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The Veil, the Cave and the Fire-Bringer

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Figure 1

Notes

  1. H. Winant, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice, Minneapolis, 2004, p. 25.

  2. W. W. Cook and J. Tatum, African American Writers and Classical Tradition, Chicago, 2010, pp. 117–24, and C. Cowherd, ‘The Wings of Atalanta: Classical Influences in The Souls of Black Folk’, in The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later, ed. D. Hubbard, Columbia, MO, 2003, pp. 284–98. E. A. Hairston, The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization and the African American Reclamation of the West, Knoxville, 2013, pp. 159–91, is not the work of a classicist nor does it focus on the image of the Veil, but it represents the most updated and thorough study of Du Bois’s engagement with Classics.

  3. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, New York, 1968, pp. 87 and 101 (Greek in high school) and 186–8 (Wilberforce).

  4. For details about Du Bois’s classical education at Fisk, see C. Kreyling et al., Classical Nashville: Athens of the South, Nashville, TN, 1996, p. 18, and E. J. Sundquist and W. E. B. Du Bois, The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, Oxford, 1985, p. 10, as well as the editors’ introduction to this special issue.

  5. As noted by other scholars. S. J. Shaw, W. E. B. Du Bois and the Souls of Black Folk, Chapel Hill, 2013, pp. 62–74, has suggested a connection between Du Bois’s notion of the Talented Tenth and Plato’s demographic vision in Republic; though Hairston, Ebony Column (n. 2 above), p. 165 prefers to see it as a Ciceronian idea (which could still be Platonic at heart). S. Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903, Chicago, 1995, pp. 178–90, offers a reading of the end of Souls in terms of Plato’s Cave. I return to Zamir’s hypothesis below.

  6. See the co-editors’ introduction to this collection for a succinct discussion of how theories of literary reception, such as that of H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Oxford, 1988, apply to Du Bois’s incorporation of classical material into his writings.

  7. For the general trend of this sort of thinking, see J. E. Smethrust, ‘Paul Laurence Dunbar and Turn-into-the-20th-Century African-American Dualism’, African American Review, 41, 2007, pp. 377–86.

  8. D. L. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography, New York, 2009, pp. 124–7, discusses the friendships that supported Du Bois through the intellectual wasteland he found at Wilberforce. Du Bois describes his surprise about Dunbar being black in Autobiography (n. 3 above), p. 187.

  9. M. Black discusses the impact of Du Bois’s notion of ‘double consciousness’ on Fanon, though without any reference to Dunbar’s poem, in ‘Fanon and DuBoisian [sic] Double Consciousness’, Human Architecture, 5, 2007, 393–404.

  10. An idea explored most recently by M. Durr, ‘Removing the Mask, Lifting the Veil: Race, Class, and Gender in the Twenty-First Century’, Social Problems, 63, 2016, pp. 151–60.

  11. For the concept of ‘triggering’ in this sense, see the introduction to this collection.

  12. All references to Souls are from the 2007 Oxford edition containing A. Rampersad’s introduction.

  13. H. L. Gates, Jr., Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered Their Pasts, New York, 2010, p. 172 shows that such racial epiphanies are a virtual set-piece in African American autobiography. This moment of realization also prompts Du Bois to set out his idea of double consciousness, which is related to the image of the Veil, since those who see the Veil must negotiate a double world (both inside and outside the Veil).

  14. The fifth stanza of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’. Cowherd, ‘Wings’ (n. 2 above), p. 294 argues for a Platonic–Orphic reading of Du Bois’s words here, in which the body is the prison.

  15. Compare the opening lines of Du Bois’s ‘The Princess of the Hither Isles’, The Crisis, 6, 1913, pp. 22–31 (reprinted in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, New York, 1920, pp. 37–9): ‘Her soul was beautiful, wherefore she kept it veiled in lightly laced humility and fear…’

  16. As noted in R. Westbrook and W. E. B. Du Bois, Education and Empowerment: The Essential Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, East Brunswick, 2013.

  17. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, Oxford, 2007.

  18. Compare C. West, Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, Philadelphia, pp. 53–4 on his theory of the ‘normative gaze’: ‘The recovery of classical antiquity in the modern West produced what I shall call a “normative gaze,” namely an ideal from which to order and compare observations. This ideal was drawn primarily from classical aesthetic values of beauty, proportion and human form and classical cultural standards of moderation, self-control and harmony. The role of classical aesthetic and cultural norms in the emergence of the idea of white supremacy as an object of modern discourse cannot be underestimated.’

  19. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro, Oxford, 2007.

  20. Zamir, ‘Dark Voices’ (n. 5 above), pp. 178–90. Cowherd, ‘Wings’ (n. 2 above), p. 292.

  21. Especially in light of the recent return to prominence of white supremacist groups in the United States, Du Bois’s approach to race feels particularly apt. For all the scientific consensus that race is not a significantly useful biological category of analysis, in terms of the lived reality of most quadrants of the modern world, race remains a sociological category of fundamental importance.

  22. Notions of the Caucasian race began in earnest with C. von Meiners, Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit, Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1785, and J. F. Blumenbach, Decas Craniorum, Göttingen, 1790–1828; the topic is thoroughly discussed in B. Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity, New York, 2006.

  23. A topic for another paper is Du Bois’s acquaintance with Antenor Firmin, the Haitian anthropologist whom he met at the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900. Firmin’s The Equality of the Human Races, New York, 2000 (orig. 1885), responds directly to Gobineau’s treatise and lauds the ethical virtues of the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound (246–8).

  24. Even the magnificent Lion, at one point, finds fault with Prometheus’s craftsmanship, since lions were thought to be scared of roosters (Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Cleitiphon, 2.21).

  25. For updated discussions of the date and authorship, see I. Ruffell, Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound, London, 2012, pp. 7–24.

  26. Moody clearly made an impression on Du Bois. In addition to using some of his lyrics from ‘The Brute’ (1901) as the epigraph to chapter 8 of Souls (‘Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece’), Du Bois later drew on a quotation from ‘The Fire-Bringer’ to conclude his essay ‘Criteria for Negro Art’, The Crisis, 32, 1926, pp. 290–97.

  27. As surveyed by Ruffell, ‘Prometheus’ (n. 25 above), pp. 105–30 and, with specific reference to matters of race, by E. Hall, ‘The Problem with Prometheus: Myth, Abolition, and Radicalism’, in Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood, ed. R. Alston et al., Oxford, 2011, pp. 209–46.

  28. This is a striking image for various reasons. The myth of ants (myrmêkes) being transformed into human Myrmidons on Aegina is already present in Hesiod fr. 205, and thus the slide from ant to human is not unprecedented. Athenians, on the other hand, represented themselves as autochthonous, and ants are one of the species of animals believed to be generated spontaneously, one might say autochthonously, from the earth. Theories of such spontaneous generation were discussed systematically by Aristotle and persisted until their refutation by Louis Pasteur in the 19th century. The Aristotelian theory is discussed thoroughly by P. Louis, ‘La Génération Spontanée chez Aristote’, Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences, 1968, pp. 291–305.

  29. J. E. Seery, Political Theory for Mortals: Shades of Justice, Images of Death, Ithaca, NY, 1996, p. 64–5.

  30. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward the History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, Oxford, 2014, p. 529.

  31. E. Hall, ‘The Problem with Prometheus’ (n. 27 above), pp. 233–6. Hall goes on to suggest that race and skin colour were only part of the problem, however, and that other traits of the Titan, especially those involving socially revolutionary politics, were also tricky to harness to an American context. L. Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, New York, 1998, p. 226–51 argues that Douglass is Promethean because he stole his person by extricating himself from slavery.

  32. Crump’s image is striking, but it is not the first depiction of Prometheus as explicitly black. Hall, ‘The Problem with Prometheus’ (n. 27 above) surveys various images that associate Prometheus with blackness and the Atlantic slave trade, including an 1809 engraving in which Prometheus clearly represents slavery but is, himself, of ambiguous race (pp. 210–11), and another from 1844 in which the Promethean bondage is portrayed by a black woman defending her baby (pp. 233–4). The latter prompts Hall to note that ‘the very substitution of a mother with a very young baby for a muscular Titan offers another clue to the difficulties that Prometheus presented to abolitionists’ (p. 233). A somewhat later black Prometheus, who may be more directly relevant to Du Bois’s project, can be found in Dunbar’s ‘Prometheus’, in Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899). The poem is primarily about the difficulty any literary artist faces in finding a creative place among the past masters, especially, in Dunbar’s poem, Shelley. With the last line, however, we realize that the subjective voice is speaking from a specifically black perspective, based on the racialized history of the banjo: we strum our banjo-strings and call them lyres. As noted above, Du Bois knew Dunbar and his work, and this darkening of Prometheus, subtler than Crum’s graphic visual, may also have influenced Du Bois’s shift in depicting Prometheus as white in 1920 and black in 1935.

  33. It was also in 1935 that Huxley and Haddon declared that ‘racialism is a myth, and a dangerous myth at that’, in J. Huxley and A. C. Haddon, We Europeans: A Survey of ‘Racial’ Problems, London, 1935, p. 287.

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to Harriet Fertik and Mathias Hanses, who have been affable, generous, and visionary editors, and to Julia Nelson Hawkins, Denise McCoskey and Anna Peterson, for conversations and feedback that have refined and improved my ideas about Du Bois.

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    Tom Hawkins

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Hawkins, T. The Veil, the Cave and the Fire-Bringer. Int class trad 26, 38–53 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-018-0478-6

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