The servant and the served : Ellen Douglas's can't quit you, baby
The servant and the served : Ellen Douglas's can't quit you, baby
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仆人和被服务者：艾伦·道格拉斯无法离开你，宝贝
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发表时间：
1998
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通讯作者：
Ann M. Bomberger
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作者：
Ann M. Bomberger
阿米里·巴拉卡（Amiri Baraka）在《音乐：对爵士乐和蓝调的反思》一书中批评白人音乐家、制作公司和评论家将蓝调、爵士乐和其他基于非裔美国文化的音乐类型吸纳、商业化、脱离语境，或者同时进行这三者。巴拉卡认为，音乐产业经常将非裔美国音乐翻译成更容易被接受的白人形式：“传统爵士乐有迪克西兰音乐，大乐队爵士乐有摇摆乐，BeBop 爵士乐有酷乐，RB 和当代黑人音乐有融合音乐，所有这些主要都是针对白人中产阶级观众、主要是白人表演者的企业创作。这样做的结果是让黑人演奏家和艺术家以及黑人国家本身处于社会底层，甚至无法从他们自己的创作中充分受益。”文化”（264）。他认为非裔美国音乐以阶级斗争为基础，如果没有适当的背景，蓝调和爵士乐就会被剥夺一些基本成分。(1) 他的批评对南方白人艾伦·道格拉斯(Ellen Douglas)写的小说《宝贝，不能离开你》(Can't Quit You, Baby, 1988)提出了有趣的问题，该书的标题和主要符号取自威利·迪克森(Willie Dixon)的同名布鲁斯歌曲。当然，这部小说并没有像巴拉卡本人或诗人/散文家阿尔·杨的作品那样，以任何扩展的方式将布鲁斯或爵士乐的节奏融入其结构中。相反，道格拉斯使用迪克森的歌曲就像作者经常引用其他作品作为铭文，或者偶尔引用文学来源作为贯穿整部小说的统一线索：也就是说，虽然她对这首歌的使用在主题中发挥着重要作用，但其应用在很大程度上是功利性的。现在，使用布鲁斯歌曲，即使相当简单，其本身也不一定有问题。然而，更有问题的是，道格拉斯决定用非裔美国管家的角色来从情感上“拯救”名叫科妮莉亚的白人主角。就像迪克森的文本“服务”来阐明书中的冲突一样，就像爵士乐被一些白人艺术家为了物质利益而拉拢一样，这位名叫推特（或者科妮莉亚更喜欢这样称呼她的朱莉娅）的管家，不仅充当了科妮莉亚的家庭仆人，而且还充当了她的精神向导。道格拉斯在小说的关键点上借鉴了“民间”智慧，推特成为道格拉斯利用非裔美国文化的方式，为白人女性提供与周围其他人建立联系的新方式。在本文的结尾，我将科妮莉亚和道格拉斯对推文的使用与白人在学术界撰写种族问题时出现的难题联系起来。通过探索白人雇主和她的非裔美国管家之间的关系，道格拉斯显然正在利用一个具有很多历史和文学共鸣的形象。正如伊丽莎白·舒尔茨所说，“在大多数美国小说中，白人女性和有色人种女性之间的关系遵循情妇和仆人、加害者和受害者的范式，只是偶尔发生逆转，将历史受害者转变为加害者，将历史加害者转变为受害者”（69）。道格拉斯试图通过更深入地探索女性关系、审视冲突并提出纽带来重塑传统的二分法。推特和科妮莉亚的关系在小说中正在转变。它从一种基于科妮莉亚故意无知的关系转变为一种双方都更诚实地尝试真正理解的关系。由于家政服务是雇主和雇员通常都是女性的少数长期职业之一，而且女性往往来自不同种族，因此研究这些类型的关系可以告诉我们很多关于女性在等级制度中互动的方式（Rollins 6）。在描述一个实际的非裔美国管家和一个白人女雇主之间的具体关系时，朱迪思·罗林斯说，“爱、经济剥削、尊重和不尊重、相互依赖、强烈的自利、没有真正沟通的亲密关系、相互保护——所有这些元素都包含在这种异常复杂的关系中”(178)。 ……
Amiri Baraka, in The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, criticizes white musicians, production companies, and critics for taking blues, jazz, and other types of music based in African American culture and either co-opting them, commercializing them, decontextualizing them, or doing all three simultaneously. Baraka argues that the music industry regularly translates African American music into more acceptable white forms: "Traditional jazz had its Dixieland; Big-band jazz its Swing; BeBop its Cool; RB and Contemporary black music its Fusion, all of which, in the main, were corporate creations aimed at a white middle-class audience with mainly white performers. What this does is help keep black players and artists and the black nation itself at the bottom of society, unable even to fully benefit from the creations of their own culture" (264). Without the proper context of African American music, which he argues is based in class struggle, blues and jazz are stripped of some of their essential ingredients.(1) His critique raises interesting questions for a novel written by Ellen Douglas, a white southerner, called Can't Quit You, Baby (1988), which pulls its title and major symbol from a Willie Dixon blues song of the same name. Certainly the novel does not adapt the rhythms of blues or jazz into its structure in any extended way, as do the writings of Baraka himself or poet/essayist Al Young, for instance. Rather, Douglas uses Dixon's song much as authors often use quotations from other works as epigraphs or include the occasional quote from a literary source as a unifying thread throughout the novel: that is, while her use of the song plays an important role in the thematics, its application is largely utilitarian. Now the use of a blues song, even fairly briefly, in itself is not necessarily that problematic. What is more problematic, however, is Douglas's decision to use the character of an African American housekeeper to emotionally "save" the white protagonist named Cornelia. Much as the Dixon text "serves" to illuminate conflicts of the book and much as jazz is co-opted by some white artists for material gain, the housekeeper, named Tweet (or Julia, as Cornelia tellingly prefers to call her), serves Cornelia not only as her domestic servant but also as her spiritual guide. Drawing on "folk" wisdom at key points in the novel, Tweet becomes Douglas's way to use African American culture in order to suggest new ways for white women to relate to others around them. At the end of this essay, I connect Cornelia and Douglas's use of Tweet to the difficult issues that arise from whites writing about race in academia. By exploring the relationship between a white employer and her African American housekeeper, Douglas is clearly tapping into an image with much historical and literary resonance. "In most American novels," as Elizabeth Shultz states, "the relationship between white women and women of color follows this paradigm of mistress and servant, victimizer with and victim with only an occasional reversal which converts the historical victim to victimizer, the historical victimizer to victim" (69). Douglas attempts to rework the traditional dichotomy by exploring the women's relationship in more depth, examining conflict while suggesting a bond. Tweet and Cornelia's relationship is in transition in the novel. It moves from a relationship based upon the willful ignorance of Cornelia to one in which there is a more honest attempt at actual understanding on the part of both women. Since domestic service is one of the few long-standing occupations where both employer and employee are often women and one in which the women are often of different races, studying these kinds of relationships tells us much about the way women interact in hierarchical situations (Rollins 6). In describing a specific relationship between an actual African American housekeeper and a white female employer, Judith Rollins says, "Love, economic exploitation, respect and disrespect, mutual dependency, intense self-interest, intimacy without genuine communication, mutual protection--all of these elements were contained in this extraordinarily complex relationship" (178). …