To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance - Review | African American Review | Find Articles at BNET

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

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by C. K. Doreski

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
1 - 4 of 4 -->
• Next

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.

via findarticles.com