The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement - Review

Albert Murray. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.238 pp. $23.00.

Reviewed by

Carolyn M. Jones Louisiana State University

In The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement, Albert Murray once again returns to the critical stage for a masterful performance. Murray is one of American literature's most enduring writers and critics. In his criticism, his novels, and his autobiographical works, Murray examines European, American, and African cultural forms and personalities and how these have forged a new culture in the American landscape and a new form of the hero in the blues hero. His persistent themes have been "down home" heritage as foundation and, in many ways, critic of American aesthetics, the blues as indigenous form, and improvisation as the highest achievement of the artist and the basis of survival and of freedom for African Americans. In The Blue Devils of Nada, using artistic, literary, and critical cultural forms from ancient Greek tragedy, to modernism, to sports, to philosophy, to visual art, to music, Murray examines the work of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Romare Bearden, and Ernest Hemingway. His improvisation writes a new song: a song on American "character, outlook, attitude, native value system, and lifestyle."

America, Murray has argued, is a mulatto, composite culture, shaped by the conjunctions of influences from the Yankee to the Native to the Black. This fact is, he maintains, the essence of our national creativity, but also the source of our greatest tensions. Murray's work articulates a notion of culture that can acknowledge the existence and interdependence of this multiplicity of voices that makes up "the American" and that can create a form of expression through which free and mutual selves can interact and respect, if not either resolve or transcend, the tensions in our culture. He argues that this form already exists, that it is an indigenous form, and he calls it the blues idiom.

The blues idiom, enacted by the blues hero, emerges from Southern roots that teach one to function in terms of rootlessness and to face squarely an historical reality of pain and suffering: "To protest the existence of dragons (or even hooded or unhooded Grand Dragons for that matter) is not only sentimental but naive." The blues idiom also includes connecting the knowledge gained in one's personal experience to history and to the canon of the West. The blues musician, through the play which is interplay between the individual and the tradition as well as between persons and groups, is able to move beyond the binaries that are the dragon's, the dominant ideological stance, to slay the dragon and, thereby, to gain "the ultimate boon to which the dragon denies you access."

The current social-scientific and political approaches to the dragon are too formulaic to defeat it, for they, first, define black people as social problems and, second, reduce and oversimplify human experience and response. Murray prefers the metaphorical to the scientific. Black artists regard themselves as "flesh and blood human being[s], as person[s] of capability with many possibilities . . . not as . . . social problems in urgent need of white liberal compassion." The social-scientific idiom pretends to capture all of experience, seeing human response as predictable. Human beings, Murray argues, are not machines; they "can never be reduced to zero. Not as long as they [are] potentially capable of defining [themselves] in terms of [their] own aspirations." The social sciences disregard play, imagination, and creativity.

While the social sciences disregard play, imagination, and creativity, Murray, emphasizing them, argues for the importance of metaphor. The poetic metaphor, because its "net" is more loosely woven, can trap and stylize large areas of experience. Style is essential for Murray; it is form individualized and made elegant. Individual experience and regional particularities can be stylized into universal significance. The blues idiom is the most powerful metaphorical structure, offering a way to make a response to the human condition that is meaningful, significant, and individually stylized. As a performative construction of identity and community, blues improvisation also creates the capacity to function in situations of confrontation. The blues idiom offers a creative, disruptive counterstatement to the ideology of the dragon in the terms of the common culture. It offers "not attempts to go beyond the form, but rather . . . efforts to take [the form] as far as it would go." This extension, which is improvisation, is to riff from the tradition the method that can make the solution fit the indigenous style; it is to make the tradition your own. The fully orchestrated blues statement offers a model for life that, for Murray, can deal with tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and farce naturally and simultaneously. The blues statement "expresses a sense of life that is affirmative." To improvise is to establish one's style: "the dancing of an attitude."