“The Essence of the Word is its Ambivalence”: Writing the Color Line in
Twentieth Century Southern Literature
A Division III Project
by Grace Hirt
2012-2013
Committee Chair: Rachel Rubinstein
Committee Member: Michele Hardesty
2 Acknowledgments
This project would have been impossible without the help of my insightful, intelligent, positive, encouraging, all-around wonderful committee, Rachel Rubinstein and Michele
Hardesty. I always approached my meetings with them in a state of anxiety, worrying that I had not produced enough, or that what I had produced would not meet their high standards. I walked out of nearly every one of those meetings feeling invigorated and encouraged, challenged to do my best work and confident in my ability to rise to that challenge. Every Division III should be so lucky to have a committee with such energy and dedication. I cannot thank them enough.
There are a few other professors who made invaluable contributions to this project. Professor Michael Gorra of Smith College not only allowed me the academic freedom of writing my Faulkner chapter as the final paper for his excellent Faulkner class, but also took the time to provide thorough feedback and support. At Hampshire,
Professor Brown Kennedy, in one long and important meeting, inspired me to undertake the most intense and rewarding re-writing project of my academic career. I am also indebted to Professor Scott Branson for meeting with me numerous times to talk about my O’Connor chapter, which would not have been nearly as good without his helpful input. I wish he had decided to include Wise Blood on the syllabus for his fascinating class on the experimental novel, but in any case I am also extremely grateful that I was able to take it.
Thank you to the directors of the David E. Smith Endowment, for their generous support, and finally, thank you to my family and friends.
3
4 Contents
Acknowledgments...... 3
Introduction...... 7
1 “It Was Not to Her I Spoke”: Absalom, Absalom! and the Presence of Absence...... 21
2 No Place to Be: Racial Structures and Identity in the Novels of Flannery O’Connor...... 53
3 Ellison’s American Joke: Laughter and Ambivalence in Invisible Man...... 85
Conclusion...... 123
Bibliography...... 131
5
6 Introduction
Poet and scholar Kevin Young begins his monumental study of the black American artistic tradition by explaining what he calls the “shadow book.” These are books that are either unwritten, such as Du Bois’ Africana Encyclopedia or the second novels of
Toomer and Ellison; removed, “the book that’s a shadow of the one we do have...the secret book found just behind all the others, its meaning never to be fully revealed;” or lost, books that have been written and are now gone, what Young describes as “ghost limbs.”1 These black-authored and -unauthored shadow books represent the conflicted relationships of black writers to the condition of being black in the United States, the fleeting and constricted and threatened nature of black utterance, and the works of art that are as yet unclaimed in the black tradition.2 As Young describes it, the shadow book is the (non-)product of a long history of racial oppression, and the pressures it put and puts on black authorship and creativity.
I am interested in what we can glean from the unwritten words that stand behind and outside all that is written. The blackness of Young’s shadow book is indisputable – the concept arises from particular historically determined circumstances of oppression, and has its own specific concerns. Nonetheless, there are always things that cannot be written, things that fall outside the bounds of acceptability or conscious ideology, dangerous things that must be excluded from straightforward articulation. I do not mean to suggest that the same kinds of pressures that have limited black authorship have been exerted with the same intensity on white authorship – it is not my goal to make a comparative claim one way or the other. I only wish to point out and explore the
1 The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press 2012), 14. 2 Ibid. 11-15.
7 pressures that race has exerted on both black and white imaginations throughout the history of the United States, “a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression.”3 And because the United States as we know it is a nation that was essentially written into existence, I am particularly interested in the role of the word in both repressing and revealing, articulating and silencing, these anxieties.
Ralph Ellison, in 1946, recognized the dual power of literary language when he wrote that “[t]he essence of the word is its ambivalence, and in fiction it is never so effective and revealing as when both potentials are operating simultaneously, as when it mirrors both good and bad, as when it blows both hot and cold in the same breath.”4 He lamented the fact that the scales of this ambivalent language were tipped against the black
American to such a degree that even the greatest of the nation’s writers created images of black people “drained of humanity” (CE 82). The black characters in the work of twentieth-century literary titans like Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner, where they even appear at all, are one-dimensional, shallow, and distorted, “seldom...possessing the full, complex ambiguity of the human” (CE 82). Ellison sees this as the result of a shift from humanism to individualism in American fiction – a trend elevating technical accomplishment at the expense of literature’s moral possibilities, and implicitly evading the nation’s central unresolved moral issue of race (CE 91-2). But he also anticipates
Toni Morrison’s work on the Africanist presence in American literature when he claims that “the Negro stereotype is really an image of the unorganized, irrational forces of
3 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage 1993, originally published 1992), xiii. 4 “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library 1995), 81. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text as CE.
8 American life, forces through which, by projecting them in forms of images of an easily dominated minority, the white individual seeks to be at home in the vast unknown world of America” (CE 97). My project is inspired by this dual quality of racial language in
American fiction, the ways it both evades the question of black humanity and is shaped by it in profound if not-quite-articulated ways. Between the self-conscious construction of free white selfhood and the repressed universe of influences represented by black bodies lies a boundary that has proven to be crucial fictional territory for both white and black writers.
Toni Morrison’s thesis is premised on that self-conscious construction of whiteness – the need of a new republic to “consolidat[e] identity along culturally valuable lines of interest.”5 She illustrates the extent to which free white selfhood relied upon its control of subdued and othered black bodies, the constant companions to the closed images of “impenetrable” and “blinding whiteness” that she encounters so often in early
American literature.6 The construction of a solid, unquestionable white identity requires the foregrounding of its opposite in order to delineate and maintain a strict boundary – of feeling, identification, expression, and general humanity – between the two. The
Enlightenment ideology that so heavily informed early discursive constructions of
Americanness had to designate a difference between the free white and the enslaved black, a difference that required the negation of black humanity itself. Both the inhuman images of black people that characterize so much American literature, as well as the tradition of blackface minstrelsy,7 do the conscious work of maintaining that concrete and
5 Ibid. 39. 6 Ibid. 33. 7 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press 1993).
9 fundamental boundary between white and black subjectivity. But these qualities that white American literature often assigns to “blackness” also reveal the profound incoherence and instability that spring from that boundary.
The uncomfortable knowledge that the boundary between black and white is not, in fact, so solidly or clearly demarcated exerts unconscious force in the novels I examine in my study. The white mind’s obsession with maintaining this boundary between its own full personhood and a diminished or nonexistent black humanity indicates the threatening power of black subjectivity to disrupt and complicate a carefully constructed white identity. If Young’s black shadow book is composed of what has not yet been said – if it stands for the potentialities of the imaginative freedom that exists within constricted circumstances – then the analogous white book could be described as containing what cannot be said about the power – white power – that creates and enforces those circumstances. The first two chapters of this study examine the incoherence and instability that grow out of those unspeakable areas of white consciousness, and in this way my work is very much in the vein of Morrison’s. The identities of these novels’ white protagonists are shaped by the presence of blackness and the pressure it exerts on the neat distinctions that American white supremacy imposes between the races. The barrier created by the American racial system becomes visible where white prose cannot conceive of fully realized black characters, but this absence, conceived as the opposite side of an unbridgeable racial binary, ultimately reveals the instability of such a binary.
In its need to exorcise “blackness” from itself, the white literary ego becomes incapable of fully understanding itself, and the result is a literary inscription of identity rife with contradiction and incoherence.
10 There are many ways of understanding the incoherence that springs from the uneasy black/white divide in American culture. In Love and Theft, Eric Lott makes the case that blackface minstrelsy’s cultural domination and othering of black bodies hides a basic white desire for those bodies and the internal taboos represented by the staged images: “Whites get satisfaction in supposing the ‘racial’ Other enjoys in ways unavailable to them...And yet at the same time, because the Other personifies their inner divisions, hatred of their own excess of enjoyment necessitates hatred of the Other.”8
Black bodies exert unquestionable power over the white imagination, even the very formation of the white ego itself. Not only do whites “love” blacks in these veiled ways, black bodies occupy a certain “place” in the white psyche that is crucial to the internal coherence of that psyche. Anne Anlin Cheng identifies this dynamic with the melancholic ego, which is “formed and fortified by a spectral drama, whereby the subject sustains itself through the ghostly emptiness of a lost other.”9 The white American ego sustains itself by making black humanity into a “ghostly emptiness,” constitutive of
American identity precisely because it was exorcised in the early formation of American identity.10 The white mind must continually reinforce the exorcism, which means that the
“absent presence” of black bodies, and what they represent in relation to white power, must persist.
It is my concern in the first two chapters of this study to examine moments where the ghostly or repressed presence of blackness disrupts the coherence of white identity. I focus on how the relative historical positioning of blacks and whites influences two
8 Ibid. 148. 9 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), 10. 10 Ibid. 11.
11 iconic white Southern writers’ imaginations, and the strategies they develop to deny this influence or exorcise its effects. My interest lies in what they cannot say about Southern history and identity, and the various ways these unspeakable things are nonetheless expressed. Forming an identity in the United States means positioning oneself within the complex web of racial feeling that is attached to historical images and roles, and nowhere is this more complicated than in the South. The problem that Southern history presents to these writers is not simply guilt, though that guilt is both an origin point and offshoot of a deeper, more uncomfortable quandary. In these first two analyses, I find that the white southerners’ inability to come to terms with the influence of blackness and black humanity on their own identities results in a profound incoherence and dividedness in those identities. From this unspeakable, un-writeable zone of consciousness springs
Quentin’s simultaneous obsession with and horror at Southern history in Absalom,
Absalom!, and the futility of Hazel Motes’ search for home and coherence based on transitory symbols of self-reliance in Wise Blood. In short, I have attempted to centralize the repression of blackness in the formation of white identity as it appears in the work of
William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, and the moral and philosophical implications of such repression for these novels’ central characters.
The final section of my study concerns what it is to live and write as the object of that psychological repression, behind the veil of what Du Bois termed double- consciousness. Being black in America means being historically identified as the object of the white gaze, a gaze marked both by desire and fear, admiration and contempt. For
Du Bois, it is a condition of seeing oneself “through the revelation of the other world,”
12 i.e., the white world.11 It is to live both as oneself and as the image that other world wants to see; it is to play the role the white world demands in order to maintain its own social and psychological coherence. Du Bois asserts that it is through “dogged strength alone” that the black people are kept “from being torn asunder” by this “two-ness.”12
Strength may be essential for Du Bois, but it is clear that more complex forces are at work in the black artistic tradition than the simple capacity to endure. For it was not strength alone that created the uniquely American black culture that Ralph Ellison celebrates in Invisible Man. This culture does, however, have its roots in the “two-ness” that Du Bois identifies as double-consciousness. From the beginning, slaves understood the role they played in the eyes of the masters, and understood it as just that: a role in a scripted drama of power, in which a good performance meant survival. They wore the mask of obedience, but “behind the veil,” they saw the score. And within a system that designated them as a sign for inhuman evil, the slaves created an alternate system of meaning.13
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. focuses on the Signifyin(g) tradition, while Kevin Young approaches vernacular more generally, but both take the stance that American black speech and tradition arose at least in part out of the need to create codes that could not be understood by the masters. “African American Vernacular English is often spoken to confuse as much as to communicate; it is ‘untranslatable’ because it does not want to be...No wonder that to be ‘with it’ you must be ‘down’ – the vernacular speaks on the
11 W.E.B. du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classics 1995), 45. 12 Ibid. 13 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning,” in The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, ed. Abby Wolf (New York: Basic Civitas 2012), 234-286.
13 lower frequencies.”14 These “lower frequencies” are the ones undetectable to the loud power of whiteness, the voices disguised as harmless or simply meaningless. The tradition does the work of creating a racial community based on shared and inherited tropes that take shape independently of white meaning. Ellison focused on the comical aspects of this tradition, the humor that always infuses the blues, and the space that it creates for independent black consciousness. The question that I present in my final chapter is whether this tradition itself, and the laughter that characterizes it, truly constitute a political strategy. In other words, can the black tradition, by speaking only on the lower frequencies and consciously closing itself off from institutional white power, make progress toward racial justice?
* * *
The progression from Faulkner to O’Connor to Ellison arose from a more or less organic process of intellectual inquiry. I began this project because I was interested in the first two specifically as Southern writers. Besides my purely subjective enjoyment of their prose, I was intrigued by the South as an idea, from my position of outsider looking in.
Without a doubt, I initially accepted some version of the myth of Southern exceptionalism: I began with the intention of charting the literary implications of
Southern defeat in the Civil War, which as C. Vann Woodward points out, is not an experience shared by any other part of the United States.15 This unique historical experience led to my interest in the uniquely Southern way of remembering it, or misremembering it, as the honorable struggle of agrarian underdogs against the powerful
14 Young 129. 15 “The Irony of Southern History,” from The Burden of Southern History (Louisiana State University 1960 and 1968), reprinted in William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, ed. David Minter (New York: Norton 1994), 243.
14 industrial North. I was and am interested in the South’s narrative of itself, how that narrative is maintained and challenged, and the role literature plays in doing both. My status as a northerner – a foreigner – compelled me to penetrate the curtain that separated my understanding of the world from the one I saw represented in these two iconic
Southern writers.
But even as a northerner, it took me some time to move beyond the myths. In working on Faulkner’s text, for a long time I focused on the endless, twisting, tortured repetitions of the same historical narrative – the bewilderment and confusion over what had occurred seventy years before – without coming to the center of those convoluted linguistic spirals. The South’s history of slavery forms the moral heart of its defeat, its memory of the war, and Faulkner’s work, and it is for precisely this reason that the text cannot bring itself to contemplate slavery’s defining horror: the denial of the humanity of those who were enslaved. In order to maintain and rationalize a system of such brutality, slaves were defined as less than human or inhuman, with no agency of their own besides raw savageness. The violence inherent in this conception of difference is succinctly summed up in Morrison’s account of the “ego-reinforcing presence of an Africanist population”:
This population is convenient in every way, not the least of which is self- definition. This new white male can now persuade himself that savagery is ‘out there.’ The lashes ordered...are not one’s own savagery; repeated and dangerous breaks for freedom are ‘puzzling’ confirmations of black irrationality; the combination of Dean and Swift’s beatitudes and a life of regularized violence is civilized; and if the sensibilities are dulled enough, the rawness remains external.16
The system requires that the master both designate the slave as inhuman and continually project the internal cruelty and violence that such a designation implies outward onto the
16 Morrison 45.
15 slave. For the master to contemplate the slave as a person in the same category as himself is impossible within this system, which relies on the enforcement of strict racial boundaries. And yet, the historical reality of miscegenation demonstrates that these boundaries were not actually so strict, and the end of slavery meant that slaves became fully human in the eyes of the law. It is significant that Absalom, Absalom! was published one year after Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America and the same year as
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind: it is a crucial contribution to the contested discourse of Southern historical narrative.
My first chapter, an analysis of Absalom, Absalom!, is primarily concerned with
Quentin’s psychological divide over the Sutpen story and what it means for his relationship with the South – and this divide springs from those strict but unsustainable boundaries placed between the races. Sutpen, the figure at the heart of the novel, represents the unspeakably inhuman lengths to which the white South had to go to enforce those boundaries. The totalizing narrative of Southern history built on black inhumanity becomes insufficient for Quentin; the tightly-woven fabric of tradition is unable to contain the full truth of the love story that develops or its horrifying end.
Quentin becomes alienated from his region and even from himself as he comes closer to comprehending this flaw, but it is so disruptive to his conception of his region and his own identity that he can only approach it through echoes and repetitions, never looking straight at the root of his panic. I use Cathy Caruth’s work on Freudian/Lacanian trauma theory to illuminate this seemingly paradoxical centrality of de-centeredness, the crucial aspect of the characters’ history and identity that is also situated outside their comprehension. To comprehend the full moral weight of slavery is to comprehend the
16 full humanity of slaves – and to condemn the entire cultural narrative whose purpose is to refute it. Though it can only be approached indirectly, that consciousness exists in the text and shapes it, and suggests a parallel book that cannot be written due to its place just outside the language available to describe it.
My second chapter takes on the Africanist presence in Flannery O’Connor’s two novels, and how the respective identities of the main characters are shaped by the relatively short interactions each has with a black man at the beginning of their journeys.
Wise Blood opens with Hazel Motes on a train taking him away from his abandoned home town, Eastrod, and he has a confrontation with a black porter that establishes his central crisis. The porter refuses to play along with Hazel’s assertion that he knows him from Eastrod, instead insisting that he is from Chicago. The porter’s blackness means that he occupies a certain predetermined position in Hazel’s consciousness, which is experiencing a radical ungrounding as the novel opens. With no family or geographical reference point by which to construct a new identity, Hazel latches onto the porter as a comforting, controllable image that he associates with his lost home. The porter’s denial of this assigned role disrupts Hazel’s sense of himself, history, and language, so that for the rest of the novel he is engaged in a futile search for coherence with only himself as a reference point. In O’Connor’s second novel, the black man’s presence is in some ways parallel, but functionally wholly different from the porter’s. This man, Buford Munson, is accommodating, and essentially part of the land that young Tarwater calls “home.” He does not pose a challenge to Tarwater’s sense of himself. Instead he is static, remaining in the rural setting (where Hazel would presumably wish to place the porter in his mind)
17 and maintaining it as a living home to which Tarwater can return and from which he can set off, confirmed in his freely adopted identity.
I decided to take on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in my third chapter because I saw in it a response to the complex of evasion and repressed obsession with which white authors so frequently approached the question of race. White America’s need to avoid contemplating black humanity, paired with the obvious reality of its existence as well as the central place black people occupy in American identity and life, informs the novel’s richly comic but equally tragic portrait of what it means to be the object of this psychological drama. In this chapter, I examine both the performative nature of race in this country as well as the black tradition that has grown up in response to it, especially its humorous elements as they appear in Invisible Man. I ask whether knowing, ironic laughter in the face of the absurdity of racial boundaries can truly constitute a strategy for fighting racial oppression, if one is still playing the role the oppressor expects. I find that at the end of Ellison’s novel, the narrator embraces the ambiguity and ambivalence of language to express the possibilities inherent in himself as a political actor, using the tools of fiction to imagine a new, inclusive political and artistic space. Despite Ellison’s
1946 condemnation of modern American fictional portrayals of black humanity, his novel reveals an overriding faith in the unique role of literature in creating a multi-dimensional
American character, “a delicately poised unity of divergencies” (CE 83).
The story I am trying to tell with these three chapters is, then, one of movement.
The “place” blacks occupy in the white American imagination has never been stationary, of course; it has always been in the process of renovation by art, culture, and political reality. But within the time period I focus on, the race question went from being a
18 repressed human rights tragedy to a central political issue for the nation as a whole.
Between Absalom, Absalom!’s appearance in 1936 and The Violent Bear it Away’s in
1960, millions of blacks migrated from the rural South to Northern industrial cities as part of the Great Migration that began after World War I and did not end until 1970.17
Blacks rejected the prejudice and oppression they experienced in the South by leaving it in droves, producing a radical shift in demographics that was instrumental in spurring political action for civil rights. White America could no longer avoid the reality of black participation in national life, nor could it ignore the violence that made life in the South intolerable for many blacks. Because the novels I examine in this study were written during a time of such extreme cultural upheaval, when the contradiction between
American ideals and the reality of its prejudices was becoming so unavoidable, my project ceased to be “about” the South, even though all three authors and their novels are rooted there. The color line during this period was becoming more and more visible and prominent in the mind of the entire nation. “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”18 – Du Bois does not call it a Southern problem.
All three of my chapters engage in some way with this movement from South to
North and how it impacts the way the texts address race. For Quentin, leaving the South for Harvard means having to represent to an outsider the myths that make up his identity as a southerner, revealing both his own intense attachment to those myths and his feeling of alienation from them. In Wise Blood, the train porter who enforces Haze’s feeling of homelessness is a walking symbol of both the Great Migration and the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, the first black labor union, which played an instrumental role in
17 Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, Vintage 2011). 18 Du Bois 78.
19 early agitation for civil rights.19 Haze’s unease with his own lost place in society is expressed through his disbelief that the porter could be from Chicago, and disgust at the idea of driving a car built by blacks in Detroit.20 This significant demographic shift, uprooting Southern blacks from their origins, also uproots Haze’s sense of his own origins and cancels the possibility of his feeling “in place” anywhere. Finally, in
Invisible Man, the protagonist leaves his Southern college to pursue opportunity in New
York – only to find that the racial structures that dominated his life in the South were not dismantled when he crossed the Mason-Dixon. It is only the overtness of the racial violence that diminishes; the Invisible Man is still expected to play a certain role that denies him individual humanity. I eventually realized that the geographical boundary between North and South was almost immaterial when it came to addressing the full complexity of the American color line and its appearance in literature. Though the authors I write about are Southern, reading their novels in the context of the historical trajectory of the twentieth century reveals that the color line was – and remains – a fully
American problem.
19 William A. Darity, “Pullman Porters,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 6th ed., s.v. 6 vols. (Detroit: Macmillian Reference USA 2008): 628-629. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
20 Chapter One
“It Was Not to Her I Spoke”: Absalom, Absalom! and the Presence of Absence
1936 was a banner year in Southern letters, producing both Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! The appearance of two books in the same year that took the Civil War and Reconstruction as their subject matter may have been coincidental, but it also makes clear just how prevalent these events were in the Southern mind a full seventy years after the end of the war. Both novels took part in the ongoing conversation about how Southern history should be remembered, a largely white conversation that glorified the antebellum South and blamed the North for the failure of Reconstruction. Though W.E.B. Du Bois had made a radically new contribution to that conversation the year before with his monumental study, Black
Reconstruction in America, the wild popularity of Mitchell’s novel demonstrated that most white southerners – and northerners – preferred to take a more romantic view of the
Old South rather than seriously contemplate the moral problem of slavery and the role of blacks in Southern history. Not so with Faulkner. His densely layered novel takes up his regional history with all its contradictions, and finds in the Southern mentality, which perpetually memorializes Confederate heroes and mourns the loss of some idyllic antebellum past, not an honorable tradition, but rather one that evades the central moral questions of Southern history and obscures as much as it reveals about the character of those heroes. The Confederate ghosts that populate Jefferson, Mississippi assert themselves as unavoidable presences, and the old stories about them constitute a memorial tradition that demands participation. To live in this place is not only to be
21 surrounded by ghosts, but to be forced to negotiate a personal relationship with these ghosts and the history they represent.
The repetitive telling by which history asserts itself as tradition in Jefferson is more interesting for what it cannot say than for what it does say over and over. The spiraling narrative in Absalom, Absalom! always runs up against something it cannot explain, most prominently the murder of Charles Bon by Henry Sutpen right before Bon was supposed to marry Henry’s sister Judith. This central mystery of Jefferson’s past contains the kernel of everything that is inaccessible and unspeakable about Southern history. It is a moment that can only be approached indirectly, a missed encounter with the violence that must be repressed as the origin of Southern tradition. Quentin
Compson, a Jefferson native who leaves for Harvard in 1910, and his college roommate,
Canadian Shreve McCannon, are the ones who are able to come up with an explanation for this violence: Henry’s discovery that Bon is not only his half-brother, but that his father abandoned his first wife and son because he discovered that they had black ancestry, and were therefore unsuitable to his dynastic purposes. Race, of course, is at the center of the story, but what seems the only logical conclusion to the two young men is passed over by the town’s telling. It must be passed over, for to acknowledge the central place of miscegenation in the South’s history – to acknowledge that Henry murdered his brother, an act of extreme and inhuman violence – would be to face the unspeakable guilt implied in the original sin of slavery.
The tradition of Southern memory in which Faulkner and Quentin are steeped foregrounds the suffering of the whites during and after the war and deliberately avoids acknowledging the centrality of slavery – indeed, its constitutive role – in the antebellum
22 South. If this Lost Cause mythology was an attempt to celebrate Southern military heroism while ignoring the memory of the war’s moral center – the end of slavery – then it can be seen as an exercise in the repression of the guilt attendant upon participating in a system that robbed an entire population of its humanity. David Blight notes that this kind of repressive memory was a national trend, not only a Southern one: in ceremonies, speeches, and monument dedications all over the country in the decades following the
Civil War, there was a tendency toward reconciliation, glorifying the valor of both
Northern and Southern soldiers at the expense of recognizing the moral superiority of the
Union cause.21 Frederick Douglass, for one, saw a dangerous historical erasure inherent in the placing of the South on equal moral grounds with the North simply because all the soldiers fought honestly and valiantly for a cause in which they firmly believed. He claimed that while the North may not have begun the war with Emancipation in mind, the war “came only to execute the moral and humane judgment of the nation...It was an instrument of a higher power than itself.”22 Douglass exerted considerable effort toward his goal of centralizing slavery in the nation’s memory of the Civil War, against the tide of historical revision that emphasized honor and bravery rather than the moral horror at the heart of the war. 23 This is the Southern memorial tradition of which Quentin is a part: it represses the moral question of slavery in favor of remembering the war’s heroes, but in the novel, this repressed element renders the players in the South’s history – in this case, Thomas and Henry Sutpen specifically – incomprehensible, unrecognizable, and monstrous.
21 “‘For Something beyond the Battlefield’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” in Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press 2002), 93-119. 22 Douglass qtd. in ibid. 98. 23 Ibid.
23 There are four primary narrators in the novel, but Quentin has the most interesting role. He is poised between the South and the North, and has no direct experience of the events he is rehearsing. Yet he is also seemingly the most deeply troubled by the ghosts and secondhand memories that form the town’s tradition, and it is difficult not to read his anguish by the end of Absalom as a precursor to his suicide in Faulkner’s earlier (but chronologically later) novel, The Sound and the Fury. Quentin is haunted – in sociologist
Avery F. Gordon’s phrase – by historical forces that are also intensely personal, forces that claim him and demand his witness, but are simultaneously completely inaccessible to him.24 The tradition that mandates his participation makes the town’s ancestors perpetually present, but this overwhelming presence is also made strange by something missing. The “facts” of history are missing, but there is a more fundamental absence than that. The mysteriousness of the events, the distance, the strangeness, do the work of obscuring the original and formative violence of Southern history. Following Cathy
Caruth’s scholarship on historical trauma, and connecting it with Toni Morrison’s work on the Africanist presence in the formation of American identity, I locate the establishment of the system of slavery at the heart of Quentin’s struggles. Slavery requires the white master to turn away from black people as humans, an inherently violent act that prefigures slavery’s perpetual violence. The novel itself cannot fully contemplate blacks as humans, even as it continually calls attention at key moments to both the presence of black bodies and the inhuman violence that must be perpetrated to maintain the distinction. The result of this violence is a history too strange and appalling to approach directly, but too central and repercussive to ignore.
24 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997).
24 I. Ghosts and Traumas: Theoretical Groundwork
In order to understand Quentin’s burgeoning psychological breakdown, we must understand how the South functions in his psyche: as both an all-encompassing, constitutive force in his identity, and also an alien force that claims him from out of the long-dead past. The past is Jefferson’s obsession; to live there is to walk among phantoms evoked “out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust” itself (AA 4).
These “garrulous outraged baffled ghosts” that both inhabit and constitute the town are inextricable from their Civil War origins (AA 4), the point of departure for the town’s endlessly repetitive chorus of remembering. It is this “outraged recapitulation” of the dead names and stories told over and over that evokes the ghosts (AA 2). Political history is intimately personal in Jefferson, and it is this merger that structures Quentin’s experience of his hometown – and by extension, the South in general – as haunted.
In her work, Avery Gordon approaches haunting as a very real phenomenon located precisely in that margin that the “objective” facts offered by historical and sociological science must expel in order to maintain their own authority; hence her focus on fiction as a means of exploring “the story of how the real story has emerged,” what is left “gaping [and] detouring” “on the other side of the facts.”25 The condition for a haunting in Gordon’s estimation is what she terms a “noisy silence” or a “seething absence,” the elements of history that power has excluded from the legible or speakable record, which nonetheless assert themselves as presences to be reckoned with by the living. Faulkner’s novel is fictional, of course, and concerns itself with individual characters, but all of these characters – Quentin especially – are in the grip of historical
25 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997), 26-7.
25 forces, memories, and mysteries that defy their attempts at comprehension and categorization. History intrudes upon these characters, claims them, speaks to them, and requires their constant acknowledgment and attention, but remains elusive. The novel’s convoluted and repetitious language and indirect telling of events express this inexact nature of history: ghosts do not emerge where events are logical, simple, or accessible. In her chapter on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Gordon discusses how the novel “transform[s] those who do not speak into what is unspeakable...the ghost gesticulates, signals, and sometimes mimics the unspeakable as it shines for both the remembered and the forgotten.”26 Though it may seem an inappropriate leap to compare the ghost of a slave girl murdered by her mother to the Civil War ghosts that people Jefferson, it is not my intention to put the Confederates’ outrage and bafflement on equal footing with
Beloved’s anonymous suffering. It is my assertion, however, that the same system that created Beloved’s anonymity – “Slavery with a capital S”27 – created the town’s need to continually honor their confederate ghosts in a way that ignores their participation in that system. These are the “unspeakable origins” of whiteness,28 the rupture in humanity figured in Henry’s murder of his own brother, that must be erased and covered over by the creation of a new system for organizing memory. The missing black voice must be made ontologically silent; the mechanism by which black humanity was denied must itself be denied importance in the discourse. The horror of history becomes unspeakable.
Its shadow remains, however, silently engendering the “official” historical memory that
Jefferson obsessively cultivates, and that must work very hard to ignore those unspeakable origins.
26 Ibid. 150. 27 Ibid. 142. 28 Ibid. 189.
26 Quentin is at the psychic center of the novel: it is he whom Rosa summons to hear the story, he who also inherits it from his father, and he who must carry it north to
Harvard. His centrality reflects Faulkner’s enduring interest in this character, as seen through the lens of the impact of Southern history and what is missing from its memory on those who are two generations removed from the war. As Eric Sundquist points out, in writing the later novel and addressing the roots of Quentin’s psychological breakdown,
Faulker was “‘reading by repercussion’ his own work and the tragedy, the original sin, that set it in motion, knowing full well, as Rosa once again puts it, that ‘there is no all, no finish, it is not the blow we suffer from but the tedious repercussive anti-climax of it, the rubbishy aftermath to clear away from off the very threshold of despair.’”29 In Absalom, history’s all-encompassing but morally ambiguous haunting presence is clearly identified as an important factor in Quentin’s divided consciousness. He grows up fully immersed in a culture structured by memories and ghosts; he is, in fact, constituted by these ghosts, the names of which are “interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth” (AA 7). By virtue of his “twenty years’ heritage of breathing the same air and hearing his father talk about the man” (AA 7),
Quentin knows Sutpen’s story intimately and understands its prominence among the dead names that resound through his body. But he can only know it as a haunting: his position in history means that his only substantive experience of these dead names is as ghosts, rendered inhuman and “demon-like” by the “seething absence” left by the economic system they participated in and by the memorializing system of the town. Though this social memory is formative to Quentin’s identity, his encounter with the crucial facts of
29 Ibid. 136. Italics in original.
27 his regional history is restricted to a “tedious repercussive anti-climax,” which turns out to be more damaging to his psychological well-being than perhaps the blow itself would have been.
Quentin’s difficulty with Southern history springs, first of all, from that doubleness of experience, in which he is claimed by the past and obligated to take part in and perpetuate his town’s social memory, but also cut off from its reality in a profound way. The silent missing piece that renders Jefferson’s legendary figures unfamiliar and incomprehensible is magnified in Quentin’s consciousness, so that Sutpen can only be a demon to him, a ghost whose motives and character will always be obscure. This obscurity, Sutpen’s unknowability, merges with Quentin’s intensely tangible experience of knowing the story, and creates a loop of familiarity and strangeness that demands his attention. For not only must he face the implications of his town’s haunted tradition in his own mind, his leaving the South for Harvard means that he must take on the responsibility of representing his homeland to a Northern audience. It is here that a moral dimension enters the act of remembering, even if Quentin does not recognize it as such.
In acting as a representative of Southern history, he must negotiate his relationship with the romantic Lost Cause tradition, which upholds Southern honor and heroism while ignoring slavery’s centrality in the structure of antebellum Southern society. Quentin intuits an incoherence, a strangeness in the familiar story, something missing in the inherited tradition whose fixation on the “fever” of war obscures the importance of the systemic “disease” that was cured by that war (AA 7). But Miss Rosa demands that he swallow and reproduce the tradition in an easily digestible narrative of individual rather than systemic folly:
28 “So maybe you will enter the literary profession as so many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen too are doing now and maybe some day you will remember this and write about it. You will be married then I expect and perhaps your wife will want a new gown or a new chair for the house and you can write this and submit it to the magazines...[Sutpen] was brave. I have never gainsaid that. But that our cause, our very life and future hopes and past pride, should have been thrown into the balance with men like that to buttress it – men with valor and strength but without pity or honor. Is it any wonder that Heaven saw fit to let us lose?” (AA 5-13)
This version of Southern history, which Quentin has the unique opportunity (or obligation) to disseminate to a Northern audience, allows the South to disavow Sutpen’s
“dishonorable” character while retaining the moral authority of “our cause, our very life and future hopes and past pride.” The narrative that Miss Rosa expects Quentin to perpetuate is simple and reductive: it obscures the formative influence of slavery’s systemic violence on Sutpen’s character and the character of all the inhuman ghosts that haunt Jefferson. This tradition is the one that Frederick Douglass fought against with his insistence on remembering slavery’s place at the heart of the Civil War. This discourse with a missing piece, the systematically enforced silence within the narrative of Southern history, is the point of departure for the novel’s portrayal of Quentin’s psychological dividedness: it haunts him because it is both all-consuming and elusive.
Gordon’s theory of haunting overlaps in many aspects with Cathy Caruth’s treatment of trauma theory. Both scholars take on disciplines – sociology and psychoanalysis, respectively – that have traditionally been defined by their striving toward a more objective view of murky areas of human experience, and identify points where objectively available knowledge is insufficient to explain lived reality, where silences speak loudly, and where thresholds are uncrossable. In Unclaimed Experience:
Trauma, Narrative, and History, Caruth examines and expands upon Freud’s work on
29 trauma, which defines a traumatic experience as one “that is not fully assimilated as it occurs.”30 She explores the implications of this concept as it applies to a selection of both literary and theoretical texts, claiming that
these texts...ask what it means to transmit and to theorize around a crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness. Such a question...can never be asked in a straightforward way, but must, indeed, also be spoken in a language that is always somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding.31
Like Gordon’s noisy silences, the crisis intrudes and demands acknowledgment, but defies direct comprehension – and so can be productively explored, like haunting, using literary language. What arises to compensate for the absence of true understanding is the phenomenon Freud terms repetition compulsion, the repeated occurrence of nightmares and hallucinations that force the victim to endlessly relive the trauma in such a way that it intrudes upon normal life, perhaps leading to total breakdown. Since the recurring dream of the trauma cannot be said to express a subconscious desire, but is rather a wholly unwanted and destructive intrusion of a moment of violence, he recognizes it as an expression of the death drive – the desire of consciousness to return to the moment before it existed, the moment before its awakening to life – a moment that is, for obvious reasons, always inaccessible.32
Caruth identifies the death drive as the pivot between Freud’s explicit conception of trauma, as an incomprehensible confrontation with death, and her own reading of his work, in which she points to the “incomprehensibility of survival” 33 as key to the traumatic experience. The defining characteristic of trauma and its repetitious recurrence
30 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996), 5. 31 Ibid. 5. 32 Ibid. 65. 33 Ibid. 64.
30 is the “fright,” the result of consciousness being completely unprepared for the event and therefore experiencing it “out of time”:
The return of the traumatic experience in the dream is not the signal of the direct experience but, rather, of the attempt to overcome the fact that it was not direct, to attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place...For consciousness then, the act of survival, as the experience of trauma, is the repeated confrontation with the necessity and impossibility of grasping the threat to one’s own life. It is because the mind cannot confront the threat of death directly that survival becomes for the human being, paradoxically, an endless testimony to the impossibility of living.34
This incomprehensible survival is what Caruth identifies as the implicit key to understanding trauma in Freud’s text – the idea that life after trauma is an endless attempt to come to terms with one’s own mortality, and especially the dissonance between the threat of death and having survived it.
Trauma begins to bear more of a relationship with haunting when Caruth recounts how Freud expands his theory of trauma into a more general theory about history. He takes repetition compulsion – an unwanted, literal return of the past –
as a model for repetitive behavior in general, [and] ultimately argues, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that it is traumatic repetition, rather than the meaningful distortions of neurosis, that defines the shape of individual lives...[and] ultimately asks what it would mean to understand history as the history of a trauma.35
Freud understands the traumatic crisis as a figure for the violence of history, and in
Moses and Monotheism, he attempts an analogy between individual trauma and historical trauma via the history of the Jews. He invents a moment of violence at the beginning of
Jewish history – the murder of the first Moses, the originator of monotheism among the
Hebrews – and imagines it as a trauma which cannot be comprehended and must be repressed. After the murder comes the return of the repressed: a new leader, also named
34 Ibid. 62. 35 Ibid. 59-60.
31 Moses, who is eventually assimilated to the first one.36 Monotheism survives, but only as a tradition in Jewish life, as the sense of being chosen, which, Caruth explains, is for
Freud “precisely what cannot be grasped in the Jewish past, the way in which its past has imposed itself upon it as a history that it survives but does not fully understand.”37 The history of the Jews is thus figured in Freud’s work as deeply related to the story of an individual trauma as a formative experience of violence that the psyche cannot fully comprehend.
This rather lengthy summary of Caruth’s work with Freudian trauma theory is necessary to arrive at what I find her particularly striking and useful explanation of the individual’s relationship with history, and how history is generally constructed. Caruth takes on Freud’s account of Jewish tradition and zooms in on what it means to be
“chosen” – a question which she sees as directly tied to the post-traumatic grappling with what it means to survive:
If monotheism for Freud is an ‘awakening,’ it is not simply a return of the past, but of the fact of having survived it, a survival that, in the figure of the new Jewish god, appears not as an act chosen by the Jews, but as the incomprehensible fact of being chosen for a future that remains, in its promise, yet to be understood...The belated experience of trauma in Jewish monotheism suggests that history is not only the passing on of a crisis but also the passing on of a survival that can only be possessed within a history larger than any single individual or any single generation.38
The point that Caruth finds implicit in Freud is how generational or historical trauma, because it concerns events in the past that are formative but inaccessible, “is in some sense presupposed in the theory of individual trauma.”39 The essentially incomprehensible nature of moments of traumatic violence both in one’s individual
36 Ibid. 67. 37 Ibid. 68. Italics in original. 38 Ibid. 71. Italics in original. 39 Ibid. 136.
32 history and in a generational history like that of the Jews points to a notion of trauma that
“describes the individual experience as something that exceeds itself, that brings within individual experience as its most intense sense of isolation the very breaking of individual knowledge and mastery of events.”40 It is here that the notion of haunting crosses paths with trauma. If the traumatic experience, individually and historically, exceeds individual bounds, then it can be said to be intimately related, more or less abstractly, to the voice of another. Just as a haunting is the manifestation of a missing presence – missing from the historical or memorial record, but demanding witness nonetheless – the experience of trauma is an encounter with an event that does not properly belong to the one who experiences it. Because of the “irreducible inaccessibility and otherness”41 of this event (the condition of death), this encounter always implies the presence of “the other,” and an ethical imperative in survival to witness that otherness.42
This dimension of Caruth’s work is illuminated best in the final chapter of her book, in which she meticulously explores Freud’s case study of a man whose son has died of a fever; while someone else is watching over the body, the grief-stricken father attempts to get some sleep in the next room. The watcher falls asleep and one of the candles falls onto the sheet on which the corpse lies, setting the body on fire. In his sleep, the father sees his son, still alive, approach him and ask, “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” Immediately after this vision, he awakens to the reality of his son’s death and the quite literal burning in the next room. Caruth enumerates both Freud’s and Lacan’s interpretations of this particular narrative. While Freud theorized that the dream fulfills the desire of consciousness for its own suspension by prolonging the father’s sleep, Lacan
40 Ibid. 136. 41 Ibid. 105. 42 Ibid. 104-7.
33 focused on the awakening as “itself a site of trauma, the trauma of the necessity and impossibility of responding to another’s death.”43 The father’s awakening is a repetition of the death of his son, a reenactment of the father’s survival, which is “no longer simply the effect of an accident but carries within it, and is defined by, its response to the words of the dead child” – the response, that is, embodied in the father’s waking up.44 Caruth, expanding upon Lacan, illuminates the specifically ethical framework in which the awakening takes place. “To awaken,” she asserts, is “to bear the imperative to survive,” an imperative that implies an “appointment with the real,” a going forth into the world
“as the one who must tell what it means not to see, which is also what it means to hear the unthinkable words of the dying child.”45 Like a haunting, which demands not only acknowledgment but action on the part of the living in response to the absence of the dead,46 this notion of an “appointment with the real” implies the inherent necessity, after experiencing trauma, of bearing witness to it while never being able to fully possess it.
Though Freud’s case study is literally the story of an individual’s response to his dead child, insofar as trauma always involves a missed encounter with death, the experience of traumatic repetition always implies the voice of the other, missing from accessible experience and demanding witness because of it.
The voice of the other that is implicit in both haunting and the experience of trauma is the central reason I have embarked upon such a lengthy treatment of the theoretical work of both Gordon and Caruth. Both of these scholars take on the issue of social memory and how individuals engage with history, and both focus on the formative
43 Caruth 96, 100. Italics in original. 44 Ibid. 102. 45 Ibid. 105. Italics in original. 46 Gordon 137-90.
34 influence of the inaccessible elements of the past. Caruth’s work is more specifically concerned with how the psyche encounters history and what it means to be part of a tradition whose origins one cannot claim to understand, while Gordon delves more deeply into the nature of those origins, the voices missing from the historical record that insert themselves into modern life in the form of ghosts. I am focusing on these two paradigms in order to illustrate the central theoretical thrust of my argument about
Absalom, Absalom!, and how its characters engage with and respond to the tradition that informs their experience of history. The novel is explicitly concerned with history, but it is not just any history. It is first of all an unreadable history, overwhelmingly present in the life of the town but also inaccessible to immediate experience. The characters who take on the retelling of the Sutpen story are, to a certain extent, simply performing the task that all historians perform when confronted with an incomplete historical record.47
But within the context of the specific history they are reconstructing, there is a very obvious gap, a silence that structures both the story itself and the way the novel’s modern protagonists tell it. As is the case in Beloved, “those who do not speak [are transformed] into what is unspeakable.”48 The Southern tradition that demands Quentin’s participation must not acknowledge its own origins, specifically the violence implicit in the system of slavery that requires the denial of humanity to black people.
47 See Colleen E. Donnelly, “Compelled to Believe: Historiography and Truth in Absalom, Absalom!” Style 25 (1) (Spring 1991): 104-123. The author makes the case that Absalom is a novel about the metahistorical process, in which access to the “raw data” of history is never available and the creation of a historical narrative is a subjective – and communal – activity. 48 Gordon 150.
35 II. Inhuman Strangeness: The Absence of Sutpen
The violence enacted upon black bodies in slavery is required to enforce the idea of black inhumanity and is also made possible by it, but the white masters are not immune to the dehumanizing impact of this structure. Writer and literary scholar Toni Morrison names this impact as one of her concerns in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination, claiming that “a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters” is valuable on the same level as that which looks into the impact of this ideology on slaves.49 Morrison focuses on the formative presence of black slaves in the process of defining white American freedom and autonomy, a process which “necessitated coded language and purposeful restrictions to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart.”50 The cognitive dissonance produced by the gap between the discourse of freedom and the brutal reality of slavery in turn created the “significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, [and] heavily nuanced conflicts” Morrison finds so pervasive in white- authored American literature.51 In the early history of the United States, this literature self-consciously took part in the “highly problematic construction of the American as a new white man,” and the omissions and silences, which Morrison identifies as signs of the Africanist presence, stretch the seams of the design and demonstrate its unstable foundations.52
A foundational theme in the construction of white American individualism is the narrative of the white man conquering the savage wilderness by pure strength of will,
49 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books 1993, originally published 1992), 11-12. 50 Ibid. 6. 51 Ibid. 6. 52 Ibid. 39.
36 which also forms the basic structure of Thomas Sutpen’s arrival in Jefferson. He raises his plantation out of a swamp, using raw materials that he finds there in the wilderness twelve miles from town. He has help, of course, in the form of his “band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men,” the image of which Quentin finds inextricable from his mental picture of Sutpen himself (AA 4). Morrison foregrounds the importance of slaves in the narrative of whites taming the wilderness using a passage from Bernard Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West – a passage that compares its non-fictional subject, William Dunbar, to Faulkner’s Sutpen. Bailyn’s portrait of him highlights
Dunbar’s feeling of autonomy and freedom in a “raw, half-savage world” peopled by slaves, and Morrison asserts that the ideological construction of this “background of savagery”53 allows the new white man to define himself as different from it:
[The Africanist population] is convenient in every way, not the least of which is self-definition. This new white male can now persuade himself that savagery is ‘out there.’ The lashes ordered...are not one’s own savagery; repeated and dangerous breaks for freedom are ‘puzzling’ confirmations of black irrationality; the combination of Dean Swift’s beatitudes and a life of regularized violence is civilized; and if the sensibilities are dulled enough, the rawness remains external.54
In this equation, it becomes clear that Faulkner’s sensibilities are anything but dull. He describes the slaves in animalistic terms, but also often describes Sutpen in explicitly the same terms. He is rendered indistinguishable from his slaves in the building of his house, covered in mud like them and speaking to them in their language. In Rosa’s memory of her first sight of the family, Sutpen’s face is “exactly like” the “wild negro” driving the carriage (AA 16). In her mind, his demonic, inhuman qualities are intertwined with the same qualities she sees in the slaves, a connection that is not incidental. The equation of
53 Ibid. 42-4. 54 Ibid. 45.
37 Sutpen’s inhuman cruelty with black savagery is best expressed in the scene where he fights one of his own slaves, “both naked to the waist and gouging at one another’s eyes as if their skins should not only have been the same color but should have been covered with fur too” (AA 20-21). Notions of savagery, inhumanity, and barbarism traditionally located in black bodies spill out and encompass Sutpen as well, highlighting the violence inherent in the system of slavery and its designation of fundamental difference between black and white – a violence that, more than any other quality, comes to embody Sutpen and the way he is remembered.
Sutpen’s unfeeling character gives way to a general sense of his inaccessibility – his inhumanity structures the town’s perception of him in such a way that he is permanently defined by this enigmatic callousness. Mr. Compson puzzles over Sutpen’s
“morality which had all the parts but which refused to run, to move” (AA224). His lack of discernible morality is figured partly in his condition of perpetual bodily absence; even when he bursts seemingly from thin air into Jefferson, this radical presence is radical precisely because there is so much that is missing about him. His origins are shadowy and sinister in their unknowability: the town suspects that his wealth was not honestly gained, and his refusal to talk about where he came from lends him a permanent air of distance. His mysteriousness only reinforces his centrality, however. His absence during the war defines the nun-like existence of the three women who await his return at
Sutpen’s Hundred – Rosa states that “now he was all we had, all that gave us any reason for continuing to exist” (AA 124). He is a central figure in the women’s lives, but this centrality is premised on his not being there. When he returns from the war, Rosa says that only “the shell of him” is there, that he is absent from whatever room he is in
38 because “a part of him encompass[es] each ruined field and fallen fence and crumbling wall of cabin or cotton house or crib” (AA 129). He is there, but diffuse and ill-defined; it is this turning between presence and absence that constitutes Sutpen. “Yes. He wasn’t there” says Rosa in a suggestively contradictory turn of phrase (AA 129).
Though he initially puts up a front of being present in the community, even part of it, there is something fundamentally not-there about him, an absence that is closely associated with his disturbing lack of human feeling. When he stops coming to church, he still pulls the strings remotely, violating every rule of decorum by forcing the “wild negro” driver to race the carriage to the church door. Rosa imagines the triumph “on the face twelve miles back there at Sutpen’s Hundred, which did not even require to see or be present. It was the negro now” (AA 17). Sutpen’s demonic motives are illegible but central, and it is significant that his face is replaced by the face of his slave: his total control over the actions of this slave (“‘Marster say; I do. You tell Marster’” [AA 17]) replaces his own bodily substance, leaving only mystifying but intrusive cruelty.
Sutpen’s central place in the story is mediated through his shadowy, substanceless character, even while he is still alive. It is no wonder, then, that his presence haunts the town: despite – or in the view of trauma theory, because of – the fact that he was never truly known, Sutpen is at the center of the town’s exploration of its own tradition, and especially what the unspeakable violence at the heart of that tradition. Sutpen must naturalize the savagery of slavery by designating slaves as inhuman savages – but in the process of that violent act, he loses his own humanity, and the “rawness,” in Morrison’s phrase, creeps inward.
39 The full extent to which Sutpen’s inaccessibility as a character is structured by his participation in the system of slavery becomes clear in the “primal scene” of his childhood, the moment he is turned away from the front door of the mansion by a black slave. This episode is one of the most heavily mediated in the novel: Sutpen apparently told it to Quentin’s grandfather, who told it to Quentin’s father, who told it to Quentin, who is now telling it to Shreve, which speaks to the way in which Quentin’s engagement with this history has more to do with tradition than the history itself. Sutpen’s voice can never be recovered, but the story of this formative moment in his childhood reveals just how intertwined his own lost voice is with the lost voices of slaves. As Quentin tells the story (as it was told to him), at a young age Sutpen moved with his family from an isolated cabin in the mountains to the wealthy Tidewater region of Virginia, where his father found work on a plantation. The journey down from the mountains is the occasion of Sutpen’s first interaction with a black man, a slave who throws his drunken father out of a tavern, “a huge bull of a nigger...who emerged with the old man over his shoulder like a sack of meal and his – the nigger’s – mouth loud with laughing and full of teeth like tombstones” (AA 182). Curiously, this first black figure in Sutpen’s life has bodily power over his white father – when Quentin says that Sutpen “had learned the difference...between white men and black ones,” he does not speculate as to what this difference entails in Sutpen’s young mind (AA 183). However, this first difference is essential to the one that comes next: “he was learning that there was a difference between white men and white men not to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room” (AA 183).
Learning this second difference is what it takes for Sutpen to become what Morrison calls
40 a “new white man,” and to do so he must enforce the first difference, designating black people as savages in order to feel that he himself is not.
By observing the owner of the plantation, Sutpen begins to understand the power dynamic that will rule the rest of his life. Though he covets the man’s possessions and leisure, he does not yet envy the man himself any more “than he would have envied a mountain man who happened to own a fine rifle.”
He would have coveted the rifle, but he would himself have supported and confirmed the owner’s pride and pleasure in its ownership because he could not have conceived of the owner taking such crass advantage of the luck which gave the rifle to him rather than to another man as to say to other men: Because I own this rifle, my arms and legs and blood and bones are superior to yours except as the victorious outcome of a fight with rifles: and how in the world could a man fight another man with dressed-up niggers and the fact that he could lie in a hammock all afternoon with his shoes off? and what in the world would he be fighting for if he did? (AA 185)
He is still “innocent,” and unaware of his innocence in these matters of power – he is steeped in a culture of backwoods “equality,” measured by bodily power. But when his father sends him to deliver a message at the mansion, Sutpen receives an instantaneous education in the system he is entering. The slave tells him never to come to the front door, delineating “the difference between white men and white men” that cannot be measured in the ways Sutpen understands. In that moment, he is initiated into the economic system that awards worth to those who possess the most, and transforms black people into possessions.
Sutpen’s meditations following this moment are characterized by certain insistently repetitious phrases that reveal what must be denied in order for this system to be accepted. The moment he is turned away from the door by the black man, Sutpen grasps that the proper object of his fury is not the slave but the owner. It is this moment
41 that initiates Sutpen’s chain of realizations that insistently references black people only to deny their humanity and agency within the system he must now enter. All of a sudden, he understands his class’ relative lack of power, which he sees expressed in the
“obliviousness” of the slaves to the poor whites’ cabins as they pass by. Though they would be easy objects of wrath,
they (the niggers) were not it, not what you wanted to hit; that when you hit them you would just be hitting a child’s toy balloon with a face painted on it; a face slick and smooth and distended and about to burst into laughing and so you did not dare strike it because it would merely burst and you would rather let it walk on out of your sight than to have stood there in the loud laughing. (AA 186)
The image of black people as “balloon faces” clamors for attention in this passage and the pages that follow, especially surrounding Sutpen’s memory of his father coming home drunk, growling that he and some other white men “whupped one of Pettibone’s niggers tonight.” When Sutpen asks his father what the man had done, he responds,
“Hell fire, that goddamn son of a bitch Pettibone’s nigger” (AA 187). The slave is nothing but a stand-in for Pettibone, who is apparently the true object of Sutpen’s father’s fury. But the way this substitution is made centralizes the dehumanizing force of the economic system that has granted Pettibone dominance. Sutpen decides that “he must have meant the question the same way his father meant the answer”:
no actual nigger, living creature, living flesh to feel and cry out. He could even seem to see them: the torch-disturbed darkness among trees, the fierce hysterical faces of the white men, the balloon face of the nigger. Maybe the nigger’s hands would be tied or held but that would be all right because they were not the hands with which the balloon face would struggle and writhe for freedom, not the balloon face: it was just poised among them, levitative and slick with paper-thin distension. (AA 187)
The insistent positioning of these black “balloon faces” as substitutes for the white men of power who own them reveals the totalizing dehumanization that is the cognitive price
42 of being white in this system. However, the equally insistent presence of black people as gatekeepers placed on the thresholds of power illuminates the centrality of their absence, so to speak. Just as Sutpen’s shadowy absence is insistently reiterated, this repetitious denial of black people as the objects of his fury – the denial of their agency and humanity in his perpetual figuration of them as “balloon faces” – seems to gesture toward the gravity of the psychological consequences that would accompany a serious contemplation of them as true human beings.
The persistent presence, within the narrative as well as on the discursive level of the text itself, of black people figured as inhuman, leads me back to Caruth’s focus on the
“insistently recurring words or figures” in the texts she writes about. Her argument, which ultimately arrives at an understanding of trauma as a force that asserts itself as an unknowable lost voice or encounter, departs from these recurring figures as a way of revealing what they simultaneously call attention to and obscure:
The key figures my analysis uncovers and highlights...in their insistence, here engender stories that in fact emerge out of the rhetorical potential and the literary resonance of these figures, a literary dimension that cannot be reduced to the thematic content of the text or to what the theory encodes, and that, beyond what we can know or theorize about it, stubbornly persists in bearing witness to some forgotten wound.55
The insistent presence of the black faces that surround Sutpen, particularly in this crucial scene, and the equal insistence with which they are denied importance, agency, and full humanity in the scheme of the novel, point to their central and originative place in its structure. These black faces and the human will behind them are what must be passed over in order for Sutpen to enter the system that denies that human will and then must repress that denial. This is the “forgotten wound” that initiates Sutpen into the system
55 Caruth 5.
43 and his own whiteness, and it is the unthinkably violent logical conclusion of his participation in this system – the inhumanity attendant upon denying humanity to others – that Quentin will find impossible to reconcile to his concept of Southern tradition in any coherent fashion.
III. “The Shot Heard Only by its Echo”: Thresholds and Living Deaths
Faulkner scholar Eric Sundquist claims that “[t]here is no way to overestimate the stupendous, tortuous effort Faulkner makes in Absalom, Absalom! to force into crisis and overcome the tragic divisions upon which his novel is built,” and finds that the author
“had first to create a design and, it seems, destroy it with his own hand.”56 These divisions – both the racial divide and “the razor’s edge dividing repressed guilt and ostentatious innocence”57 – are what the novel’s primary marriage plot is meant to overcome. As Sundquist points out, Sutpen could allow Bon to marry Judith and rely on the marriage’s public acceptability, but to his own eye it would be “a mockery and a betrayal of that little boy who approached that door fifty years ago and was turned away, for whose vindication the whole plan was conceived and carried forward” (AA 220). The division asserts itself: Sutpen cannot deviate from the racial and psychological system into which he was initiated in that moment on the threshold of the mansion. To do so would be to negate the entire premise of that system, and cross over from the ostentatious innocence Sutpen seems to maintain in his own mind to the guilt implied in participating in a system that requires murdering one’s own flesh and blood.
56 Eric Sundquist, “Absalom, Absalom! and the House Divided,” in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: A Casebook, ed. Fred Hobson (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003), 115, 119. 57 Ibid. 114.
44 For Sutpen, Bon’s return is simply a “mistake,” a flaw in his design that could not have been predicted, whose reassertion after so many years amazes and immobilizes him.58 He does not recognize it as an indictment of his callous abandonment of his first wife and son in Haiti, for which he “atoned” by paying them off – reducing human relationships to economic and legal requirements, per the mandate of the slave society in which he lives. In that act, Sutpen negates the humanity of his family: no matter how much of his own blood resides in his first son’s veins, the black blood with which it is mixed cancels its social value absolutely. Ironically but very appropriately, the economic value he assigns to these bodies that no longer hold any social value for him is what allows this “mistake” to reenter his life. The money with which Sutpen expresses his repudiation allows his wife and son to move to New Orleans and, as Quentin and Shreve imagine it, pay a lawyer to track him down.
Sutpen’s total rejection of his first family initiates the series of events that lead to the novel’s central (and, to the narrators, most mysterious) moment of violence, and reveals the grave issue of miscegenation at the center of the novel’s tortured contemplation of Southern guilt. It is both a central problem of Southern history and precisely what must be denied in its retelling. Miscegenation, Sundquist points out, was
“the gravest threat to slavery in the South” because it made the races indistinguishable and therefore equal.59 The sexual act itself implies a certain equality of flesh, as Rosa implicitly states: “there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both” (AA 111-2). If this does not
58 Ibid. 107. 59 Ibid. 119.
45 quite imply equalization as such, it does destabilize the “decorous ordering” of the system meant to maintain the absolute separation and inequality of the races. It breaks down through sheer bodily force the divisions that constitute the surface structure of society, a destruction that mixed-race children, as the logical outcome of miscegenation, complete.
They provide a stark image of everything the system must deny: the inherent violence in the system of slavery that allowed white men to hold dominion over black women’s bodies, the fact that the dividing line between black and white is tenuous and permeable, and that assigning ontologically inhuman status to those with black blood often means rejecting the humanity of those with whom one is intimately related, as Sutpen is with
Charles Bon. The South must repress the reality of miscegenation because it reveals that the boundary between black and white is artificial, and its repression in historical memory mirrors and elaborates upon the repression of black humanity. This violent psychological action, required to participate in the system of slavery without moral horror, in turn requires the master to deny the humanity of his own mixed-race children.
Sutpen’s denial of Bon and Henry’s shooting him embody and reveal the violence that initiated the system. It is this requisite repression of miscegenation, more than the miscegenation itself, that dooms the system that requires it: all Bon wants is paternal acknowledgment, which Sutpen cannot give him.60
Thus, the “mistake” that returns to destroy Sutpen’s design – one might say, the thing that haunts it – is really not a mistake at all, but rather a built-in structural defect of the system within which his design is constructed. Within the scheme that I have established for understanding the novel’s structure, repressing the existence of
60 Ben Railton, “‘What Else Could a Southern Gentleman Do?’: Quentin Compson, Rhett Butler, and Miscegenation,” The Southern Literary Journal 35 (2) (Spring 2003): 51.
46 miscegenation is both an offshoot of and analogous to the repression of black humanity.
To consciously acknowledge miscegenation is on some level to acknowledge the equal humanity of blacks and whites and the violence imposed by slavery, which is impossible for white southerners to do without calling into question the basis of the tradition in which they are steeped, and for Quentin, of which he is made. But to not acknowledge it is to live in constant denial of what is so obviously present: the intimate ties between blacks and whites. The black people (including Bon) in Faulkner’s novel are central to the plot, despite their overwhelming silence. The priority given to miscegenation as a plot point brings this silence into focus by making present that which is supposed to be absent. It highlights the original act of silencing and absenting from which Southern tradition unfolds, and it forces the crisis – Henry’s murdering Bon – that embodies the basic violence of that silencing.
The fact that the climactic moment of violence is experienced – in the text and explicitly by Rosa – only as an echo attests to its fully unspeakable implications. The moment itself is lost, unfathomable, and incomprehensible. As Rosa tells it, she is summoned by Wash Jones out to the house, where she is “able to learn nothing save this: a shot heard, faint and far away and even direction and source unknown” (AA 108). She repeatedly states that she never saw the body, indeed, never even saw Bon while he was alive, compounding her sense of detachment and alienation from the event itself. “I heard a name, I saw a photograph, I helped to make a grave: and that was all....I heard an echo, but not the shot; I saw a closed door but did not enter it” (AA 117, 121). Bon’s physical disappearance and Judith’s outward lack of emotion obscure the actual moment of violence even as it echoes through history and the text. The entire Sutpen tale is told
47 again and again throughout the course of the novel, always coming back to this moment of almost mythic violence and yet always identifying it as impenetrable. The scenario
Quentin and Shreve come up with to explain the murder is the most concise expression of the violence implied by the Southern racial system, a violence that finds expression in fratricide: “You are my brother,” Henry says to Bon, who replies, “No I’m not. I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry” (AA 286). The full moral weight of the killing is expressed in this turn of phrase, from brother to nigger
– a designation that requires Henry to repudiate Bon and also the part of himself that loves Bon.
If the murder is the culminating expression of the violence inherent in Sutpen’s primal “threshold” moment, its aftermath illustrates the living death that lies beyond that threshold. Sundquist perceptively writes that Absalom’s “endless repetition and repercussion of images and actions...all lead toward and fall away from that which cannot be expressed: first, the bedroom of his sister in which the dead Bon lies, and second, the bedroom in which the dying Henry lies.”61 Containing as they do the victim and the perpetrator of an act of violence that perfectly expresses the South’s original sin, to cross the thresholds of these bedrooms is to cross “the razor’s edge” dividing innocence from guilt, ignorance from understanding, and tradition from truth. Thresholds bookend the tale: the one that Sutpen cannot cross is the site of his initiation into the violence of the racial system, and the one that Quentin eventually does cross confirms the gruesome repercussions of that initiation. These bedrooms – and all that they imply about the domestic, personal, familial sphere in which the South’s racial drama played out – contain everything that cannot be spoken about Southern tradition, most importantly the
61 Sundquist 142.
48 silence that asserts itself as a haunting presence. Bon’s body is made invisible almost as soon as Henry fires the shot. But this absence is also expressed in Henry’s absence, and at the culmination of the novel, in Henry’s death-like presence at Sutpen’s Hundred. The same violence that renders Sutpen himself inhumanly strange places Henry beyond the reach of the living. Morrison, in Beloved, calls this violence a “jungle” that the whites planted in the blacks, which grew and spread “until it invaded the whites who had made it...The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”62 The racial divide imposed by whites expands into white consciousness itself, so that the savagery they assign to blacks is really their own, and the world that seems to invade the white design from the outside is “a world of their own making.”63 For
Quentin, crossing the threshold and facing Henry Sutpen’s living-to-die body is the ultimate confrontation with the death at the center of Southern history, and he is appropriately horrified: “‘Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace. Nevermore.
Nevermore. Nevermore,’” he repeats to himself, lying in bed at Harvard and recalling the sight of Henry’s wasted body (AA 298-9).
The whites are clearly the novel’s focus, but there is still the issue of the black presence – the repressed humanity at the root of an unspeakable history – that everywhere asserts itself, especially in those key moments of threshold-crossing. The most prominent interaction between a white and a black character is between Rosa and Clytie after Bon is killed, and it exemplifies the way in which the humanity of the blacks in the novel is elided even as this elision is the work’s central issue. Clytie herself hardly speaks at all in the novel, remaining a kind of stoic and mysterious presence from when she first
62 Morrison qtd. in Gordon 189. 63 Gordon 190.
49 appears – referred to only as “the negro girl” – watching with Judith as their father fights his slaves (AA 22). Faulkner’s text erases Clytie’s individual character, or rather the nature of her character is the very fact of her not being there. When Rosa races out to
Sutpen’s Hundred, she is met by Clytie but essentially refuses to believe that it is Clytie herself standing there, keeping her from going up the stairs to see her niece. Rather she only sees Sutpen’s face, with Clytie as “not owner” but “instrument” of his will (AA
111). The entire passage, convoluted by Rosa’s parenthetical qualifications and negations and elaborately constructed imagery, paints Clytie not as a person but rather a kind of mythological gatekeeper, set there by Sutpen as “the cold Cerberus of his private hell” (AA 109). Even the touch of flesh with flesh, “which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering,” cannot truly make
Clytie present to Rosa:
But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. Yes, I stopped dead – no woman’s hand, no negro’s hand, but bitted bridle-curb to check and guide the furious unbending will – I crying not to her, to it; speaking to it through the negro, the woman, only because of the shock which was not yet outrage because it would be terror soon, expecting and receiving no answer because we both knew it was not to her I spoke: ‘Take your hand off me, nigger!’ (AA 111-2)
Though Clytie’s black flesh touches Rosa’s white in an apparently radical act of human connection – “watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too” – Rosa is unable to identify Clytie as Clytie – she is still not speaking to the woman in front of her. And yet, Clytie is there, even if Rosa chooses to see Sutpen. Her bodily presence is what spurs Rosa’s violent reaction: “Take your hand off me, nigger!”
It is my contention that even though Faulkner did not or could not create fully realized black characters in Absalom – in terms of physical description, motivation, or
50 voice – they nonetheless assert themselves as forceful bodily presences that mark even as they obscure the sites of encounter between the whites and their corrupt tradition. This tradition is explored through repetition, a spiraling narrative that can only approach the original events indirectly because those events contain the unthinkable ramifications of the Southern racial system. Despite its attempt to abstract all events beyond recognition, to place everything just beyond the reach of true understanding, the novel’s use of these black gatekeepers is a reminder of precisely what that system erases. Slavery required the white mind to evacuate the humanity from the black bodies surrounding them, to eliminate black individuality, voice, and personhood. But the bodies were still there, as were their mixed-race children, never quite allowing the white mind to free itself from the repressed consciousness of its own horrendous wrong. These silent black bodies, in their recurring, insistent presence, stand on the razor’s edge that must be crossed in order for Faulkner’s white southerners to take full measure of the original silencing that created the division. Their humanity must still be absent, but their insistent presence gestures toward their missing voices. In this sense, Jim Bond – the “one nigger Sutpen left,” as
Shreve puts it (AA 302) – is the perfect figure with which to close the Sutpen story. His bellow endures after the mansion has burned to the ground, invisible and strange, but insistently present – a “noisy silence” that obscures as much as it reveals about the forces that brought it into being. This voice, essentially devoid of human reason, serves as a marker for the absented humanity that Quentin, Faulkner, and the novel itself must face, but which they all too often do not have the language to express.
51
52 Chapter Two
No Place to Be: Racial Structures and Identity in the Novels of Flannery O’Connor
The opening scene of Wise Blood (1952), Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, finds Hazel
Motes uprooted. He is on a train, in motion, leaving behind a lost home and heading toward an unknown city. Any possible sympathy we may have for him in his directionless situation is undercut, however, by his utter antagonism: he is anything but likeable, refusing to engage on even the most basic human level with the other passengers, preferring to maintain his antagonistic distance from reality. In this context, or no-context, of the loss of personal identity and propulsion into an unknown future, the only person with whom Haze is interested in interacting is the black porter on the train – surely a significant fact in a novel with no other living black characters, written in the
South when it was fast becoming clear that the race problem was not going away, was in fact inevitably moving toward a radical shake-up of traditional racial structures. Haze’s desperation to place the porter within his memory of his hometown, and the porter’s refusal to be claimed in this way, reveal the complex dependence of white identity on identification and maintenance of blacks in a certain place, time, and subordinated position. The historical structure that keeps blacks “in their place,” however uneasily maintained, allows whites to feel in their place – at home in history. Wise Blood explores the effects of the breakdown of this structure on the psychological coherence of a white subject, Hazel Motes, whose loss of home signifies a loss of personal and historical reference.
53 The effects of this loss are encapsulated in the porter’s “sour triumphant” remark that closes the novel’s first chapter: “‘Jesus been a long time gone.’”64 Jesus, who represents both a point of departure for historical time and its end-point in his return, becomes a signifier for this stable identity, coherence, reference, in-placeness, home, the loss of which Haze struggles to negotiate throughout the novel. He is ultimately unsuccessful, however, because his response to this newly incoherent world is to retreat into an illusion of total individualism. The language he uses to preach his new Church
Without Christ is confused and contradictory because it identifies the individual as the only vessel of meaning – while maintaining that meaning does not, in fact, exist, that words are empty and Jesus was a liar. In other words, the out-of-placeness Haze feels in the world (as opposed to the in-placeness that would be confirmed by an acquiescent response from the porter) informs his language in its refusal to commit one way or the other and its simultaneous search for and denial of meaning.
O’Connor’s later novel, The Violent Bear it Away (1960), helps to illustrate the complexity and irresolvability of Haze’s relationship with his place in history through the parallel but inverse struggles of Francis Marion Tarwater, Violent’s young protagonist. If
Haze’s experience of out-of-placeness is encapsulated in his interaction with the black porter, then Tarwater’s interactions with Buford Munson in the later novel, which closely mirror those of Haze with the porter, are worth investigating. Buford is one of two black characters in the novel (the other is his wife, Luella, whose role is limited to her mourning cries for Old Tarwater). He appears at the beginning of Tarwater’s journey, right after his great uncle dies, and then reappears in the same place when the boy returns
64 Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1952), 27. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text as WB.
54 at the end of the novel. Buford maintains Powderhead as a living home for Tarwater to return to by plowing the corn crop; he also buries Old Tarwater, literalizing the relationship between the home/land in which the boy is rooted and the prophetic identity conferred on him by the old man. It is this solidity of place, provided by Buford, that allows Tarwater to assume his identity with confidence and conviction, without philosophical wavering. Where Haze sees a world of irremediable nothingness, Tarwater sees nothingness as simply waiting to be filled by a revelation of his purpose, an individualism whose stability is founded in the stability of the role of the black man, who makes possible Tarwater’s assumption of identity. His parting statement to Tarwater after the old man’s death (“‘Nobody going to bother you. That going to be your trouble.’”65) is similar to the porter’s “‘Jesus been a long time gone’” in that it identifies the central problem of each protagonist and essentially leaves him alone in the world.
The crucial difference is that Buford is not a figure of resistance: instead of uprooting
Tarwater’s sense of self, he grounds it, his statement implying the boy’s control over the land, his great uncle’s body, and his own destiny. The movement from Wise Blood to
The Violent Bear it Away is from alienation to integration, from a character who struggles to comprehend his surroundings to one who achieves a relatively uncomplicated sense of his identity in relation to the world. In this context, the vastly different black figures in the novels become charged with social and political significance for the formation of each protagonist’s sense of self. Much like the black “gatekeepers” present at pivotal threshold moments for the white characters in Absalom, Absalom!, the participation of these black men in the crucial departure – and in Tarwater’s case, return – scenes of the
65 Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1960), 48. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text as VBA.
55 novels reveals that blackness occupies a central place in O’Connor’s construction of individual white identity.
I. “You Can’t Go Back There Neither”: Racial Melancholia, Memory, and Loss
The train ride that begins Wise Blood establishes a dynamic between Haze and virtually everyone around him that will remain in place for the entire novel. Haze is sullen, unwilling to participate in the meaningless chatter expected of him by his seatmate, Mrs.
Wally Bee Hitchcock, who tells him she thinks the early evening is the prettiest time of day, and doesn’t he think so too, a question to which she gets no response (WB 9). Haze is distracted, taking only a moment to look at Mrs. Hitchcock before fixing his eyes back down the length of the train. She makes continuous attempts at conversation with Haze, all the while studying his manner, clothing, and appearance, focusing most intently on his eyes, whose “settings were so deep that they seemed, to her, almost like passages leading somewhere” (WB 10). After evading her conversation a while, the first response Haze gives her is negative: “‘Are you going home?’ Mrs. Hitchcock asked. He looked at her sourly and gripped the black hat by the brim. ‘No, I ain’t,’ he said in a sharp high nasal
Tennessee voice” (WB 13). His barely concealed irritation does nothing to halt her chatter.
Mrs. Hitchcock’s conversation has a definite theme. Once Haze has finally responded to one of her questions, she feels at liberty to talk at length about the reason for her trip, a visit to her married daughter in Florida. Once she loses this “train of talk,” she asks Haze whether he is visiting someone too; finding that he is going to Taulkinham, she tells him her sister-in-law’s brother-in-law lives there. Her talk revolves around personal,
56 even if relatively obscure, connections, attempts to insert herself and her knowledge into what little information Haze provides her with. The content of her chatter takes on significance in light of what we subsequently learn about Haze – that he has just returned from the war to find his hometown completely empty. Without any connections of his own to discuss with Mrs. Hitchcock, Haze is unable or unwilling to engage in her “train of talk” – he continues to respond briefly and unpleasantly, mostly in negative terms.
“‘Going to Taulkinham,’ he said and ground himself into the seat and looked at the window. ‘Don’t know nobody there, but I’m going to do some things...I ain’t from
Taulkinham...I said I’m going there, that’s all’” (WB 13-14). Haze cannot go home, because home no longer exists, and therefore he cannot find a meaningful way to communicate with Mrs. Hitchcock, so bound up with her family connections and geographical reference points. Haze’s method of dealing with his own lack of personal reference is to deny that it even matters: “‘You might as well go one place as another...That’s all I know’” (WB 14). This mode of communication – deny, negate, evade – informs virtually every interaction Haze has in the novel.
Unsurprisingly, Haze’s unfriendly manner elicits unfriendly responses, and his trip to the dining car furthers this antagonism until it seems that everyone on the train harbors a vague hostility toward him. Even the garrulous Mrs. Hitchcock abandons him, in favor of a woman who can engage in the meaningless referential conversation she desires: “Mrs. Hitchcock told the woman about her sister’s husband who was with the
City Water Works in Toolafalls, Alabama, and the lady told about a cousin who had cancer of the throat” (WB 15). Still, Haze tries to enter the car with the ladies, the only personal connection he has on the train, and reacts with a kind of angry panicked
57 embarrassment when the steward rudely pushes him back into the line to wait for an empty seat. The table where Haze ends up is already occupied by three fashionable young women, one of whom blows smoke in his face and stares at him with a “bold game-hen expression” (WB 16). Haze is uncomfortable; the gap between himself and these women is palpable and widens into a sense of total solitary exclusion from the community created when the steward winks at them.
The only personal interaction Haze seems interested in pursuing on this train ride is with the porter, a black man whom Haze believes he knows from his deserted hometown. The porter is no friendlier to Haze than anyone else on the train. Yet he is the object of Haze’s single-minded fixation, a fixation which illuminates the complex web of loss and desire that constitutes his mind on this crucial train ride, away from his lack-of-home and toward an unknown city. Haze’s consciousness of the porter is unequivocal: he knows him to be “a Parrum nigger from Eastrod” (WB 12). He does not guess or think, he knows, with categorizing certainty. The porter is not just a “nigger,” he is a Parrum, a name that evokes a memory of place, Eastrod, home. But almost as soon as Haze remembers this name, he also remembers its loss. “Now there were no more
Motes, no more Ashfields, no more Blasengames, Feys, Jacksons...or Parrums – even niggers wouldn’t have it” (WB 21). In the community he remembers/imagines on this totally acommunal train ride, the name that signifies himself – Motes – is listed with the
Parrums as “no more.” Haze’s “memory” implicates the porter in this communal oblivion, claiming him as part of a new community of the lost: “‘I remember you. Your father was a nigger named Cash Parrum. You can’t go back there neither, nor anybody else, not if they wanted to’” (WB 18). Haze’s interactions with the porter reveal a history
58 of loss, the inextricability of the idea of that loss from the idea of home, and a desire to reestablish a coherent identity through identification with another, an identification that is also an act of control.
Freud’s notion of melancholia, as Anne Anlin Cheng applies it to racial identity in
America, seems apt in reading this crucial scene. The choice of the porter – rather than one of the white men on the train, whom he could identify as, say, one of the lost
Ashfields – is anything but arbitrary. As a black man, the porter lies at the heart of an
American identity that would exclude him but also needs his continued existence-in-place in order to maintain its own legitimacy, indeed, its very identity. In Freud’s work, melancholic loss is actually the formative force of the ego: “it is unclear...whether there could have been an ego prior to melancholia, since the ego comes into being as a psychical object, as a perceptual object, only after the ‘shadow of the object’ has fallen upon it.”66 To apply this concept to race as it functions in white American identity is to acknowledge the truly constitutive force exerted by the presence of the racial other. As
Cheng puts it, “Dominant white identity in America operates melancholically – as an elaborate identificatory system based on psychical and social consumption-and-denial.”67
Racist institutions do not wish to eliminate the racial other, but rather to “maintain that other within existing structures. With phenomena such as segregation and colonialism, the racial question is an issue of place (the literalization of Freudian melancholic suspension) rather than of full relinquishment.” White American identity is based upon a
“constitutive loss” of the racial other from the human community, a loss that is
66 The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), 8. 67 Ibid. 11.
59 maintained uneasily and, Cheng argues, melancholically.68 Haze’s desire to make claims on the porter and not the white people on the train is the result of just this sort of loss – the collapsing of his memory of “a Parrum nigger” (who lacks even the specificity of a first name) with the porter effaces any real humanity either might have had in his mind and leaves nothing but a controllable image, suspended in place. This image, so long as he can maintain this control, allows him a coherent identity and a space in which to grieve: if he can identify this black man in front of him with the black men from his town, he can legitimize his memories and rejoin white American society, which is founded on the denial of individual humanity to racial others.
Significantly, of course, the porter’s resistance shatters this dynamic. To extend
Cheng’s analysis, I see another kind of racial melancholia operating in Wise Blood, one specifically connected with the growing consciousness in white America that the racial structures in place would not remain stable. If the melancholic ego is formed by suspending the lost object in place, the white American ego was (and is) threatened by black progress toward social equality. The porter’s profession is significant in its reference to the Pullman porters, whose position “became the catalyst for both the formation of an African American middle class and the first major African American labor union (the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters). In addition it was linked to the emergence of the U.S. civil rights movement in the twentieth century.”69 The strides in both social and legal equality made by the Pullman porters over the course of the twentieth century dislodged or at least destabilized the dominant image of the porter held
68 Ibid. 12. 69 William A. Darity, “Pullman Porters,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 6th ed., s.v. 6 vols. (Detroit: Macmillian Reference USA 2008): 628-629. Gale Virtual Reference Library. http://go.galegroup.com.proxy2.hampshire.edu/ps/i.do?action=interpret&id=GALE|CX3045302130&v=2.1 &u=mlin_w_hampcol&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&authCount=1 (accessed November 19, 2012).
60 by white America. Like Haze, most white Pullman passengers failed to treat the porters as individuals, calling all of them “George” (after George Pullman) or simply “nigger.”70
And like the porter in Wise Blood, many real-life porters resisted this offensive generalization. One recalls responding to passengers who called him “boy”, “‘Don’t call me ‘boy.’ My mommy and daddy named me Harold.’”71 Though they endured poverty wages, sleep deprivation, insults from passengers, brutally exacting company standards, and the constant threat of being fired, the Pullman porters also used their privileged position of contact with whites to resist the racial inequalities they experienced daily.
Designed to capitalize on the white myth of the happy slave, the kind of
“consumption-and-denial” to which Cheng refers, the Pullman porter’s position entailed intimate contact between the races, and therefore opportunities for intimate resistance.
The smiling, servile attitude expected of the porters belied an immense amount of frustration that often manifested itself in interactions with passengers. One former porter,
John Thomas Harrison, recalled putting an extremely drunk passenger to bed:
“The man said to me, ‘Don’t tell me what to do, peckerwood. Ain’t no nigger putting me to bed.’ I didn’t fly off. I got him back to his bed, put him in bed, took his clothes off, and put him to sleep...I landed him one in the face. I beat up his lip and hit him all in the face and mouth. The next morning he got up and said, ‘What happened last night? I feel like a truck ran over me.’ I made a good customer out of him, and he never did know what hit him.”72
Though an extreme example, this particular episode demonstrates both the intimacy of the relationship (the porter actually took the man’s clothes off for him) and the fine line between this personal care and the retributive violence the porter visits upon the racist passenger. As the porters crusaded for economic and legal power, they were also,
70 Larry Tye, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class (New York: Owl Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC 2004). 71 Harold Reddick qtd. in Tye 93. 72 Qtd. in Tye 94.
61 implicitly, fighting the long-standing image of their race as servile, obliging, only too happy to attend to every whim of their white masters. The custom of tipping, the only means of supplementing the meager wages paid by the Pullman company, perpetuated this stereotype by making the porter’s service seem less a professional duty than a personal favor; ending the practice was one of the early demands made by the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.73 The porters wanted to be treated as what they were: laborers – and highly respected ones within their race – rather than modern slaves.74 They refused to remain within those structures that would impose on them the latter role, and white America was gradually forced to come to terms with this reality, both on a broad political level and in the context of intimate personal interactions, as is illustrated in the porters’ stories.
Thus, O’Connor’s choice of a porter for the central figure in the first scene of
Wise Blood is highly significant in the context of America’s racial history. Instead of grounding Haze in a known world, his interactions with the porter result in two moments of (melancholic) suspension, quite like the train ride itself, a coming/going between loss and the unknown. The first time Haze tries to claim knowledge of the porter, he is met by a brisk refusal in the guise of professional mandate, to maintain efficiency of movement on the train:
“Your feet in the middle of the aisle. Somebody going to want to get by you,” the porter said, turning suddenly and brushing past. Haze got up and hung there a few seconds. He looked as if he were held by a rope caught in the middle of his back and attached to the train ceiling. He watched the porter move in a fine controlled lurch down the aisle and disappear at the other end of the car. (WB 12)
73 Tye 145. 74 Ibid. 77.
62 In contrast to the “controlled” movements of the porter, a condition of his profession,
Haze is trackless, motionless, “in the middle of the aisle.” The porter is “in place” on the train, while Haze is alienated and lost. The porter’s refusal to remain “suspended” in
Haze’s consciousness results in his own feeling of suspension. The “hanging” imagery serves to reinforce the inversion at work here: the white man is, in a sense, lynched by the black man, “held by a rope caught in the middle of his back.” Haze is in a radically powerless position in this scene, at the mercy of a black man who asserts his dominance through his position, his “place” on the train.
In the second scene of suspension, as the porter is letting him into his upper berth, this sense of groundlessness becomes more dramatic and literal. Just like the drunken man in Harrison’s story, Haze is in a position of relative vulnerability. Dependent upon the porter to reach his bed, his “home” for the night, he insults him and receives appropriately intimate retribution, though it lacks outright violence. The porter is irritated and insistent: “‘I’m from Chicago...My name is not Parrum...My father was a railroad man’” (WB 18-19). Haze laughs, seemingly in disbelief, just as he leers when the porter first tells him he is from Chicago: “‘Yeah, I bet you are’” (WB 12). The porter, in turn, establishes his own position of dominance by jerking the ladder away suddenly, “with a wrench of his arm that sent the boy clutching at the blanket into the berth. He lay on his stomach for a few minutes and didn’t move” (WB 19). Haze’s superior attitude is once again interrupted, or “suspended” by the porter’s assertion of his own individuality. Instead of feeling “at home” in a comfortably dominant position,
Haze is left dangling in midair.
63 Arguably a scene of even greater violence – though it involves no physical contact whatsoever – comes at the very end of this first chapter, when Haze awakes in the berth. He is jolted out of his half-sleep by a dream of his mother’s coffin closing, “falling down on top of her, closing down all the time. From inside he saw it closing, coming closer closer down and cutting off the light and the room” (WB 27). The berth, meant to be a comfortable place to spend a night of traveling, becomes a coffin, where his dreams are all of his dead family members in their own coffins. Haze’s only association with home is death – his memories of Eastrod are infused with loss, so that even his memories of the place are a dead end, unable to provide him with a sense of stability or being-in- place. He calls for help, for extrication from this tomb, to no avail: “The porter stood watching him and didn’t move” (WB 27). Again, the man who is supposed to provide the comforts of home, the most intimate of services, refuses this role. His “sour triumphant voice” resounds forcefully through the rest of the novel, as he refuses to relieve Haze of his deathlike discomfort. His not-moving is reiterated, his negative response to Haze’s invocation of Jesus heard only in the sound of this unpleasant voice. “‘Jesus been a long time gone.’” With a finality that Haze apparently takes to heart, the porter smashes every traditional structure of succor, comfort, help, home. Not only is Jesus gone, he has been gone a long time. Haze is suspended by this loss, expressed through and figured by the porter’s refusal to remain in-place in a familiar structure, over a void that can only be met by spiritual nihilism.
64 II. “Waiting on Nothing”: Living in Suspension
In the absence of a familiar structure, constituted by a racial other, in which to ground his identity, Haze turns inward, developing an intense self-reliance and denying the significance of external reality in his own inner life. This psychical coping mechanism finds practical expression in the city, where he decides to buy a car; the purchase proves to be an extension of his interaction with the porter in that it is an entrenchment into a model that simply will not function, one which leaves him suspended once again. He buys the Essex, an old car, partly for its place in a white-dominated past, contrasted with the present in which racial structures are shifting. The salesman tells Haze that the car
“‘ain’t been built by a bunch of niggers. All the niggers are living in Detroit now, putting cars together...I was up there a while myself and I seen. I come home’” (WB 71). In appealing to a nostalgia for a time when cars were not built by blacks, the salesman implicitly refers to the shifting demographics of the nation. As Susan Edmunds points out, “no African Americans ever appear in Taulkinham, despite its status as a thriving, postwar southern metropolis...Taulkinham’s all-white population is less a function of authorial oversight than a grotesquely exaggerated tribute to the effects of the great migration.”75 Similar to the porter’s position, blacks in Detroit building cars is an image that has specific sociohistorical connotations. During the great migration, huge numbers of Southern blacks migrated to Northern cities in search of better employment opportunities and living standards. In addition, they experienced the easing of some of the worst effects of Southern racism. O’Connor invokes this mass exodus of blacks from the South to compound Haze’s feeling of displacement and suspension in a world where
75 “Through a Glass Darkly: Visions of Integrated Community in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood,” Contemporary Literature 37 (4) (Winter 1996): 566.
65 all the old structures are changing or even being inverted. In his defense of the car after it breaks down, he echoes the salesman and adds that the car was built “‘by people with their eyes open that knew where they were at’” (WB 127). The implication, of course, is that what Haze sees now are people who don’t know where they’re at. He projects his out-of-placeness onto the world at large, which he sees as somehow fundamentally uprooted.
The car functions in many ways like the train berth – Haze buys it “‘mostly to be a house for me...I ain’t got any place to be’” (WB 73). This home on wheels invokes the familiar racial structures of the past, just as the Pullman porter’s position was designed to take advantage of American myths about slavery. Haze is attempting to stabilize his uprooted sense of self, but the car refuses to cooperate. It breaks down unexpectedly, then just as suddenly starts again, seemingly indifferent to any action on Haze’s part.
The dials seem to be working “on a private system, independent of the whole car” (WB
124). He believes that the car will get him anywhere he wants to go, but this is obviously a delusion – the instrument of his supposed mobility does nothing but strand him. It is terminal, another coffin. Haze dreams, while spending the night in the car, that he is “not dead but only buried...not waiting on the Judgment because there was no Judgment, he was waiting on nothing” (WB 160). In the car, the fundamental contradiction of Haze’s life is revealed to be this waiting with nothing to wait for. He seeks an idea of “home” in things that refuse to accommodate him, in (literally) transitory objects that offer travel with no destination. He is eternally suspended by his reliance upon a social system, represented by the car, that simply will not function any longer. He cannot articulate an end to his going to Taulkinham, or any other city, and his means of getting to these not-
66 places turn out to be ends in themselves; they close down like coffins on the possibility of any more lasting home.
The tensions between home and travel, in-placeness and uprootedness, seeking and self-reliance, are everywhere in Wise Blood and irresolvable in Haze’s consciousness. His simultaneous pursuit and rejection of the “blind” preacher Asa
Hawks is one of the most obvious examples of Haze’s fundamental need both to seek and to negate. After meeting the preacher and his daughter, he trails them with single-minded persistence, only to deny he did so for any reason other than to reject what they preach.
He goes so far as to move into the same boarding house as them, expecting a “secret welcome” when he knocks on their door; when the preacher turns him away, Haze responds with a plea for acceptance that is also a challenge: “‘What kind of a preacher are you...not to see if you can save my soul?’” (WB 108). After Hawks shuts the door in
Haze’s face, his daughter’s comment about the stranger’s eyes encapsulates these contradictions: “‘They don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep on looking’” (WB 109). Haze is seeking, reaching out, searching for home or coherence or meaning, while refusing to really see his surroundings due to his myopic and belligerent self-reliance. In the unreliable car, he sees an illusion of home, but also its total inaccessibility and terminality. In the porter, he sees Eastrod, but also its loss.
III. “A Way to Say Something”: Loss of Reference and the New Jesus
A large part of Haze’s dilemma has to do with language, or communication in general.
What he is seeking remains nameless, its namelessness almost an inherent quality. His deep eyes, constantly searching, seem to see a world composed of nothingness,
67 everything as “a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him” (WB 74). That “blank thing,” I would suggest, is the loss of reference embodied in the porter’s resistance. Without those stable structures from which to construct his own identity and the nature of the world around him, Haze has a difficult time concretely identifying anything at all. When he discovers that the preacher has been lying about his blindness, his expression seems “to open onto a deeper blankness and reflect something and then close again” (WB 162). Haze’s language is consistently vague (“‘Going to Taulkinham...going to do some things’” [WB 13]), perpetually ambivalent, never quite able to say what it means – there are gaps, contradictions, and explicit reference to the blank spaces left by language. In response to the preacher’s accusations of fornication and blasphemy, Haze proclaims that those things “‘ain’t nothing but words...If I was in sin I was in it before I ever committed any. There’s no change come in me’” (WB 53). For Haze, words like sin and conscience have no power outside one’s own body, where they must be recognized as meaningless and hunted down and killed (WB 166). What is left after this violent purge of all meaning in language is a yawning chasm, empty but for the quite tangible nothingness Haze forces into it as a substitute.
The substantive emptiness of words is a symptom of Haze’s own experience of a patently empty reality, a world bereft of any unifying signification, the concept of God being O’Connor’s way of representing this unity. Haze’s difficulty in identifying meaning becomes a constant negotiation between denying it exists and seeming to be bowled over by its very present absence, represented by the infinite nothingness reflected in his eyes. Haze’s early awareness of the non-presence of God comes after committing
68 what he dimly conceives of as a sin, entering a carnival sideshow not meant for his eyes.
When his mother asks him what he has seen, this specific sin is forgotten in favor of “the nameless unplaced guilt” now inside him (WB 63). He attempts to purge this guilt through an act of corporal repentance, walking a mile in shoes filled with rocks. “He thought, that ought to satisfy Him. Nothing happened. If a stone had fallen he would have taken it as a sign” (WB 63-4). God’s silence is deafening, and it seems to be all
Haze can hear from now on. He deals with it, in the moment, by putting his rocky shoes back on and continuing his repentant walk – the endless, futile travel that continues on the train and in the car. This early experience of the absence of a sign translates into a sometimes willful non-reading of all kinds of signs throughout the novel. His second night in Taulkinham, he walks down town “close to the store fronts but not looking in them;” on the road, he sees but “deliberately [does] not read” a sign that says “Jesus died for YOU” (WB 37, 207). To Enoch, who believes he has had a sign of Haze’s coming, he replies, “‘I don’t care about your signs’” (WB 92). Haze internalizes his early experience of reality’s refusal to supply meaning by rejecting in advance any potential
“sign” that could do so and relying solely on himself. However, his eyes “keep on looking,” as the preacher’s daughter notes, despite the fact that they don’t seem to see what’s in front of him.
The contradictory language of Haze’s church – the result of his contradictory perception of the world – reveals the fundamental tension between his rejection of external meaning and his need to keep searching for it. He both acknowledges Jesus and declares that he was a liar, that indeed, nothing matters besides this fact (WB 105). In his rejection of Jesus’ truth, he also rejects the necessity of a stable home/church: “‘If there’s
69 no Christ, there’s no reason to have a set place to do it in’” (WB 106). The apparent nihilism of Haze’s Church Without Christ is counterbalanced, however, by the need to identify some truth, somewhere:
“No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. “Nothing outside you can give you any place...You needn’t to look at the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?” (WB 166)
There is both no place for you to be and only one; both no truth and one truth behind all others. The movement between no-truth and one-truth, between no-place and only-place, is also a movement between a rooted place in historical time and a timelessness in the self. Haze’s pain at not being able to go “backwards” to Eastrod, a lost time, turns his gaze inward – lacking an external reference point, he has only himself and the moment in which he finds himself. But as we saw on the train, this moment is also a paralysis, a moment of eternal motion, a suspension that is no home at all but rather its opposite: an always no-place.
Haze’s ambivalent relationship with words and signs, his simultaneous seeking and rejection of meaning, is embodied in the episode of the new jesus. The concept comes about as Haze struggles, in his typically inexact manner, to articulate the direction in which he wants his church to go. The new jesus, as distinguished from Jesus, would not “‘waste his blood redeeming people with it, because he’s all man and ain’t got any
God in him’” (WB 121). Haze seeks a jesus with whom he can identify, one fully rooted
70 in reality, a man just like himself. As for the function of the new jesus, Haze does not specify, he only knows his church needs one. Once again, his language descends into vague contradictions as he attempts to define an end point or eschatological goal. He seeks a figure whose significance in the church is the very fact of his insignificance, his total, flesh-and-blood humanity, his ability to “‘speak plain.’” In addition, however, he should not look like any other man “‘so you’ll look at him,’” and the sight of him will show you once and for all “‘that you haven’t been redeemed’” (WB 140-1). This new jesus, whose purpose is to reveal humanity’s unredeemed state, is a hybrid figure, simultaneously human and different-from-all-humans: a paradox by definition. It is unsurprising, then, that Haze does not truly believe this new jesus exists in reality – it is nothing but “‘a way to say something’” (WB 158). Once again, language fails to convey meaning, but the deeper failure is that of Haze in conceiving that meaning in the first place.
Enoch’s journey is an inversion of Haze’s in that he invests reality with an abundance of meaning, and the symbolic holds power over his imagination. Where Haze looks inward and finds only an irreducible physical existence of flesh and blood without a symbolic referent from which to construct a language and philosophy, and refuses to acknowledge the importance of anything outside himself, Enoch has “wise blood” that tells him to do things that serve some larger purpose. His reverent misreading of the word “museum” (“‘Muvseevum’...The strange word made him shiver” [WB 96]) contrasts with Haze’s refusal to identify meaning in language or his surroundings.
Haze’s vague, unconscious seeking finds its inverse in Enoch’s very conscious and concrete seeing of a purpose all around him. When he sees the mummy in the museum,
71 he knows it holds significance and that he must be the one to steal it, even if he does not understand exactly why he is “risk[ing] his skin for a dead shriveled-up part-nigger dwarf” (WB 176). This black figure holds mysterious power for Enoch, who also disguises himself “so that if he were seen in the act, he would be taken for a colored person” (WB 174). Blackness is both extremely powerful to Enoch and fully available for his use. His later insult by a man in a black gorilla costume parallels Haze’s insult by the train porter, but Enoch maintains the gorilla as a site of power rather than letting the experience dislocate his entire sense of reality. He steals the costume and dons it himself, endowing blackness with symbolic power, even as he is fully in control of that blackness.
Enoch’s use of blackface references the practice of blackface minstrelsy in the United
States, performances that simultaneously revealed white America’s intense attraction to blackness, which it invested with enormous physical and sexual power, and its need to ridicule and control that blackness by performing it symbolically and maintaining black bodies as sites of ridicule.76 Significantly, Enoch does not interact with any living black people throughout the novel, so that his control over images of “blackness” remains symbolic. He is never forced to confront black human agency and concretely changing racial structures the way Haze is, and so is able to maintain a coherent sense of his own identity as bound up with the powerful yet controlled image of a racial other.
Haze finds the mummy powerful as well, but is disturbed by what it represents in its otherness, and unlike the porter, the mummy is an image Haze can control and violently reject. The absurd literalization of the concept of a new jesus (a man without blood to waste, and different in appearance from any other man) confronts Haze with
76 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press 1993). For a fuller discussion of the dynamics of blackface minstrelsy in my work, see chapter 3, pg. 90-93.
72 both its strangeness and its familiarity: it squints at Haze “as if it were trying to identify an old friend who was going to kill it” (WB 187). The problem is this unexpected closeness, which paradoxically provokes violent rejection. Both times Haze sees the mummy, he is also implicated in some kind of domestic image – the first time, his own reflection in the glass case at the museum merges with that of the mother with her two sons, at which point he runs from the building. The second time, it is Sabbath, the preacher’s daughter, who presents the mummy to Haze’s view, in the posture of a mother and identifying Haze as the father with definite obligations to the “child” she is holding in her arms: “‘Ask your daddy yonder where he was running off to...Ask him isn’t he going to take you and me with him?’” (WB 99, 187). The dark-skinned face, totally and incomprehensibly foreign but presented in conjunction with images of family, overpowers Haze with its contradictory claim on his being – it asks him to adapt his self- perception to include this new face. Whereas the porter totally rejects Haze’s attempts to incorporate him into his own identity, the mummy’s incomprehensible face offers some semblance of familiarity, salvation, and comfort – it offers a possibility of a “home” that includes blackness, an integrated identity. Fixated as he is on the past that he cannot recover, a racially structured, hierarchical past, the mummy becomes yet another sign of an inassimilable new reality, which he can do nothing but reject. Haze’s act of violent control over this image, which he throws against the wall and then out into the rain, contrasts with his inability to control the porter, but leaves him in the same no-place of suspension and paralysis, staring out into the “gray blur” of the world outside (WB 188).
The mummy’s face concretizes and reinforces Haze’s total alienation from the world around him, and reveals it to be almost entirely self-imposed.
73 Haze’s existential dilemma culminates in the total loss of any illusions he could have had about his own mobility and self-reliance in the face of society’s claim on him.
He murders his double, Solace Layfield, partly in order to sever any connection between himself and the social world – he sees his own gospel being co-opted by Layfield and
Shoats in a way that eliminates its contradictions and places it in an understandable social context. They displace him from his own gospel, eliminating even this tenuous hold on individuality and subsuming it in a process of integration with reality. Haze forces
Layfield to remove his suit and hat – those objects that render him virtually indistinguishable from Haze himself – before running him down with his car, that symbol of his own belligerent and delusional self-reliance (WB 203-4). He has put what little faith he has in the car as an object that frees him from responsibility, an object that also embodies the familiar racial structures of the past. Thus, when the policeman pushes the car off a cliff for Haze’s relatively small crime of not having a license, it is the final straw. Haze no longer has an object on which to fix his hopes for coherence and identity.
In this moment, the emptiness he sees in his surroundings becomes extreme and overpowering: “His face seemed to reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond, the entire distance that extended from his eyes to the blank gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space. His knees bent under him and he sat down on the edge of the embankment with his feet hanging over” (WB 209). Yet again, Haze is “hanging,” in suspension, this time without even the illusion of mobility left to him. He is confronted by a reality too vast in its possibilities to make any place for him that he can understand. The social (racial) structures of the past are displaced, through historical movement, by a present that offers no hope of a stable identity for Haze. His faith in the
74 car, a no-place, parallels his Church Without Christ, a vehicle for non-salvation: they are both symptoms of his refusal to engage with social reality on its own terms.
Confronted by the now-apparent insubstantiality of all his previous efforts to retreat from a world he does not understand, Haze takes the extreme final step of blinding himself. With this action, he removes himself from society almost completely, rejecting material reality to better experience the vast beyond reflected in his eyes throughout the novel: “‘If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more’” (WB 222). His only human contact is with his landlady, Mrs. Flood, who takes a peculiar interested in him, frustrated by what she does not understand about him. She mirrors Haze’s own posture of leaning forward and staring, “as if she expected to see something she hadn’t seen before” (WB
213). Significantly, Haze’s blindness causes Mrs. Flood to question her own identity, because even when he answers her, she can never tell whether he knows it is she. “She herself. Mrs. Flood, the landlady. Not just anybody” (WB 217). Eventually she becomes so obsessed with Haze that she proposes marriage to him, using language that evokes Haze’s own claim on the porter in the first chapter. “‘You don’t have anybody to look after you but me,’” she tells Haze, “‘No other place to be but mine!’” (WB 228).
Characteristically, Haze runs away from these claims on him, resists social connection in favor of wandering; now, without a car to wander in, his totally solitary existence and delusional self-reliance prove fatal. Haze ends as he existed throughout the novel: in suspension between no-places. The police find him in a drainage ditch near an abandoned construction project, unclear on whether he is the man they are looking for and even whether he is alive or dead; he dies in the squad car, never finally arriving anywhere. Mrs. Flood is exultant when the police drop him off, exclaiming, “‘I see
75 you’ve come home!’” (WB 231). This statement is revealed to be yet another absurdity, however. Haze has no home: even Eastrod, the embodiment of his forever-lost identity, is a place he can only associate with death. Mrs. Flood stares into his eyes, unable to see anything, feeling as if she has “finally got to the beginning of something she [can’t] begin,” envisioning Haze as a pin point of light, moving farther and farther away (WB
231-2). This moment recreates, in a way, Haze’s own moments of suspension, of non- grounding in reality or reference. Haze’s self-blinding perpetuates his own state of incomprehension of and non-grounding in reality, and transfers it onto Mrs. Flood.
Nothing is changed, and no one is redeemed.
IV. “Nobody Going to Bother You”: Racial Domination and Triumphant Individualism
To compare this gloomy ending to the rather more triumphant one in The Violent Bear it
Away requires examination of the mechanism by which young Tarwater, the hero of the later novel, is able to come to such a fully developed sense of himself and his purpose in the world. I have noted that both Haze and Tarwater interact with a black man in the scenes that depict their departures from known to unknown worlds; the porter’s resistance to Haze’s attempt to impose his own narrative on him places Haze in an irremediably foreign landscape with no reference point from which to construct an identity. He seeks a home that does not exist, a refuge from a society which cannot comprehend him and which he cannot comprehend. Tarwater’s interaction with Buford Munson, on the other hand, goes the way most interactions between blacks and whites went in the traditional racial hierarchy of the South at the time of O’Connor’s writing. Buford gently admonishes Tarwater for his delay in burying his dead uncle, but does not otherwise
76 interfere – in contrast with the porter’s jerking away of the ladder, Buford removes his hand from Tarwater’s shoulder at his rude command, “‘Nigger, take your hand off me’”
(VBA 48). Buford’s verbal response to Tarwater – “‘Nobody going to bother you...That going to be your trouble’” (VBA 48) – both parallels and inverts the porter’s final remark to Haze. Both statements leave the protagonist alone in some sense, but to opposite effect: if the porter destabilizes Haze’s sense of self by inverting the structures that have shaped that self and uprooting his sense of a coherent place in time, Buford serves to confirm Tarwater’s dominance over Powderhead, his belonging in-place, by confirming his right to do as he pleases. In his uprooting, Haze is trapped by his own refusal to engage with reality on its own terms, whereas Tarwater is set free, in a sense, through his firm rooting in a home that implies a stable past and social hierarchy. Even though
Tarwater decides he must depart for the city, the place from which he departs still exists and is fully his own. Tarwater is not constructing an identity out of nothing – his uncle’s death, while it shakes his faith in his upbringing, does not eliminate it, and in fact allows him to assert a strong claim of ownership over the land, a stable reference point from which to depart. His firm grounding in Powderhead and in his great uncle’s teaching allows him to return to a home that has not lost significance, a home which, on the contrary, is steeped in meaning.
Though Tarwater struggles between the two worldviews presented to him, he does not struggle with nothingness. If Haze’s eyes reject his immediate surroundings and seem to reflect a vast blankness, Tarwater experiences a world replete with meaning. He has been raised to expect the Lord’s calling, and it shows in his frequent, sudden revelations that blind him with the light they reveal in the world around him. In his
77 memory of going to the city with his great uncle, he sees “in a burst of light” that the bustling multitude around him is “hastening away from the Lord God Almighty. It was to the city that the prophets came and he was here in the midst of it” (VBA 27). His visions reveal a radical presence, both of God and of himself in connection with the world – he sees himself in the midst of those to whom he will prophesy when he is called, an event he has no doubt will come to pass at some point. Even when his internal voice – the voice of the “stranger” that appears while he is beginning to dig his uncle’s grave – questions the validity of the “signs” Tarwater sees, he cannot ignore their significance.
When Bishop jumps into the fountain in the park, Tarwater involuntarily begins to walk toward him, apparently to baptize him, as the sun suddenly shines full upon the boy, resting “like a hand upon the child’s white head...[Tarwater] felt a distinct tension in the quiet. The old man might have been lurking near, holding his breath, waiting for the baptism. His friend was silent as if in the felt presence, he dared not raise his voice”
(VBA 164). In the silence, Tarwater perceives possibility, a distinct something that is expected of him. There is a “felt presence.” Interestingly, both this incident and Haze’s first sight of the mummy occur in the centers of parks, signaling their centrality in the overall structures of the novels. Haze, of course, flees this meaningful moment, overwhelmed by his lack of understanding of his place in relation to what he is seeing.
Tarwater’s relationship with Bishop and climactic baptism/drowning of him forms the center of his struggle between worlds. Either Bishop is nothing but a “mistake of nature” of whom he should try not even to be aware, as Rayber asserts (VBA 117), or he is the key to the boy’s calling, since according to old Tarwater he is the first person he must baptize. Tarwater is keenly aware of Bishop’s significance from even before the
78 two meet; Bishop’s heavy breathing over the phone when Tarwater attempts to call his uncle makes him feel “as if he had received a revelation he could not yet decipher. He seemed to have been stunned by some deep internal blow that had not yet made its way to the surface of his mind” (VBA 83). Bishop is the embodiment of the “waiting silence” which Tarwater feels will “reveal itself and demand to be named.” Bishop’s heavy breathing, his nonverbal contemplation of Tarwater, seems to precipitate “some inevitable vision” (VBA 86, 91). As he stares back at Bishop’s staring face, the revelation comes “silent, implacable, direct as a bullet:”
He did not look into the eyes of any fiery beast or see a burning bush. He only knew, with a certainty sunk in despair, that he was expected to baptize the child he saw and begin the life his great-uncle had prepared him for. He knew that he was called to be a prophet and that the ways of his prophecy would not be remarkable. His black pupils, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, until at last he received his reward, a broken fish, a multiplied loaf. The Lord out of dust had created him, had made him blood and nerve and mind, had made him to bleed and weep and think, and set him in a world of loss and fire all to baptize one idiot child that He need not have created in the first place and to cry out a gospel just as foolish. He tried to shout, ‘NO!’ but it was like trying to shout in his sleep. The sound was saturated in silence, lost. (VBA 91-2)
Bishop embodies Tarwater’s calling, both in the sense that his great uncle designated him as his first baptism, and in the subtler way that Bishop represents a silence waiting to be filled with meaning, a void demanding to be named. Unlike Haze’s vision of a vast nothingness, Tarwater’s eyes reflect, depth on depth, an image of himself, trudging after
Jesus with a capital J. There is an end-point, an inevitable “reward,” even if it does not strike Tarwater as an attractive one in this moment. Haze contemplates an eternal emptiness, whereas the emptiness, for Tarwater, implies its imminent filling.
Tarwater tries to avoid the destiny Bishop represents, but his most vehement attempt to deny this fate is instead what initiates his full surrender to it. He plans to
79 drown the boy in order to prove that he won’t baptize him, the obvious end toward which the novel and Tarwater’s negotiation of his identity inexorably move. Tarwater’s cynical internal voice challenges him to act, commands that he “do something at last, one thing to prove you ain’t going to do another” (VBA 167). Drowning the boy would be a confirmation that his life is nothing but an accident anyway – his own father, in an embodiment of his grotesquely “rational” philosophy, projects that “‘In a hundred years people may have learned enough to put them to sleep when they’re born’” (VBA 168).
When he actually drowns the boy, however, the murderous act becomes bound up with the ritual of baptism he has been avoiding since he first saw Bishop. Tarwater experiences a constant pull between his apparently uncontrollable urge to baptize (as illustrated in the fountain scene) and his disgust at the mundane prophetic destiny he envisions as “trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus”
(VBA 91). His drowning of Bishop is futile as a means of proving that he can avoid this destiny, because something outside him enforces its primacy through this act. In the face of the silence Bishop presents, Tarwater involuntarily speaks the words of baptism, filling the void with meaning. As he explains it to the truck driver with whom he flees the scene, “‘It was an accident. I didn’t meant to...The words just come out of themselves but it don’t mean nothing...They were just some words that run out of my mouth and spilled in the water’” (VBA 209). The “felt presence” Tarwater experiences in contemplating Bishop manifests itself in the meaningful words that come out of his mouth – the very activity of prophecy.
The drowning/baptism also initiates Tarwater’s return to Powderhead, a journey that he conceives of, like the drowning, as a way to negate his role of prophet: “‘I’m in
80 full charge there. No voice will be uplifted...Now all I have to do is mind my own bidnis until I die. I don’t have to baptize or prophecy’” (VBA 210). He plans to assert his full independence from Old Tarwater’s influence by taking charge of Powderhead and staying there, but this scheme, too, is frustrated by the divine force that completely overpowers his actions and fills the waiting emptiness with a literal bounty of meaning, the feast of the loaves and fishes. His religious revelation is reminiscent of Haze’s final vision of the vast empty field stretching on to infinity, but to Tarwater, the field that stretches from the burnt house to the woods seems “no longer empty but peopled with a multitude.” Haze’s contemplation of nothingness is replaced in this scene by a total presence, a vision of plenitude that clarifies Tarwater’s knowledge of himself: he becomes “aware at last of the object of his hunger, aware that it was the same as the old man’s and that nothing on earth would fill him” (VBA 241). Tarwater’s return to
Powderhead occasions his vision, which represents the unavoidable imposition of the divine on his life’s path, a meaning that fills the silence. Significantly, this divine intervention is accompanied by an erasure of the figure that represents his denial of this meaning. Tarwater’s vision and surrender to his prophetic role occur after he has burned up both the site of his sexual assault and the vision of the “friend” (his cynical internal voice) to whom his violator bears a striking resemblance. Tarwater “[shakes] himself free” from this “grinning presence,” a presence which represents both Rayber’s rational voice and Tarwater’s own resistance to his destiny (VBA 232, 238). He must erase this voice in order to fully surrender to the silence that awaits revelation.
The scene is set for this revelation by the seemingly incongruous return of Buford
Munson, who says and does almost nothing but in many ways makes possible the
81 confirmation of Tarwater’s identity. Buford has buried the old man, set up a cross over the grave, and even plowed the corn, performing both religious and domestic rituals that maintain Powderhead in place, a living home. Tarwater’s revelation culminates with the command he hears while he is lying with his face pressed against the dirt of his uncle’s grave, the words “as silent as seeds opening one at a time in his blood” (VBA 242). The image of the seeds opening in his blood is connected with old man’s words, which “had been dropping one by one into him and now, silent, hidden in his bloodstream, were moving secretly toward some goal of their own,” but also, in its evocation of agriculture, the fertility of the land as maintained by Buford: “The corn the old man had left planted was up about a foot and moved in wavering lines of green across the field” (VBA 61,
238). The significance of the land is reinforced by Tarwater’s rubbing dirt from his great uncle’s grave on his forehead before beginning his walk back to the city, evocative of the sacrament of Ash Wednesday, which begins the holy period of Lent. The ground that holds Old Tarwater’s body becomes the sanctified site of the boy’s departure, and if this is the case, Buford has, in effect, performed the act of sanctification by “planting” the old man’s body in the earth. Buford maintains Powderhead as a place to which Tarwater can return – a place endowed with spiritual significance and the fertile ground that roots his identity. Buford performs a service that allows Tarwater to find meaning, identity, and purpose in his home. In Wise Blood, the porter’s refusal of service suspends Haze, annihilating any concept of home that might allow him to access these stabilizing factors.
Of course, once he has established that he is responsible for the maintenance of
Powderhead, Buford must disappear along with Tarwater’s personal inner voice in order for the totalizing vision and assumption of prophetic identity to occur. In the intensity of
82 the boy’s gaze into the distance, Buford feels “a pressure on him too great to bear...He muttered something and turned the mule around and moved off, across the back field and down to the woods” (VBA 241). It is almost as if the force of Tarwater’s vision itself exerts a physical force on Buford; there is no room in the boy’s field of vision for the man who has essentially provided him with a home to return to. He “mutters something” just as he “mutters” the phrase that confirms Tarwater’s independence (“‘Nobody going to bother you’”) before disappearing into the forest. Here, the content of his utterance is not even discernible, and he disappears again, leaving the boy with his vision. Thus,
Tarwater’s confirmation in his prophetic role is founded on both the service of a traditionally servile black man and the erasure of that man’s body from his sight, providing the illusion of total independence. Tarwater’s confident departure from home is made possible by Buford’s maintenance of that home and subsequent disappearance from the scene, leaving the boy alone with his grand vision and newly stable identity.
But identity is never truly stable. The fact that Buford must disappear and
Tarwater must neutralize a manifestation of his own inner voice in order for him to fully assume the prophetic mantle means that this mantle is founded not upon the wholeness of the prophet, but upon the exclusion of some elements of the prophet that go into his making – just as Freud’s melancholic ego is constituted by its losses.77 Those things that tie him to Powderhead, that endow the place with divine significance, must also be left behind so that he can pursue his calling, a concept made possible by unfettered individualism. The ending of The Violent Bear it Away proposes an unqualified triumph, the total identification of Tarwater with his calling. But the strange presence and abrupt departure of Buford Munson, in their very understatedness, would seem to imply a
77 Cheng 8.
83 qualification of this identity which, as Cheng shows, is founded in the exclusion of a racial other, and the maintenance of that other in a certain place. In this case, that place is specifically rural, isolated, and agricultural, the traditional place for blacks to be in a nation founded on slavery. For the porter in Wise Blood to insist that he is from Chicago, a Northern industrial city, and to feel so at home in transit rather than remaining in place, are violations of this structure, the code from which white American identity was constructed. Haze is left without a home, either geographically or historically. His delusional self-reliance is doomed to fail because there is nothing in the self which was not first outside it, and all he can see outside himself is nothingness.
84 Chapter Three
Ellison’s American Joke: Laughter and Ambivalence in Invisible Man
When Ralph Ellison first came to New York in 1936, Langston Hughes invited him to attend a Broadway performance of Jack Kirkland’s Tobacco Road, based on Erskine
Caldwell’s 1932 novel of the same name. The play concerns a family of poor Southern whites who are so hungry that the father urges his sixteen-year-old daughter to seduce her older sister’s husband so that he will give them a bag of turnips, his only food. The family is dirty, lazy, and sexually depraved, the bank is foreclosing on their farm, and both the mother and grandmother die during the course of the play, a grim pronouncement as to the fate of this particular breed of rural existence. Yet the tragedy is infused with an outrageous “comedy of the grotesque,” which Ellison identifies as an antidote to the stressful dislocations racking Depression-era American life.78 The play’s brand of humor overwhelmed him during a scene in which the daughter and her brother- in-law, the owner of the turnips, express their mutual attraction through an elaborate back-to-back dance across the stage termed “horsing.” Observing such absurdity, Ellison was struck with a gale of loud and uncontrollable laughter whose sheer force and duration distracted audience and actors alike (CE 648-51).
Framed as an apology by way of explanation to Caldwell himself, the experience forms the centerpiece of “An Extravagance of Laughter,” his extended meditation on the
American theater of race and what he sees as humor’s starring role. In the midst of his outburst, Ellison writes, he glanced at his “shocked” host and imagined him saying,
78 Ralph Ellison, “An Extravagance of Laughter,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library 1995), 647. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text as CE.
85 “‘Damn, if I’d known this would be his reaction I would have picked a theater with laughing barrels!’” (CE 649). These barrels, Ellison goes on to explain, were a particularly absurd manifestation of the white South’s desire to control and contain black expression. As he tells it, the barrels were a feature of “some small Southern town” where, when a black person felt an outburst of laughter coming on, he was required to thrust his head into one and remain there until the fit was over (CE 649). The barrels were considered necessary for protecting white sensibilities from “a peculiar form of insanity suffered exclusively by Negroes, who in light of their social status and past condition of servitude were regarded as having absolutely nothing in their daily experience which could possibly inspire rational laughter” (CE 650). Black laughter was nothing short of a mystery, and the barrels provided the confounded whites with a means of saving face (CE 651).
Ellison’s discussion of black laughter is also a theoretical framework for understanding American racial identity, couched as it is in his reminiscence of navigating
New York’s racial codes during this first trip north. As he spins out the yarn of the laughing barrels, he describes the most tradition-bound white southerners joining in the raucous laughter coming from the barrels, quite against their will and everything the barrels are supposed to accomplish: the total separation of black self-expression from white sensibility, the enforcement of strict racial boundaries. Some whites even begin to suspect that “in some mysterious fashion the Negro involved was not only laughing at himself laughing, but was also laughing at them laughing at his laughing against their own determined wills” (CE 653). This reversal of power is obviously worrisome: “It was feared that if such unhappy instances of interracial laughter occurred with any frequency,
86 it would create a crisis in which social order would be fatally undermined by something as unpolitical as a bunch of Negroes with their laughing heads stuck into the interiors of a batch of old whitewashed whiskey barrels” (CE 654). The notion of interracial identification through laughter, intensely threatening to Southern power structures, turns out to be central to Ellison’s conception of his own American identity. Part of what
Ellison was responding to with his outrageous laughter was the remarkable ability of
American humor to reveal the absurdity of the divisions that order the country’s social life, “for in responding to the imbalance which was shaking American social hierarchy from its apex to its base, [Caldwell] placed the yokelike anti-Negro stereotypes upon the necks of whites” (CE 648). By compelling him to laugh at the “symbolic and therefore nonthreatening Southern whites” in the play, Caldwell forced him through the barriers that separated his life from theirs, to a recognition of “certain absurd aspects of our common humanity” (CE 655). The genius of American humor, Ellison implies, is its ability to expose both the human recognition hidden by the racial divide, and the absurd conceit and delusion of those who would hold themselves above such recognition and disdain laughter.
The theatrical situation with which Ellison frames his essay is not incidental: he sees theatricality as fundamental to American society and very much at the heart of its humor. He quotes Kenneth Burke to point out that all human societies are essentially
“dramatic” in the sense that their members “‘enact roles...change roles...participate...[and] develop modes of social appeal’” before going on to claim that “the semi-open structure of American society, with its many opportunities for individual self-transformation, intensifies the dramatic element by increasing the possibilities for both cooperation and
87 conflict” (CE 629-30). Of course, “semi-open” is a key term. When he enumerates the ways Americans can take advantage of the protean nature of identity (“Create by an act of immaculate self-conception an autobiography like that which transformed James Gatz into ‘Jay Gatsby.’ Alter the shape of your nose, tint of skin, or texture of hair” [CE 630]), it reads as an ironic invocation of the distinct lack of possibilities for those “assigned and restricted to predestined roles in the hierarchal drama of American society” (CE 630). In
New York, he negotiates its flexible structure to mask himself as a confident New
Yorker, but the essay is haunted by his memories of the South, where racial roles are rigidly fixed and the script is always already written.
This racial theater, with its material reality of anguish, forms the dark underbelly of Ellison’s meditations on humor. His discussion of the theatrical elements of lynching reveals the truly tragic dimensions of black laughter as a response to the horror that surrounds black life in America. He posits that “because lynch mobs are driven by a passionate need to destroy the distinction between the actual and the symbolic, its victim is forced to undergo death for all his group” (CE 641). If “blackness is a sign of satanic evil given human form,” the lynch mob enacts literally the logical conclusion of this social/psychological designation (CE 641). Everyone is playing a role in a deeply ritual drama, but for the victims in the drama, “such sacrifices are the source of emotions that move far beyond the tragic conception of pity and terror and down into the abysmal levels of conflict and folly from which arises our famous American humor” (CE 642).
Thus, this tragic element of black life in America is traced to the same origin as what made Ellison laugh hysterically at Tobacco Road: identification of common humanity, and whites’ attempt to rid themselves of it. White America’s notion of its own racial
88 supremacy is balanced by a deep awareness of the humanity they share with blacks, a reality that threatens the power structure and must be repressed by theatrical means. Eric
Lott, in his study of blackface minstrelsy, proposes to demonstrate “how precariously nineteenth-century white working people lived their whiteness,”79 and as such, asserts that minstrel performances “invok[ed] the power of ‘blackness’ while deriding it, in an effort of cultural control.”80 Much like lynching, these performances revealed a deep consciousness in white America of the threatening power of blackness, and even its own attraction to “black” forms, but used theater to ritually put blackness in its assigned role and provide white audiences with the assurance that they shared nothing in common with the “othered” image on the stage.
Clearly, however, the boundaries between black and white are permeable, each exerting an influence on the other, with both blacks and whites aware of the artificiality of the social distinctions that separate them. Cheng’s use of Freudian melancholia as a framework for understanding race relations in America is useful here, and both Ellison and Lott can be seen as anticipating her work. In Cheng’s adaptation of Freud’s definition, the presence of blackness is formative to whiteness because of a long and interrelated history of mutual dependence, while racial roles constructed by white supremacy do the work of assuring whites that this is not the case, that in fact, the two races have nothing in common. The purpose of the racial “script,” then, is to obscure the fact that such a script even exists, or rather to naturalize the artificial divisions that structure it. Ellison’s take on the matter focuses on his side of the cultural color line:
“Brother, the blackness of Afro-American ‘black humor’ is not black; it is tragically
79 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press 1993), 4. 80Ibid. 26.
89 human and finds its source and object in the notion of ‘whiteness’” (CE 642). Whites’ melancholic relationship with blackness manifests as an attempt to dehumanize it by assigning certain roles which are played out most directly in the theater of lynch mobs.
The black response to this horrifying but clearly futile attempt to rid the nation of them is to laugh at whiteness in a way that diminishes its power, at least in the black psyche.
This impulse gives rise to what some might find a shockingly lighthearted attitude toward violent oppression, as Ellison remembers from his school days in the South. Back on campus after one particularly painful episode in a nearby town, “we were compelled to buffer the pain and negate the humiliation by making grotesque comedy out of the extremes to which whites would go to keep us in what they considered to be our ‘place’”
(CE 636). Comedy is not only a necessary antidote to constant stress, but also a way of subverting social power structures that would designate blacks as irremediably Other.
The tale of the laughing barrels effectively suggests the absurdity and impossibility of white attempts to purge themselves of blackness, black amusement at those very efforts, and the threat that amusement can pose to structures of white power.
The relationship between racial theater, laughter, and power that Ellison explores in “An Extravagance of Laughter” makes it an essential companion text to his best- known work and only completed novel, Invisible Man. The centrality of laughter in
Ellison’s essay about racial roles should point readers toward the same theme in his novel. Laughter is a constant presence in Invisible Man, bubbling up at moments when there seems to be nothing to inspire it, at least nothing “rational,” in Ellison’s words. The novel places black laughter within a cultural tradition of humorously acknowledging the absurdity of the structures that dictate racial behavior, while remaining fully aware of the
90 tragic history underpinning this absurdity. This ambivalent laughter, however, is insufficient as a strategy for changing those structures, which is the Invisible Man’s ultimate goal. In fact, the novel shows that taken to its logical conclusion, using laughter
– which becomes nothing more than an agreeable mask – as a strategy plays into the scripted roles expected of black people, and allows only the cynical advancement of personal power rather than meaningful change for the race. The novel relates the
Invisible Man’s struggle to engage in this oppressive reality on its own terms, acting out the role he is expected to play, before finally coming to the understanding that he must detach himself from the script altogether. He rejects all the models for political engagement that are presented to him in favor of creating his own.
The tension between engagement and detachment is one that largely structured the novel’s initial reception, as well as most subsequent criticism up to the present day.
Particularly among ideologically committed Communists and adherents to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, Ellison’s ruthless satirization of both the Party (the Brotherhood) and black nationalism in the figure of Ras the Destroyer seemed to signal the author’s apolitical stance and lack of commitment to racial issues.81 This view found its apex in
Irving Howe’s 1963 essay, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” which lambasted Ellison and
James Baldwin for not writing sufficiently livid protest novels in the vein of their obvious predecessor, Richard Wright.82 The ending of Invisible Man, which finds the narrator underground, apparently finished with political struggle, has fed into many critics’ notion
81 For general discussion of the reception history of Ellison and Invisible Man, see Morris Dickstein, “Ralph Ellison, Race, and American Culture”; Timothy Parrish, Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America; and Ross Posnock, “Introduction: Ellison’s Joking.” Full citations can be found in bibliography. 82 Dissent (September 1963): 353-368. Dissent digital archives.
91 of the division between politics and art, and Ellison’s reputation as a “politically disengaged...high modernist” who valued aesthetic experimentation over political protest.83 As Gregg Crane points out, however, Ellison’s work recognizes no neat distinction between aesthetics and politics, and claims for the artist “greater flexibility in addressing the law.”84 Indeed, it is my contention that Ellison’s political engagement, far from being absent, is inextricably tied with his artistry, particularly the freedom that the written word affords the political subject. Presented with numerous “scripts” for participation in American reality, the Invisible Man ultimately decides that none of them represent viable options for effecting political change. His political vision instead insists on the importance of ambivalence, the ambivalence that makes laughter compatible with sorrow in the expression of identity. Laughter becomes a signal toward the absurdity of racial boundaries, but the novel also demonstrates the insufficiency of laughter alone to permanently dismantle those boundaries, because it can so easily become a performance that remains within scripted racial constructs rather than a creative force for expressing the complexity of identity. Contradiction and ambivalence permeate Invisible Man, illustrating a political vision that is first of all creative and inclusive, eschewing rigid distinctions. The epilogue, rather than marking the narrator’s full retreat from the political world, rather signifies his entrance into the literary realm that allows the full expression of his identity in the world, without the already-written scripts that constitute the greatest obstacle to meaningful political action.
83 Ross Posnock, “Introduction: Ellison’s Joking,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, ed. Ross Posnock. Cambridge Companions Online (Cambridge University Press 2013), 1. 84 Jesse Wolfe, “Ralph Ellison’s Constitutional Faith,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, ed. Ross Posnock. Cambridge Companions Online (Cambridge University Press 2013), 106.
92 I. Blackface Performance and Performances of Blackness
In “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Ellison interweaves the phenomena of theatricality and humor almost intuitively. His outburst of laughter is a response not only to the immediate comedy of the play, but also to the dramatic complex of alienation and identification he sees represented there and in American race relations at large. By highlighting the performative aspect of racial identity in Ellison’s fiction and essays, we get a sense of the absurd reality to which he believes black laughter responds. As discussed above, Ellison firmly subscribes to the notion that all life, and particularly
American life, is the wearing of a mask, and that identity is theatrical. In his 1958 essay,
“Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” he takes issue with one critic’s description of the trickster figure as primarily a black trope, and points out that the role of “smart man playing dumb” is more broadly American than anything else (CE 108). He bases this assessment on his interpretation of the ways blacks and whites regard each other across the “joke at the center of American identity”:
The white American has charged the Negro American with being without past or tradition (something which strikes the white man with a nameless horror), just as he himself has been so charged by European and American critics with a nostalgia for the stability once typical of European cultures, and the Negro knows that both were ‘mammy-made’ right here at home. What’s more, each secretly believes that he alone knows what is valid in the American experience, and that the other knows he knows but will not admit it, and each suspects the other of being at bottom a phony. The white man’s half-conscious awareness that his image of the Negro is false makes him suspect the Negro of always seeking to take him in, and assume his motives are anger and fear – which very often they are. On his side of the joke the Negro looks at the white man and finds it difficult to believe that the ‘grays’ – a Negro term for white people – can be so absurdly self-deluded over the true interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness. To him the white man seems a hypocrite who boasts of a pure identity while standing with his humanity exposed to the world. (CE 108-9)
93 At the heart of Ellison’s conception of racial roles is this suspicion with which blacks and whites regard each other – a suspicion based upon competing claims to authenticity and
American identity, or even human identity. This suspicion results in a broad impossibility of sincerity between the races, a way of interacting in which both sides are also acting in a theatrical sense.
Though expectations of racial roles exist on both sides, Ellison focuses on the white South’s identification of blackness with evil and its consequent need to ritually scapegoat and punish individual blacks as representative of the threat to the “pure identity” they desire for themselves (CE 641, 109). Laughing barrels, segregation on
Southern buses, and the dark ritual of lynching are all identified as sites where white power and racial purity are staged and enforced through control of the black body. In
Ellison’s view and my own, however, the important aspect of these sites of control and separation is the essential porousness of the boundaries that whites attempt to place between themselves and blackness. The human identification that slips through the cracks is just as important as the boundaries themselves, as Eric Lott’s Love and Theft:
Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class makes clear. This important study of the desire (love) that characterizes white practices of cultural appropriation
(theft) departs from the view of most critics, who have seen “racial aversion” at the heart of minstrelsy.85 He rejects the notion that “white minstrels had no investment in black culture, no idea what they were doing,”86 and emphasizes that the origins of the minstrel show can be found in complex interrelations between Northern blacks and working-class
85 Lott 6. 86 Ibid. 41.
94 whites who in many cases “shared a common culture of jokes, games, and dances.”87 He makes the claim that there were in fact real black people shaping the performative practices that constituted blackface minstrel acts.88 And while he never neglects the reality that “white commodification of black bodies structured all of this activity, or that the cultural forms of the black dispossessed in the United States have been appropriated and circulated as stand-ins for a supposedly national folk culture,” he nevertheless identifies a certain amount of agency for blacks in these early creations:
Black performance itself, first of all, was precisely ‘performative,’ a cultural invention, not some precious essence installed in black bodies; and for better or worse it was often a product of self-commodification, a way of getting along in a constricted world. Black people, that is to say, not only exercised a certain amount of control over such practices but perforce sometimes developed them in tandem with white spectators. Moreover, practices taken as black were occasionally interracial creations whose commodification on white stages attested only to whites’ greater access to public distribution (and profit).89
As Lott explains it, racial and economic structures forced blacks into the performative roles that shaped the minstrel form, and denied them any actual material gain from minstrelsy’s immense popularity. From this description, three things become apparent about black cultural forms: first, that blacks often consciously shaped their own behavior in performative ways in order to survive in a white-dominated world; second, that these consciously created performances made their way in some form into the white popular imagination as “black;” and third, that white audiences positively loved these performances.
As is clear from his title, Lott is largely concerned with that love and its implications for racial feeling in the antebellum United States. Though the immediate
87 Ibid. 47. 88 Ibid. 39. 89 Ibid. 39.
95 ideological effect of blackface minstrelsy was to control and denigrate the power of blackness, it also put the audience’s less acceptable impulses and desires on display, if in a veiled way. In an industrial society that increasingly insisted on workplace “morality” and discipline, “the blackface body figured the traditional, ‘preindustrial’ joys that social and economic pressures had begun to marginalize.”90 For both performer and spectator, minstrelsy represented a space of sexualized license – phallic imagery, childishly exaggerated bodily orifices, thinly veiled references to sex and orgasm in song lyrics – that they both intensely desired to inhabit and were forced by societal norms to denigrate.
“In rationalized societies such as the one coming into being in the antebellum years, the
Other is of prime importance in the organization of desire,” Lott writes. Citing Slavoj
Žižek, he explains the interrelatedness of this desire and hatred:
Because one is so ambivalent about and represses one’s own pleasure, one imagines the Other to have stolen it or taken it away, and ‘fantasies about the Other’s special, excessive enjoyment’ allow that pleasure to return. Whites get satisfaction in supposing the ‘racial’ Other enjoys in ways unavailable to them – through exotic food, strange and noisy music, outlandish bodily exhibitions, or unremitting sexual appetite. And yet at the same time, because the Other personifies their inner divisions, hatred of their own excess of enjoyment necessitates hatred of the Other.91
This dynamic, much like racial melancholia, emphasizes the importance of blackness in the formation of the white ego, as a presence that must be denigrated as it is simultaneously held in place and embraced. In Lott’s words, “the repellent elements repressed from white consciousness and projected onto black people were far from securely alienated; they are always already ‘inside,’ part of ‘us.’”92 Blackface performances offered whites a very public way to gratify their repressed pleasures as well
90 Ibid. 148. 91 Ibid. 148. 92 Ibid. 149.
96 as continually demarcate the boundary between self and racial Other through the shows’ specifically performative and exaggerated forms.
From this account of things, it is clear that performances of blackness as structured by whites never achieve their goal of total alienation from the Other.
Identification and repressed desire are always at the heart of the performance, as is so eloquently demonstrated in Ellison’s tale of the laughing barrels. Invisible Man, too, is often structured by forced, scripted performances of blackness, such as the viscerally horrifying battle royal. Though tightly controlled by the white men who demand it, this ritual drama also reveals their desire for and identification with the black male bodies on display. Cheng writes that the presence of the blonde woman is meant to put the black boys’ bestial desires on display for the white audience, so that the narrator, gazing at the woman with mixed desire and hatred, “is but performing the inseparability of desire, shame, and rage that he, according to white fantasy, is supposed to feel as a black man gazing at a white woman...The mise en scène is designed to exhibit black murderous desire. The invisible man is thus caught up in a setup where his personal response is always already a historical response,”93 what I would call a historically scripted response.
Nonetheless, as both Cheng and Jarenski point out, the presence of the woman also mediates the white male gaze on the boys themselves: “If the woman is present, the men’s gaze can be coded as a policing of black male desire, allowing the white men to disavow their own desire for the boys.”94 As in minstrel shows, the complex of desire, fear, and denigration that allowed white audiences such a controlled outlet for pleasure is present in the battle royal, which is meant to put black physical and sexual potency on
93 Cheng 129-30. 94 Shelly Jarenski, “Invisibility Embraced: The Abject as a Site of Agency in Ellison’s Invisible Man,” MELUS 35 (4) (Winter 2010): 93.
97 display even as the boys themselves are entirely powerless. And here, too, identification with the “performers” is not absent. While the boys confusedly and fearfully demonstrate their desire for the woman, one of the white men allows himself to be fully “hypnotized” by his own desire: “I noticed a certain merchant who followed her hungrily, his lips loose and drooling...each time the blonde swayed her undulating hips he ran his hands through the thin hair of his bald head and, with his arms upheld, his posture clumsy like that of an intoxicated panda, wound his belly in a slow and obscene grind.”95 Thus, a performance meant to confirm the white men’s notions of black bestial desire for white women gives them permission to act out their own grotesque and animalistic impulses, which they would consciously locate only in black male bodies.
The history of race in the United States, then, is often a history of racial performance. From the days of slavery, when blacks veiled the rebellious content of their songs through indirect language or reversed antiphonal structures,96 “performing” the role that the owners wanted and thus protecting themselves from retribution, to the
Communist Party’s use of black people in tightly controlled roles that inspired Ellison’s portrait of the Brotherhood, white power has structured what it sees of black behavior around performative paradigms. These paradigms serve different needs, as is clear from the various performances demanded of the narrator throughout Invisible Man. Whether it is the violent aggression asked of him at the battle royal and in his interaction with Sybil, or the intellectual repression of racial identity required by the Brotherhood, the Invisible
Man’s behavior is almost always structured by white expectations and needs that reduce
95 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International 1995, originally published 1952), 20. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text as IM. 96 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning,” in The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, ed. Abby Wolf (New York: Basic Civitas 2012), 257-8.
98 the complexity of his identity to an already-written script. He is a black body restricted in outward expression by the structures of white power in which he performs his role.
II. The Ambivalence of Laughter
The leap from racial performance to laughter about that performance is a short one to make, which Ellison’s work and that of other black artists demonstrate. In the opening paragraph of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the narrator interrogates his own motives in revealing himself as part black, and discovers that “back of it all, I think I find a sort of savage and diabolical desire to gather up all the little tragedies of my life, and turn them into a practical joke on society.”97 He repeatedly refers to “playing a role” in various racially demarcated contexts, and once he decides to live as a white man, he finds humor in it:
The anomaly of my social position often appealed strongly to my sense of humor. I frequently smiled inwardly at some remark not altogether complimentary to people of color; and more than once I felt like declaiming, ‘I am a colored man. Do I not disprove the theory that one drop of Negro blood renders a man unfit?’ Many a night when I returned to my room after an enjoyable evening, I laughed heartily over what struck me as the capital joke I was playing.98
Inhabiting a world structured by insidious racial stereotypes, in which defining oneself as one race or the other is, for the light-skinned black man, a matter of good acting, the narrator is able to laugh privately at his practical joke. And yet, the moment that he decides in favor of living as a white man is distinctly un-comical: during his travels in the
South, he witnesses the capture and burning alive of a black man by a white mob.
Shocked, he contemplates the rhetoric of white supremacy, the “great and impassable
97 (New York: Library of America Paperback Classics 2011, originally published 1912), 5. 98 Ibid. 119.
99 gulf” that whites imagine between the races, and the “old, underlying animal instincts and passions” found in ancient tales of romance and chivalry which still seem to inspire
Southern white behavior.99 In Ellison’s words, the narrator witnesses “the abysmal levels of conflict and folly from which arises our famous American humor” (CE 642), and when he talks about laughing at the racial attitudes of his white friends, one cannot help but be reminded of this horrific scene of white supremacy taken to its logical extreme. If
Johnson makes a private joke out of racial identity, it is a deeply ambivalent joke, fully aware of the tragedy that is its object.
Similarly, Invisible Man’s first instance of laughter establishes the ambivalent tone that will characterize laughter throughout the novel. By ambivalent, I mean that its presence never signals true comedy, instead always responding, with more or less irony, to the absurdity of the racial script and the tragedy of its enforcement. It filters down from upstairs in the prologue’s dream scene, mingling with much more sorrowful tones.
The dream begins with the narrator’s vision of a girl “pleading in a voice like my mother’s as she stood before a group of slaveowners who bid for her naked body” (IM 9).
This disturbing dream image captures the dehumanization at the heart of slavery’s gruesome history, as well its deeply personal implications – “a voice like my mother’s.”
Then, while laughter resounds upstairs, the narrator converses with a moaning woman who says she dearly loved her master, because he gave her several sons, though she hated him too. “‘I too have become acquainted with ambivalence’” the narrator replies (IM 10).
Laughter mingles with pain in the figure of the old woman: “‘I laughs too, but I moans too’” she laments, before the narrator becomes confused, and cannot say what he wants because “the laughter upstairs became too loud and moan-like for me and I tried to break
99 Ibid. 114.
100 out of it, but I couldn’t” (IM 11). This scene combines a sourceless laughter with deeply sorrowful images of slavery, so that the narrator’s feeling of ambivalence becomes the prevailing mood. His conversation with the old woman is punctuated by his desire to ask her what freedom is, which she says she loved even more than her master. But in keeping with the rest of the section, they come to no conclusion: he suggests that it lies in hating, she in loving. When he asks her again, it is she who becomes confused: “‘I done forgot, son. It’s all mixed up. First I think it’s one thing, then I think it’s another’” (IM
11). Then he asks her a third time, and she is overwhelmed, asking him to leave her alone. This woman, a figure of slavery and its legacy, embodies the central question and dilemma of the novel. She voices an essential dividedness toward the past, and a corresponding ambivalence in present modes of expression. Is greater freedom to be found in laughing or in moaning? In other words, is it more politically productive to take a lighthearted attitude toward racial realities than a deadly serious one?
Ellison addresses what he sees as the connection between laughter and freedom in his 1981 introduction to Invisible Man. Once he recognized the “un-visibility” that is a condition of being black in America,
and given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter? And could it be that there was a subtle triumph hidden in such laughter that I had missed, but one which still was more affirmative than raw anger? A secret, hard-earned wisdom that might, perhaps, offer a more effective strategy through which a floundering Afro-American novelist could convey his vision? It was a startling idea, yet the voice was so persuasive with echoes of blues-toned laughter that I found myself being nudged toward a frame of mind in which, suddenly, current events, memories and artifacts began combining to form a vague but intriguing new perspective. (IM xv-xvi)
In typical Ellison style, he does not articulate exactly what this “intriguing new perspective” entails, but laughter is central, both as a strategy for responding to
101 oppression and as a way of expressing his “vision.” “Blues-toned laughter,” which characterized the voice of the Invisible Man as Ellison was conceiving of the novel, is a particularly useful phrase because it collapses what he sees as two fundamental elements of black creative expression into that ambivalent laughter-moaning so crucial to the prologue. Ellison places the blues alongside spirituals, jazz, and folk tales under the umbrella of the “Negro American folk tradition,” and asserts that this tradition has “much to tell us of the faith, humor and adaptability to reality necessary to live in a world which has taken on much of the insecurity and blues-like absurdity known to those who brought it into being” (CE 112). What these disparate writings on humor and the black creative tradition tell us is that Ellison sees laughter as fundamental to black expression, in its ability to acknowledge the material reality of historical oppression while it simultaneously exceeds the boundaries of that reality, giving voice to essential creative freedom.
The importance of humor and lightheartedness in the black tradition is developed in the novel during the hospital episode, which follows the explosion at Liberty Paints.
In this central scene, the narrator is literally trapped in a glass box, floating in and out of consciousness as the doctors subject him to a sadistic medical experiment whose aim is to
“‘produce the results of a prefrontal lobotomy without the negative effects of the knife’”
(IM 236). The narrator is completely powerless, being shocked by the machine inside which he lies, at the mercy of doctors who consider his psychology of “absolutely no importance” and joke about castrating him instead (IM 236). The doctors are remote and do not treat him as a human being; rather they see him as an object to be controlled and kept in their glass box in order to prove their scientific theories. The entire apparatus
102 stands as a metaphor for the power that forces blacks into painful performances that foreground their lack of control over their own image. The scene is reminiscent of the horrifying battle royal, in which the electrified rug causes one boy to “literally dance upon his back” (IM 27). The shocks the narrator receives cause him to “fairly dance between the nodes,” and one of the doctors looks in and remarks with a laugh, “‘They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot, boy! Get hot!’” (IM 237). With literally no control over his movements, the Invisible Man is powerless to change his performance in a way that would challenge this doctor’s image of him.
In such dire circumstances, the jokes and verses that arise in the narrator’s head once again seem wildly incongruous. In his half-conscious state, he mentally addresses the voices that drone above him, mixing the idyllic with the traumatic in a bizarre sequence of reminiscences:
Oh, doctor, I thought drowsily, did you ever wade in a brook before breakfast? Ever chew on sugar cane? You know, doc, the same fall day I first saw the hounds chasing black men in stripes and chains my grandmother sat with me and sang with twinkling eyes:
“Godamighty made a monkey Godamighty made a whale And Godamighty made a ‘gator With hickeys all over his tail...”
Or you, nurse, did you know that when you strolled in pink organdy and picture hat between the rows of cape jasmine, cooing to your beau in a drawl as thick as sorghum, we little black boys hidden snug in the bushes called out so loud that you daren’t hear:
“Did you ever see Miss Margaret boil water? Man, she hisses a wonderful stream, Seventeen miles and a quarter Man, and you can’t see her pot for the steam...”
But now the music became a distinct wail of female pain. (IM 234-5)
Once again, laughter melts into its opposite. This time, however, all of it is occurring
103 inside the narrator’s head. His only freedom in this episode is mental, and even that is limited by the overwhelming shocks that force an evacuation of all thought besides pain.
He takes what little advantage he can of this minor freedom. When the doctors are trying to get him to remember his name, he inwardly resists through jokes and verses similar to those above. When one writes “WHO WAS YOUR MOTHER?” on the slate, he feels “a quick dislike” and thinks, “half in amusement, I don’t play the dozens. And how’s your old lady today?” (IM 241).100 When the doctors ask him who Buckeye the Rabbit was, he laughs, “deep, deep inside me, giddy with the delight of self-discovery and the desire to hide it. Somehow I was Buckeye the Rabbit...or had been, when as children we danced and sang barefoot in the dusty streets” (IM 241). In the midst of an exchange in which the Invisible Man realizes that he cannot remember his own name, his mother’s name, or anything about his identity, he fixes on these childhood memories centered around jokes, verses, and games, and they make him laugh. They also provide a basis for an identity, where his “true” identity has been lost.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s discussion of the black rhetorical strategy called
Signifyin(g) sheds light on this somewhat perplexing scene. The presence of laughter in dire circumstances is well established in the novel at this point, but the specifically rhetorical focus of the passage requires some background to interpret. Gates cites
“playing the dozens” as a highly recognizable trope that falls into the category of
Signifyin(g), but defines Signifyin(g) more broadly as the black stylistic tradition of
100 By “playing the dozens,” the narrator refers to a black linguistic practice of creative insult contests. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning.” The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader. Ed. Abby Wolf (New York: Basic Civitas 2012), 263.
104 language play that “turns upon the foregrounding of the Signifier.”101 It is a fundamentally double-voiced practice arising from the condition of slavery, in which slaves’ songs of sorrow and protest were necessarily encoded to convey the opposite meaning to non-slaves.102 In a time when survival depended on adherence to a certain racial role in front of the masters, Signifyin(g) functioned as a kind of in-joke, one which has continued to resonate in black America with profound cultural consequences. Black literary and musical traditions constantly Signify upon what came before, emphasizing
“refiguration, or repetition and difference, or troping, underscoring the foregrounding of the chain of signifiers, rather than the mimetic representation of a novel content.”103
Gates is primarily concerned with everyday black “street speech” as the most salient form of Signification, and identifies the two “most important defining features of Signifyin(g)” as “‘indirect intent’ and ‘metaphorical reference,’” meaning that the formal rhetoric it involves never means what it says literally, or that literal definitions are insufficient to explain meaning.104 So, if Signifyin(g) is a practice based in an independent black tradition composed of formal revisions of signifiers designed to evade direct understanding of black speech by non-blacks, it is actually a radical act that “challenge[s] through a literal critique of the sign the meaning of meaning. What did/do black people signify in a society in which they were intentionally introduced as the subjugated, as the enslaved cipher? Nothing on the x axis of white signification, and everything on the y axis of blackness.”105
101 Ibid. 279. 102 Ibid. 258. 103 Ibid. 271. 104 Ibid. 279. 105 Ibid. 237.
105 Assuming the Invisible Man’s inner commentary during the hospital scene falls into the category of Signifyin(g), or at least draws on the tradition, its purpose is to evade the imposition of white meaning onto his consciousness. It is a form of resistance even if it is not voiced. Significantly, the doctors ask him who Buckeye and Brer Rabbit are in their attempt to gauge his memory and self-identity, and perhaps also to pin down black meaning. The narrator calls these well-known characters “childish names,” and wonders why they would ask him about such trivial things, implying that even he himself does not fully understand their significance (IM 242). But if the doctors use them with the goal of proving something about the narrator or their “treatment,” it doesn’t work: the Invisible
Man simply smiles back at his interrogators, laughing inwardly and foiling their attempts to impose their own meaning onto his brain and body. The Invisible Man draws on black linguistic tradition in a way that makes light of his situation and creates an independent mental space.
Again, however, this space is marked by ambivalence. It both acknowledges the tragedies of history and treats them with lighthearted linguistic play and laughter. It resists the scientific impositions of the doctors and the machine, but he is still trapped, unable to conceive of a plan of action that will not result in his own destruction: “I had no desire to destroy myself even if it destroyed the machine; I wanted freedom, not destruction. It was exhausting, for no matter what the scheme I conceived, there was one constant flaw – myself” (IM 243). In his isolated state, his only options are to keep alive his inner resistance while remaining essentially a slave to the machine, or to take himself out of the equation entirely, destroying himself and precluding any possibility of further progress even as he destroys this particular machine. These two bleak alternatives can be
106 usefully compared with the dilemma he faces later on in Harlem, and generally at the end of the novel. How can one meaningfully resist the all-encompassing, machine-like racial structure of society while remaining present enough to transmit this resistance beyond one’s own particular situation?
The novel itself raises questions as to the political effectiveness of a strategy solely focused on internal resistance. It is perhaps true that laughter contains “a subtle triumph” in that it represents the perseverance of the spirit in the face of centuries of oppression, and connects the one who laughs with the racial community who gained that
“secret, hard-earned wisdom.” Laughter is a victory of expression that can also resist and overpower social convention, as in the tale of the laughing barrels, where black laughter flies in the face of scripted expectations of both black and white behavior. It does not, however, precisely do anything to change political reality. As a veiled acknowledgment of the absurdity of racial oppression and racially determined roles, it is a responsive tool, not a strategy for eliminating that oppression. The presence of laughter in situations where the Invisible Man is not the one laughing, but rather feels that a joke is being played on him, suggests that humor is functionally a signal toward the theatricality of the roles being played in these situations, an acknowledgment that does not necessarily constitute a rebellion, because it can divide just as easily as it can create a shared imaginative space. Johnson’s narrator’s internal laughter provides him with personal relief and amusement, but it is isolated and therefore unproductive. The question at the end of the Invisible Man’s journey is what a real strategy for altering reality would look like, because neither can his life underground effect real change. “I believe in nothing if not in action” he claims in the prologue, but it is unclear what action, if any, he will take
107 (IM 13). He must develop a way to acknowledge history and the insidiousness of racial realities, to cultivate a consciousness that is fully aware of the absurd theater of society, without letting that mental space become destructive rather than imaginative, isolated rather than productive.
Among the models presented to the narrator for engaging with an absurd and oppressive reality, his grandfather’s deathbed advice is one extreme with which he struggles throughout the novel. The grandfather tells his son, the narrator’s father, that he has lived his life as “‘a spy in the enemy’s country...Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open’” (IM 16).
Robert G. O’Meally, writing about Louis Armstrong’s comic mask with Ellison’s theories of humor as a guide, aligns himself with the grandfather in identifying this as a legitimate strategy for fighting racial oppression. Armstrong, a heavy influence on the prologue and epilogue of Invisible Man, is one of the most well-known black performers in American history and also a patently comic figure, a persona he developed throughout his career.106 O’Meally makes the case that adopting this stereotypically black comic mask, the mask that his white listeners wanted to see from a black entertainer, “permitted him to express his own complex sense of life through his music without ruffling the feathers of those who preferred to think him less than he was.”107 But is this an effective strategy for changing political reality? O’Meally writes that in Invisible Man, the narrator learns that “if he can anticipate the uses by his enemies of such racist images as
[Mary’s metal bank], maybe he can deploy them for his own strategic purposes – to
106 Robert G. O’Meally, “Checking Our Balances: Ellison on Armstrong’s Humor” (boundary 2, 30.2, summer 2003), 115-136. 107 Ibid. 125.
108 ‘overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction,’ as his grandfather advised.”108 The critic never quite defines how these images are to be deployed, however, except as a mask for the true anger and aggression that lie just beneath the surface. He fails to make the connection between Armstrong’s comic mask and his actual political action, which was based in deep racial frustration that the mask disguised rather than precipitated. O’Meally also bases his argument on the assumption that Ellison’s novel endorses the grandfather’s advice, which I do not believe.
Ellison, for his part, calls the grandfather’s advice “sphinxlike” and says that the old man “represents the ambiguity of the past for the hero” and “poses a riddle which points the plot in the dual direction which the hero will follow throughout the novel” (CE
110). Like the old woman in the prologue, who poisoned her master so that he “withered away like a frost-bit apple” rather than let her sons violently murder him (IM 11), the grandfather advocates defeating the enemy slowly, from the inside. The difference is that he does not seem to be troubled by ambivalent feelings of love; he only advocates a strategy of ambivalent action – or inaction – that masks internal hatred. In her discussion of racial melancholia in Ellison’s novel, Cheng points out the frequent occurrence of metaphors of swallowing and gagging, beginning with the grandfather’s advice. Each act of incorporation, she writes, “bespeaks a mutual counter-incorporation, whereby the white man and the black man mime each another, both trying to approximate their identity through the projected image of the other.”109 The grandfather employs a strategy dependent upon racial melancholia: he understands that blackness is formative to
American whiteness, that the social construct of race is a theater designed to maintain
108 Ibid. 124. 109 Cheng 130.
109 white dominance, and advocates life as conscious performance of his assigned role with the goal of quietly subverting the play. He bets on Ellison’s assertion in “Extravagance” that “American life is of a whole, and that what happens to blacks will accrue eventually, one way or another, to the nation as a whole” (CE 648). But the novel makes it unclear just how his yessing and grinning will cause the “death and destruction” he envisions, except that which is suffered by black people themselves.
In many ways, Bledsoe embodies the logical conclusion of the grandfather’s advice, and it is therefore important that his “yessing” does nothing to subvert the structure he inhabits. When the Invisible Man finds himself in the president’s office after the Norton fiasco, he is shocked at the extent of Bledsoe’s cynicism. His realism is uncompromising and unfeeling; communal progress is thrown under the bus of personal power. He does not aim to change the system, only to maintain his powerful position within it. He goes so far as to say that he would “‘have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am’” (IM 143). He is emphatic about the way he gained so much influence:
“Negroes don’t control this school or much of anything else – haven’t you learned even that? No, sir, they don’t control this school, nor white folk either. True they support it, but I control it. I’s big and black and I say “Yes, suh” as loudly as any burrhead when it’s convenient, but I’m still the king down here...I had to be strong and purposeful to get where I am. I had to wait and plan and lick around...Yes, I had to act the nigger!” he said, adding another fiery, “Yes!” (IM 142-3).
To “act the nigger” is to perform the role of humble, obedient servant, to say yes to the white man’s rules and don the mask of the particular brand of blackness that makes him comfortable – grin and agree, in the grandfather’s terms. But death and destruction is not
Bledsoe’s goal. In the power set-up of the white-dominated system, he simply wants to remain “at the controls” (IM 142). Bledsoe understands the role he is playing, and he
110 continues to play it because he is not trying to rewrite the script. He just wants to be the star of the show.
The narrator’s interaction with Bledsoe is punctuated by the president’s laughter, gesturing toward the more cynical side of Ellison’s conception of its sustaining value among black people. Though as an expressive response to the absurd theater of white supremacy laughter can have politically destabilizing effects, the destabilizing factor is not inherent, as is clear in Bledsoe’s case. His goal in this interaction is rather to destabilize the narrator’s entire worldview – his laughter is destructive; it places a barrier between himself and the narrator, and essentially his entire race. The Invisible Man goes in preparing for a serious interview about the day’s events, but the president “beg[ins] mildly, as if quietly joking, throwing me off balance” (IM 137). Bledsoe alternates between this mild irony and intimidating rage, stating the facts of race relations as he sees them with cynical frustration at the narrator’s naiveté. “‘Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!’” he fumes. “‘What kind of education are you getting around here?’” (IM 139). His laughter reinforces the narrator’s structural disadvantage, confirming his exclusion from the inner circle of power that Bledsoe has managed to enter. He recounts that the veteran at the
Golden Day accused him of believing that white was right, and Bledsoe’s “face twitched and cracked like the surface of dark water. ‘And you do, don’t you?’ Dr. Bledsoe said, suppressing a nasty laugh. ‘Well, don’t you?’” (IM 140). The image is almost eerie, lending a sinister sense of the split in Bledsoe’s character. In order to gain his influence, he has had to internalize on some level the notion that white is right, and yet his “nasty” laughter reveals his ironic positioning – he is powerful because he understands how
111 things work, but unwilling to use his power in a subversive or transformative way. His face “cracks” like the mask it is, beneath which is a keen awareness of social reality. The narrator is about to leave in frustration when Bledsoe’s face once again catches his attention: “For a moment he looked me up and down and I saw his head go back into the shadow, hearing a high, thin sound like a cry of rage; then his face came forward and I saw his laughter...It was as though I were being put through a fraternity initiation and found myself going back. He looked at me, still laughing with agony” (IM 141). The image of this inscrutable face/mask merges with a moment of ambivalent laughter-rage that recalls the laughing-moaning so pervasive in the prologue. Bledsoe laughs because he understands the structure in which he occupies a powerful position, and facing him across his desk is one uninitiated. But his dark, ironic laughter points to the fault in the grandfather’s advice, which relies wholly on internal resistance. Externally, the narrator’s grandfather was “a quiet old man who never made any trouble” (IM 16). The grandfather’s and Bledsoe’s internal understanding of the artificiality of their roles produces no structural change in the script. Bledsoe’s laughter does not unite by inviting mutual ridicule of the structures that divide. It must be directed at the narrator rather than the forces of oppression, before which he must bow and perform.
III. Beyond the Script, and Between Yes and No
The Invisible Man initially latches onto the Brotherhood as a bastion of hope and progress within which he can work meaningfully toward a more equal society. But it gradually becomes clear that the Brotherhood is not interested in his experience, and that he is nothing more to them than a black body and voice contracted to spread their
112 message. “‘You were not hired to think,’” Brother Jack tells him after the committee berates him for his handling of Clifton’s death (IM 469). The Brotherhood’s one-track mentality blinds them to the power and importance of the people’s amorphous anger over
Clifton’s death, because when he left them he rejected their scripted role. The
Brotherhood’s philosophy would reduce human beings to cogs in their theoretical machine, and Clifton refuses to conform to the blueprint. His departure from the
Brotherhood and subsequent murder are full of contradictions and ambiguities, and because of this, intensely human and individual. The narrator’s funeral speech can only acknowledge Clifton’s humanity by removing the Brotherhood’s political script from his body, a script that would eliminate that body from the folds of its rigid philosophy. The speech is a consummately untheatrical gesture, designating Clifton as, at bottom, a human, giving up on scripted rhetoric and gesturing toward a shared human identity that embraces ambivalence and contradiction.
In its negation of individual humanity, the Brotherhood functions somewhat like white supremacy: it structures the world by imposing rigid barriers between its own philosophy and the individuals who refuse to conform to it. It imposes its blanket philosophy – its “script” – with no regard for the individual, attempting to be so all- encompassing that it fails – or refuses – to see anything outside its own “scientific” viewpoint. The Brotherhood is blind to the multi-faceted nature of identity and politics, which is demonstrated quite literally and grotesquely when Jack’s false eye pops out.
Though racial language is absent from its rhetoric, the cruel realities of racism resonate through its philosophy. When Brother Hambro explains to the Invisible Man that his people in Harlem must be “sacrificed” for the good of the whole (IM 501), his language
113 evokes Ellison’s characterization of lynchings as ritual sacrifices designed to negate the humanity of the victims (CE 641-2). Anyone who lives outside the Brotherhood’s rigid structures, or does not serve an immediate purpose within them, is abandoned like
Clifton’s memory, or sacrificed like the black people of Harlem.
This is the point at which the Invisible Man decides to adopt his grandfather’s philosophy, to begin “yessing” the Brotherhood to death. Part of his inspiration for this plan is the unintentional disguise he adopts when he buys dark glasses and a wide-brim hat, and everyone in Harlem starts mistaking him for Rinehart: lover, numbers runner, reverend; seemingly everything to everyone, or only what he needs to be in any given situation. The narrator never sees him, but Rinehart opens his imagination to the potentialities of such a protean existence. “His world was possibility and he knew it,” the narrator says of Rinehart (IM 498). He takes his cue from this mysterious persona and decides to play the role the Brotherhood wants of him:
That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, and then heard only in one big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh!...They wanted a machine? Very well, I’d become a supersensitive confirmer of their misconceptions, and just to hold their confidence I’d try to be right part of the time. Oh, I’d serve them well and I’d make invisibility felt if not seen, and they’d learn that it could be as polluting as a decaying body, or a piece of bad meat in a stew. (IM 509)
In Bledsoe’s words, he decides that he’ll “play the nigger.” His angry intentions are clear, but his political strategy is vague. He will “lull them to sleep; assure them that the community was in full agreement with their program...It was a dreary prospect but a means of destroying them, at least in Harlem” (IM 510). He will put on a smiling, agreeable face, masking his internal resistance, helping the Brotherhood to ignore the reality in Harlem “until it exploded in their faces” (IM 511), at which point he will
114 presumably laugh at their failure. His plan brings him within the realm of Bledsoe-ism, with its total focus on a personal agenda at the expense of the fate of his own people.
And yet, for all his internal hatred of the Brotherhood, awareness of its absurdities, and newly independent mental space, his strategy of “yessing” does not turn out as he planned, because it makes him part of the machine, even though he is internally opposed to it. Clashes begin erupting all over Harlem, and the narrator must ignore his uneasiness and concentrate on his ultimate goal: “I didn’t like the look of things, for all my wish to see the committee confounded” (IM 513). His yessing does not bring him closer to his Harlem community, or bring the community closer to meaningful action.
Instead, the absence of organization turns the community against itself, and Harlem erupts in chaos while the Invisible Man is busy trying to seduce a committee wife into giving him information. He is performing for her like he is performing for the
Brotherhood, playing a racial role: she casts him in “fantasies in which I was Brother
Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are-possible,” asking him to rape her (IM 517). He gets no information from her, and when they go out into the street, he begins to understand his mistake: “What was happening uptown? Why should I worry over bureaucrats, blind men? I am invisible” (IM 528). He will never do anything but play a role for the
Brotherhood, which cares nothing for his schemes and will most likely survive them, if not in Harlem. He should be casting his lot with his people uptown, who are currently on the brink of total destruction partly because of his neglect.
As the riot rages, it dawns on the Invisible Man that in his thirst for revenge he has sacrificed his own people to his anger. Things begin to turn sour for him when he comes upon a wounded man and is mistaken for a doctor because he twists the tourniquet
115 and stops the blood from flowing. He looks at his bloody hands in a pointed moment of self-reflection, admitting that he “‘couldn’t cure a headache’” (IM 551). It begins to dawn that though he could offer a temporary fix, he is not in control of the violence, and has not offered the community a solution; there is blood on his hands. When a man declares that if the unrest becomes a real race riot he wants to be in the middle of it to fight back, the words strike the Invisible Man “like bullets fired close range, blasting my satisfaction to earth...I could see it now, see it clearly and in growing magnitude. It was not suicide, but murder. The committee had planned it. And I had helped, had been a tool. By pretending to agree I had indeed agreed...” (IM 553). His plan of defeating the
Brotherhood from the inside has backfired; what he imagined as a private joke on the organization has become a horrifying reality, reinforcing divisions rather than uniting the
Harlem community. The scene culminates with the narrator coming upon a “lynching” of seven white mannequins, a grotesque visual joke that inverts the color scheme of lynching but maintains its dramatic power. He expects the relief of laughter, but
“suddenly was more devastated by the humor than by the horror” (IM 556). Humor, he finds, can become so effective at dramatizing absurd tragedy that it is more devastating than the original horror. His own joke has failed violently, and if there is humor here it is utterly grim.
The Invisible Man’s final confrontation with Ras the Destroyer highlights the total lack of viable options left open to him; clearly, neither violent anger nor a performed obedience masking a private joke is an effective strategy for confronting oppression.
Both fit perfectly into the script of those in power, the committee members “‘downtown laughing at the trick they played’” (IM 558). The full weight of the night’s events comes
116 down on the narrator when he overhears a group of men laughingly retelling the story of
Ras’ confrontation with the police:
I lay in a cramp, wanting to laugh and yet knowing that Ras was not funny, or not only funny, but dangerous as well, wrong but justified, crazy and yet coldly sane...Why did they make it seem funny, only funny? I thought. And yet knowing that it was. It was funny and dangerous and sad. Jack had seen it, or had stumbled upon it and used it to prepare a sacrifice. And I had been used as a tool. My grandfather had been wrong about yessing them to death and destruction or else things had changed too much since his day. (IM 564)
Humor, as he now sees, is insufficient to respond to these tragic events. Understanding as he does the extent of the tragedy, and who is behind the curtain controlling the action, he cannot take a simple view of things. He has tried to create a strategy out of nothing but this understanding, out of his own internal laughter at the absurdity he sees around him and its all-encompassing hold on his life. But this silent resistance is effectively nothing but passive agreement, dividing him from his community, dividing the community against itself, and making it clear that some other action is required. Just what this action will be, however, is obscured in the darkness of the coal pit in which the
Invisible Man finds himself at the end of the novel.
In short, none of the strategies for resisting oppression that are explicitly presented by the Invisible Man – or Invisible Man, for that matter – are viable. The hero never finds a way to make himself visible, or subvert the structures that make him invisible in any way that he finds meaningful or lasting. In his view, black life in the
United States cannot avoid a certain ambivalence. He sees the script that keeps him tied to a certain role, understands its absurdity, laughs at it, and simultaneously shudders, wondering how he can extricate himself from this machine without wiping himself off the face of the earth. All the roles he is expected to play are limiting, because none of
117 them have been created by him – he has no outward creative freedom in this reality. This impossible predicament surfaces at the Invisible Man’s first Brotherhood meeting, in a scene that evokes the tale of the laughing barrels. A drunk white man approaches the narrator and requests that he sing, expecting that because he is black he will oblige him with a performance of “Go Down Moses.” Before the Invisible Man can respond, brother
Jack interrupts: “‘The brother does not sing!...This is an outrageous example of unconscious racial chauvinism!’” (IM 312). Caught between these two scripts – the one that expects him to be a natural performer for the pleasure of whites and the one that defines this expectation with no input from him – the Invisible Man can respond with nothing but laughter. His laughter is so violent that eventually everyone in the room joins in, where before a silent tension filled the air (IM 313). This mutual laughter allows the white Brotherhood members to overcome their racial embarrassment: the Invisible Man’s laughter gives them permission to identify with him and acknowledge the absurdity of the drunk man’s request. Laughter is an equalizer; the barriers to mutual expression come down.
But when the Invisible Man stops laughing, something disturbs him: “Shouldn’t the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious? After all, he was singing, or trying to. What if
I asked him to sing?” (IM 314). Though he resents the expectation that he is a natural entertainer, he is not ready to fully subscribe to Brother Jack’s condemnation, which allows him no voice in the interaction and discounts any hypothetical desire he may have to sing. Jack’s intervention simultaneously reveals and enforces the historically determined structure of the man’s request, so that the Invisible Man is again “caught up
118 in a setup where his personal response is always already a historical response.”110 It also portends his later break with the Brotherhood, which he sees as blind to the importance of cultural reality and individual variation, and which treats him as nothing more than an automatic mouthpiece for its own scientific viewpoint, a robot whose skin color is merely a necessary aesthetic bridge between itself and the people it wants to convert to its vision.
What the Invisible Man wants is to “plunge out of history,” as Clifton puts it, into a space where his skin color does not determine who he is. More than that, he seeks a way to engage in progressive action without having to choose between defining himself by his skin color – with the unproductive violence of Ras – and disavowing its importance, as the Brotherhood would have him do.
It is appropriate, then, that the book ends underground, in hibernation. He has not given up on the world; he says that it is not enough to have left it behind. “Because, damn it, there’s the mind, the mind. It wouldn’t let me rest...My belated appreciation of the crude joke that had kept me running, was not enough” (IM 573). He is taking a rest from the world, from that joke, but he still inhabits it from a distance. Throughout the novel, the Invisible Man struggles with how to act in the world without succumbing to either cynical laughter or violent rage, and underground he can fully embrace that ambivalence: “now, after first being ‘for’ society and then ‘against’ it, I assign myself no rank or any limit...Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health” (IM 576). Underground, he does not have to act “for” or
“against.” He can exist in all possibilities simultaneously. Laughing and moaning can be fully compatible, because this dividedness and contradiction is the only way to confront a history and current reality that are so patently absurd.
110 Cheng 129-30.
119 Key to this existence is the specifically literary medium through which he expresses himself and these possibilities. From his removed position, he has attempted to write it all down, and it is this explicitly textual identity that has demonstrated to him the truly diverse, divided, contradictory nature of reality:
So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down?...Why should I be dedicated and set aside – yes, if not to at least tell a few people about it? There seems to be no escape. Here I’ve set out to throw my anger into the world’s face, but now that I’ve tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns, and I’m drawn upward again. So that even before I finish I’ve failed (maybe my anger is too heavy; perhaps, being a talker, I’ve used too many words). But I’ve failed. The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness. So it is that now I denounce and defend, or feel prepared to defend. I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. (IM 579)
The act of writing and the narrator’s total identification with the text – we know nothing of him besides what occurs in the novel itself – allows him to create a world not bounded by a script. Jokes and laughter are a part of it, as are moaning and wrath. As he says of
Tobacco Road, “such preposterous comedy is an indispensable agency for dealing with
American experience precisely because it allows for redeeming perspectives on our rampant incongruities” (CE 658). By writing, the Invisible Man invents a body for himself that embraces those incongruities, uniting absurdity with anguish to authentically express the condition of living in both of them. Six years before publishing Invisible
Man, Ellison wrote that “the essence of the word is its ambivalence” (CE 81). Like
Rinehart, language can be shaped to mean different things to different people. But unlike
Rinehart, whose game is deception, the narrator’s writing is meant to be shared – he wants to tell a few people what he’s learned. It is a performance without the constrictions imposed by a physical body, and as such represents a space of unbounded opportunity in which to imagine and create a new script, or freedom from a script altogether. This may
120 not be the kind of concrete political freedom for which he initially strives, but in its ability to live with internal contradiction, it is a precondition for change that meaningfully embraces all human possibilities. The final line of the novel – “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (IM 581) – reflects Ellison’s vision of inclusive expression. Outside the bounds of historically scripted racial interactions, he seeks a mode of communication where mutual understanding is informed by mutual humanity, and all the contradictions that provide humanity’s – and art’s – animating force.
121
122 Conclusion
I began this project with the intention of charting how Southern writers of the twentieth century responded to, created, and synthesized the legacy of the Civil War in their literature. I was interested in the Civil War because it is what makes the South different from the North, and I wanted to understand how it made Southern literature different from Northern literature. What fascinated me was the culture of residual memory surrounding the war that dominated my conception of the South, the obsession with honor and some idyllic antebellum past uprooted by the war. In short, I was enthralled by the South’s own myths, and how literature reflected the intertwining memories and histories that created them. I knew, of course, that slavery and race were issues I would have to tackle as part of the story I wanted to explore. But it did not take me long to come to an understanding of the Southern myth complex – by which I mean the discourse of memory that designates the Civil War as an honorable fight by brave men to preserve an agrarian way of life, often called the Lost Cause myth – as an institution that did not simply or incidentally ignore the centrality of slavery in the South’s history, but rather one whose primary purpose was to obscure it. The first half of the project then became an exploration of the foundations and implications of that act of erasure within the fiction of two iconic white Southern writers, but more importantly the ways that it fails. The language of Faulkner and O’Connor reveals in different ways a deep awareness of just how influential the presence of black people and what they represent – a complex of bodily and psychological impacts that I term “blackness” – have been on the white psyche.
123 If the primary purpose of the Lost Cause myth was to obscure the importance of black people and slavery in Southern history, it was not, of course, a conscious purpose.
The central role of slavery in the antebellum South confronts the southerner with historical realities too gruesome to meet directly, realities that imply a lapse in human feeling too severe to maintain a coherent sense of self. The South went to war to defend a “way of life” dependent upon the forced labor of a group of people who were designated as non-human, and it is this designation that I identify as the starting point for that Southern myth. The ideology that makes slavery possible is premised on that initial violence, the imposition of a fundamental divide between white and black consciousness.
This inherently violent psychological distinction fundamentally implies a loss of understanding, of the racial other and of oneself as a human, and can therefore be described as a missed encounter: “an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs,” and so bears a relationship with trauma.111 Obviously using the word “trauma” to describe the white experience of slavery is fraught territory, which I have attempted to tread with the utmost care. Black and white experiences of slavery and its aftermath are not worth comparing in terms of material and psychological suffering. But as Toni
Morrison points out, “a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters” is a necessary part of investigating
American history, culture, and literature as a whole.112 I have tried to separate my use of the concept of trauma from the sense in which we traditionally conceive of it, as an event where the survivor of an experience of physical violence suffers tangible effects
111 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press ,1996), 5. 112 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books 1993, originally published 1992), 11-12.
124 afterward. My notion of trauma as it is manifested in the literature is one that incorporates the function of guilt, though guilt does not capture the full complexity of the experience. Rather, the violent moment in which the white master divides his or her consciousness from black humanity functions like trauma for white inheritors of the tradition, in that it is both a definitive experience that perpetually demands attention, and an inaccessible experience that can never be looked at directly.
The repetition of the names and stories that structure Quentin’s hometown existence in Absalom, Absalom! make up the constructed memory that replaces that lost experience, an institution very similar to the Lost Cause myth. This mythology gropes about using the language and imagery available to it – war heroes and the South’s stoic suffering – but is unable to express the horror that is its center and point of origin.
Faulkner’s novel is both totally concerned with the central problem of race in Southern history and unable to conceive of fully realized black characters, because black humanity is precisely what must be avoided in the reconstruction of the events that designated them as non-humans. Literary language, however, has a way of revealing the content that a writer cannot consciously or explicitly articulate. The repetition of those old names and stories is doubled by the repeated and insistent imagery of silent, inhuman blackness, a presence that demands witness but is also defined by its absence. This “absent presence” is highlighted by the positioning of miscegenation at the center of the novel’s plot. In the presence of what is at bottom an interracial love story, and the fratricide that is required to end it and maintain racial barriers, the silence of these black bodies speaks multitudes
125 about the original act of inhuman violence that is replaced in the white mind with this
“noisy silence.”113
So much of this first part of my project can be summed up by that term of
Gordon’s: a noisy silence is another way of describing an absent presence, or Caruth’s notion of trauma as “a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding.”114
Literature – what is written – is the object of my study, but what I found is that for
Faulkner and O’Connor, race is almost always an issue that must be explored by examining what is not written, and how those unspeakable, even unthinkable terms shape and make demands on the text that does exist. For O’Connor, the black mind itself was apparently an impenetrable object: she once said that she did not “feel capable of entering the mind of a Negro. In my stories, they’re seen from the outside.”115 This alienation, however, is balanced by the central position occupied by black characters in the identities of her novels’ main characters. Though they have small parts, the train porter and Buford
Munson both shape O’Connor’s protagonists in profound ways. Hazel Motes cannot domesticate the porter into the place blacks have traditionally occupied in his mind: a rural, subordinate place, separate from the white ego (“seen from the outside”) but necessary to its formation, as Cheng describes with her concept of racial melancholia.
For Haze, this black man’s refusal to conform to his expectations represents the loss of a way of life, and with it, his reference point for understanding himself in relation to society. Significantly, this loss of reference translates into a loss of coherence in language – Haze becomes totally unable to say what he means, or to identify any
113 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1997. 114 Caruth 5. 115 Quoted in Claire Kahane, “The Artificial Niggers.” (The Massachuetts Review, 19.1, April 1978), 187.
126 “meaning” in language at all. The presence of absence, figured in Faulkner’s portrayal of silent but insistently present black bodies, finds expression for O’Connor in the absolute nothingness left behind where meaning was previously structured by a stable racial hierarchy. The incoherence that characterizes Haze’s mind throughout Wise Blood is the result of his creeping realization that the racially demarcated world he remembers does not exist. In The Violent Bear it Away, Tarwater’s comparatively facile triumph, in contrast with Haze’s doomed individualism, is reliant upon a submissive, stable, rural black figure who also disappears, allowing the young boy’s worldview to remain internally coherent.
I have found that incoherence is a major theme, if not the characteristic, of my readings of race in American literature, and this is almost certainly because the issue of race in American history is the most visible site of the country’s foundational cognitive dissonance. To repeat Morrison’s phrase, which perfectly encapsulates the contradiction, the United States is “a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression.”116 The “we the people” of the Declaration of Independence made universal claims for natural rights, but consciously excluded millions who did not fit the founders’ definition of “we” or “people.” This act of self-definition required a willful blindness, an enforced absence that has nonetheless made itself felt in the uneasy inscriptions of white
Americanness found in the nation’s literature.
Yet the erasure of black people from this foundational inscription of American ideals did not prevent them from asserting their presence in American life and culture in profound ways, so that the dissonance at the center of the nation’s self-conception and the
116 Morrison xiii.
127 racial barriers established to drown it out were gradually revealed to be the most tragic of absurdities. Though I want to avoid creating binary simplifications, I cannot help but see
Ralph Ellison’s work in light of how it responds to the themes I established in the first part of my study, the racial history and cultural reality that white authors often found unspeakable. In Invisible Man, Ellison’s metaphor of invisibility is a complex portrayal of life beyond the Du Boisian veil – the human subjectivity behind the anxieties and desires white America projects onto black bodies in its scripted drama of power. Ellison is responding to this script, which Faulkner and O’Connor had a hand in writing, and illuminating the joke at its center, across which the two races regard each other (CE 108).
As I have shown, white authorship is often structured by what it cannot say about race, especially the inherent violence and artificiality of the barriers white supremacy imposes between black and white subjectivity. Ellison’s novel is a necessary balance to my work with Faulkner and O’Connor because he wants it to say everything. His portrait of racial life in the United States is steeped in the history and customs that determine the behavior of both blacks and whites, but its object is to expose the absurdity of those predetermined roles and the limits they place on true expression. The Invisible Man is unsatisfied with essentialism of any kind, whether it be the sterile, culturally insensitive science of the
Brotherhood, which reduces him to a cog in a machine, or Ras’ aggressive nationalism, which reduces him to the color of his skin. His impatience with these reductions means that his contemplation of racial history is infused with both comedy and tragedy, and his model for political engagement in an absurd political system necessarily requires saying both yes and no. In writing a book that embraces the contradictory nature of American society rather than shying away from the racial complexities and interrelations that white
128 supremacy would prefer to ignore or erase, Ellison revealed the power of literature to move beyond the confined language that has so often dominated the nation’s racial introspection. His novel is a crucial contribution to the perpetual activity of writing and re-writing of American identity.
129
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