VIOLENCE, LYRICISM, AND THE MODERN BLUES AESTHETIC By Ben Papsun

I wondered if Medea felt this way before she walked out to meet Jason for the first time, like a hard wind come through her and set her to shaking. The insects singing as they ring the red dirt yard, the bouncing ball, Daddy’s blues coming from his truck radio, they all called me out the door.

Ralph Ellison, in a 1945 review of Richard Wright’s Black

Boy, wrote that “the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (Ellison 62). As the blues form becomes transfigured over time, its aesthetic becomes harder to identify, and an honest-to-goodness blues aesthetic in a modern setting evokes a sense of anachronism, a methodology and a time abandoned to the Jim Crow era. The blues appears to have died out, or at least changed its hues; no longer do we hear the same mythic Southern night club narratives laden with wanton violence and Dionysian indulgence. The questions I am interested in, then, are how can we recognize a modern “blues” narrative, and how can we draw beyond an outdated and reductivist identification of the blues so that we can continue to read black narratives within an appropriate cultural context? The work of the modern blues artist (and I mean “artist” in the broadest possible sense) consists in integrating the easily recognized blues aesthetic of the Jim Crow era with more expansive modern conceptions of the black experience. The end of this work is to make the blues aesthetic accessible to people who may not have had a personal relationship with the old-school “jook joint” brand of the blues, and whose relationship with the blues can extend beyond the tropes of violent behavior and wanton aggression that are frequently associated with it. This idea of a modern blues must then push the aesthetic further in its social, emotional, sexual, spatial, and temporal dimensions.

One example of a modern work which pushes the blues on these axes is Jesmyn Ward’s 2012 novel Salvage the Bones, a powerful depiction of a black working-class Mississippi family living in the impending shadow of Hurricane Katrina. Salvage the Bones is a useful entry point into analyzing the scope and shape of the blues aesthetic, and how it is at play in modern narratives. The portrayal of Esch, the 15-year-old girl who guides the action and shapes the narrative of the book, challenges the limitations of the traditional blues aesthetic beyond the kinds of people and experiences it would typically be used to represent. Salvage demonstrates how the traditional blues aesthetic can be channeled while also being expanded.

Before we can look at how Salvage the Bones challenges the tropes that make up the bona fide traditional blues aesthetic, we must examine what these tropes are. Is there some common motivic lineage that unites the blues narrative in the social imaginary? Adam Gussow suggests, in his 2002 book Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, that this common thread running through the blues is “intimate violence,” or violence inflicted among and celebrated by black blues people.2 “…intimate violence was not only not a distraction from the jook’s principal activities limned by [Zora Neale] Hurston (musicking, dancing, drinking, gambling), but was one of the jook’s principal activities, a de facto constituent of the cultural institution” (Gussow 202). The case Gussow makes includes a persuasive body of evidence to support his claim, drawing from an exhaustive collection of depictions of violence in the blues, including the personal testimonies of prominent blues musicians. He frames the violence enacted within blues communities as a physical rebellion against a power structure imposed by white hegemony and as an effect of “spiritual depression.” He writes: “[Southern blues people] reclaimed their bodies, pride, and agency with the help of music and dance, insults and threats, boasts and tall tales. But they also claimed each other’s bodies through the medium of intimate violence; asserted their fragile pride with the help of guns and knives; became agents of their own fate at the cost of inflicted pain and social mayhem” (Gussow 211).

Although violence has played an undeniable role in blues narratives and the blues aesthetic throughout history, to claim that violence is a codified aspect of the blues, one enforced and inflicted by black people, is unfair at best and dangerously erasive at worst. Although violence may drift in and out of the blues dialogue, it is neither inherently constructive to nor constitutive of the blues aesthetic. Violence alone does not confer meaning onto the blues

Gussow defines intimate violence as “the violence that black folk inflict on each other: the cuttings, shootings, razor slashings, beatings, and murders described— and, more often than one might expect, celebrated as a locus of power and self making—by African American blues people in both story and song” (195-196). experience. This is because violence is, as Gussow calls it, a “medium” through which the aesthetic of the blues can be expressed. There is a formal flaw in this construction of the blues as violence: an artistic style should be characterized by its content, not circumscribed by its medium. The fact of the blues aesthetic being expressed through violence does not give one the license to attribute its “bluesiness” to that violence. Gussow sees violence as a premise of the blues; according to his theory, blues singers and jook dancers seem to have no immediate cultural foundations beyond aggression and self-destruction. I see Gussow’s argument as fundamentally limited by its focus on historicality and location. In fact, reading his piece, one might be inclined to imagine that jook joints are the sole sites of blues culture, and that they existed in a perpetual state of bloodshed and hysteria.

The argument that must be made in response to Gussow is that the expressive forms available to artists working within the blues tradition are not limited to vocabularies of violence, notwithstanding the role violence undeniably played in the culture. Put simply, the blues (or a blues) can exist outside of violence. This becomes most apparent when we consider the blues in the post-Jim Crow, post-Civil Rights Act era. If intimate violence is, as Gussow describes it, “a survival tool in the face of Jim Crow prescriptions designed to silence and kill,” then it seems likely that the mechanism of the blues would have changed dramatically since 1965. Although the legacy of slavery continues to shape the experience of blackness, and overt oppression is still apparent in many American institutions (police brutality, incarceration and prison labor, systemic white supremacy), the temporal distance from slavery has allowed the blues aesthetic to change its form as the experience of living blackness in America has changed. Ellison’s definition of the blues as an expression of “personal catastrophe” is incomplete without a recognition of the origins of these catastrophes in the black experience (perhaps he thought this element was too obvious to include). By confining the blues experience to sites defined by aggression, Gussow limits expressions of blackness and of black pain to those sites as well. Gussow’s model of blues culture is rooted in a segregation-era metaphysic; it is outdated and in need of an overhaul.

Salvage the Bones has no shortage of depictions of violence; in fact, one of the central thematic elements of the novel is dog fighting, and the scenes depicting the dogfights are viscerally graphic. However, Esch does not see her life in terms of an economy of violence. Esch is not blood-thirsty nor vindictive; she is not even outspoken. She spends more time thinking about Greek tragedy than she ever does about “violent pleasuring” (Gussow 196). She is less like Gussow’s mythic blues woman, a “violent, ax-wielding ‘black gal’” (Gussow 207),4 and more like the blues woman as described by Angela Davis, who depicts them as women who “found the courage to lift their heads and fight back, asserting their right to be respected Gussow borrows this description from Hurston, who describes this kind of blues woman as a “disparaging fictitious drama.” Gussow seems to insinuate that this stereotype is more real than Hurston is willing to admit, going on to emphasize: “…her explosive vitality is also her very real threat. Real means real” (Gussow 207). not as appendages or victims of men but as truly independent human beings with vividly articulated sexual desires” (Davis 20). It is important to recognize that even though Davis acknowledges “fighting back” as a trait of the blues woman, her blues woman’s existence is not explicitly defined in relation to violence. Gussow’s blues woman becomes aligned with the blues by virtue of her wielding a weapon; Davis’ blues woman becomes aligned with the blues because of her independent spirit, which might inspire her to retaliate against her oppressors. Although Esch is spiritually aligned with the stereotypical blues woman, her narrative gives her more allowance for a depth and interiority that reaches outside of the blues tradition.

Thinking of Esch as a modern blues woman and her narrative as a manifestation of the blues provides some idea of how to rethink Gussow’s interpretation of the aesthetic. Although she has to grapple with multiple sources of emotional trauma (a secret teenage pregnancy, the fear of the oncoming hurricane, the pain of unrequited love), the essence of her blues originates from a single “personal catastrophe”: the loss of her mother at a young age. This absence of maternal care and guidance hardens her and forces her to internalize much of her pain, and it is this internalization that transforms her narrative into a blues. Esch recounts her experience of coping with her mother’s death: After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing we could do. (Ward 206)

This account matches Ellison’s description of the blues: “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it” (Ellison 62). The act of Esch reflecting on her own emotional pain is not merely a recreation of past thoughts, it is a transcendance of past experiences by way of lyricality. The mellifluousness of Ward’s writing in part stems from its adherence to blues tradition—an awareness of form, a vulnerable yet deep simplicity, and above all, the use of repetition. Repetition might offer a useful alternative to the blues being made identifiable through violence. The presence of repetition in a narrative stemming from pain and lyricism gives us a content-based litmus test for a blues, rather than the medium-based signifier of violence which Gussow offers. Perhaps instead of being expressed through acts of violence, the blues makes itself known through the employment of repetition.

James A. Snead, in his essay “Repetition as a figure of black culture,” explains the significance of repetition and cyclicality in black culture5 as opposed to the European gold standard of progress and “transcendent goals.” In opposition to Hegel, who saw Africa as “non-progressive” and “at a lower stage of development” than European culture, Snead proposes that the repetition typical of African culture “which seemed to define its nonexistence” might now Snead writes that “Repetitive words and rhythms have long been recognized as a focal constituent of African music and its American descendants—slave-songs, blues, spirituals and jazz” (Snead 68). be thought to explain its value (Snead 63-64). It seems almost impossible to imagine a true blues which does not repeat its central theme or follow a clear rhyme scheme (such as ABA) or other recognizable form—there remain links between narrative and the repetition of sound even within a more dynamic understanding of the blues.

Salvage the Bones is also bluesy in this way, and although its scheme of repetition is far more complex than ABA, the essence of the blues can still be felt within the novel. One particular mode of repetition Ward utilizes is the reincorporation of images to create parallels between external events and internal conditions. For instance, after Esch reveals her pregnancy to Manny (the father of her child, and the object of her conflicted yearning) and he throws her against the bathroom stall door and leaves, Ward uses reincorporation to draw together the different emotional centers of the novel. When Esch flushes the toilet, she describes the water spinning “in a spiral, a baby storm” (Ward 146), which reflects both Esch’s awareness of the child developing inside of her and her awareness of the incipient hurricane.

This is one of several instances where the line between Esch’s pregnancy and the hurricane, both looming threats centered around the presence of water, is blurred metaphorically. When a fight breaks out between Skeetah and Rico at a basketball game, the crowd’s reaction is described: “The referees on the floor blow their whistles, and people are standing up around us, like they are doing a wave” (Ward 150). Again, a concrete event (the fight breaking out) is anchored in metaphor to the pervading anticipation of the hurricane (heralded by “a wave”), the one common reality that can be said to unite all of the characters in the novel. This repetition creates the sense of “that which is without history and resolution” (Snead 63)— the hurricane is a few days away, and yet somehow it has already come, and is always present, manifesting itself in the social realities of Bois Sauvage. Ultimately, the interconnectedness of motifs and the inescapability of tragedy in the text do much more to align Ward’s narrative with the blues aesthetic than the presentation of violence does.

Additionally, Salvage the Bones offers several alternatives to Gussow’s antiquated jook joint as possible sites for blues narratives and culture to take place. Gussow imagines “[t]he social sites of black working-class culture as loci of enlivening pleasures” (Gussow 206). This is a useful and accurate characterization, but it only sees applications to a specific kind of place belonging to a particular historical period (the jook joint), which also limits the blues to only those people old enough to have experienced jook culture. It is no coincidence that almost every direct mention of the blues in the book is associated with Esch’s father and his youth—the old-school jook blues is far from extinct, but it is antiquated. Esch is the new torchbearer of the blues tradition. Ward’s novel shows that the blues can exist anywhere where blues people do, even in a modern context. In various settings, the sorrow of daily Southern life and the primal joy of expression mingle powerfully to create the striking “near tragic, near-comic lyricism” which Ellison describes. These include the Pit, where Esch and her friends could go as kids and swim themselves clean of their daily realities like the boys in Richard Wright’s “Down By the Riverside,” the basketball court, where Randall can channel his pent-up adolescent rage through his dexterity and focus, and even the dog-fighting circle, where the boys’ intimate relationships with their dogs are laid bare against those of their neighbors in a frenetic mix of love and aggression. Each of these settings contains elements which go beyond the “self-created passional economy” that dominates Gussow’s jooks. Expression in these new blues arenas need not be based on the claiming of dominance, and even when dominance is a factor (as in the dogfights), the setting’s meaning and emotional power are not derived from it.

Despite the ways in which Salvage the Bones allows us to step outside of Gussow’s framework, there may still be some concessions to be made to him. Although Esch certainly does not embody the kind of violent blues figure that populates Gussow’s analysis, some elements of his theory nonetheless seem to ring true for her. When Esch finally draws up the courage to confront Manny about her pregnancy, she does display the same desire for “blues-violence – as-inscription” (Gussow 198) possessed by many of the knife wielding caricatures of blues lore. Esch’s emotions boil over and she attacks Manny in a blind fit of love and rage: “‘I loved you!’ This is Medea holding the knife. This is Medea cutting. I rake my fingernails across his face, leave pink scratches that turn red, fill with blood” (Ward 204). Does this scene of Esch succumbing to a desire for violent inscription validate Gussow’s idea that violence is an essential constituent of the blues aesthetic? Gussow does write that cutting, one of the “paradigmatic jook violences,” could be used as an instrument for “the communication of sexual jealousy and other strong feeling” (Gussow 208-209). Both elements seem applicable to Esch here, although the grander scheme of oppression that this violence is supposed to reflect is largely absent. We certainly never get a sense that Esch attacks Manny as a means of “contest[ing] the erasure [of] ‘backbreaking wage work’” (Gussow 209). Esch’s impulse is simple and understandable: she is doing it because it is the only way she can get Manny’s attention. He, the father of her child, has been ignoring her for weeks, and she desperately needs some kind of recognition from him. This motivation again seems closer to Davis than Gussow, showing Esch’s refusal to “affirm woman’s resignation and powerlessness” (Davis 20).

I am not arguing that an instance of intimate violence like this is an “occasional distraction” to the blues aesthetic (a viewpoint which Gussow dismisses), nor am I supporting Gussow’s argument that it is the bedrock of blues society (Gussow 206). I believe that there is a middle ground that neither argument alone is able to capture—that any blues can include violence, but need not rely on that violence to establish its aesthetic value. As we continue to recognize the blues in its modern applications and incarnations, we must develop the ability to hold in our minds the ideas of both history and the potential for its transcendence. It would be irresponsible to allow our interpretations of the blues to ignore violence, and we would run the risk of depriving a story’s actors of their agency by doing so. Conversely, it is also urgent that we do not allow a framework of violence to structure our experience of the blues.

Violence, like love, sex, and death, is an inescapable facet of the human experience, and makes up an important but incomplete part of our individual and collective narratives. We must remain open to the discovery of meaning in the blues in any and all of the ways in which it may present itself. This openness is the basic dignity we owe to the blues and its heritage, and which allows the rivers of blues narratives to flow, as Langston Hughes wrote, “like human blood in human veins.”

Works Cited

Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues.” The Antioch Review, vol. 5, no. 2, 1945, pp. 61–74.

“Guns, Knives, and Buckets of Blood: The Predicament of Blues Culture.” Gussow, Adam.

Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 195-232.

“I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama.” Davis, Angela. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Random House, 1999, pp. 3–41.

Ward, Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones. Bloomsbury, 2011.

Snead, James A. “Repetition as a figure of black culture.” Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,

Methuen, 1984, pp. 59–79.

Ben Papsun is a junior English major with minors in Analytic Philosophy and Music Composition. His interests include Dutch angles, overanalysis, and Moxie soda. In his spare time, he can be found practicing piano, or pretending to read a book

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