Du Bois and Art Theory: The Souls of Black Folk as a "Total Work of Art"

Anne E. Carroll

One of the most striking aspects of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is the author’s use of lines of poetry and bars of song to open each of the book’s fourteen chapters. Each inscription includes a few lines or stanzas of poetry by writers from America and Europe, such as James Lowell, Lord Byron, or Friedrich von Schiller, paired with one or two bars of song. How the reader should understand these epigraphs is not immediately clear, though, for they include just the lines, the notes, and the poets’ names, without explanations or even titles. Indeed, throughout the first thirteen chapters of the book, Du Bois was silent about these epigraphs; they remain cultural inscriptions that we, as readers, must decipher. Only in his last chapter did Du Bois refer to them, and his commentary here is focused more broadly on what he called “the sorrow songs,” the spirituals sung by slaves and their descendants, than on the epigraphs themselves. Here Du Bois indicated that the bars of song are symbols of the rich cultural achievements of African Americans; readers come to understand that they are part of his assertion of the importance of African Americans in America’s cultural, spiritual, and material development. But even in this final chapter, Du Bois said little about the pairing of songs and poems. What, then, are we to make of these combinations?

We can understand the epigraphs simply as unifying elements of the book or as a signal of Du Bois’s argument about the songs’ artistic value. But if we consider Souls in the context of theories about relations among the arts in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, its combinations of music and poetry illuminate an as yet unappreciated aspect of Du Bois’s creation. In particular, reading Du Bois’s book in light of ideas about the “total work of art,” especially as advocated by opera composer and theorist Richard Wagner, draws our attention to Du Bois’s successful appropriation of theories about the unity of the arts to his goal of undermining American racism.1 Indeed, Souls can be read as a total work of art in the sense advocated by Wagner. But Souls is a different kind of artwork than Wagner’s operas, both in form and in politics. Du Bois extended the concepts outlined by Wagner, using them to create a new and distinctive kind of text suited to the struggle against racism in the United States. Evaluating his book as a total work of art, then, enhances our appreciation of its innovative form and of Du Bois’s creative and intellectual achievement.

Admittedly, the extent to which Du Bois intentionally applied ideas like Wagner’s to the composition of Souls is unclear. There is little evidence in his published writing to link the book to these concepts about the arts.2 But there is significant cultural and textual evidence that suggests the relevance of the idea of the total work of art to Souls. It seems highly unlikely, moreover, that Du Bois would have been unfamiliar with the concept. For one thing, Wagner and his theories about the unity of the arts were widely disseminated and hugely influential in Germany in the years when Du Bois lived there as a graduate student. Wagner, who began to compose operas and publish essays about the arts during the 1840s, was one of many Romantic artists who were frustrated with what they saw as an unfortunate fragmentation of the arts. They believed that, in isolated form, works of art failed to have a sufficient effect on their readers or viewers. They hoped that creating works that involved multiple media, and thus reuniting the arts, might allow them to create texts that had a stronger impact. This goal was particularly widespread among English and German theorists and artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.3 Those who attempted to create unified arts combined music and literature, music and the visual arts, and even music and odors or colors.4 They hoped, by doing so, to give their work synaesthesic properties, to create texts that appealed to more than one of the senses of the audience members.5 The stage often was the locus of these efforts, as the performance arts offered numerous possibilities for combining different kinds of stimuli.

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Notes

1. Du Bois scholars have identified numerous ways in which Du Bois applied the ideas of German intellectuals to the situations of African Americans, but as Russell A. Berman points out, “the nexus of Du Bois and Wagner has not been scrutinized.” Berman, “Du Bois and Wagner: Race, Nation, and Culture between the United States and Germany,” German Quarterly 70 (1997): 127 and 134n32. Berman offers a brief overview of other scholars’ assessments of Du Bois’s use of German philosophy. “Du Bois and Wagner,” 126–27.
2. Oddly, Du Bois devotes little attention to Souls in his autobiographies. He mentions it briefly in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940; New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002) but not at all in The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International, 1968). Souls does not even appear in the “calendar” of Du Bois’s public life that appears near the end of the latter book. Du Bois published a short essay on Souls in the Independent in 1904, but it includes no discussion of any influences on the composition of the book. See Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk,” reprinted in The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams (Boston: Bedford, 1997), 254–55. If Du Bois explicitly linked Wagner to Souls in his unpublished papers, David Levering Lewis does not mention this in his biography of Du Bois, for which he drew heavily on those papers. See Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois—Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Holt, 1993). I have been unable to find any explicit references to Souls as a total work of art in published letters to or from Du Bois or in reviews from the period.
3. For overviews of these developments, see Günter Berghaus, “A Theater of Image, Sound, and Motion: On Synaesthesia and the Idea of a Total Work of Art,” Maske und Kothurn 32, nos. 1–2 (1986): 11–14; Thomas Jensen Hines, Collaborative Form: Studies in the Relations of the Arts (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991), 1; and Jack M“> Stein, Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1960), 3–5. Berghaus also points out that efforts to combine various media in the theater happened as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he emphasizes that it was the Romantics who first “produced a body of theoretical literature on how this Utopian idea might be achieved.” Berghaus, “A Theater,” 11–12. Berghaus, Hines, and Stein list an extensive number of participants in these experiments; some of the most recognizable names include Friedrich W. J. Schelling, who was a particularly influential philosopher and advocate of such practices; the writer and artist William Blake; the composers Robert Schumann, Franz Peter Schubert, Hugo Wolf, and Claude Debussy; the writers and theorists Gotthold Lessing, Johann von Herder, Johann von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Philipp Otto Runge; and the painters Joseph Turner, James Whistler, and Eugene Delacroix.
4. Berghaus discusses efforts to create “colour clavichords” and “clavichords of odours” as well as “theatrical spectacles” that combined sound, colors, and smells. Berghaus, “A Theater,” 7–11. Wolfgang Domling focuses on attempts at the “musicalization of painting”; see “Reuniting the Arts: Notes on the History of an Idea,” 19th Century Music 18, no. 1 (1994): 3–9.
5. Berghaus, “A Theater,” 10, 16.