The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates

First published: 1988

Type of work: Cultural criticism

Form and Content

After an informative introduction, Gates divides his study into two parts. Part 1, “A Theory of the Tradition,” includes three chapters that set the background against which part 2 is to be read. Part 2, “Reading the Tradition,” first treats five early narratives of slavery or captivity and then analyzes in separate chapters three novels by twentieth century African American writers.

The preface acknowledges a strong debt to two works: Ralph Ellison’s critical study Shadow and Act (1964) and Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972). Gates states his purposes as “to show how the black tradition has inscribed its own theories of its nature and function within elaborate hermeneutical and rhetorical systems” and “to argue, implicitly, that the central questions asked in Western critical discourse have been asked, and answered, in other textual traditions as well.”

The introduction makes important points about the analyses to come. The black vernacular has been a source of great power to African Americans, standing out as their “ultimate sign of difference.” It is the relationship of this vernacular tradition, with its African roots, to the African American literary tradition that constitutes the heart of this study.

The book begins with Esu-Elegbara, a “divine trickster figure” of the Fon and Yoruba cultures of Benin and Nigeria, with counterparts in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and the United States. Numerous carved representations of him exist. Esu’s powers are set forth in numerous poems as well as in prose narratives about the origin of the world and the gods. Esu is especially identified with the power of figurative language and its interpretation, and he is traditionally double-voiced, an attribute identified with textual indeterminacy. He is, in a sense, a god of rhetoric. Among the Fon, he is “the divine linguist” who speaks all languages. In the Yoruba tradition, he often holds a calabash containing ase, a slippery word that Gates translates as logos, the divine reason.

Esu is the interpreter of Ifa, the sacred knowledge of the Yoruba. The texts with which Esu works are a set of sixteen palm nuts that are shaken up on a wooden divination tray. The arrangement into which the nuts settle is read by Esu to reveal to humans the message of Ifa. Even though Esu is depicted as masculine, he can be understood as genderless; his sexual ambiguity is matched by his double-voicedness.

The historical details cannot be filled in, but evidence suggests that Esu survived the Middle Passage—the Atlantic crossing of the slave ships—and was reborn in the New World in the rhetorical genius of the Signifying Monkey. Gates is succinct: “The Signifying Monkey is the figure of the text of the Afro-American speaking subject, whose manipulations of the figurative and the literal both wreak havoc upon and inscribe order for criticism in the jungle.”

The Signifying Monkey originates in the playful, usually coarse, language rituals found in such typically male settings as barrooms and pool halls. The characters in these ritual stories are the Monkey, the Lion, and the Elephant. The Monkey repeats to the Lion some insult supposedly uttered by the Elephant, but this insult, meant figuratively, is taken literally by the Lion. The Elephant will not apologize to the Lion but whips him instead, whereupon the Lion, now realizing his mistake, goes back and thrashes the Monkey. The Monkey in this drama is a disingenuous master of rhetorical deceptions, as is Esu, the Yoruba personification of indeterminacy.

The Monkey is said to “Signify” on the Lion in these rituals; that is, he is working on the Lion any of a number of complex verbal ruses that can make fun of, cajole, deceive, irritate, or otherwise befuddle a victim. “Doing the dozens” is probably the best-known version of Signifyin(g), which also has obvious close relations with rapping. (The spelling “Signifyin(g)” denotes a set of African American rhetorical devices, with many examples given in chapter 3.)

Part 2, “Reading the Tradition,” begins with an engrossing chapter on “The Trope of the Talking Book,” a figure of speech that apparently appeared originally in Gracilasso de la Vega’s Historia General del Peru (1617), translated as The Royal Commentaries of Peru in 1688. Gracilasso recounts a confrontation between the Inca chief Atahualpa and Friar Vincente de Valverde in which Atahualpa holds a Bible to his ear and, not hearing anything, hurls it to the ground. This trope (“the ur-trope of the Anglo-African tradition,” Gates calls it) captures poignantly the image of the slave who seeks to master the written word as the embodiment of divine reason (the logos, or the Yoruba ase).

This trope then appears in five slave narratives that Gates summarizes with commentary. A key passage from James Albert Gronniosaw’s narrative makes the trope vivid:

[My master] used to read prayers in public to the ship’s crew every Sabbath day; and when I first saw him read, I was never so surprised in my life, as when I saw the book talk to my master, for I thought it did, as I observed him to look upon it, and move his lips. I wished it would do so with me. As soon as my master had done reading, I followed him to the place where he put the book, being mightily delighted with it, and when nobody saw me, I opened it, and put my ear down close upon it, in great hopes that it would say something to me; but I was very sorry, and greatly disappointed, when I found that it would not speak. This thought immediately presented itself to me, that every body and every thing despised me because I was black.

This story is the primal scene of black self-consciousness of color.

Gates’s chapter on the Talking Book is splendid literary history. More than that, the accounts by the five authors are moving to read.

In separate chapters, Gates explicates three well-known novels in terms of their “Signifyin(g)”: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). The word “Signifyin(g)” hums through these chapters like a mantra, with the (g) symbolizing the “black difference.” “Whatever is black about black American literature is to be found in this identifiable black Signifyin(g) difference.” Thus Hurston, Reed, and Walker share a difference that unites them, and their works embody a tradition derived from that (g). Writing with others in the Signifyin(g) tradition in mind, they create a uniquely African American canon. At the same time, Gates insists, this Signifyin(g) quality of texts is not limited to African American literature, for in the postmodernist fashion of intertextuality “the implicit premise of this study is that all texts Signify upon other texts.”

Critical Context

The Signifying Monkey continues a discussion that Gates began in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987). These works will clearly constitute a monument to African American literature and its history and theory. The Signifying Monkey adds to the story of Esu-Elegbara and his many-faceted nature, bringing the Monkey himself front and center in American culture. The protean figure of the Monkey, whatever its origin, vitalizes African American literature with a trope that helps link the works of a living corpus. Ironically, Gates devotes his subtlest, most satisfying explication to Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, explicating that complex novel as a rejection both of the theory of a double-voiced African American, at once American and black, and of the notion of a transcendental blackness.

Gates has done truly groundbreaking work in slave narratives, and the section on that genre and its trope of the Talking Book will be for many readers the most valuable. No theory is necessary to account for the power of the passages quoted: The speakers reach out with human voices that command respect for their courage and longing. The accounts of the slave writers, moreover, are free from the mostly gratuitous postmodernist jargon that frequently gnarls the other chapters.

As for the explications of the novels by Hurston, Reed, and Walker, the chapter on Mumbo Jumbo has an impressive substantiality to it that the other two discussions lack. The whole analysis in Mumbo Jumbo is built on a foundation of the theory of the sign conjured by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure; hence Gates’s subtitle “A Critique of the Sign.” Briefly, Saussure defined a sign as an alloy of a signifier (the vocalization of the word) and a signified (the idea named by the signifier). Gates’s interpretation of Reed is that Reed accepts a signifier (the word blackness) and a signified (the idea of blackness) but will not allow any transcendental blackness that gives the signified meaning. Not every student of African American literature will assent to Gates’s dense argument about Mumbo Jumbo.

To find a “speakerly text” in Their Eyes Were Watching God seems fair enough, but it remains to be proved that Hurston invented it. As Gates interprets Hurston’s intentions, the “speakerly text” solves the problem of an authentic voice that Hurston faced, and she undeniably used it well.

The Signifyin(g) of African American writers on one another is a phenomenon that nobody would deny, but sometimes Gates’s unraveling of relationships seems too fine. Perhaps the steady focus on black writers Signifyin(g) on other black writers blurs their considerable Signifyin(g) on whites as well, although Gates himself points to several examples of that. How, for example, does Ernest Gaines’s admiration for Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty get assimilated into the tradition?

An inevitable impulse is to start finding parallels suggested by Gates’s research into Esu-Elegbara and the tradition of the Signifying Monkey. How does the divination practiced by Esu compare to the transactions carried out at the Oracle of Delphi? What does Signifyin(g), as it occurs in “doing the dozens,” share with the Anglo-Saxon flyting? Was Zora Neale Hurston Signifyin(g) on Katherine Mansfield’s story “Bliss” (1918) in her symbolic use of the pear tree in Their Eyes Were Watching God? Doesn’t Ishmael Reed in Mumbo Jumbo seem to be Signifyin(g) on Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) more than on any African American work? These are the kinds of questions that occur naturally in reading The Signifying Monkey, a complex and rewarding study that will certainly invigorate the future study of African American literature.

Bibliography

Abrahams, Roger D. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. 1st rev. ed. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1970. One of the earliest studies of black signifying; still a valuable source study.

Abrahams, Roger D., and Rudolphe C. Troike, eds. Language and Cultural Diversity in American Education. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Section 5 contains six essays on “Black English,” including the seminal study “The Relationship of the Speech of American Negroes to the Speech of Whites” by Raven I. McDavid and Virginia Glenn McDavid.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. A powerful and well-written study that, Gates explains, does for the blues what he tries to do for Signifyin(g).

Cuddon, J. A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 3d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Reference, 1991. The Signifying Monkey is rife with the special language of postmodernist critical theory, most of it not on the tip of the common reader’s tongue. Cuddon explains the jargon as lucidly as anyone can.

Gruesser, John Cullen. Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Gates is prominently featured in this analysis of interrelations and interactions between African American literary theory, postcolonial theory, and the work of Paul Gilroy to theorize the Black Atlantic.

Pelton, Robert D. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Indispensable study of the tradition of Esu-Elegbara and his variants. The final chapter summarizes theories about the trickster’s significance.

Smitherman-Donaldson, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. A study of African American dialect that asserts for it a unique rhetorical style rooted in its African origins.