These contradictions cut and slash their way through the pages of American literature. How could they not have? As Dominick LaCapra reminds us, “‘Classic’ novels, are not only worked over … by common contextual forces (such as ideologies) but also rework and at least partially work through those forces in critical and at times potentially transformative fashion.”
The imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American writers journey is in very large measure shaped and determined by the presence of the racial Other. Statements to the contrary insisting upon the meaninglessness of race to American identity are themselves full of meaning. The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens, in that violent, self-serving act of erasure, to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise.
Explicit or implicit, the Africanistic presence informs in significant, compelling, and inescapable ways the texture and shape of American literature. It is a dark and abiding presence that serves the literary imagination as both a visible and an invisible meditating force. So that even, and especially, when American texts are not “about” Africanistic presences, or characters, or narrative, or idiom, their shadows hover there, implied, signified, as boundaries. It is no accident and no mistake that immigrant populations (and much immigrant literature) understood their “Americanness” as an opposition to the resident population. Race, in fact, now functions as a metaphor so necessary to the construction of “Americanness” that it rivals the old pseudoscientific and class-informed racialisms whose dynamics we are more used to deciphering.
As a means of transacting the whole process of Americanization while burying its particular racial ingredients, this Africanistic presence may be something the United States cannot do without. For in this part of the twentieth century, the word “American” contains its association with race deep within. This is not true of “Canadian” or “English.” To identify someone as South African is to say very little; we need the adjective “white” or “black” or “colored” to make our meaning clear. In the United States it is quite the reverse. “American” means “white,” and Africanistic people struggle to make the terms applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphens. Americans did not have an immanent nobility from which to wrest and against which to define an identity of national virtue while continuing to covet aristocratic license and luxury. The American nation negotiated both its disdain and its envy in the same way Dunbar did: through a self-reflexive contemplation of fabricated, mythological Africanism. For Dunbar, and for American writers generally, this Africanistic Other became the means of thinking about the body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; became the occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom, of aggression; for the exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting the obligations of the social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the ramifications of power.
Reading and charting the emergence of an Africanistic persona in the development of a national literature is both a fascinating project and an urgent one, if the history and criticism of our literature are to become coherent. Emerson’s plea for intellectual independence was like the offer of an empty plate that writers could fill with nourishment from an indigenous kitchen. The language was, of course, to be English, but the content of the language, its subject, was to be deliberately, insistently un-English and anti-European, insofar as it rhetorically repudiated an adoration of the Old World and defined the past as corrupt and indefensible.
In the scholarship on the formation of an American character and the production of a national literature, a number of items have been cataloged. A major item to be added to the list must be an Africanistic presence—decidedly not-American, decidedly Other.
The necessity for establishing difference stemmed not only from the Old World but from a difference within the New. What was distinctive in the New was, first of all, its claim to freedom and, second, the presence of the unfree at the heart of the democratic experiment—the critical absence of democracy, its echo, its shadow, its silence, and its silent force in the political and intellectual activity of some not-Americans. The distinguishing features of the not-Americans were their slave status, their social status—and their color. It is conceivable that the first would have self-destructed in a variety of ways had it not been for the last. These slaves, unlike many others in the world’s history, were visible to a fault. And they had inherited, among other things, a long history of the “meaning” of color. It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color “meant” something. This “meaning” had been named and deployed by scholars from at least the moment, in the eighteenth century, when other and sometimes the same scholars investigated both the natural history and the inalienable rights of man—that is to say, human freedom.
One supposes that if Africans all had three eyes, or one ear, the significance of that difference from the small but conquering European invaders would also have been found to have “meaning.” In any case, the subjective nature of ascribing value and meaning to color cannot be questioned this late in the twentieth century. The point for this discussion is the alliance of “visually rendered ideas with linguistic utterances.” And this leads into the social and political nature of received knowledge as it is revealed in American literature.
Knowledge, however mundane and utilitarian, creates linguistic images and cultural practices. Responding to culture—clarifying, explicating, valorizing, translating, transforming, critiquing—is what artists everywhere do, and this is especially true of writers involved in the development of a literature at the founding of a new nation. Whatever their personal and formally “political” responses to the “problem” inherent in the contradiction of a free republic deeply committed to a slave population, nineteenth-century writers were mindful of the presence of these blacks. More importantly, they addressed, in more or less passionate ways, their views on that difficult presence.
Awareness of this slave population did not confine itself to the personal encounters writers may have had. The publication of slave narratives was a nineteenth-century publication boom. The discussion of slavery and freedom filled the press, as well as the campaigns and policies of political parties and elected government. One would have to have been isolated indeed to be unaware of the most explosive issue in the nation. How could one speak of profit, economy, labor, progress, suffragism, Christianity, the frontier, the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands, education, transportation (freight and passengers), neighborhoods, quarters, the military—practically anything a country concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse, at the heart of definition, the presence of Africans and their descendants?
It was not possible. And it did not happen. What did happen, frequently, was an effort to talk about these things with a vocabulary designed to disguise the subject. This did not always succeed, and in the work of many writers disguise was never intended. But the consequence was a master narrative that spoke for the African and his descendants, or of him. The legislator’s narrative could not coexist with a response from the Africanistic persona.
Whatever popularity the slave narratives had—and they inspired abolitionists and converted anti-abolitionists—the slaves’ own narrative, while freeing the narrator in many ways, did not destroy the master narrative. That latter narrative could accommodate many shifts, could make any number of adjustments to keep itself intact. Silence from and about the subject was the order of the day. Some of the silences were broken and some maintained by authors who lived with and within the policing narrative. I am interested in the strategies for maintaining the silence and for bre
aking it. How did the founding writers of young America engage, imagine, employ, and create an Africanistic presence and persona? In what ways do these strategies explicate American literature? How does excavating these pathways lead to fresher and more profound analyses of what they contain and how they contain it?
Let me take one example: a major American novel that is both an example and a critique of romance as a genre. If we supplement our reading of Huckleberry Finn, expand it, move beyond its clutch of sentimental nostrums about lighting out to the territory, river gods, and the fundamental innocence of Americanness; if we incorporate into our reading the novel’s combative critique of antebellum America, thus shedding much light on the problems created by traditional readings too shy to linger over the implications of the Africanistic presence at its center, it seems to be another, somehow fuller novel. We understand that at a certain level, the critique of class and race is there, although disguised or enhanced through a combination of humor, adventure, and the naïve.
Twain’s readers are free to dismiss the novel’s combative, contestatory qualities and focus on its celebration of savvy innocence, while voicing polite embarrassment at the symptomatic racial attitude it espouses. Early criticism, those reappraisals in the fifties that led to the canonization of Huckleberry Finn as a great novel, missed or dismissed the social quarrel because the work appears to have fully assimilated the ideological assumptions of its society and culture; because it is narrated in the voice and controlled by the gaze of a child without status (an outsider, marginal, and already “othered” by the middle-class society he loathes and seems never to envy); and because the novel masks itself in the comic, the parody, and exaggeration of the tall tale.
In this young but street-smart innocent, Huck, who is virginally uncorrupted by bourgeois yearnings, fury, and helplessness, Mark Twain inscribes the critique of slavery and the pretensions of the would-be middle class, the resistance to the loss of Eden, and the difficulty of becoming that oxymoron, “a social individual.” The agency for Huck’s struggle, however, is the nigger Jim, and it is absolutely necessary that the term “nigger” be inextricable from Huck’s deliberations about who and what he himself is. Or, more precisely, is not. The major controversies about the greatness or near-greatness of Huckleberry Finn as an American (or even “world”) novel exist as controversies because they forgo a close examination of the interdependence of slavery and freedom, of Huck’s growth and Jim’s serviceability within it, and even of Twain’s inability to continue, to explore the journey into free territory.
The critical controversy focuses on the collapse of the so-called fatal ending of the novel. It has been suggested that the ending is a brilliant finesse that returns Tom Sawyer to center stage where he should be. That it is a brilliant play on the dangers and limitations of romance. That the ending is a valuable learning experience for Jim and for Huck for which we and they should be grateful. That it is a sad and confused ending to a book that the author, after a long blocked period, did not know what to do with and so changed back to a child’s story out of disgust. What is not stressed is that there is no way, given the confines of the novel, for Huck to mature into a moral human being in America without Jim, and therefore that to let Jim go free, to let him not miss the mouth of the Ohio River and passage into free territory, would be to abandon the whole premise of the book.
Neither Huck nor Twain can tolerate in imaginative terms Jim freed. To do so would blast the predilection from its mooring. Thus the “fatal” ending becomes an elaborate deferment of a necessary and necessarily unfree Africanistic character’s escape, because freedom has no meaning to Huck or the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism, the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another: the signed, marked, informing, and mutating presence of a black slave. The novel addresses at every point in its structural edifice, and lingers over it in every fissure, the slave’s body and personality: the way it spoke, what passion, legal or illicit, it was prey to, what pain it could endure, what limits, if any, there were to its suffering, what possibilities there were for forgiveness, for compassion, for love.
Two things strike us in this novel: the apparently limitless store of love and compassion the black man has for his white masters, and his assumptions that the whites are indeed what they say they are—superior and adult. This representation of Jim as the visible Other can be read as white yearning for forgiveness and love, but the yearning is made possible only when it is understood that the black man has recognized his inferiority (not as a slave but as a black) and despised it; that, as Jim is made to, he has permitted his persecutors to torment and humiliate him, and responds to the torment and humiliation with boundless love. The humiliation Huck and Tom subject Jim to is baroque, endless, foolish, mind-softening—and it comes after we have experienced Jim as an adult, a caring father, and a sensitive man. If Jim had been a white ex-convict befriended by Huck, the ending could not have been imagined or written because it would not have been possible for two children to play so painfully with the life of a white man (regardless of his class, education, or fugitiveness) once he had been revealed to us as a moral adult. Jim’s slave status makes the “play and deferment” possible, and also actualizes, in its style and mode of narration, the significance of slavery to the achievement (in actual terms) of freedom. Jim seems unassertive, loving, irrational, passionate, dependent, inarticulate (except for the “talks” he and Huck have, long sweet talks we are not privy to. What did you talk about, Huck?). What should solicit our attention is not what Jim seems, but what Twain, Huck, and especially Tom need from him. Huckleberry Finn may indeed be “great,” because in its structure, in what hell it puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it simulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.
My suggestion that Africanism has come to have a metaphysical necessity should in no way be understood to imply that it has lost its ideological one. There is still much ill-gotten gain to reap from rationalizing power grabs and clutches with inferences of inferiority and the ranking of differences. There is still much national solace in continuing dreams of democratic egalitarianism to be gained by hiding class conflict, rage, and impotence in figurations of race. And there is quite a lot of juice to be extracted from plummy reminiscences of “individualism” and “freedom” if the tree upon which such fruit hangs is a black population forced to serve as freedom’s polar opposite. “Individualism” is foregrounded and believed in when its background is stereotyped, enforced dependency. “Freedom” (to move, to earn, to learn, to be allied with a powerful center, to narrate the world) can be relished more deeply cheek by jowl with the bound and the unfree, the economically oppressed, the marginalized, the silenced. The ideological dependence on racialism is intact.
Surely, it will be said, white Americans have considered questions of morality and ethics, the supremacy of mind and the vulnerability of body, the blessings and liabilities of progress and modernity, without reference to the situation of its black population. Where, it will be asked, does one find the record that such a referent was part of these deliberations?
My answer to this question is another one: In what public discourse can the reference to black people be said not to exist? It is there in every moment of the nation’s mightiest struggles. The presence of black people not only lies behind the framing of the Constitution, it is also in the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, and the illiterate. In the construction of a free and public school system, in the balancing of representation in legislative bodies, in jurisprudence and the legal definitions of justice. In theological discourse, in the memoranda of banking houses, in the concept of manifest destiny and the narrative that accompanies the initiation of every immigrant into the community of American citizenship.
The literature of the United States, like its history, illustrates and represents the transformations of biological, ideological, and metaphysical concepts of racial differe
nces. But literature has an additional concern and subject matter: the private imagination interacting with the external world it inhabits. Literature redistributes and mutates in figurative language the social conventions of Africanism. In minstrelsy, a layer of blackness applied to a white face released it from law. Just as entertainers, through blackface, could render permissible topics that would otherwise have been taboo, so American writers have been able to employ an imagined Africanistic persona to articulate and imaginatively act out the forbidden in American culture.
Encoded or implicit, indirect or overt, the linguistic responses to an Africanistic presence complicate the texts, sometimes contradicting them entirely. They can serve as allegorical fodder for the contemplation of Eden, expulsion, and the availability of grace. They provide paradox, ambiguity; they reveal omissions, repetitions, disruptions, polarities, reifications, violence. In other words, they give the texts a deeper, richer, more complex life than the sanitized one commonly presented to us. It would be a pity if criticism of this literature continued to shellac these texts, immobilizing their complexities and power beneath its tight, reflecting surface. It would be a pity if the criticism remained too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.
Unspeakable Things Unspoken
The Afro-American Presence in American Literature
I
I planned to call this paper “Canon Fodder,” because the terms put me in mind of a kind of trained muscular response that appears to be on display in some areas of the recent canon debate. Also I liked the clash and swirl of those two words. At first they reminded me of that host of young men—black or “ethnics” or poor or working class—who left high school for the war in Vietnam and were perceived by war resisters as “fodder.” Indeed many of those who went, as well as those who returned, were treated as one of that word’s definitions: “coarse food for livestock,” or, in the context of my thoughts about the subject of this paper, a more applicable definition: “people considered as readily available and of little value.” Rude feed to feed the war machine. There was also the play of cannon and canon. The etymology of the first includes tube, cane, or cane-like, reed. Of the second, sources include rod becoming body of law, body of rules, measuring rod. When the two words faced each other, the image became the shape of the cannon wielded on (or by) the body of law. The boom of power announcing an “officially recognized set of texts.” Cannon defending canon, you might say. And without any etymological connection I heard father in fodder, and sensed father in both cannon and canon, ending up with “father food.” And what does this father eat? Readily available people/texts of little value. But I changed my mind (so many have used the phrase) and hope to make clear the appropriateness of the title I settled on.
Mouth Full of Blood Page 17
