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What is meant negatively is that man cannot be comprehended in a formula; what is meant positively is the sense of complication and possibility, of surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth. These are things whose more or less abstract expressions we recognize in the arts; in our inability to admit them in social matters lies a great significance. … It is a tragic irony that this diminution of the moral possibility, with all that the moral possibility implies of free will and individual value, should spring, as it does, from the notion of the perfectibility of man.
—Lionel Trilling, "Elements That Are Wanted" (1940)
Have you seen Beetle Creek? I haven't.
—Albert Murray to Ralph Ellison (1950)1
This was a story that was very sneaky.
—William Demby to Giovanna Micconi (2008)2
For critics and historians interested in William Demby's accomplishment and legacy, the urgent task remains context and framing. Never part of the quasi-Freudian maneuvering among advocates of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Demby's situation has always been idiosyncratic, a mere node in an unnameable network, a Roman outsider in a deeply Greek drama. If Kenneth W. Warren is correct to suggest that the very rationale and conditions for an African American literary practice and criticism have steadily diminished since the onset of the formal civil rights revolution, then Demby is plausibly a fine case study to investigate what is restorative, risky, and incisive about such counterintuition.3 This does not necessarily entertain or assert a hermeneutic of race denial but would instead engage speculatively what changing cultural and political conditions meant for personal projections of tradition and entry into material networks of production and consumption.
Like his mentor Robert Hayden, Demby could never be accused of discomfort in his skin or disinterest in deeply embedded and formative African American myths and history. Simultaneously, however, he found himself seemingly locked into permanent struggle to assert himself in those discursive worlds where his emergent sense of justice and meaning-making might manifest most effectively and translate into reputation and the vocation of writer and intellectual. We might ask: What variety of criticism is up to the task of making sense of Demby's work and life? Warren has pressed hard on the limits of...