To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance - Review

Jon Woodson. To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 218 pp. $45.00 cloth/$18.00 paper.

It would take a Gurdjieffian, literary modernist and African American historian to review To Make a New Race properly. This is but an appreciation by neither a stranger nor an adept. Familiarity with the paraphernalia of Blake's "mental travel," Yeats's "mystic geometry," and the theosophical systems of A. P. Sinnett and H. P. Blavatsky prepared me for the sentiment but not the strategy of the abstruse metaphysics of G. I. Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson that Jon Woodson deems necessary for comprehending the esoterica underpinning the fiction of the Harlem group. Thought critically exhausted by many, these works are read anew by Woodson as "reduced version[s] of Beelzbub's Tales." And in this audacious, sometimes frustrating, and convincing study, he demonstrates that Gurdjieff's worn path led straight through Harlem.

Aimed at the uninitiated, Woodson's daunting and valuable introduction to Gurdjieffian recondite systems of reference and knowledge risks offending those for whom esotericism itself represents the ersatz in spirit and intellect. Woodson, aware of the prejudice, attacks the problem historically, placing Gurdjieff, Jean Toomer, and A. R. Orage in a vortex of spiritualism and literary enlightenment that is at once familiar and strange. Gurdjieff, while not unprecedented, was certainly original in his remapping of allegorical and spiritual traditions. Derived from a host of visionary tenets (Sufism and Zoroastrianism, Christianity, neo-Platonism, and gnosticism), his modes of instruction emphasized the quest, not the answer--"Take the understanding of the East,/and the knowledge of the West--/and then seek." Though mumbo jumbo to some, this protean recipe has for others liberated, awakened, and redirected their human potential.

Woodson deftly choreographs parables, injunctions, encryptions, and other manifestations of Gurdjieff's system with an eye to Harlem's modifications. Rich in anecdotes, the introduction energizes the dated-though-cosmopolitan world of the "Harlem-in-Vogue" crowd, complicating the assumptions of such "folk"-obsessed scholars as J. Martin Favor and David G. Nicholl. Woodson's proof for the pervasive and profound influence of Gurdjieff (extending beyond the Harlem group to such literary sponsors as Carl Van Vechten) comes not, as some might wish, from newly discovered transcripts of secret meetings (names, dates, times) but from the literature itself. Woodson's most controversial and potentially valuable insight is a seeming tautology: "The work" (Gurdjieff's contraction for "the group's work") was their work (their writing), and their work is "the work." His primary critical concern is the literary enactment of this redundancy.

Toomer's tailoring of Gurdjieff's teaching provides Woodson's starting point. Identifying scholars who have uncritically relied upon Langston Hughes's selective autobiographical account, Woodson critiques Nellie McKay's characteristic "dependency on Hughes's autobiography [that] encourages critics to disregard Toomer's introduction of Gurdjieff's system to the Harlem writers." Toomer manuscripts--"The Crock of Problems" and "A New Group, 1926"--reveal a committed disciple of Gurdjieff and Orage who shaped their teachings into a conundrum of local circumstance: "African-Americans had to disidentify themselves as African-Americans, yet remain conscious that they were African-Americans." The result was a body of literature that would "exploit African-American culture as a means to enforce the view that race is an illusion."

Wallace Thurman occasions a foray into Gurdjieffian method: an "attack on reading" that illumines a "self-destroying text designed to collapse in such a way that reading it exposes the underlying 'objective' structure of the subtext." Reading between the lines, deciphering intertexts, and breaking encryptions expose esoteric substrata to The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring. Woodson emphasizes that these novels are "tapestr[ies] of wordplay" in which names are intended to be read as ciphers. Toomer's visionary goal of "raceless individuality" adumbrates this novel-as-manifesto rendering of Infants of the Spring, "the only published account of the Harlem group's plan to create a body of 'objective' literature."

Equating Rudolph Fisher's short stories and detective novel with Gurdjieff's "teaching stories," Woodson moves from decoding the esoteric subtexts to broader claims for the movement in Harlem: "Although it is clear that the narrative level of The Walls of Jericho presented a case against race and color discrimination, without Fisher's ciphered message, the reader would remain unaware of the African-American Gurdjieffians who were organizing to change the structure of American culture." The Conjure-Man Dies, generically and esoterically, presents demanding self-referential problems for the writer and the reader of such hermeneutic texts. In the person of an African chieftain, the "psychist" N'Gana Frimbo, Fisher risks an indirect representation of Gurdjieff that is signaled descriptively ("the deep-set eyes still held their peculiar glow") and anagrammatically ("Frimbo" as anagram..."which can be recognized as a Gurdjieffian exhortation to 'form [the] Big I'").