The Signifying Monkey

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism is a groundbreaking work of literary theory by revered African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. Often regarded as a foundational text of black literary theory, the book’s stated intention is “if not exactly to invent a black theory…to locate and identify how the 'black tradition' had theorized about itself.” Gates achieves this by focusing on the Black cultural practice of “signifyin(g),” a sophisticated form of wordplay, which Gates traces back to a figure of Yoruba myth, and forward through the novels of Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and other major African-American authors.

Gates begins his search for the “black tradition’s” theory of itself in the Fon and Yoruba cultures of Benin and Nigeria, and among the remnants of those cultures that survived the Middle Passage to thrive in the Americas. A central figure in this cultural tradition is Esu-Elegbara, a “divine trickster,” whose attributes are described in the prose and poetry of West Africa.

Esu is closely associated with language and its powers: rhetoric and persuasion, slipperiness and metaphor. The Fon hail him as a “divine linguist” who knows all languages. The Yoruba portray him carrying a calabash which contains ase, a concept which Gates identifies with the Ancient Greek logos, the divine Word which embodies reason and truth.



Above all, Esu is associated with interpretation and its challenges. He is the interpreter of the Yoruba’s canon of sacred knowledge, called Ifa. His tools are a set of 16 marked palm nuts, shaken on a wooden tray. In their arrangement—obscure to humans—Esu reads the revealed wisdom of Ifa. He is traditionally described as “double-voiced,” which Gates links to the Western theoretical idea of indeterminacy, i.e. the capacity of written texts to support multiple interpretations. Gates links this concept also to the traditional understanding of Esu as genderless and sexually ambiguous. For Gates, Esu embodies a sophisticated and specifically West African approach to interpretation and textuality.

Did Esu survive the Middle Passage? Gates’s answer is yes, although he admits that the exact historical lineage is lost—unsurprisingly, given the trauma and dislocation through which any transmission must have taken place. Gates identifies Esu in the African-American cultural figure of the “Signifying Monkey.”

This figure originates in the language-play of male-dominated social environments: bars, social clubs, pool halls. In these settings, a set of stories is told, about the Monkey, the Lion, and the Elephant. The story begins with the Monkey reporting to the Lion some words spoken by the Elephant: the words are harmless, figurative, but the Monkey repeats them in the knowledge that the Lion will take them literally and be insulted by them. The Lion demands an apology. The Elephant refuses and gives the Lion a thrashing for good measure. The Lion, realizing that he has been tricked, takes his displeasure out on the Monkey. For Gates, the Monkey, with his mastery of language’s slipperiness and indeterminacy, is a descendant of Esu. What’s more, he is “the figure of the text of the Afro-American speaking subject, whose manipulations of the figurative and the literal both wreak havoc upon and inscribe order for criticism in the jungle.”



The Monkey’s verbal trickery is referred to in Black English as “Signifyin’” or “Signifying” (combined in the text as “Signifyin(g)”) on the Lion. Gates outlines the many forms of verbal play, trickery, and teasing that can be described as “signifyin(g),” before arguing that the core of any signifyin(g) maneuver is “repetition with a signal difference.”

Gates emphasizes that this practice of signifyin(g)—repetition with a signal difference—is a signature feature of African-American speech. Having identified it in simple verbal gestures, from boasts to sly teasing, he goes on to argue that it can also be found in more complex forms in Black literature. In this context, signifyin(g) can be seen as a “metaphor for textual revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition.” Gates argues that the practice underlies the specifically Black ways in which major African-American novelists have adopted and improvised upon tropes established by their peers and predecessors.

In the final part of the book, Gates goes on to demonstrate the practice of signifyin(g) in Black writing. He begins by tracing the roots of African-American literature to the slave narrative. From here, Gates proceeds to demonstrate a complex network of intertextuality, as authors from Richard Wright and Jean Toomer to Ralph Ellison and W.E.B. Dubois signify on each other’s works in increasingly sophisticated and complex ways. For Gates, most of this signifying is not the “oppositional” signifyin(g) of most Monkey stories, but a “cooperative” or “unmotivated” signifyin(g) which “encodes admiration and respect,” or at least “the absence of a negative critique.” He focuses particularly on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, to trace layers of signifyin(g) intertextuality.