McKay, Claude. Banana Bottom. 1933, reprint,
Chatham, N.J.: The Chatham Bookseller, 1970.
Singh, Amritjit. The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance:
Twelve Black Writers, 1923–1933. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.
Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for
Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1992.
Banjo: A Story Without a Plot
Claude McKay(1929)
A novel inspired by CLAUDEMCKAY’s own experi-
ences and interactions with the laborers, seamen,
and itinerants whom he met while in the French
port city of Marseille in 1926. Banjoattempts to ar-
ticulate the meanings of racial differences, and it
explores the tension between private artistic vision
and the public politics of representation. The
novel features Ray and Banjo, two characters
whom McKay developed first in HOME TO
HARLEM(1928), the controversial novel that he
published just one year earlier.
Banjois a novel in which McKay takes great
pains to underscore the differences between white
and African-American culture. The subtitle, “A
Story Without a Plot,” signals the potential itiner-
ancy of the work, not just of the primary charac-
ters themselves. McKay uses Lincoln Agrippa
Daily, known also as Banjo, to represent blackness
as an extremely natural state that is represented
well by music and by seemingly immediate, un-
thinking responses to the world. The story is set in
Marseille, a place that will not only host a Pan-
African conference but one that is also home to
cabarets and prostitutes. The glaring juxtaposition
here establishes the first of many binary opposi-
tions that exist in the novel. Banjo, characterized
in one review as “the unthinking negro” of the
book, pursues a relatively carefree life as an itiner-
ant musician. Ray welcomes his interaction with
Banjo, a figure who is even more free-spirited than
his old friend Jake in Home to Harlem.Banjo, who
is also a master of the instrument after whom his
nickname is derived, persuades Ray to accompany
him on his adventures. Together, the two immerse
themselves in the lower-class communities of the
city. They survive interactions with Satanists, the
gruesome deaths of several compatriots, and trou-
bling interactions with West Africans who suffer at
the hands of aggressive French police.
By the novel’s end, Ray is the character who
has sustained the most ambitious conversations
about race, art, materialism, European racism, and
racial stereotypes. In contrast, it is Banjo who ap-
pears to test his friend’s theories and who gravi-
tates toward action rather than speculation,
toward immersion rather than purposeful objectiv-
ity. Ultimately, Ray does not allow his penchant
for intellectual inquiry to keep him from the
streets. The novel closes as he and Banjo decide
to leave the city and continue their travels to-
gether elsewhere.
McKay, who was traveling abroad during the
period in which he wrote and then revised the
novel, had to contend with major and unsolicited
editorial revisions of his work. When he received
the proofs, he was struck by what he regarded as
excessive changes to his writing. “I am a poet and
have always striven conscientiously to find words
to say exactly what I see and feel,” he wrote in a
letter to editor Eugene Saxton at the press. He in-
sisted that he “took a long time to write Banjoin
the face of real difficulties, writing and re-writing
to find the right words to rend the atmosphere and
the types that moved in it” and suggested that the
editors had “wantonly compromise[d] the charac-
ter of my writing by replacing my personal words
with cheap two- and three-syllabled stock words”
(Cooper, 253). He won the right to have his origi-
nal prose restored, although the publishers charged
him for this second round of editing.
Reviewers welcomed the reemergence of Ray, a
character who they believed “bobs up again in
Banjoto rescue Mr. McKay’s second novel from...
‘the sink of naturalism’” (NYT,12 May 1929, BR5).
Recent scholarship on McKay and this novel, how-
ever, suggests that the work is part of McKay’s de-
liberate effort to “antagoniz[e] the American black
intellectual establishment” and to generate a work
in which the “sterility and the perversion of materi-
alistic white culture... are... repeatedly summa-
rized, analyzed, and denounced” (Giles, 84). There
is continued debate about whether or not the novel
is a purposeful representation of African-American
life. One early review of the work suggested that
“[i]n spite of some too-picturesque writing in which
the color is slapped on with several trowels, and in26 Banjo: A Story Without a Plot