My Amputations by Clarence Major

First published: 1986

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Experimental; picaresque

Time of work: 1980’s

Locale: United States; Europe; Africa

Principal Characters:

• Mason Ellis, an African American man born in Georgia who masquerades as the Author
• Chiro, Mason’s father, a dark figure who leaves Mason a complicated legacy
• Painted Turtle, a Native American woman who lived on a reservation in New Mexico before meeting Mason in Georgia
• Judith Williams, the wife of Mason Ellis and mother of their six children
• Edith Levine, a white, college-educated actress who conspires with Mason, Jesus, and Brad on a bank robbery
• Jesus, a criminal
• Brad, a criminal friend of Mason
• John Armegurn, the director of Mason’s fellowship money
• The Author, an unnamed and unspecified African American writer who takes the name Clarence McKay

The Novel

My Amputations is a postmodernist experimental novel that combines picaresque and bildungsroman techniques in a story about Mason Ellis and his search for an African American identity. Written in short episodes, the novel narrates the escapades of Mason from child to Air Force serviceman to hoodlum and bank robber and then to lecturer. His ultimate con is to receive $50,000 a year from the Magnan-Rockford Foundation. The novel is a complex blend of Mason’s past with his dreams and hallucinations. Fragments of his own novel are interjected into a narrative unreliably presented by a nameless narrator. Mason’s mental state suggests paranoid schizophrenia, as he constantly fears an unnamed conspiracy organized by the System.

Mason is the son of Melba, a light-skinned black woman, and Chiro, a hard-living black man. Mason’s youth in Chicago is troubled, and he has a fantasy existence with his muse, Celt CuRoi, perhaps a derivation of his mother’s partial Irish ancestry. Mason suffers episodes of racial bigotry in the service. His apprenticeship as a writer starts conventionally, as he imitates white writers such as Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway and black writers such as Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin. After the service, Mason moves back to Chicago’s South Side, marries, has six children, and separates from his wife. Mason and a woman named Painted Turtle move to New York City and turn to a life of crime.

Mason claims that another man, possibly the Author, stole his manuscript. This same man has taken the name Clarence McKay to hide his identity. Mason kidnaps Clarence McKay and, with three others, robs a bank. After the robbery, Mason assumes the identity of the Author and claims the Author’s fellowship money. The reader is never sure if this Author is Clarence McKay, Mason himself, or the author of the novel being read. Mason lectures at colleges and universities in the United States, Europe, and Africa. Lovers and friends from the past appear briefly in the second half of the novel, but only as hallucinations. Each episode describes drinking, eating, and sexual escapades connected to his lecture tour. At different lectures, Mason reads from his work in progress. Wherever Mason lectures, violence breaks out. In London, he escapes a bomb explosion in the tube station. In Berlin, people standing at a bus stop are blown to pieces. Later, in Berlin, he is kidnapped by a neo-Nazi group, and in Italy, he is arrested and beaten by the police for being an arsonist. In each instance, alcohol is involved, the actual facts of the incident are confused, and Mason is miraculously rescued by his friends.

In Nice, Mason becomes anxious about his great deception as the Author and fears a conspiracy against him. He goes to a detective fiction conference and voices questions about fog, confusion, and contradictions. These questions mirror others raised in the novel concerning truth, fiction, and the nature of reality. Mason’s quest for his identity disintegrates into hallucination. He imagines that he sees old criminal friends from his past, and then Clarence McKay attacks him on the beach with a pistol. Mason is incapable of balancing his criminal past with his current masquerade as the black Author. He imagines that he is pursued by detectives sent by the mysterious foundation that funds his fellowship. Mason descends into paranoid frenzy as he travels through Italy and Greece. Finally, he is sent an envelope by the foundation and is told to deliver it to an African chieftain in Ghana. Mason locates the village and, in the middle of the night, wearing a mask, he is escorted into the presence of the chieftain, who tells him that he has come to the end of his running. The novel ends ambiguously, questioning the nature of discourse and leaving Mason in the dark.

The Characters

Mason Ellis is the focal point of the novel. The reader never really knows if Mason is hallucinating or is dreaming what has happened. The first part of the novel sketches Mason’s youth and young manhood in a realistic mode, but as the novel progresses the text becomes more fantasy than reality. The possibility of Mason’s schizophrenia is brought up early in the novel in relation to his fantasy episodes with Celt CuRoi. A strict reading of Mason’s character as insane is too easy an interpretation of this complicated text. Certainly, the issue of Mason’s criminality and his great hoax of masquerading as a well-known black Author is cloaked in ambiguity. The reader comes to believe that Mason is in fact a black author struggling with defining his identity and somehow feeling as if he is an impostor.

Mason’s background as an African American contains many authentic touches and suggests a continuity of community that Mason seems incapable of accepting. References are made to black authors and aspects of the black vernacular and folk tradition. Black musicians such as Charlie Parker, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and the Platters pop up continuously in the text. Furthermore, the split in Mason’s consciousness represented by his connection to the Irish-sounding Celt CuRoi and his search for authentic African American identity and African heritage may in part be responsible for the conflicts in the novel. Mason’s criminality figures heavily in the first half of the novel, yet in the second part, he is able to talk to academic audiences all over the world, and his expertise is never brought into question. The two parts of his personality do not seem to connect in any meaningful way except on the hinge of his assumption of the black Author’s identity. In the end, perhaps readers are meant to see Mason’s and the Author’s identity as the same. The narrative then concerns the progressive disintegration of Mason’s consciousness as he travels back to his African roots for rebirth and renewal.

This divorce in Mason’s reality is reflected in the other characters in the novel. Mason’s family history is well sketched. Readers recognize his light-skinned mother and his renegade father as two characters who have emotional range and depth. Mason’s progression from childhood through his time in the Air Force to his disastrous marriage in Chicago also has the ring of verisimilitude. Mason’s entry into the criminal world seems less substantive. With this descent, the novel’s focus also begins to fragment. The characters of Edith, Jesus, and Brad, with whom Mason commits a bank robbery, are shadowy at best. Edith Levine is an academic who craves the excitement of the underworld. Jesus and Brad could be anybody as they become props in Mason’s growing obsession with the Author.

Nebulous characterization is best represented by the Author. The reader is never given a clue about this character. He may be Clarence McKay, or he may be Mason Ellis, who imagines himself as an impostor masquerading as himself. As the narrative focuses more on Mason’s wild hallucinations of pursuit, capture, and torture, other characters become only names who pop up in the text. This sketchy characterization becomes the norm as Mason travels (as the Author) through the United States, Europe, and Africa.

Readers are hazily informed of Mason’s extracurricular activities, in which he continuously gets free meals, alcohol, and women. In Nice, his companion is an exchange student named Barbara Ann who may or may not be appearing in his bed at night chain-smoking cigarettes. In Berlin, it is a professor, Heiner Graf, with whom he spends a riotous evening ending in a mad bombing spree. In Italy, it is Vito and nameless women. In Greece, it is Zizi Kifissias, a painter, and Melina Karamanlis, a journalist. The catalog of minor characters continues to the end of the book, with no clear rationale for their existence ever established.

Overall, the characters in My Amputations revolve around the central character of Mason Ellis. Mason is the focal point of the narrative, and the characters in the first part of the book help to elucidate his early background. In the second part, the characters become whimsical and elusive. As Mason slips in and out of dreams and hallucinations, the characters may be people he meets or simply figments of his imagination.

Critical Context

My Amputations fits well into Major’s body of postmodernist writing. Major is perhaps best known for his novel All-Night Visitors (1969), which shares many of the themes surrounding African American male identity found in this novel. Major experiments with unusual narrative techniques, blending prose and poetry. He is also interested in creatively adapting genre forms, as in the detective novel Reflex and Bone Structure (1975). Major’s background as a painter is often seen in his novels. My Amputations contains many references to European painters of the modern tradition.

Major is recognized as a leading experimenter in black writing and has been critically appraised as an innovative artist. In novels such as All-Night Visitors, No (1973), and Emergency Exit (1979), the author uses a combination of prose experiments to present an alternative view of the African American experience. His work is commonly appreciative of the black vernacular tradition. Through the daring use of sex, nonlinear plots, and unreliable narrators, Major confirms the postmodernist examination of fiction’s accepted roles in society. Major’s work rejects the assumption that language offers a logical means by which one might understand the world. In the end, the text represents nothing outside itself.

Major is an African American poet and editor of the Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (1970). He is often cited as one of the founding theoreticians of the 1960’s new black aesthetic movement. As editor of a poetry anthology, The New Black Poetry (1969), Major stressed the importance of African American poetic identity in collectively attempting to revolutionize social and political relationships through creation of a brotherhood of black consciousness. This African American cultural emphasis and heightened sense of the positive black identity was shared by other black writers such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Addison Gayle, Jr., and Ishmael Reed.

Bibliography

Bell, Bernard W. “Modernism and Postmodernism.” In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Places Major in the African American postmodern tradition of experimenting with language and form. Sees Major as parodying and extending genre forms while searching for new ways to express African American identity.

Black American Literary Forum 13, no. 2 (1979). This issue is devoted to Major and contains a number of interesting articles. Among these are “Towards a Primary Bibliography of Clarence Major,” by Joe Weixlmann and Clarence Major, and “Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure and the Anti-Detective Tradition,” by Larry McCaffrey and Linda Gregory.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Chapter Eight: Clarence Major.” In The Life of Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Discusses the disruptive qualities of Major’s work in relation to the postmodernist text. Sees Major as an instrumental African American writer who blends social and racial critique into experimental texts.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Places Major in a postmodern tradition of writers including William S. Burroughs and John Barth. Considers Major an extremely clever writer confronting accepted narrative conventions.

Major, Clarence. The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work. New York: Third Press, 1974. A collection of varied essays, including Major’s seminal essay on the black aesthetic titled “Black Criteria.” Also includes a number of interviews, one of them a self-interview.