Claude McKay’s Primitivist Narration

This chapter considers Claude McKay’s novels Home to Harlem and Banjo as attempts to undertake literary primitivism’s project of immediacy by means of a musical aesthetics. Exploring his relationship both to the negritude poets and to Lawrence, especially the latter’s Aaron’s Rod, it argues that of all the writers discussed in this book, McKay’s work most strenuously attempts to enter the immediate mode. In McKay’s novels the hope for a reconciliation of reflexivity and immediacy, the primitive and the civilized is enacted simultaneously at the level of prose style and narrative structure. This allows us to identify a number of fissures and contradictions that beset the aesthetics of primitivism, especially the pitfalls of a utopian racialism.