| This dissertation explores the uses of music in the fictional works of James Baldwin and Alice Walker. By bringing wide-ranging mythological and philosophical theories to bear upon the issue of music and the politics of culture, this dissertation examines Baldwin's and Walker's fictional representations of music as subversive and revolutionary force and the musician as a modern-day iconoclastic prophet who teaches by music and song rather than by word. Essential to this inquiry is an investigation of the metaphysics of music, that is, what there is in the nature of music that makes it an ideal medium for subversion, revolution, and ultimate self-realization.; In depicting the musician as an incorrigible disturber of peace, as a bringer of light and enlightenment, as an empowering agent of spiritual wholeness and racial identity, and as a disciple of the erotic, the two authors/mediums/witnesses, as they call themselves, echo through inversion and appropriation the archetypal and traditional images of the demonic musician as a sinister siren who lures by sweet music and promise of worldly knowledge. The musicians' promise of greater knowledge also calls to mind the Biblical serpent that enticed man and woman to eat from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. The mythological, religious, and later philosophical connections between particular kinds of music, forbidden or dangerous knowledge, the siren, the serpent, and threatening or unsettling underground agency are all reversed and replayed in Baldwin's and Walker's subversive fictional vision. What has been mythologically, religiously, and philosophically established as evil or sinister--the devil's music, the serpent, the feminine, the oppressed, the emotional, the black, and the pansexual--is consistently depicted in Baldwin and Walker as spiritually superior. In their suspicion and rejection of the dominant culture, the two authors experiment with moments of verbal music, attempting on the one hand to capture and illuminate the essence of their characters' emotional wholeness, and on the other hand to liberate their own artistic visions from the English language. |
