The Emblematic Novel announces a new novel by Zora Neale Hurston, reads the inner meaning of Nella Larsen’s Passing, and establishes the novels of Carl Van Vechten as originating the form of the modern novel for Faulkner, Ellison, Thomas Wolfe, John O’Hara, Raymond Chandler, and many other canonical writers.

The Emblematic Novel reveals the hidden system of alchemical emblems, Tarot cards, photographs, and paintings that are coded into Carl Van Vechten’s novel The Blind Bow-Boy. Van Vechten’s esoteric novel was the template for a large number of canonical modernist novels including works by Faulkner, Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee, Ralph Ellison, Raymond Chandler, John O’Hara, and many others. Chapter Two is a close reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing that demonstrates its influence from Van Vechten and traces the system of Tarot cards, alchemical emblems, photographs, and paintings that make sense of its ambiguous surface text. Chapter Three reveals for the first time a new novel authored by Zora Neale Hurston that served as the template for the modernist memoir. Like the Van Vechten novel, Hurston’s memoir-novel is written in code and contains a hidden system of esoteric symbols. Woodson’s The Emblematic Novel is an important revision of the modern novel with major implications about a school of modernist writing that has until now remained out of sight. Given the poor understanding of a host of modernist writers, such as Nathaniel West, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Ralph Ellison, the discovery of a linking commonality in the esoteric solves many of the interpretive mysteries surrounding these and other writers. The Emblematic Novel contains a panoply of illustrations that relate to the surface narrative of the texts under discussion. Woodson’s argument is grounded in the “conscious discrepancies” in the texts—intentional mistakes—that have remained beneath the notice of the literary scholars who have examined these texts. These mistakes along with the alchemical code that they point to are convincingly brought to the surface through a detailed exposition that is irrefutable. The Emblematic Novel is a critical tour de force that opens the door to modernism as an evocation of spiritual alchemy.

The Zora Neale Hurston discussed in the essays collected in this volume bears no resemblance to the bodacious, womanist Zora Neale Hurston as she is commonly presented. Historically, the scholarly work on Hurston has been a matter of over-reaching, fantasy, projection, and wish fulfillment. These four essays refuse the critical discourses that have been used to misread so badly and to misconstrue so routinely Hurston’s texts, to distort and overwrite her ideology, and to disfigure her identity. For the first time since Hurston’s texts were revived in the 1970s, light is thrown comprehensively on the many problems raised by Hurston and her fiction and non-fiction writings. By contextualizing Hurston as a major figure in a lost literary movement, Oragean Modernism, these essays resolve the several contradictions that have made Hurston such a controversial and enigmatic cultural figure. This unprecedented Hurston is shown to have been a literary collaborator with William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

In 1920 P.D. Ouspensky electrified the cultural avant-garde from New York to Moscow with his fourth-dimensional ideas about cosmic consciousness. His book Tertium Organum was a manual for becoming a Superman. He said, “Two hundred conscious people, if they existed and if they find it necessary and legitimate, could change the whole of life on the earth. But either there are not enough of them, or they do not want to, or perhaps the time has not come, or perhaps other people are sleeping too soundly.” 

In 1925 the American followers of A.R. Orage rose to this challenge. Believing that they were the only force that could save the Earth from destruction, they carried out a master plan steeled by a new morality that faced head-on “the terror of the situation.” Fearlessly determined to intervene in world history, they infiltrated the American Communist Party and the publishing industry. 

The movement included Carl Van Vechten, Djuna Barnes, Nathaniel West, John Dos Passos, John Hall Wheelock, Arna Bontemps, Dawn Powell, James Agee, Maxwell Perkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, C. Daly King, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ann Petry, Margaret Walker, Dorothy West and many more. 

In Oragean Modernism, a lost literary movement Jon Woodson reveals the coded contents of their published writings—which were many of the stellar works of 20th century American literature. 

This is the second edition. It has a live index and a revised chart of the Oragean Modernist network.

Jon Woodson’s Oragean Modernism: a lost literary movement, 1924-1953 (2013) is the sequel to his path-breaking intervention in Harlem Renaissance studies, To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance (1999). Beginning with A Critical Analysis of the Poetry of Melvin B. Tolson (1979), Woodson has investigated complex modernist texts by African American writers, searching for the key to their contradictions, enigmas, and spellbinding literary mastery. Widening the scope of his inquiry to include Lost Generation authors, Woodson has revealed an unprecedented conspiracy of writers, editors, publishers, artists, intellectuals, and technocrats—all united in a secret plan to change the course of world history in order to circumvent a global disaster. Fortified by belief in their superhumanity, the Oragean Modernists were convinced that only they could redirect the fate of the Earth. Writing titanically, they produced a vast body of esoteric literature to disseminate their message to their contemporaries, and to future generations—should they fail. Comprising many popular and canonical literary works, the Oragean Modernist writings are nevertheless some of the most controversial and difficult literary works of the 1920s and 1930s. For the first time, Woodson’s iconoclastic study places these works in a context that gathers them into a narrative that is daring, sweeping, and intellectually electrifying.

Everyone knows who MLK was. Hardly anyone knows that MLK was the creation of the breakaway American followers of the modern mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. 

Led by A.R. Orage, a large group of highly accomplished Americans intervened in history by creating a modern civil messiah. To do this they followed a plan laid down four thousand years ago by the priests of Horus and two thousand years ago by the Essene community.

Orage’s group of self-appointed spiritual supermen began in the early 1930s, and twice they failed. The third time they changed their strategy and the result was the charismatic civil rights activist, MLK.

Ralph Ellison’s unpublished second novel Three Days Before the Shooting hides an account of this daring scheme beneath layers of ciphers, myth, and literary dazzle. Concealed within the American Communist Party and other groups, a cadre of writers, intellectuals, editors, lawyers, artists, and publishers staged an Objective Drama that made MLK a towering moral leader. Only in the disordered pages of Ellison’s esoteric, experimental novel is there a full account of this monumental project.

Building on a decades-long course of research beginning with an audacious dissertation on Melvin B. Tolson, Jon Woodson has revealed the contents of Ellison’s fascinating and profound work of genius.

Jon Woodson’s investigation of Ralph Ellison’s second novel marks an important departure from the former approaches to Ellison’s fiction. Previous scholarship on Ellison was grounded in either Ellison’s own comments or derived from speculations that disguised their provisional nature through jargon, volume, and theory. Woodson argues that Ellison’s surface text is always deceptive, so using Ellison's essays and notes to explicate his fiction is fruitless. Woodson has produced a reading of Three Days Before the Shooting that accounts for everything in the text by turning in each case to the texts that Ellison consulted in the writing of his novel. Woodson shows how Ellison invented new modes of encryption that surpassed those devices used in such indecipherable texts as Djuna Barnes’s, Nightwood, William Faulkner’s Pylon, and Mina Loy’s Insel—novels with a deep kinship to Ellison’s Three Days. 

Woodson’s six notes address the materials at the core of Ellison’s novel: Objective Art, Alchemical Cabala, Roman à Clef, Modern Civil Messiahs, Ancient Egypt, and Pseudo-Communism. 

Woodson provides the name of a real person for every character in Three Days Before the Shooting. This is all the more astonishing against the fact that no other scholar has discussed the novel as a one-for-one roman à clef. Jon Woodson’s insights establish an entirely new understanding not only of Three Days Before the Shooting but for the complete Ellison oeuvre.

By showing that Joseph Heller was heavily influenced by the New Criticism and myth criticism that he studied in graduate school, this book discloses that Catch-22 is a faithful and inclusive retelling of the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, much as Joyce’s Ulysses famously recapitulates Homer’s Odyssey. This book shows that what previous critics have understood to be characteristics of the absurdist and Black Humor influence are derived from Heller’s faithfulness to the Babylonian text itself. The study details Heller’s use of a mystical and Jungian framework to portray the individuation of a modern hero through his struggles with the mythic and archetypal forces of irrationalism as they are manifested in modern civilization. Revealing that Heller’s conception is religious and mystical, this book explores Heller’s use of T. S. Eliot’s mythic method and the experimental techniques of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The themes of race, homosexuality, individuation, sado-masochism, and modernity are dealt with at length.

Jean Toomer's adamant stance against racism and his call for a raceless society were far more complex than the average reader of works from the Harlem Renaissance might believe. In To Make a New Race Jon Woodson explores the intense influence of Greek-born mystic G. I. Gurdjieff on the thinking of Toomer and his coterie-Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman-and, through them, the mystic's influence on many of the notables in African American literature.
Gurdjieff, born of poor Greco-Armenian parents on the Russo-Turkish frontier, espoused the theory that man is asleep and in prison unless he strains against the major burdens of life, especially those of identification, like race. Toomer, whose novel Cane became an inspiration to many later Harlem Renaissance writers, traveled to France and labored at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Later, the writer became one of the primary followers approved to teach Gurdjieff's philosophy in the United States.
Woodson's is the first study of Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance to look beyond contemporary portrayals of the mystic in order to judge his influence. Scouring correspondence, manuscripts, and published texts, Woodson finds the direct links in which Gurdjieff through Toomer played a major role in the development of "objective literature." He discovers both coded and explicit ways in which Gurdjieff's philosophy shaped the world views of writers well into the 1960s. Moreover Woodson reinforces the extensive contribution Toomer and other African-American writers with all their international influences made to the American cultural scene. 

Jon Woodson, an associate professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C., is a contributor to the collection, Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960. He has published articles in African American Review and other journals.

In the 1930s African Americans faced three distinct historical crises that impacted the lives of African Americans directly—the Great Depression, the existential-identity crisis, and the Italo-Ethiopian War, with its threat of a race war. A sizeable body of black poetry was produced in this decade, which captured the new modes of autonomy through which black Americans resisted these social calamities. Much of it, however, including the most influential protest poems, was dismissed as “romantic” by major, leftist critics and anthologists.

Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s, by Jon Woodson, uses social philology to unveil social discourse, self fashioning, and debates in poems gathered from anthologies, magazines, newspapers, and individual collections. The first chapter examines three long poems, finding overarching jeremiadic discourse that inaugurated a militant, politically aware agent. Chapter two examines self-fashioning in the numerous sonnets that responded to the new media of radio, newsreels, movies, and photo-magazines. The third chapter shows how new subjectivities were generated by poetry addressed to the threat of race war in which the white race was exterminated.

The black intellectuals who dominated the interpretative discourses of the 1930s fostered exteriority, while black culture as a whole plunged into interiority. Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants delineates the struggle between these inner and outer worlds, a study made difficult by a contemporary intellectual culture which recoils from a belief in a consistent, integrated self.