron,and when he does he will realize the essentially unchangingnature of the world. aesAt work in both the narrator's thetic theory and the patron'sassumption that time will inevitably draw the narratorcloser to his position is the

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logic of culturalsublimation.Sublimation, the impossiblebut culturally valorized process that a hegemonic Americanidentity gives to individuals and culturesas a way of shaping a futurefor themselves, is what sounds in the patron'sspeech and in the configurationsof sound dictatedby classical form. It is the targetof the critique mounted by Johnson'snovel and by the ragtimethat resonatesthroughout it. The motion and the future that emerge from sublimationdepend upon the privileging of three interrelated conceptualoperations:a model of truth based on a strictseparationof thought and experience,an assumptionthat this truthis timeless and valid for all futureexperience,and a suppression of materialityand the body that legitimizes the distinctionbetween thought and experienceas well as being the preconditionfor thinking of any truth as outside of time. All three are implicit in the patron'sargumentwith the narrator,and all three are operativein the way that the narratorinteracts,or fails to interact,with the practiceshe finds on his trip through the South. Taken together,these three ideologemes act as a normativefilterthat masks the movements vibrantcall-and-response of the AfricanAmericanmusical practices present in the text. In his lectureson Kant'sCritique of Adorno sketches out the PureReason, imbricationof the first two of these idereferringto them collectiveologemes, "residual as the theory of truth,"a ly reductivemethod in which "everything that can be regardedas ephemeral, transitory,deceptive, and illusory is left to one side, so that what remainsis supposed to be indispensable, absolutelysecure, something I can hold permanentlyin my hands" (25). PermeatingAdorno's descriptionis the logic of sublimation:one arrivesat "residualtruth"through an intellectual distillationthat transmutesexperience into thought by boiling away the inessentialand the impure. The truth that results from this process is then

conceived of as having a timeless quality that gives it an ease of applicability "to all future eventualities."An implicit assumptionis that all possible forms of experiencehave at their core the same immutableand unchanging truths and thus, that while the process of arrivingat truthtakes place in time, the truththat arises out of it is not affectedor shaped by time. Time serves to separatetruth from experience,and once this process is accomplished,time becomes the motion by which new objectsand experiencesare fitted into alreadyexisting categoriesof thought. In other words, time, in its avoidance of the genuinely new or unexpected, becomes timeless. Adherenceto this conceptionof time fuels both the patron'sdesire to "blotout" time and the narrator'saspirationto fix the improvisatoryand collective musical practiceshe encountersin the South within the frameworkof a narrowly conceived classicalform. The conceptionof time and concomitantdisparagementof experience that motivate the actions of the narrator and his patron are centralorganizing principlesof the form of early 20thcenturymodernity and exchange society. Adorno writes that "thisstrange idea of the truth as something lasting and enduring somehow always appearswhere urbanexchange ideas have developed" (26).13Forhim, the residual and timeless theory of truth that is distilled out of experienceis, "in economic terms,""theprofit that remainsafterdeducting all the costs of production"(25).The timeless truth of Kantand of exchange society is modeled on the commodities that capitalism produces, and the aversion to the new is a function of the inabilityof exchange-thinkingto imagine the emergenceof anything that has not form of been paid for by the "proper" intellectualor economic labor.14 Exchangesociety mobilizes all the resourcesat its disposal to insure that the future is profitableand that this profit is distributedin a way that does not threatenthe intellectual,material,
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or social conditions of its existence.In the interestof minimizing risk and the possibility of profitlessactivity,manual laboris separatedfrom intellectual labor,a conceptualoperationbased on the analogy that comparessocial processes to the chemicalprocess of sublimation.The profit deriving from manual laborflows away from the bodies responsiblefor this laborto the "higher"realm of those who practice intellectuallabor.This division of labor shadows the narrator'sassumption that he will win fame for his arrangement of the themes he gleans from his southernsojourn.The sublimatingflow of time that he allows to shape his actions leads to a hierarchyin which his individual work on the themes he extractsare "worth"more than the work involved in generatingthese themes.15 Following the analogy of sublimation, this flow is figured as natural,and the realm of intellectuallaboris figured as both self-sustainingand free from any manual labor.What sustains this analogy is the negation of materiality, both in the disavowal of the link between intellectuallabor and the extractionof profit from the manual laborthat makes it possible, and in the disavowal of the fact that intellectual laboris also manual labor.The cultural logic of sublimationis at base a logic that operatesby transformingthe impossibilityof an escape from materiality into the desirabilityand possibility of masteringmaterialityin orderto move beyond it. This logic enforcesa move away from the body, the very thing that ragtimeplays so provocatively upon, and away from the interactionbetween bodies, one of the main sources of the genius of the African Americanmusic that the narrator comes to see as raw material. Having adopted both the patron's selfishness and the assumptions about time and sublimationthat lie behind it, the narratorgoes about gathering materialfor his symphony in a way that consistentlystrives to transform collective expressioninto individual
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expression.Thata skilled ragtime pianist would ever attemptthis transformationdemonstratesthe cultural force of the logic of sublimation,for the music that the narratorclaims inspires him is so intimatelylinked to the situation in which it is performedthat it is hard to imagine exactly what the narrator takes away from it in the notebooks that he uses to jot down "themesand melodies."The two figures who most impress the narratorare the preacher JohnBrown and the hymn-leader what is most "SingingJohnson"; remarkableabout both figures are their improvisationalskills and their ability to judge the perfectmoment for specific musical or rhetoricaleffects.Singing Johnson'simpressivenesslies in his unfailing knowledge of "justwhat hymn to sing and when to sing it" (178)as well as of the appropriatekey for each congregation,while John Brown'sbrillianceresults from "an imaginationso free and daring"that, when combinedwith his "intuitionof a born theatricalmanager"(175),allows him to employ his knowledge of oratory to tailorhis sermon to fit the needs of each congregation.Brown'spowers convince the narratorthat "eloquence consists more in the mannerof saying than what is said" (176). All in all, the narrator'sdescription of the performancesthat he witnesses in the South emphasizes their improvisationalflexibilityand responsive suppleness, elements that seem unlikely to be capturedin the narrator's notebook of "themesand melodies" (173).The narrator'sapproachappearslikely to founder on a fundamentalmistake: mishearingthe essence of music in substantive ratherthan relationalterms. As Johnsonwrites of ragtimein the charmis not in melody, but in rhythms"(12).What the narratorputs into his notebooks arejust those aspects of music ("themesand melodies")that fit into the notation and conceptualscheme of western classical music, while left out are all the elements that contributeto the power
Bookof AmericanNegro Poetry, "its chief

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and beauty of performancessuch as SingingJohnson's,all that makes up what the narratorrefersto as "thatelusive undertone,the note in music which is not heard with the ears" (181).16 In short,the narratorhas committed himself to a course that directly contravenesthe distinctivegenius of the music describedin his narrative, both throughhis insistence on transformingcollectivemusical practices into a work attributable to an individual creator(thatis, with a signatureunlike the novel itself) and in the resultant fixing of improvisationalcontextdependent practicesin a structure notated in a mannermeant to guarantee its unvarying repeatabilityin whatever contextit might ultimately find itself. The choice of form and devotion to the logic of sublimationhave decided this course in advance;the narrator's time with the patronhas left him with an unthinkingcommitmentto what he calls "classicmusical form,"a symphonicform given its canonical shape in the early 19th-century period of heroicbourgeois individualism and still saddled with the rhythmsand logic of this conceptionof subjectivity.17Despite the narrator'sdisagreement with his patronover his plan to returnto America,the musical project that ensues from the narrator'ssojourn in Germanyensures that the aesthetic and social values of the patron accompany the narratorin his journey throughthe South. Centralto these values and the musical form that the narratoris committedto using is the intense desire to "blotout" time. The witnessing of a lynching puts a violent end to the narrator'ssymphonic project,but there is a violence implicitin the symphonic project before the lynching abortsit, a violent impulse linked to the symphony's ability to "blotout time."This "blotting out" is, of course,what the patron wants the narrator's ragtimeto do, but it is also, accordingto Theodor Adorno, one of the main functionsthe symphony performs.In an articleenti-

tled "TheRadio Symphony,"Adorno writes that the symphony "suspends time-consciousness,contractstime, and in doing so annihilatesthe contingencies of the listener'sprivate experience."Adorno is infamous for his inabilityto come to terms with jazz's distinctperformativeenactments,and it is just this auraldefect, this deafness, that makes him the perfectreference here. Like the patron,Adorno approachesjazz with aestheticexpectations shaped by Europeanforms; despite their diverging opinions of jazz and ragtime,both the patron and Adorno come to the music expecting it to deliver the same kinds of experience as does music from Europeanclassical traditions.The patronlistens in ragtime for a suspension or compression of time capableof sustaining a sense of selfhood by delivering it from the threatof repetitionand consecratinga nonreflexiveunidirectionalexperience of time. This experienceis what the symphony attemptsto deliver;it strives to do so by virtue of its "particular intensity and concentration," a function of the fact that "a truly symphonic movement containsnothing in it "everyelement is ultifortuitous;" mately traceableto very small basic elements"(115). WhatAdorno points to is the link between a totalizing integration achieved by banning everythingnot fully subordinatedto a work's overall form, and the suspension or abolition of time. Time is abolishedbecause in this constructionthere is no friction between differentparts of the work or between any of the parts of the work and the form that containsthese parts. What listenershear in the succession of these frictionlessparts is a parade of necessarymoments to which they are asked to merely nod in assent. A listener's private experienceis set aside in what is essentially a ritualizedcelebration of universalitypurged of all conor conflict. tingency, particularity, The abolitionof time and particularity enacted in the symphony depends, ultimately,on a manipulation
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of volume that can only be describedas the presentationof a force that is both overwhelming and undifferentiatedly ideal at the same time. Adorno describesthis force in the following terms:"Thepower of a symphony to 'absorb7 its parts into the organized whole, depends, in part,upon the sound volume" (118).Accordingto Adorno, to achieve the proper symphonic experience,and concomitant suppression of time, the range of volume presented to the listenermust vary not only from soft to loud, but from "Nothingto All" (123). Expressingas it does a vastness beyond that which individuals can imagine themselves producing,the massed sound of the symphony delivers the listener into a sublime transcendent space overwhelming enough to separatethose who enter it from their private experience.18 WhatAdorno describeshere is the aestheticanalog to MichaelHanchard' s centralinsight in "Afro-Modernity: Temporality,Politics and the African that time is determinedby Diaspora": power and by power differentials. Following Fabian,Hanchardexplicitly links time to the relationsof power and the mechanismsthat distributepower unequally within any particularsociety, alertingus to "the distincttemporal modalities that relationsof dominance and subordinationproduce" (253).Hanchardis speaking specifically of racialtime, as am I, but the implication of his critiqueis that all time is a function of force and power, an implication that, when combinedwith Zora Neale Hurston'sdictum "Discordis more naturalthan accord"(305),leads us to expect that time will necessarily be replete with surges, ebbs, rushes, lapses, and eddies. To expect otherwise is to fall prey to the idealisticillusion that time is transcendentaland, thus, motionless in its total detachmentfrom any tangible objectthat might move "through,""with,"or "in"time, all metaphorsobscuringthe fact that time is an abstractiondeterminedby, as well as determining,movement. Primarilya
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techniqueof social coordination,time, when detachedfrom social experience, reduces itself to the same sterileprinciple of self-consistencythat threatensto engulf a rationalityconceived of as the mere satisfaction"of certainaxioms of formalcoherence"(Aglietta14). A clock is valued not because it tells us anything about the outside world (as does a clock that beats more slowly when it is damp outside might),but because it is consistentwith itself, methodicallybeating out the same intervalthat it beat out yesterday and will beat out tomorrow.Faulkner's assertionthat "timeis dead as long as it is being checked off by little wheels" of is part of a nostalgic romanticization the past, but it is still correctabout the inadequacyof a mechanicaltime imagined as independent of the society that produces it (185).

of time as detached and Thinking regularis a kind of illusion, but it is an illusion whose pervasiveness,or even necessity, accuratelyexpresses the overwhelming forces that go into producing it. A time that surges and ebbs is the function of a give and take between differentconfigurationsof force,but a time that is both transcendental and absolutelyregularcan be of engendered only by a concentration force so overwhelming that any individual force that confrontsit is rendered virtuallyinconsequential.This inconsequentialityis why the abolition of time that the symphony strives to deliver is dependent on the abilityto generatea range of volume far exceeding that which an individual can possibly produce. The sound volume of the symphony surroundsand engulfs listeners, removing them from a position in which any response other than awed submission is possible and drawing them into an imaginaryand bodiless "symphonicspace"free from contingency and the frictionof contesting forces.The symphony assertsthe opposite of Hurston'sdictum that

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"Discordis more naturalthan accord/' by presentinga puissant auditory vision of force naturalizedas necessity and by inviting each listener to set aside her or his individual experience in orderto join in the timeless but forward marchof symphonic progression. It is this conceptionof time that Johnson'snovel critiques;the novel insists on the link between force and abstracttimelessnessby presentingthe flip side of the sublime aesthetictimelessness at work in the symphony. The two most overt displays of violence in the novel are the lynching that ends the narrator's trip throughthe South and the shooting of a white woman in the club where the narratorlearns to play ragtime.In both of these instances,the narratorexperiencesa suspension of time-consciousness,but one much less pleasant and much more crudely engendered than that experiencedby a listenerin a concerthall. Describingthe lynching that he witnesses, the narrator asserts,"Itwas over before I realized that time had elapsed" (187).In his accountof the jealousy-inspiredshooting of "thewidow' at "theClub,"the same removal from any consciousness of the passage of time is apparent:the narrator's flight is a nondescriptblur that leads him to state, "How long and far I walked I cannottell" (124).In both cases the spectacleof violence removes the narratorfrom his usual sense of time, and transformshim into a mindless and mute victimized object,a metaphoricalleaf blown by the wind of violent force itself. In these scenes showing experiences of timelessnessbrought on by unexpected and unsanctionederuptions of violent force,Johnsondispels the myth of timelessness as the medium of free, self-determiningindividuals. The narratoris never more bound by the fettersof physical causalitythan when he mindlessly flees from the club or when his stupefied horrorprevents him from turningaway from the lynching. These scenes take the grid of the narrator's planned symphony and use it to plot the narrator's real-lifeexperi-

ence; in this transpositionfrom the aesthetic registerto the everyday, the pleasure that symphonic form should yield becomes a very unpleasantterror. Johnsonliteralizesthe aestheticsof symphonic sublimationto show that the pleasure that the symphony promises to deliver centerson the presentationof an alluringbut impossible trajectory.19 Alluring,because it is the of trajectory ascension into the sphere of absolute and unlimited power; impossible because the protagonistof this ascensionis never an individual. The sublimatingmovement narrated by the symphony is the movement of power enshriningitself, a movement that does not bring individuals with it. In these scenes, Johnsonmakes visible the contradictionsinherentin the narrator's musical project.The narrator wants to "give voice" to his people, but the only way that he can conceive of doing so is by removing from specific membersof his race those elements of their musical and rhetoricalpractices that articulatethe most heightened version of their own voices. The narrator's uncriticaladherenceto the dictatesof classicalform motivates him to lift certain "themesand melodies" from the time of the camp meeting participatory and transposethem into a form that mutes the rhythmicexchanges that give them their significance.He wants to make these themes timeless by making them elements in a symphonic monument to his race.The problem with this transformation is that the monument he has in mind bears little resemblanceto the culturalpracticesof those he wants to monumentalize;the form he has chosen to express their "hopes and ambitions"unfolds itself in a rhythmuntrue to the way their hopes and ambitionsattemptto access the future.Furthermore, his plan to fit AfricanAmericancontentinto classical (western)form repeatsthe racialhierarchythat links dark-skinned Americansto formless materialityand lighter skinned Americansto higher principlesof form and order.The nar561

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ratoroperatesin accordancewith the conceptionof time adopted from his patron,and the result is an approachto musical productionthat inures him to the time operativein the forms that he wants to make into his material. Despite his desire to align himself with his race,he is so entrancedwith the movement of sublimationand symphonic development that this becomes impossible. It requiresa radical rethinkingof form, (somethinglike what Houston Bakerrefersto as "deformationof mastery")in order to derive change from a form committed to timelessness, and thus antitheticalto change.Johnson'snovel undertakes such rethinking,but the narratordoes not.

The patronwields a power over the narratorthat depends on a conception of time antitheticalto that contained in the music. The narrator describesthe patron'spower as essentially inhuman,a kind of "supernatural power" that fills him with "unearthly terror"(121).We should recognizethis impersonal,inhuman force as the power of capital,and the temporality of capitaldictatesa conceptionof the past and the future challengedby ragtime's improvisationalrhythms. The detemporalizationof time that the patronclings to in his stubborn refusalto heed the music's incitement of motion is an avoidance of a particular form of the future as well as a barrier separatingthe present from the past. Beholdento the values of calculability and predictability,the futurethat the patron desperatelylistens for should sound like the smallest possible variaof the narrator's impossibility tion of the past, a furtherstep on a situationis closely aligned with the patron'simpossible situation as he developmentalline drawn from the sits stoically listening to ragtime, past through the present into the future.To hear this kind of futurein to hear in it an from straining escape time. The idiosyncrasyof the patron's ragtimerequiresan immensely powerful imaginativeapparatus,one capable ratherirregularexpectationsof when of distortingor effacingthe supple and for how long the narratorshould unsecured from futurethat play for him is matchedby his idiosyn- between the music's peaks aliquantripples craticresponse to the music. For this and cascadesof sound. Approaching is a nonresponse fundamentally ragtimewithout the epistemological response. The response of the guests at focus of the patronand with the weight the first occasion on which the patron of his culturalbaggage quite differentdirectsthe narratorto play is characterdistributed,the narratordescribesit istic of the way that virtually everyone ly as a music of "surprise" and "theunexin the novel responds to the narrator's remarks on both "theintrihe pected": performanceof the music "that cate rhythmsin which the accentsfell demanded physical response";they are in the most unexpected places"and the astonished and surprised,and end up "sortof pleasant surpriseat the accom"involuntarilyand unconsciously" of [its] feats"(99) that results The plishment doing "animpromptuCakewalk." from its rhythmicaudacity.20 patron,on the other hand, takes the The narrator's responsivenessto music as a kind of soporific "drug,"sit- ragtimeallows him to hear in it the disting grimly and mutely, and "making location and interruptionof the very scarcelya motion except to light a fresh line of time that the patronstrainsto hear in it. Antitheticalas this music is cigarette"(121).The patronis deaf to the demands that the music makes and to the patron'smode of imagining subrefuses to yield to its bodily imperajectivityand temporality,he is nonetheless drawn to it. His attraction tives, choosing instead to hear in it a confirmationof his power to command is a symptom of the extent to which and a possible escape from the time time is a problemfor him, a problem that will eventually destroy this power. pressing enough to give him the desire

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to escape from it and to lead him eventually to escape it "by leaping into eternity" (143),that is, by taking his own life. Time is problematicfor the patron because the repetitionthat he is at such great pains to avoid or disavow is at the same time an indispensablecomponent of his existence.The fact that the narrator's most frequentappellation for his patronis "millionairefriend" indicatesthat wealth is the attribute that most defines him. His wealth was extractedfrom the labor-timeof those working for him in the past and thus is, in JacquesAttali's terms, a "stockpiling of time."Accordingto Attali, repetition enables such stockpiling:"Wehave seen that the first repetitionof all was that of the instrumentof exchange in the form of money. A preconditionfor money contains representation, exchange-time,summarizes,and abstractsit; it transformsthe concrete, lived time of negotiation and compromise into a supposedly stable sign of equivalencein orderto establishand make people believe in the stabilityof the link between things and in the indisputableharmonyof relations" (101).Money stamps the sign of the same on differentsituations,defining all varietiesof interpersonalexchanges as only quantitativelydifferentand thus making each exchangeyield differentquantitiesof the same abstraction, money itself. Depending on the exchangelogic of money, as the narrator does, puts one in the position of receivingevery situationas a repetition of the process in which exchange-time is extractedfrom use-time. This logic attenuatesthe force of anythingnew or the "unexpected") by ("surprise" measuringit in terms of the relationsof exchangeexisting in the past and fostering a non-dialecticalrelationshipto any new object,in which this objectis owned or masteredby a non-responsive and unchangingsubject.This is the situationof the patronand of his relationshipto ragtime;he attemptsto escape from the ennui of the repeated event, but his subservienceto the logic of exchangeensnareshim; he cannot fully experienceanythingnew or

and unique. Dead to the "surprise" in contained "unexpected" ragtime,the patronis a figure for a particularversion of hopelessness. In his attemptto dissuade the narratorfrom returningto America,he argues that "evil is a force, and, like the physical and chemical forces,we cannot annihilateit; we may only change its form"and that "to attemptto right the wrongs and ease the sufferingsof the world in general is a waste of effort"(146).Collective action,political struggle, and any attemptto change or ameliorateinjustice he considersfutile because such acts are based on a deluded belief in a future qualitativelydifferentfrom the present.Forhim, the only proper response to the world is an individual cultivationof a detached aesthetic appreciationof novelty and the exotic!21 The only future that the patron can see is a blase, materialisticUtopia constructedaccordingto the dictatesof exchange logic.22 This vision of the future is reinforcedby the patron'sallegianceto the motion of sublimation.Forhim, sublimation is a process whose forward motion lies in the past. He experiences it as the process that has led him to his present position of power and privilege, a position imagined as the end point of this process,beyond which stretchesan endless and timeless expanse of drearysameness. The lack of enjoymentthat the narratorderives from ragtime,the result of its provenance in a place imagined as behind and below the patron'spoint of sublimation achieved, shows the patron's inabilityto conceive anything more desirablethan his currentposition, as well as his fear that time might undo his privilege, passing him by and putting him in a situationthat forces him to admit responsibilityor subordination to something outside of or beyond himself. The patronavoids bodily response to the ragtimehe listens to both because such a response looks like a returnto an unsublimated past in which his body responds to impulses outside of his own control,
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and because letting his body move to the vibrationsemanatingfrom the piano would put him in the same time as the narrator,threateningto abolish the gulf separatingpatronfrom artist (employerfrom employee), to reverse the relationshipbetween the two, and to bring down the patron'smastery and disavowal of his dependence on his servant.The unsublimatedpast threatensthe patronbecause it proffers the possibility that such a past might propel him into an encounterwith not only his own corporealitybut with the previously subordinated corporeality of others (disavowed "servants'7) on whom his masteryin the present depends. His masteryhas been bought and paid for, but to open the present to the unruly power of the past is to call into question the validity of the coin with which this purchasewas made. If the patronwere to dance to the narrator's ragtime,whether "involuntarily and unconsciously"or not, the assumptionof the kind of timeless temporalitythat allows the patronto imagine himself as a free, powerful, and self-determiningsubjectwould expose itself to the risk of disarticulationand dissolution.23 The patron'sposition exemplifies the combinationof dread and fascination with which US society has always greetedjazz and other African Americanmusical forms and the impossibility of this society's relationship to a repetitivedynamism that it both consumes and denies. In other words, we see in the midnight encounters between the adamantinepatron and the put-upon but obedient narrator not only an isolated master/slave struggle but a confrontationof the power of capitalthat drives the industry responsiblefor much of the marketing and disseminationof jazz and ragtime with the very music that is both an objectof this industry's operations and an objectembodying a logic incommensurablewith these operations. It is not that ragtimejettisonsthe strictlyregulartime of capitalaccumulation and abstractdisembodiment;
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rather,ragtimeexposes its mobilization of surpriseand the unexpected;it shakes this regulartime so that its affinitieswith, and dependence on, its ostensibly absolute other are made apparent.The result is a revision and redefinitionof the possible ways of thinking and rethinkingthe relationship between temporalrhythmsand social participation. The patron'savoidance of the temporality of ragtimeis a version of what Du Bois calls "Listeningwithout ears" hear the music, to give it the response that it demands, would be to hear the fictive nature of sublimationand mastery, and to move in a time where the body and the past can only be mastered temporarily,if at all. The unhoused rhythmsof ragtimetake advantageof the need to constantlyrestage and re-performthe coordination of mind and body, performinga pendular hinging of call and response in which the body's response to the dictates of the mind are constantly reversed into the mind's response to the call of the body. Ragtimeforms itself in the gap between the time dominant in America'shegemonic conception of itself and the time of an African/ AfricanAmericanperformancetradition. Its chronopoliticsare both subvera repetitive sive and confrontational, play on social conditionsthat calls for a constantreturnto the music and to the conditions of its hearing and mishearing.24 Johnson'suse of music sounds a sharp critiqueof the centraltemporal assumption of a culturewhose acceptance of jazz and ragtime,and of Johnson'snovel, are never fully distinct from a racialschema that radically mutes and misrecognizesthe play on time and truth at work in them. W. C. Handy describesthis muting and misrecognitionwhen he writes, "The white man has always liked this music, but he has liked it as a thing apart" (232).A music that "demands response,"ragtimecan never be "a thing apart."Its troping of time expos(BlackReconstruction124-25). To really

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es the falsity of any time detachedfrom the rhythmof social life, much as the troping of time and sublimationperformedby Johnson'snovel lays bare the structuresof dominanceat work in the sublimatingacceptanceof this music. In the dialecticbetween the ragtime of the narratorand the "grim, relentlesstyrant"who commandsits Johnsonshows us the performance, complex mixtureof embraceand disavowal that the dynamics of African Americanliteratureand music must always confrontif they are to be heard for what they are, and not as "a thing apart."This literatureand this music are both forms that "demand response,"and the response they demand is a participationin their temporal movement, a response that sets aside assumptionsabout the movement of time and the relationship between performer,performance,and audience.To assume that these works can be fit into existent temporal

schemas without requiringany revision of these schemas is to miss what is most essential about them, and to join the patronin his attemptto "blotout" or escape from time.
CODA

of the power of Johnson's novel derives from its affiliation with the improvisationalrhythms of ragtime.To do full justice to the imperativesof the novel any analysis, including this one, would have to move from the realm of the strictlyliteraryinto the realm of music by attemptingto come to terms with the manipulationsof time and form at work in the performancesof figures like JamesP. Johnson,EubieBlake,and Willie "TheLion"Smith.

1. Suggestive of the narrator's status as an object is the patron's practice of occasionally "loan[ing]" Notes him out "to some of his friends" (120). 2. The best referent for what Johnson calls ragtime in the novel is probably the improvisatory stride style of James P. Johnson, rather than the more formal notated music of Scott Joplin. See Brown and Fell and Vinding. Note that the word jazz did not come into widespread use until 1913, a year after was used to refer to almost The Autobiography was first published. Before 1913, the term "ragtime" all improvised African American music. Many musicians (particularlySidney Bechet) never adopted the term jazz and referred to everything we now think of as jazz as "ragtime." 3. My characterization of this time as one of entanglement and imbrication owes much to Baraka s theorization of jazz rhythm in the essays cited below. It also is informed by Mbembe's reflections on time in On the Postcolony, where he describes the "time of entanglement" as "an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering and maintaining the previous ones" (16). Although Mbembe is most explicitly concerned with African rather than African American modes of sociality, his theories of the conceptual formations growing out of the interactions of African and European culture are not without relevance to jazz and ragtime. Also, insofar as he is indebted to the work of Leopold Senghor, who was never reticent about his debt to and intellectual affinitywith jazz, Mbembe can be seen as standing partially in the tradition of ragtime temporality. Mbembe spoke about the influence of Senghor's work on his own in the third of his Wellek LibraryLectures, given at UC Irvine in February of 2004. 4. This disclaimer is important because the cyclical/linear distinction, like the distinction between orality and literacy, partakes of the romance of the primitive.As Snead points out, there is no modern culture whose conception of time does not incorporate both the cylical and the linear. A purely cyclical time can exist only in a static, agrarian culture, the kind of culture usually figured as pre-modern. When Johnson was writing, no musics in the world were more modern than jazz and ragtime. 5. On the presence of Africanisms in ragtime, jazz, and African American music in general, see Maultsby; Floyd chapters 1-2; Stuckey chapter 1; Schuller chapter 1; and Jones chapters 1-3. For a valuable reminder of the dangers of overemphasis on Africanisms in African American traditions, see Hartman 223n102 and 223n1 12. On Euro-American and African American forms and cultural tradi-

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tions, cf. Wilson's observation that "cultural interaction more than culture isolation has characterized the American experience" (83). 6. Foremost of these critics is Washington, whose essay I have read with profit. However, Washington reads the classical aspirations of Johnson's narrator as the expression of a "mulatto-centered, American nationalism"; my reading differs significantly. See also Ruotolo. 7. Although the narrator never explicitly names his planned work a "symphony," both the epic tendencies make it clear that it can be scope he envisions for this work and his self-aggrandizing nothing less. His aim is to "voice all the dreams, all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form" (147-48); nothing less than the broad structural and instrumental resources of the symphony will suffice. The symphony is the most prestigious form of the classical tradition with which the narrator becomes enamored, and, as Washington notes, "Johnson's protagonist was not interested in recording an expert musician's neo-spiritual . . . but was reaching for the top of the musical hierarchy as both Locke and Johnson understood it" (253). Clearly relevant here is Dvorak's New World Symphony, a work that Johnson knew well. Although Edwards suggests this symphony as a possible influence on Johnson's poem "The Creation" (587), Johnson's aesthetics suggest his interest in a much greater role for African American music than that played by a truncated version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" in Dvorak's symphony. See Burgett for an analysis of the limited role this spiritual plays in New World Symphony (30-33). 8. Like the claimants of modernity that Habermas describes, the patron refuses to take his "orientation from the models supplied by another epoch" (Habermas 7). While the patron stands for a particular version of modernity, this does not mean that either the narrator or his music stands for any preor anti-modernity. What Johnson alludes to in his employment of ragtime is another form of moderniof the past. ty: one not based on racial exclusions and suppressions 9. The works of William Grant Still, James P. Johnson, Nathaniel Dett, Scott Joplin, and others illustrate that an entirely other relationship between classical form and African American music is possible. What stops the narrator from practicing what Baker calls "the deformation of mastery" is his assumption that classical form is neutral (Baker 50). Without his susceptibility to the ideological force of his patron's ideals, the narrator could have approached classical form in the same way that Johnson approached novelistic form, with a wariness in service of de-forming and re-forming it so as to make it do an entirely unprecedented and untraditional type of cultural work. Gates observes the similarity between Johnson's use of the novel and his narrator's use of the symphony in a 1989 introduction to The Autobiography (x-xi). 10. Johnson implies that the musical "materials" of the South appear to the narrator as commodities, that is, as exhaustible objects that use degrades. Subjected to a commodifying gaze that sees them through the lenses of sublimating time, these practices are divorced from a participatory time in which repetition enhances their vitality, and refigured in accordance with time as a force that can only corrode this vitality. The narrator's excitement over the "freshness" of the music he encounters in the South is roughly analogous to the patron's attempt to preserve the freshness of the narrator's ragtime: the patron prohibits the narrator from playing his music for anyone besides him and his guests (120). Once the narrator adopts the patron's belief in time as sublimation, everything he encounters appears to him only as objects subject to decay. 1 1 . The metaphor that Johnson employs shows that the sublimation under consideration is more Paterian than it is Freudian. P. Anderson gives a thorough description of the presence of the rhetoric of sublimation in the writings of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and of the debt this rhetoric owes to the writings of Walter Pater (47-54, 147-50). 12. The narrator's view of the creative process as purification is one shared by Alain Locke. In a 1928 article suggestively entitled "Beauty Instead of Ashes," Locke describes the "full promise" of African American music as lying in the future production of "sublimated and precious things" after which what he calls "the folk temperament" will scarcely be recognizable. The similarity between the narrator's position and Locke's indicates how widespread is the position that Johnson critiques in his novel, even among African American intellectuals. Like the patron, Locke is unable to meet jazz or ragtime on its own terms; in Sterling Brown's words, "For Locke, if Stravinsky liked it, it had to be good. And that's bad" (qtd. in Anderson 195). Cf. Du Bois's assertion that the "art coming from black folk is going to be just as beautiful, and beautiful largely in the same ways, as the art that comes from white folk" ("Criteria" 496). Even Johnson himself was not immune to this position: when he envisioned turning God's Trombones into a kind of oratorio, he turned to the British composer Constant Lambert, despite the fact that he was well aware of the wealth of musical talent in his own city. Johnson actually knew James P. Johnson, William Grant Still, and others more than capable of turning his work into a magnificent oratorio, and yet he turned to a classical composer whom he had never met. Lambert declined Johnson's offer, and God's Trombones has never been set to music (Johnson to Lambert). 13. Here we are in the realm of the sharpest incompatibility between the sublimating time of the

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patron and the rhythms of ragtime. Ragtime temporality is not reducible to African time, but the opposition between what Adorno describes and Mbiti'sdescription of African time-conceptions is illustrative of the divergence between the impetus of the narrator's ragtime and the ideas about time that the narratoradopts from his patron. Mbitiasserts, "When Africans reckon time, it is for a concrete and specific purpose, in connection with events but not just for the sake of mathematics" (17). The African heritage in the narrator's style of improvisatory ragtime resides in its construction of time out of a specific purpose and in negotiation with the events and the participants it interacts with. This time is not distilled from experience but is a coefficient of experience that revises itself in accordance with its conditions of performance. Benston identifies this "insistently revisionary impulse" in jazz performance (115-16). See also Schuller's comments on the more precise time-sense required in what he calls "socially-functioning music," a term he applies to both jazz and traditional African music (7n8, 15-27). 14. This aversion to the new is supported by the pronounced tendency of Western philosophy to focus on time's corrosive force: Locke calls time "a perpetual perishing," Schopenhauer defines it as "thatby the power of which everything at every instant turns to nothing in our hands," and Aristotle states that it "is in itself above all cause of corruption"(Zuckerkandl 223, Negri 164). Cf. Mbiti's description of a time that "has to be created or produced." Kept alive in the tradition that informs the narrator's ragtime is a construction of time in which "Manis not a slave of time; instead, he 'makes' as much time as he wants" (Mbiti 19). 15. Washington argues convincingly that Johnson's naming of Singing Johnson and John Brown, actual practitioners of Johnson's day, is an attempt to rectify the kind of unacknowledged borrowing that the narratorseems to have in mind and that is even criticized in The Autobiography. "Several of these improvisations were taken down by white men, the words slightly altered, and published under the names of the arrangers. They sprang into immediate popularity and earned small fortunes, of which the Negro originators got only a few dollars" (qtd. in Washington 251). Johnson names Singing Johnson in his preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals (22-23). 16. In the preface to the Book of American Negro Spirituals, Johnson is very direct about the inability of musical notation to capture the "peculiarities"of African American performance: "Idoubt that it is possible with our present system of notation to make a fixed transcription of these peculiarities that would be absolutely true; for in their very nature they are not susceptible to fixation"(30). 17. In recent years, the validity of Adorno's critical writings on music has been seriously challenged. Critics like Rosen have taken Adorno to task for, among other things, his lack of attention to preclassical music and for his sometimes savage, and, in Rosen's view, baseless, denunciation of music from outside the central European classical tradition Cf. Baumeister and Powell's response to Rosen. However, to my knowledge, no critics have taken issue with Adorno's characterization of the way that the sonata form of the classical symphony treats development and shapes time. My use of Adorno in this essay is a limited one. I do not embrace the entirety, or even the majority, of his critical oeuvre; I merely utilize his description of the time-consciousness of the symphony to highlight the complicity between the treatment of time in classical development and the temporality assumed by certain forms of racial subordination. 18. Although the symphony in its canonical form militates for a progressive and unidirectional time, it is not without its own polyvalence. For a treatment of some of the other ways in which the symphony works on listeners, see Said chapter 2, "On the Transgressive Elements in Music." 19. In Mackey's words, Every concept, no matter how figural or sublime, had its literal, dead letter aspect" (Bedouin Hornbook 201-02). 20. Floyd contrasts this emphasis on surprise with a "European musical orientation," pointing out that in improvised African American musical forms like ragtime, "the howoi a performance is more importantthan the what."Eschewing "nostalgia"and a "preference"for the familiar, the "musical experience of ragtime orients itself around the expectation that an unprecedented "something will happen in the playing of the music" (96-97). 21. The patron s appreciation of the music as something novel and exotic shows his participation in the primitivismthat characterizes many responses to jazz and ragtime. For accounts of this primitivism and its distorted vision of the music, see Paul Allen Anderson (especially chapter 2), Ogren, and Maureen Anderson. 22. This pessimism is shared by many of the major Anglo-American modernists. Eliot refers to "the immense panorama of futilityand anarchy which is contemporary history"(177) while Pound writes that "a tawdry cheapness shall outlast our days" (186). 23. The patron's refusal to dance is, of course, only a figure for his nonparticipation in the time of the narrator's music. There are ways of dancing that uphold this nonparticipation and sublimated mastery as well as the patron's blunt immobility. Baraka suggests as much in the distinction he makes between dance as performed in the "black

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aesthetic" and in "Arthur Murrayfootsteps" ("The 'Blues Aesthetic'" 107). Hughes makes a similar distinction between hearing and listening at the end of "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."At stake in both cases is not any specific physical action, but whether or not the listener or dancer opens himself to the time and rhythm performed in jazz or ragtime. 24. Mackey: "Musicwants us to know that truths are variable" ("Statement"717). Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. - . "The Radio Symphony." Radio Research. Eds. Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1941. 110-39. Aglietta, Michel. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation. London: New Left Books, 1997. Anderson Maureen. "The White Reception of Jazz in America." African American Rewew38 (Spring 2004): 135-45. Anderson, Paul Allen. Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. Durham: Duke UP 2001. Attali, Jacques. Noise. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 1985. Baker, Jr., Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Baraka, Amiri. "The 'Blues Aesthetic' and the 'Black Aesthetic': Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture."Black Music Research Journanj\ .2 (1991): 101-09. - . Rhythm and Rime." Newark, NJ: Kimako's Blues People, n.d. - . "Sun Ra."African American Rewew29 (Summer 1995): 253-55. Baldwin, James. "Ofthe Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption." New Edinburgh Review Anthology. Ed. James Campbell. Edinburgh: Polygon Books, 1982. 85-92. Baumeister, Thomas, and Larson Powell. "AdoringAdorno." New YorkReview of Books 50.2 (13 Feb. 2003): 82-84. Benston, Kimberly. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2000. Brown, Scott. James P. Johnson: A Case of Mistaken Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Scarecrow 1986. Burgett, Paul. "Vindicationas a Thematic Principle in the Writings of Alain Locke on the Music of Black Americans." Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1990. 29-39. Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York:Atheneum, 1977. - . "Criteriaof Negro Art."The New Negro Renaissance: An Anthology. Eds. ArthurP. Davis and Michael W. Peplow. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975: 190-97. Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. 1912. Trans. Carol Cosman. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Edwards, Brent Hayes. "The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form: James Weldon Johnson's Prefaces." O'Meally 580-601. " Eliot, T. S. 'Ulysses', Order and Myth."1923. Selected Prose of T S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975. 177-78. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia, 1983. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. New York: Random House, 1984. Fell, John L., and Terkild Vinding. Stride: Fats, Jimmy, Lion, Lamb and The Other Ticklers. New Brunswick, NJ: Scarecrow, 1999. Floyd, Jr., Samuel A.. The Power of Black Music. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Introduction. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. By James Weldon Johnson. 1912. New York: Vintage, 1989. Habermas, Jurgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: MITP, 1987. Hanchard, Michael. "Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora." Public Culture 11.1 (1999): 245-68. Handy, W. C. Father of the Blues. New York: Macmillan, 1944. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror,Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."1926. Voices From the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Nathan Huggins. New York: Oxford UP, 1976. 305-09. Hurston, Zora Neale. "Characteristics of Negro Expression." 1934. O'Meally 298-310. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1912. New York: Hilland Wang, 1960. - , ed. Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931 . - , and J. Rosamund Johnson. Book of American Negro Spirituals. 1925. New York: Da Capo, 1991.

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