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The Hero And the Blues
In this visionary book, Murray takes an audacious new look at black music and, in the process, succeeds in changing the way one reads literature. Murray's subject is the previously unacknowledged kinship between fiction and the blues. Both, he argues, are virtuoso performances that impart information, wisdom, and moral guidance to their audiences; both place a high value on improvisation; and both fiction and the blues create a delicate balance between the holy and the obscene, essential human values and cosmic absurdity.
Encompassing artists from Ernest Hemingway to Duke Ellington, and from Thomas Mann to Richard Wright , The Hero and the Blues pays homage to a new black aesthetic.
Encompassing artists from Ernest Hemingway to Duke Ellington, and from Thomas Mann to Richard Wright , The Hero and the Blues pays homage to a new black aesthetic.
112 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1973
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 16, 2021
Murray links the role/function of art/composition as mythological/archetypal to the African American experiential and improvisation gestures in both music and literature. Once established--at best a revealing exploration of the acts of creation and freedom-seeking and at worst, a comparison/contrast exercise of curiosity--he connects Odysseus to Bigger Thomas, Kafka's K to Duke Ellington, etc. in broad strokes. A fitting enough examination for this short 3-essay work, but lacking depth (at least in this read) into any work or artist (classical or minority) or to the near-obvious implications of political and psychological acts of reading which also reinforce a myth-laden marginalization of Other. Glad to have read it; was hoping it was more ambitious.
May 19, 2018
Albert Murray is, as the fashion journalists say, having a moment. His collected non-fiction and fiction/poetry have now been canonized by the Library of America (in volumes published in 2016 and 2018, respectively) and his insights on race, American identity, music, and literature are now being rediscovered by a wider readership.
Murray, who lived from 1916 to 2013, was an African-American critic and novelist most active in the mid-twentieth century and known for his writing on what he called "the blues idiom" and its intersection with literary modernism. While I had heard Murray's name before, I was first urged to read him by friend and correspondent Matthew St. Ville Hunte, whose brilliant review-essay on another Murray reissue—Murray Talks Music—is a good place to start learning about the writer:
On the other hand, the popular adversaries of the above trends are not much less deadening in their reductions than the left-liberal literati; the "Intellectual Dark Web" leaves a lot to be desired, especially intellectually. Everything today decays into the worst kind of simplistic political argument, cable TV crossfire obsolesced because now generalized—it feels as if we are all talking heads in hell. What a perfect time, then, to read and re-read an intelligent, complex writer who argues for the importance of myth, archetype, and ritual, for the universality of art, without succumbing to the cruder polemics of a Jordan Peterson, a writer who insists upon the cultural autonomy and political independence of African-Americans in a register more alive to nuance and tragedy than Kanye West's Twitter.
With the Library of American reprints, Murray's entire oeuvre—some 2000 or 3000 pages—has come flooding back all at once; but as I am a slow, lazy reader, and as we all have to start somewhere, I have decided to focus on The Hero and the Blues, a short collection of three lectures published in 1973.[1] In this small but carefully composed book, Murray outlines his thesis that art's function derives from ancient rituals meant to ensure community survival by embodying a hero's story. Art shows us how our fictional surrogate, a Representative Man, is or is not adequate to the challenges posed by life. In this way, art demonstrates how we ourselves should live:
As a result, says Murray, fiction has sold its birthright to the sociologists and psychologists (dismissively metonymized by Murray as "Marx-Freud," a hybrid monstrosity of shallow thinking). Novelists have given up tragedy, comedy, and farce for the lower art of melodrama: a story where narrowly material and social success is the goal rather than any broader confrontation with the nature of things. The higher modes of tragedy, comedy, and farce, by contrast, deal not just with the social context and material well-being emphasized by the protest writers; they put the hero into conflict with the essentials, Emerson's "lords of life"—the tragic hero transcends them even as he is defeated by them, the comic hero overcomes them through the social regeneration of marriage, and the farcical hero evades them through nimble caprice amid absurdity[2].
Murray sees the hero of tragedy, comedy, and farce as defined by what he calls "cooperative antagonism"—that is, heroism is necessitated by adversity. This in turn implies that adversity is not to be avoided even if one could, that "safety"—to put it in contemporary pop-psychobureaucratic terms—is not to be sought as a political telos, especially because it is incompatible with freedom:
I would like to conclude with Murray's defense of experimentation in the arts. Whenever anyone starts talking about myth and archetypes as underlying literature the way Murray does, people understandably get suspicious: doesn't that lead to artistic complacency and stereotypes, to political conservatism of the least thoughtful variety? But Murray was a partisan of modernism, not a marketer of Joseph Campbell monoplots to Hollywood nor a vendor of supposedly antediluvian sexual wisdom like some we could name today. Modernism's motto was "make it new"—myths and archetypes are the "it," but "new" is the point. Formal inventiveness, new ways of telling the old stories, are the aesthetic correlate of the social renewal presaged by true art's rituals of survival and transcendence, the bearing of vital traditions through every challenge:
______________________
[1] 1973 was the same year of publication, incidentally, as Toni Morrison's Sula, and only one year later than Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. It would be a great reading experience to take these three books in sequence, each correcting the excesses and omissions of the other: Reed cares, like Murray, for black expression as ritual action, but he puts this in an Afrocentric and anti-colonial context that Murray would find too culturally exclusivist and anti-American; as for Morrison, her vision of heroism incorporates more of the negative and the nihilistic than Murray seems willing to acknowledge—Murray may believe in "cooperative antagonism," but Morrison believes in the devil—and she also, crucially, portrays female heroism, whereas Murray's vision of the hero is (like all his favorite novelists) male.
[2] Murray would recognize the aforementioned social-media flayings as ritual actions, and he values farce above all genres—somewhat as Northrop Frye values satire (derived from the satyr play, the goatish—we would now call it "inappropriate"—caper that capped tragic trilogies in ancient Athens)—because of its power to counter the solemnity of ritual and mock ideologies before they become so aggrandized that they menace the community:
Murray, who lived from 1916 to 2013, was an African-American critic and novelist most active in the mid-twentieth century and known for his writing on what he called "the blues idiom" and its intersection with literary modernism. While I had heard Murray's name before, I was first urged to read him by friend and correspondent Matthew St. Ville Hunte, whose brilliant review-essay on another Murray reissue—Murray Talks Music—is a good place to start learning about the writer:
Major critics do not achieve that status by possessing impeccable taste; it is not the highest calling to have the cleanest scoresheet. Indeed, there is something foppish and epicurean about striving to merely have all the right opinions at the right times. Instead, the major critics are the ones with the strong opinions, the ones who aren’t receptive to every new experience, the ones whose defiant inflexibility may bend the culture towards the future. Major critics have major themes, which ballast their writing and allow them to rise above merely being tastemaking. Just as Edmund Wilson had modernism and Trilling had the liberal imagination, Albert Murray had the blues idiom.This is both a perfect and a somewhat odd moment for an Albert Murray revival. Odd because his ideas and emphases are almost anathema in this time of the left-liberal literati's retrenchment, its increasingly shrill insistence, enforced by regular social media mob actions against wreckers and traitors, on a Marxist-derived reductionist approach to human identity and a moralistic attitude toward the nature and purpose of art, the latter coupled with impatient defenses of inquisitorial censoriousness. They want to pull books from the shelves and pictures from the walls; who could possibly doubt that if, say, the Rushdie affair happened today, all of literate Brooklyn would high-mindedly excuse those calling for the "racist" novelist's head? Three or four times in just the last week, I have run across laments about the almost Soviet gap between what liberal writers, educators, and media professionals feel they can say in public and what they are saying in private. (What they are saying in private, let me tell you, is nothing other than what I just said—you can say it; but you will have to overcome your own pusillanimity, which is admittedly a tall order!)
On the other hand, the popular adversaries of the above trends are not much less deadening in their reductions than the left-liberal literati; the "Intellectual Dark Web" leaves a lot to be desired, especially intellectually. Everything today decays into the worst kind of simplistic political argument, cable TV crossfire obsolesced because now generalized—it feels as if we are all talking heads in hell. What a perfect time, then, to read and re-read an intelligent, complex writer who argues for the importance of myth, archetype, and ritual, for the universality of art, without succumbing to the cruder polemics of a Jordan Peterson, a writer who insists upon the cultural autonomy and political independence of African-Americans in a register more alive to nuance and tragedy than Kanye West's Twitter.
With the Library of American reprints, Murray's entire oeuvre—some 2000 or 3000 pages—has come flooding back all at once; but as I am a slow, lazy reader, and as we all have to start somewhere, I have decided to focus on The Hero and the Blues, a short collection of three lectures published in 1973.[1] In this small but carefully composed book, Murray outlines his thesis that art's function derives from ancient rituals meant to ensure community survival by embodying a hero's story. Art shows us how our fictional surrogate, a Representative Man, is or is not adequate to the challenges posed by life. In this way, art demonstrates how we ourselves should live:
It is the writer as artist, not the social or political engineer or even the philosopher, who first comes to realize when the time is out of joint. It is he who determines the extent and gravity of the current human predicament, who in effect discovers and describes the hidden elements of destruction, sounds the alarm, and even (in the process of defining "the villain") designates the targets. It is the story teller working on his own terms as mythmaker (and by implication, as value maker), who defines the conflict, identifies the hero (which is to say the good man—perhaps better, the adequate man), and decides the outcome; and in doing so, he not only evokes the image of possibility, but also prefigures the contingencies of a happily balanced humanity and of the Great Good Place.Such faith in art's universality and individual- and community-shaping power—its precedence over all antecedent disciplines, particularly the social sciences—was of course unfashionable by the late twentieth century, and even more unfashionable when race (or gender or class) was at issue. Hailing the artist as primordial maker, Murray echoes the resounding modern manifestoes: Shelley's "Defence of Poetry," Emerson's "The Poet," Woolf's "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Lawrence's "Why the Novel Matters." But his own context was the postmodern one that defined and still defines the human being as a "subject" circumscribed by social context, the creation of language rather than language's shaper.
As a result, says Murray, fiction has sold its birthright to the sociologists and psychologists (dismissively metonymized by Murray as "Marx-Freud," a hybrid monstrosity of shallow thinking). Novelists have given up tragedy, comedy, and farce for the lower art of melodrama: a story where narrowly material and social success is the goal rather than any broader confrontation with the nature of things. The higher modes of tragedy, comedy, and farce, by contrast, deal not just with the social context and material well-being emphasized by the protest writers; they put the hero into conflict with the essentials, Emerson's "lords of life"—the tragic hero transcends them even as he is defeated by them, the comic hero overcomes them through the social regeneration of marriage, and the farcical hero evades them through nimble caprice amid absurdity[2].
Murray sees the hero of tragedy, comedy, and farce as defined by what he calls "cooperative antagonism"—that is, heroism is necessitated by adversity. This in turn implies that adversity is not to be avoided even if one could, that "safety"—to put it in contemporary pop-psychobureaucratic terms—is not to be sought as a political telos, especially because it is incompatible with freedom:
Heroism, which is, among other things, another word for self-reliance, is not only an indispensable prerequisite for productive citizenship in an open society; it also that without which no individual or community can remain free. Moreover, as no one interested in either the objectives of democratic institutions or the image of democratic man can ever afford to forget, the concept of free enterprise has as much to do with adventurous speculations and improvisations in general as with the swashbuckling economics of, say, the Robber Barons.Here Murray comes into conflict with prevailing political thought about race in America on the left. (Though it should be said that this is not at all the main topic of the book, which is primarily an aesthetic treatise.) By capitulating to Marx-Freud and salvation through superior political management, black writers offer themselves up as objects of pity and study to white intellectuals, and in the meantime they give up their people's own contribution to world culture: the blues tradition, whose improvisatory craft demonstrates how oppression may be transcended through artful ritual. As Hunte comments in his review:
The blues, as explained by Murray, are not the wails of lamentations, melancholic outpourings for the woebegone and disconsolate. Au contraire, the blues are intended to dispel such feelings, not wallow in them. The blues constitute a battle against chaos and entropy and in their broadest interpretation, lie at the heart of any artistic endeavor. But this is not merely art as entertainment, though it must certainly be that as well. This is art as ritualized survival technique.Committed to the autonomy of art, Murray refuses to explain black expression as simply the result, the epiphenomenon, of slavery and oppression; he sees it, rather, as the intellectual and sensuous mastery by brilliant craftsmen of their adverse context. For this reason, he makes an extended comparison between the blues ensemble and the Elizabethan theater, and between Duke Ellington and Shakespeare: African-American art, like European art, is not a primitive eructation of the volk but the work of master crafters committed to improving the polis. Blues is thus the epitome of all true art, the heir of those rituals that assembled themselves into the epic from which all later music and narrative derives. Murray goes so far as to recommend that black experience become the paradigm of American experience in general, that all American artists become black blues artists—not as cultural appropriators, mind you, but as fellow crafters who rightly recognize the genius after which they ought to pattern themselves if they want to overcome their own troubles. The fiction of Marx-Freud, by contrast (he singles out Wright and the later Baldwin; in our own day, he might mention Coates and Rankine),
concerns itself not with the ironies and ambiguities of self-improvement and self-extension, not with the evaluation of the individual as protagonist, but rather with representing a world of collective victims whose survival and betterment depend not upon self-determination but upon a change of heart in their antagonists who thereupon will cease being villains and become patrons of social welfare!The title notwithstanding, there is surprisingly little about the blues per se in this book. Much of it is rather a reading of two of Murray's favorite modern writers, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Mann, both of whom he sees as modeling heroic fiction. His enthusiastic discussion of Mann's Joseph and His Brothers as the depiction of a nimbly exilic hero rather than a Moses bound for the Promised Land will make any reader realize that they should go beyond Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain with Mann, while his praise of Hemingway makes that writer's seeming outdatedness itself look like little more than a quirk of our own cynical era.
I would like to conclude with Murray's defense of experimentation in the arts. Whenever anyone starts talking about myth and archetypes as underlying literature the way Murray does, people understandably get suspicious: doesn't that lead to artistic complacency and stereotypes, to political conservatism of the least thoughtful variety? But Murray was a partisan of modernism, not a marketer of Joseph Campbell monoplots to Hollywood nor a vendor of supposedly antediluvian sexual wisdom like some we could name today. Modernism's motto was "make it new"—myths and archetypes are the "it," but "new" is the point. Formal inventiveness, new ways of telling the old stories, are the aesthetic correlate of the social renewal presaged by true art's rituals of survival and transcendence, the bearing of vital traditions through every challenge:
Implicitly, experiment is also an action taken to insure that nothing endures which is not workable; as such, far from being anti-traditional, as is often assumed, it actually serves the best interests of tradition, which, after all, is that which continues in the first place.Revivals of unjustly neglected or forgotten authors may also renew tradition: so, if you want surprisingly prescient and relevant wisdom from almost half a century ago, it is a good day to read Albert Murray.
______________________
[1] 1973 was the same year of publication, incidentally, as Toni Morrison's Sula, and only one year later than Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. It would be a great reading experience to take these three books in sequence, each correcting the excesses and omissions of the other: Reed cares, like Murray, for black expression as ritual action, but he puts this in an Afrocentric and anti-colonial context that Murray would find too culturally exclusivist and anti-American; as for Morrison, her vision of heroism incorporates more of the negative and the nihilistic than Murray seems willing to acknowledge—Murray may believe in "cooperative antagonism," but Morrison believes in the devil—and she also, crucially, portrays female heroism, whereas Murray's vision of the hero is (like all his favorite novelists) male.
[2] Murray would recognize the aforementioned social-media flayings as ritual actions, and he values farce above all genres—somewhat as Northrop Frye values satire (derived from the satyr play, the goatish—we would now call it "inappropriate"—caper that capped tragic trilogies in ancient Athens)—because of its power to counter the solemnity of ritual and mock ideologies before they become so aggrandized that they menace the community:
Farce breaks the spell of ritual. It counterbalances the magic which ritual works upon the imagination. It protects human existence from the excesses of the imagination and operates as a safeguard against the overextension of ideas, formulations, and formalities. After all, extended far enough, even the idea of freedom becomes a involving security measures and thus a justification for restrictions which exceed those that generated the thrust toward liberation in the first place. The world is, or should be, all too familiar with totalitarian systems which began as freedom movements."Should be"—you can say that again.
February 18, 2023
More of an Academic Paper on Theories of Art than what I expected. In this brief work Murray examines at great length (and in what I found to be very dense prose), the tradition of The Hero Epic in the writings of André Malraux and numerous others.
Malraux defines art as the means by which the raw material of human experience becomes style. Murray’s thesis is based on the belief that there is a continuum that runs from Homer through Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Twain, Poe, Hemingway, Saul Bellow and ultimately to Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong.
The Hero is man’s hope (as the writer finds it to be) of glory, salvation, deliverance, fulfillment, continuity, survival, or even sanity.
Life is a tragic struggle that the hero must always try to overcome. The moral of tragedy, however, like that of comedy and farce, is that the essential condition of man cannot be ameliorated, but it can be transcended, that struggle is precisely that which gives meaning to movement, that it is in the struggle that one finds one self.
To Murray, the Blues Hero is not the tragic or comic hero, but rather the slapstick hero, who struggles against the World he knows he can’t overcome but will use his skill at nimble improvisation to antagonize the Forces he is fated to oppose. More Charlie Chaplin than Captain America.
As he concludes:
“There is also the candid acknowledgment and sober acceptance of adversity as an inescapable condition of human existence—and perhaps in consequence an affirmative disposition toward all obstacles, whether urban or rural, whether political or metaphysical. In all events, the slapstick situation is the natural habitat of the blues–oriented hero—who qualifies as a frontiersman in the final analysis if only because he is a man who expects the best but is always prepared, at least emotionally when not otherwise, for the worst. But perhaps above all else the blues–oriented hero image represents the American embodiment of the man whose concept of being able to live happily ever afterwards is most consistent with the moral of all dragon–encounters: Improvisation is the ultimate human (i.e., heroic) endowment. It is, indeed; and even as flexibility or the ability to swing (or to perform with grace under pressure) is the key to that unique competence which generates the self–reliance and thus the charisma of the hero, and even as infinite alertness–become–dexterity is the functional source of the magic of all master craftsmen, so may skill in the art of improvisation be that which both will enable contemporary man to be at home with his sometimes tolerable but never quite certain condition of not being at home in the world and will also dispose him to regard his obstacles and frustrations as well as his achievements in terms of adventure and romance.”
So in this way, the Blues Hero continues this artistic tradition represented in Western Literature. I like his conclusion though I’m not sure I needed the groundwork he laid in this “Doctoral Thesis”! Three Stars. ***
Malraux defines art as the means by which the raw material of human experience becomes style. Murray’s thesis is based on the belief that there is a continuum that runs from Homer through Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Twain, Poe, Hemingway, Saul Bellow and ultimately to Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong.
The Hero is man’s hope (as the writer finds it to be) of glory, salvation, deliverance, fulfillment, continuity, survival, or even sanity.
Life is a tragic struggle that the hero must always try to overcome. The moral of tragedy, however, like that of comedy and farce, is that the essential condition of man cannot be ameliorated, but it can be transcended, that struggle is precisely that which gives meaning to movement, that it is in the struggle that one finds one self.
To Murray, the Blues Hero is not the tragic or comic hero, but rather the slapstick hero, who struggles against the World he knows he can’t overcome but will use his skill at nimble improvisation to antagonize the Forces he is fated to oppose. More Charlie Chaplin than Captain America.
As he concludes:
“There is also the candid acknowledgment and sober acceptance of adversity as an inescapable condition of human existence—and perhaps in consequence an affirmative disposition toward all obstacles, whether urban or rural, whether political or metaphysical. In all events, the slapstick situation is the natural habitat of the blues–oriented hero—who qualifies as a frontiersman in the final analysis if only because he is a man who expects the best but is always prepared, at least emotionally when not otherwise, for the worst. But perhaps above all else the blues–oriented hero image represents the American embodiment of the man whose concept of being able to live happily ever afterwards is most consistent with the moral of all dragon–encounters: Improvisation is the ultimate human (i.e., heroic) endowment. It is, indeed; and even as flexibility or the ability to swing (or to perform with grace under pressure) is the key to that unique competence which generates the self–reliance and thus the charisma of the hero, and even as infinite alertness–become–dexterity is the functional source of the magic of all master craftsmen, so may skill in the art of improvisation be that which both will enable contemporary man to be at home with his sometimes tolerable but never quite certain condition of not being at home in the world and will also dispose him to regard his obstacles and frustrations as well as his achievements in terms of adventure and romance.”
So in this way, the Blues Hero continues this artistic tradition represented in Western Literature. I like his conclusion though I’m not sure I needed the groundwork he laid in this “Doctoral Thesis”! Three Stars. ***
January 9, 2024
Thought this was gonna be a book about jazz but was mostly about literature! Was exposed to a lot of lit theory which was cool (kinda learned the difference between farce, melodrama, and comedy) but there were a lot of references to authors and books that went over my head completely. Biggest takeaways were around the idea of what literature is for, as opposed to propaganda or “social fiction” wherein there is no human flaw to be dealt with but only a system that is evil and needs to be overthrown. And the idea that improvisation is the height of all craft, and that the “blues idiom” is useful in that it assumes life will be absurd unfair and hard, and can still make something beautiful from it.
August 16, 2011
If you are into Joseph Campbell this will round out your study nicely. And because Murray is a genius with the language, you can study his style at the same time that you're getting a bit of learning under your belt. Murray's ideas are excellent and engaging. There are probably a lot of books out there comparing the blues player to the archetypical hero. I haven't checked into it. No doubt there's some college course devoted to just such a study. But anyway, for us lay people, it's a really good book.
I personally love the blues, and I can't think of a blues fan that wouldn't love this.
I personally love the blues, and I can't think of a blues fan that wouldn't love this.
April 8, 2021
I knew Murray's name but no specifics about him, & I must confess to being slightly disappointed by this book. The cover blurbs promise poetic essay prose, which isn't at all the case. The prose is too academic to achieve poetic effects but insufficiently dense to achieve the heady totality of the best midcentruy academic critical writing.
As a work of modernist studies, the book's pretty interesting. Murray makes some interesting observations about the role of craft in the work of Hemingway & Faulkner. I was less impressed with his observations about Henry James & Joyce, & I don't know enough to evaluate his comments on Malraux & Mann. I do think the book's genius is to treat Duke Ellington as a modernist (something I think was a surprisingly novel insight in '73) comparable in craft & ambition to Hemingway & Faulkner. I also appreciate how Murray puts the blues & jazz where they belong, as great modernist artistic achievements, whose seeming spontaneity & authenticity is the result of practice & virtuosity rather than some patronizing (& crypto-racist) appeal to spontaneity, naturalness, or racial character.
That said, one of the reasons Murray is championing Ellington & the blues aesthetic is as counter-valence to the literary prominence of black writers like Richard Wright & James Baldwin (& presumably Ann Petry & Toni Morrison), who Murray detest as melodramatic protest writers. Murray's harsh indictment of Wright & Baldwin is intriguing, as all strong misreadings are; however, it travesties the aesthetic complexities of Wright & Baldwin that work far beyond mere melodrama. Murray also repeatedly assails the Marxo-Freudianism of the protest novels, which demonstrates the typical Cold War Anglo-liberal ignorance of anything interesting, ironic, or intersubjectively complex from German or French thought, hoarding all the supposed virtues of moral & intellectual complexity on the side of empiricist simplicity & capitalist apologetic & pilfering from Franco-German thought only the vulgarest of existentialism to salve the always afflicted self-image of the US intellectual. This Cold War liberalism of Murray's occasional pops up in this essay's dull & insipid politics of meaningless liberal dissent & Horatio Alger rises. In Murray's valorization of 'heroism', a term always full of ridiculous aristocratic pretension but never more so than in the wake of modernism. At least, Murray does try, in an unconvincing mode, to generalize heroism into all human moral action. Still, at it's worst moments, the essay reads like excerpted Joseph Campbell or proto-Jordan Peterson.
Only recommended for people deep into studying modernism or the blues (or both!).
As a work of modernist studies, the book's pretty interesting. Murray makes some interesting observations about the role of craft in the work of Hemingway & Faulkner. I was less impressed with his observations about Henry James & Joyce, & I don't know enough to evaluate his comments on Malraux & Mann. I do think the book's genius is to treat Duke Ellington as a modernist (something I think was a surprisingly novel insight in '73) comparable in craft & ambition to Hemingway & Faulkner. I also appreciate how Murray puts the blues & jazz where they belong, as great modernist artistic achievements, whose seeming spontaneity & authenticity is the result of practice & virtuosity rather than some patronizing (& crypto-racist) appeal to spontaneity, naturalness, or racial character.
That said, one of the reasons Murray is championing Ellington & the blues aesthetic is as counter-valence to the literary prominence of black writers like Richard Wright & James Baldwin (& presumably Ann Petry & Toni Morrison), who Murray detest as melodramatic protest writers. Murray's harsh indictment of Wright & Baldwin is intriguing, as all strong misreadings are; however, it travesties the aesthetic complexities of Wright & Baldwin that work far beyond mere melodrama. Murray also repeatedly assails the Marxo-Freudianism of the protest novels, which demonstrates the typical Cold War Anglo-liberal ignorance of anything interesting, ironic, or intersubjectively complex from German or French thought, hoarding all the supposed virtues of moral & intellectual complexity on the side of empiricist simplicity & capitalist apologetic & pilfering from Franco-German thought only the vulgarest of existentialism to salve the always afflicted self-image of the US intellectual. This Cold War liberalism of Murray's occasional pops up in this essay's dull & insipid politics of meaningless liberal dissent & Horatio Alger rises. In Murray's valorization of 'heroism', a term always full of ridiculous aristocratic pretension but never more so than in the wake of modernism. At least, Murray does try, in an unconvincing mode, to generalize heroism into all human moral action. Still, at it's worst moments, the essay reads like excerpted Joseph Campbell or proto-Jordan Peterson.
Only recommended for people deep into studying modernism or the blues (or both!).
December 10, 2023
Five stars here is a little arbitrary. Esoteric works of literary criticism do go a bit above my head and I’m not fully equipped to snuff out any bullshit. That said a lot of the ideas in this echoed “The Hero of a Thousand Faces” (similarly difficult to grasp) nicely. And a lot of Murray’s critiques of politically motivated fiction felt spot on to me.
January 27, 2021
This was a very short and insightful book of essays. The essays deal mainly with the "hero" in literature, its purpose, and its social impact. Murray goes through that by analyzing many authors and tracing parallels to the blues tradition.
Although it doesn't dive that deep, his analysis is interesting, and he also provides useful insights into how to write political/social themes in a way that's not purely denouncing them (even though I'd disagree with his assessment of some writers when it comes to that).
Although it doesn't dive that deep, his analysis is interesting, and he also provides useful insights into how to write political/social themes in a way that's not purely denouncing them (even though I'd disagree with his assessment of some writers when it comes to that).
June 16, 2019
A brief book with an interesting thesis, but—damn—it’s dense writing.
March 27, 2021
A provocation that must be contended with if one is to take writing seriously.
February 12, 2017
A fantastic look at literary theory on what it means to be a hero, what jazz theory can contribute to the American hero criticism, and what tragedy and epic mean in today's society. I'm sure I'll re-read this at some point in the near future.
November 1, 2014
Really an extended essay riffing off of Joseph Campbell's work on "the hero", these was just not a whole lot of blues in this book... and that's what I was looking for from the author of "Stomping the Blues," one of the more important - albeit controversial - pieces of writing on African American music.
Want to Read
January 26, 2011Mentioned in The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women by Harriet Rubin.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews