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Prisoners of Style: Slavery, Ethics, and the Lives of American Literary Characters Jamie Parra Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

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Prisoners of Style: Slavery, Ethics, and the Lives of American Literary Characters Jamie Parra Submitted in Partial Fulfillment Prisoners of Style: Slavery, Ethics, and the Lives of American Literary Characters Jamie Parra Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 ©2016 Jamie Parra All rights reserved ABSTRACT Prisoners of Style: Slavery, Ethics, and the Lives of American Literary Characters Jamie Parra This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between fiction and slavery in American literary culture. “Prisoners of Style” shows how writers from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, including Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and William Faulkner, wrestled with enslavement. They found it not only a subject to be written about, but also a problem of characterization. Slavery and the ontological sorcery through which it produced a new kind of individual—the individual who is also a thing—led these authors to rethink basic formal assumptions about realist fiction, especially about what constitutes a literary character. The writers I discuss did not set out to argue for the slave’s humanity or to render her interiority, but instead sought to represent the systematic unmaking of black personhood perpetrated by the laws and institutions that governed chattel slavery in the US. They set out to reveal the ideological violence perpetrated against enslaved blacks, and they did so by writing characters who embodied the categorical uncertainty of the slave, characters who were not allegories for real, full people. The tradition of writing I describe does not represent the fullness of enslaved “persons”; instead it renders something far more abstract: the epistemology that undergirded enslavement—those patterns of thought that preconditioned slavery itself. The authors I study understood fictionality as a thorny ethical, epistemological, and political problem. In my chapter on Crafts, for example, I look at The Bondwoman’s Narrative alongside a set of non-fiction texts about Jane Johnson, the slave who preceded her in John Hill Wheeler’s household. Reading the novel against legal documents, pamphlets, and histories about Johnson and her escape from Wheeler, the chapter explores what fiction could do that these other modes of writing could not. In moments of sleep, amnesia, and daydreaming, Crafts resists the normative logic of subjecthood and individual rights that underpins the representations of Johnson. In the second half of the project, I demonstrate the significance of fictionality to American literary realism’s evolution into modernism. The final chapter, on Faulkner, places two of his Yoknapatawpha novels within the context of his interest in modernist painting and sculpture. Work by Picasso, Matisse, and other visual artists inspired his concern with surfaces and flatness, leading to a meditation on artifice that runs throughout his major novels. I argue that his flatness—his insistence on the non-referential quality of fiction—is crucial for understanding his characterization and philosophy of history history, in particular the history of Southern plantation slavery. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .....................................................................................................ii INTRODUCTION The Poetics of Evasion ...........................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE How to Have Style in an Emergency: Huckleberry Finn and the Ethics of Fictionality .......34 CHAPTER TWO Disfigurations: Description and Slavery in The Bondwoman’s Narrative ............................76 CHAPTER THREE Persons and Things in the “Curious Realism” of Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales .........................108 CHAPTER FOUR Surface Effects: Faulkner’s Flat Land ...................................................................................143 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................192 REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................197 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The initial idea for this dissertation came out of an afternoon of conversation with the inimitable Kara Walker, earning her my deepest gratitude. My committee members have been unfailingly supportive of this project from the start. Jonathan Arac’s acute insights and belief in my ability to contribute something to the field of literary studies kept me working through periods of self-doubt. Saidiya Hartman has been a superlative interlocutor for the last seven years, pushing me to become a more rigorous thinker and, at crucial moments, giving me license to be more speculative, more “wild.” Brent Hayes Edwards’s generosity is well known at Columbia, and I am not the first student to take him as a model for my future teaching and mentorship. His close, insightful readings and long conversations about my work are hidden throughout these pages. I owe a debt of gratitude to many of the other students in my graduate program at Columbia, including Lindsay Van Tine, Tim Donoghue, Nijah Cunningham, and Lucy Sheehan—all of whom read drafts and lent me their wonderful insights. I presented two of the chapters in the department’s Americanist Colloquium, and both of those discussions made the work of revision easier. I am especially grateful to Katherine Biers, who gave me her draft from one of those meetings, where she had scribbled an outline that made me see chapter two in an entirely new way. Branka Arsić provided valuable commentary on chapter one. Danny Wright deserves a special thank you for seeing potential during the earliest stages of writing and for being an all-around wonderful colleague. He was also a member of an ACLA seminar organized by Anne-Lise François and Anahid Nersessian on “Critical Divestment” that was very generative for me. Leon Hilton and Gillian Young are ideal writing group members. ii Thank you to my remarkable friends, who provided all manner of support: Michael Stamm, Graig Morris, Danny Jasnow, Dave Reilly, Kaitlin Jessing-Butz, and Kristy Callahan. Christine Smallwood and Marci Kwon continually astonish me by being so giving of their time, encouragement, formidable intellectual powers, and friendship. Finally, I have dedicated this dissertation to my parents. For so many reasons I could not have written it without them. iii for my parents iv INTRODUCTION The Poetics of Evasion And we may, as poets, wish to impersonate and imagine situations of extreme captivity for reasons that are not merely selfish; wanting to ask questions of horror, to know where it begins and how it might end, we may have a compulsion to touch, with respect and terror, the zero-degree instances of desubjectification that remind our fingers of the possibility of frost. –Wayne Koestenbaum1 Readers of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have long wanted to help free Jim. Many have found his treatment in the novel (and by the novel) troubling, especially his incarceration at the end of the book, where he finds himself stuck in a shed, waiting for Tom Sawyer to plan and execute an excruciatingly complex emancipatory plot. The episode stretches on for long chapters, which unnecessarily extend Jim’s captivity for the sake of what appears to be merely a game. Tom hijacks the plot of the novel from Huck’s control and all the gravity of the situation drains out of the text; it becomes just another one of Tom’s beloved adventure stories. Those final chapters appear to relinquish real-world moral seriousness in favor of a game of make- believe and draw the novel’s fictionality to the surface. The distance between the reader and the 1 Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation (New York: Picador, 2011), 135. 1 characters stretches too far, leading critics to wonder whether those pages have anything to tell us about the non-fictional past of slavery or the present of its aftermath. During a pause in their scheming, Huck asks Tom, why, when Jim could be freed with little effort, they are using huge amounts of time to concoct an escape plot worthy of an adventure novel. Tom replies, “When a prisoner of style escapes, it’s called an evasion.”2 What Tom means is not immediately clear, in part because there are at least two distinct ways of reading the sentence: Jim is a “prisoner of style” both in the sense that he is being imprisoned in or with style, that is, stylishly, and in the sense that he is imprisoned by style, to the extent that he is being treated like a literary character in a story authored by Tom. Twain brings Tom back at the end of the novel in order to introduce an authorial avatar who can bring to our attention the ethical problems of writerly power, or the ways in which the novelist aspires to a God-like control over the world of his making—including over the characters who populate that world. To be a prisoner of style is the condition of all literary characters for whom there can be no escape from the bounds of the text. Thus, the novel forces the reader to confront the falsity of the fiction and consider the ethical implications of being a reader—of being a kind of witness to another’s enslavement. Twain is, after all, asking us to be entertained by, to take pleasure in, prolonged scenes of Jim’s oppression, raising questions about the ethical status of fiction. Do we have ethical obligations to fictional characters? And if we do, what are those obligations? How do characters hail us? Does it matter when we put a text down and
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