Not Even Past: Race, Historical Trauma, and Subjectivity in Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten (American Literatures Initiative)

Acknowledgments

Above my desk is a sentence adapted from The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot: “She devotes all her energy to not writing, so that, writing, she should write out of failure, in failure’s intensity.”1 This project was perhaps no longer coming to fruition than other, cognate undertakings, but its progress has often been doubtful. I would like to thank those who have educated me, kept me company, and cared for me through all this not-writing and writing. First, my teachers. Charles Shepherdson’s intellectual integrity and commitment are insuperable. Further, his generosity, humor, and loyalty in the face of my compulsive critical divagations have been unstinting. I count myself extremely fortunate to have written my dissertation under his direction. Ron Bosco told me, at the very beginning, to look at what D. H. Lawrence said in 1923, and his clear-eyed, holistic sense of U.S. literatures and literary scholarship has been a model and a standard. Branka Arsic was the first person to look at my wild drafts and say, “This is a book,” a statement for which I remain depthlessly grateful. Dina AlKassim introduced me to trauma studies, and her stringent challenges to irresolute thinking have immeasurably improved this work. Many colleagues likewise merit thanks for their intellectual and personal support. When I lost the ability to laugh at myself, Tyler Kessel willingly took up the slack. Lisa Nolan shared her original, powerful work on Federico García Lorca with me. Tim Barnard, Cynthia Callahan, and especially Mary Thompson afforded great fellowship and professional solidarity. I am particularly grateful to the English Department at

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Temple University for its energetic and open atmosphere. Sheldon Brivic kindly commented on a chapter at very short notice. Keith Gumery, Eli Goldblatt, and Sue Wells, together with my lively and engaging students, have made teaching First-Year Writing more pleasure than duty. Portions of this work have been presented at a variety of professional conferences and seminars. I thank audiences and co-panelists at the Northeast Modern Languages Association over several years, the 2005 School of Criticism and Theory (particularly the Sexuality Reading Group), and the 2006 Faulkner Society panel at the MLA Convention for challenging questions and comments. Portions of chapter 1 originally appeared in Genders, and I thank that journal for republication here. Many thanks are also due to the anonymous readers for Fordham University Press, and to Helen Tartar, for their confidence in the project. I would also like to thank Bruce Kellner, executor of the Van Vechten estate, for permission to reproduce Van Vechten’s photographic works and for background information on specific images. Curators and archivists have likewise been extraordinarily helpful and patient with my often imprecise requests for information about Van Vechten, and I thank Nancy Kuhl at the Beinecke Library and Kate Ware and Julia Dolan at the Philadelphia Museum for their assistance. Lamyaa El-Gabry has been my friend for two decades, and I am delighted to have her as a colleague now as well. I am also deeply indebted to Lisa Romesser, Zach Watkinson, Abigail Roberts, and above all Grethe Kvernes for faithful friendship. My sister Ruth Stringer and my brother James Stringer have not only been loving family, but also intellectual companions, repeatedly demanding that I articulate my critical and ethical commitments and sharing with me the intoxicating excitement of their own. Finally, my parents, Jeff Stringer and Peggy Stringer, have given me everything they could.

Figures

1 Portrait of Peter Abrahams by Carl Van Vechten

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2 Portrait of Carmen de Lavallade by Carl Van Vechten

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3 Portrait of Claude McKay by Carl Van Vechten

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4 Portrait of Feral Benga by Carl Van Vechten

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5 Portrait of Ethel Waters by Carl Van Vechten

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6 Portrait of Billie Holiday by Carl Van Vechten

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Introduction

Prologue: fort The scene of the fort/da, whatever its exemplary content, is always in the process of describing in advance, as a kind of deferred overlapping, the scene of its own description. The writing of a fort/da is always a fort/da . . .  —jacques derrida

Fort and da, in Sigmund Freud’s 1920 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, are elements of a game invented by his eighteen-month-old grandson.1 The baby would hide or throw away his toys while announcing “o-o-o” (fort, “gone,” according to daily caretakers), and sometimes rediscover them with a joyful “da!” (“there!”). Freud read the game as a figuration of the child’s mother’s absence. More broadly, he identified the fort/da game as “beyond the pleasure principle”: it is not driven by the search for gratification, since the baby is not representing something he wishes to have. Instead, fort/da is a critical activity; the baby reenacts the scene of departure in order to make distinctions and render judgments. Separating out and naming constituent events (“gone” and “there!”), and soliciting others’ attention to his analysis (they’re the ones who have to pick up all the toys2), the baby asserts his intellectual mastery over a frightening situation he cannot control. One might argue, through and beyond this childhood scene, that fort and da are the minima of criticism as such: “this is not here” and “this is here.” Beyond focuses on traumatic illnesses, such as soldiers’ “shell-shock,” whose severity and extrapsychic origins pose a fundamental challenge to psychoanalysis. The anecdote of the baby’s repetitive game, however, also

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links “the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis” to “normal” psychic experience.3 Fort/da therefore serves as a kind of promise about the theoretical encounter with trauma, offered well in advance of Freud’s famous “speculation, often far-fetched speculation” on neural capacity and a postulated death drive.4 It promises that anxiety can be controlled, that memory can be organized—that trauma, which seems so overwhelming in its adult manifestations, can nonetheless become subject to critical judgment. Just as the anecdote’s “normal,” Oedipal resonances (desired mother, frustrated son) enclose the baby’s repetitious, toy-throwing anxiety, so too normative psychic structure can encapsulate traumatic rupture. This promise contains an ambiguity, however, because the baby’s game was not always “completed”; more often than not, fort was “staged as a game in itself.”5 Even after it comes back, the toy always goes away again. The baby’s mother doubtless also must leave him again and again, but more important than that eventuality is the fact that, as Jacques Derrida points out, fort itself, gone-ness, is what the game really makes da, present. Even telling the anecdote is itself a way of making absence present, since both the baby and his mother, Freud’s grandson and daughter, had died unexpectedly by the time of writing.6 In other words, absence can be defined in relation to presence, but that presence-ing process never fills in or cancels the absence. The point here is not that Freud’s text is symptomatic of what it describes, but rather that any critic working with trauma must be similarly symptomatic. In the face of trauma, criticism says what is missing, explains what could have been present, and demonstrates how lack persists, over and over. It says fort and it says da, and then it says fort again; like the baby’s game, it is more often “incomplete” than not. On one hand, then, criticism addressed to traumatic texts offers mastery of a world of radical violence; it holds that meaning continues to be made, even after the subjective and the social encounter what is inassimilable, unknowable, inhumane. On the other, like the fort/da game, such criticism cannot help but make absence the more present, and therefore risks simply acting out traumatic repetitions. This book addresses images of nineteenth-century slavery in several twentieth-century, modernist novels and photographs. The texts under discussion here are not direct literary testimony to historical violence; rather, they evince the “overlap,”7 at once temporal and textual, between writing and the writing process, between traumatic symptom and critical recognition of trauma, between historical events of extreme violence

introduction  /  3

and subsequent, quotidian psychic life. The disparate traumatic scenes of novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and of portrait photographs by their lesser-known contemporary, Carl Van Vechten, all reveal a common representational crisis, in which distinctions between relatively inconsequential, contemporary expressions of anti-black racism and the deathly dehumanizations of slavery and white-supremacist violence disappear. Further, when that distinction fails, narration freezes, individuals lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and politics fail. Slavery’s trauma, its unbearable psychic and material violence, is thus not merely absent from the self-consciously modern literature of the United States. It is also a strange, persistent presence—an anomaly in (ostensibly universalist and ahistorical) modernist accounts of consciousness and affect, and a symptom of reading instantiated by the texts themselves. Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten make no conventionally political claims in the works studied here, and in their extra-artistic lives each held defiantly impractical, independent, local, overprivileged, and undertheorized positions on white/black relations in the wake of the Great Migration. Yet the last generation of black Americans to be born into slavery was well into old age when these three insisted, in defiance of a quiescently racist majority-white public sphere and against the grain of Alain Locke’s 1925 description of the “New Negro,” on the past’s presence, and particularly on the twentieth-century immediate psychic cost of nineteenth-century chattel slavery. Theirs is not an expounded or avowed, but an interstitial theory, finding its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Further, since their works appeared well prior to the public prominence of trauma theories and traumatic discourse over the past thirty years, they could not hope to claim political or cultural power by means of testimonials. Instead, all encoded their interest in U.S. slavery and its belated effects in well-established novelistic and photographic tropes of subjective interiority, particularly depictions of such privileged inner states as madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment. Despite their exemplary acuity in tracing the relationships among psyche, history, and race, however, all three also participate in the process of carrying the traumatic past forward into the future, and this overlap between historical analysis and renewed traumatization makes these texts inassimilable, indeed all but illegible, to progressivist, anti-racist politics in their day and ours. Such figurations of a returning nineteenth century as the two novelists’ habit of killing off black transgressors of

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the color line and the photographer’s insistence on an idiom of black primitivism also lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth. The value of their work for us now lies not, obviously, in such fatal lapses into conservatism. Rather, in that very failure, these three U.S. modernists’ works tell us is that it is not enough to recognize trauma, not enough to exercise critical acuity on the marks of past violence. Reading, however masterful, cannot interrupt a history in the midst of repeating itself; it can only itself reiterate the disaster. The remainder of this introduction first summarizes the field of trauma studies, with particular attention to recent considerations of the problem of symptomatic criticism. It then moves, however, to describe certain critical precedents for a trauma studies addressed specifically to the history of slavery, and withal to the problem of describing relationships among vast national traumas, subjective and psychic experience, and literature. I argue here that a long-standing tradition in psychoanalytic criticism of U.S. literatures has both anticipated contemporary theories of trauma and decisively linked anti-black racism with the traumatic. The closing pages discuss the remaining chapters of this work, with a particular eye to delineating the primary texts’ shared interest in defining and depicting subjective experiences of an “overlap” between traumatic experience and daily life.

Contemporary Trauma Studies Like the present work, many other contributions in literary and cultural trauma studies begin analysis with the acknowledgment of repetition. The immediate point is to maintain solidarity with the traumatized and to underline scholarship’s belatedness on the scene of trauma. More broadly, however, critical interest in the repetition compulsion proceeds from a politically invested account of the relationships among author, text, history, and audience. In Freud’s clinical description of traumatic neuroses, the repetition compulsion (Wiederholungszwang), or “perpetual recurrence of the same thing,”8 may manifest as children’s play, a nightmare, an unconscious behavior, or even complex interpersonal relationships that always end the same way. Despite their surface similarity to familiar psychoanalytic topoi such as dreams or sexual neuroses, however, repetition compulsions do not reflect fantasized wish-fulfillment or repressed desires. Rather, they reiterate some violent event that has already happened chronologically but that exceeded or overwhelmed the capacity of the nervous system. The traumatic event is re-presented

introduction  /  5

repeatedly because it “is” still present—it seems still to be happening, still arriving to a psyche that remains unprepared, unable properly to experience or remember. Similarly, contemporary trauma theory identifies what cannot be fully re-membered, the illegible, the unspeakable, with a somethingrepeated, be it an image, a phrase, a metaphor, even a syllable or sound. That repetition is the “wound that cries out” for witness,9 the trace of a disaster that must be read and re-read. It is still happening as we read. Trauma studies’ direct political engagement varies widely, ranging from the psychiatrist Judith Herman’s strong feminist argument that public and academic attention to traumatic symptomology constitutes a challenge to existing systems of dominance,10 to much more abstract literarycritical attention to figurative representations of disruption and violence. Across these variations the field’s methodology is quite consistent: textual analysis that privileges the traumatic bears witness to specific historical disasters, and offers up scholarship itself as a mode of moral and ethical engagement in the present. Foundational works in trauma-theoretical literary criticism, however (including Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience, her edited collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory, and influential works by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Dominick La Capra, Michael Rothberg, and others), also shared a very specific moment in recent cultural politics: the intensifying historical, literary, philosophical, and mass-media interest in the United States, during the 1980s and 1990s, in the Nazis’ genocides and other crimes against humanity. As many scholars have pointed out, this sudden return to particular historical crimes can itself be understood as a traumatic repetition. The mechanized mass murder of Jews, Roma, political dissidents, homosexuals, the disabled, and others met with a flurry of mass-mediated recognition at the time of camp liberation and through the second half of the 1940s, but that recognition was followed by a significant period of public silence, from roughly 1950 through the mid-1970s.11 Audiovisual texts such as Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies,12 autobiographies, novels, films, and other artworks, all seemed to return to public consciousness, much as traumatic nightmares return to individual consciousness. U.S. academics in many fields, but particularly in the humanities, answered their demand for witness with scholarship, pedagogy, archival work, and theory.13 It was, and remains, an extraordinarily successful effort. Grown beyond its original inter-implication with Holocaust studies, trauma

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studies has long since become a consistently productive, unusually decentralized, and mobile field that addresses a wide range of texts, cultures, historical events, and contemporary political crises. In languages and literatures dozens of articles and a significant number of monographs appear yearly, with most applying trauma-theoretical paradigms to new literary objects and an expanding array of national-literary fields. A cursory search in the MLA Bibliography finds nearly 150 dissertations addressed to trauma studies within the last decade. Meanwhile, at least thirteen MLA-indexed journals (including both metacritical fora such as Cultural Critique and Parallax, and specialist organs such as Children’s Literature, Biography, and JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition), have devoted issues or sections to trauma and related topics. Several have devoted more than one issue to the subject. Trauma studies also encompasses significant work in a range of nonliterary disciplines, including clinical psychoanalysis,14 film and photographic studies,15 anthropology,16 American studies,17 intellectual history,18 and even biological and social sciences.19 Thus, while it lacks an institutional home comparable to the departments and programs of other interdisciplinary, inquiry-based fields (such as women’s studies, the various ethnic studies, American studies, or LGBTQ studies), trauma studies has virtually attained similar organizational goods—graduate students, publishing venues, an internally complex theoretical canon— by permeating a broad range of contemporary critical conversations. Despite trauma studies’ notable success and flexible modality, however, it has also been subject to a number of fundamental critiques. Interestingly, these are (allowing for the initial impact of Caruth’s 1996 Unclaimed Experience, without question the most influential work in the field) fairly evenly distributed across the decade-plus of trauma studies’ institutional life, and they originate from a wide variety of disciplines. Many bear on trauma studies’ capacity to expand beyond its initial emphases on European literatures, the Freudian subject, and the Nazi Holocaust, and several suggest that trauma studies’ continuing productivity simply reiterates a few basic insights on violence and social memory, to politically interested ends. Nerea Arruti, for example, has recently characterized trauma theory as a “reading machine” whose invariant, outdated productions retard scholarly political engagement.20 Likewise associating traumatic discourse with conceptual homogenization, Michael Rothberg points out that in the wake of U.S.-produced, mass-mediated and globalized spectacles such as Schindler’s List, the Holocaust is “no longer simply a

introduction  /  7

challenge to European modernity . . . [but] now beginning to function as an anchor of American modernity, part and parcel of postmodern culture and economics, and central to the political landscape of global political power.”21 Allen Feldman has, in a similar vein, mounted an extended critique of the globalization of testimony in human-rights activism,22 while Lauren Berlant, John Mowitt, and Naomi Mandel have all questioned what they see as a tendency to authorize U.S.-specific identity politics by means of trauma theory.23 Meanwhile, a number of scholars, many working outside the literary disciplines and/or beyond the original, mid-twentieth-century historical basis of trauma theory, have highlighted the collective and constructed character of trauma and traumatic discourses. Some anthropologists, following Allan Young in his study of the PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) diagnosis, have emphasized the link between traumatic discourse and “new social movements”24 that demand recognition for the politicized character of social and emotional life.25 Literary critics working on canonical texts have also hypothesized that traumatic effects intensify in Western modernity,26 or indeed that trauma itself was invented in the course of constructing the modern bourgeois subject.27 Finally, a number of psychoanalytically-committed theorists have argued that excessive attention to traumatization’s external causes slights the unconscious and misrecognizes subjects’ complex and creative investments in traumatic discourse.28 It’s a dizzying array of dissents and qualifications, and from a point of view that seeks firm definitions for “trauma,” “repetition compulsion,” “psyche,” and other basic terms, the current state of the literature resembles the Freudian cliché of “kettle logic”: we never agreed on how to talk about trauma, and it’s not trauma we’re talking about anyways. Literary criticism, however, has been little affected by either the demand within literary studies for trauma-theoretical elaboration or by redefinitions of “trauma” itself from other sectors of the academy. Hence the “machine”-like character of trauma-studies criticism, as Arruti, Patricia Yaeger,29 and others have identified it: since repetition in tropes, narrative, sounds, even typography, is so very “literal,” in Caruth’s habitual term—so much a feature of reading itself—trauma theory is subsumed under an endlessly proliferating series of readings that identify instances of traumatic representation. This tendency to defer conceptual specification even as concepts are deployed is more than a local critical failure, however. It also interrupts the implicit narrative of progress that governs poststructuralist,

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deconstructive, and postmodern “Theory” in humanistic sectors of the U.S. academy. That interruption, in turn, inspires calls for vigilance against trauma-theoretical decadence. Dominick La Capra, for example, casts trauma-oriented literary criticism in clinical psychoanalytic terms, as a dialogic scene characterized by critics’ “transferential relationship to the dynamics of trauma, which they often tend compulsively to repeat or act out rather than work through.”30 La Capra’s account is unlike the Derridean reading of fort/da, because it casts the contagion of repetition as no deconstructive eventuality, but an individual error requiring practical repair. His idea resonates, however, with a number of other recent cautions against particular critical methods. Amy Hungerford, for example, argues that “personification,” a literary-critical practice that conflates textual features with aspects of personhood, misdirects and devalues moral responsibility. Similarly, Naomi Mandel decries the common critical recourse to a rhetoric of the “unspeakable” as so many efforts to evade individuals’ and societies’ complex, culturally and historically transmitted complicity in traumatization.31 Ruth Leys’s reading of Unclaimed Experience all but identifies literary criticism as such with ethical and historical failure. Asserting that Caruth’s “primary commitment [is] to [make] victimhood unlocatable in any particular person or place, thereby permitting it to migrate or spread contagiously to others,” Leys concludes that she subscribes to a sentimentalist reading practice that undermines objective distinctions among victims, bystanders, and perpetrators of historical crimes.32 Close reading is an infinitely subtle knife, and it can just as easily attack these arguments for intensified critical responsibility as support them. One might, for example, note contra La Capra that transference is the basis, and not the interruption, of psychoanalytic work, or point out the strain of misogyny that prompts many of Caruth’s detractors to equate ideas they reject to feminine defects of personality,33 or highlight Hungerford’s own recourse to the rhetorical trope of personification,34 or assert that Mandel’s concept of the “unspeakable” shows an unacknowledged debt to Judith Herman’s much earlier work.35 Yet one discerns in these efforts to discipline scholarship and excise scholars’ personalities not only a common anxiety about critical authority in trauma studies, but also a common hope for a restorative critical politics in the present. Mandel, for example, closes her monograph with an impassioned appeal for a moral rhetoric that goes beyond Manichean absolutes, while La Capra has emphasized in many works that one of the goals of trauma studies ought to be material and public reparative justice. In other

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words, theirs are ambivalent critiques: they both reject and desire traumatic repetition’s power, as Derrida describes it, to determine the critical agenda in advance. Contemporary trauma theorists’ ambivalence about the overlap of traumatization with traumatic criticism, moreover, has unexpected resonance with the objects of this study. Faulkner’s and Larsen’s novels, and Van Vechten’s photography, all engaged a historically specific traumatic past at a time when disavowal of past crimes dominated public culture. A “plantation tradition” that represented happy slaves on idyllic plantations was the major form of public discourse about black history after the end of Reconstruction; at the same time, however, the Jim Crow system, including its extreme expression in spectacular lynchings, not only violently deprived blacks of the public sphere, but sought to police their desires and fantasies.36 Slavery was both endorsed and disavowed, and no vantage point on the past, or on the past’s importance in the present—no body of historical scholarship, and as yet no widely available black nationalist thought other than Garveyism—escaped this ambivalence. The ethical and theoretical failures of which many trauma theorists warn, in other words, are prior to and constitutive of my objects of study. Racial slavery appears in these works as already subjectivized and internalized, already preserved as a fantasy even while it is discounted as a feature of power relations in the world; transferences abound and critical judgment has failed. These artists write and photograph “after” that failure—that is, both subsequent to and in partial mimesis of it. Hence, their readers’ task is not simply to bear witness to trauma, but to examine the ways in which witness can—as La Capra and others caution—conserve the power relations that proceed from traumatization.

American Trauma Theories: Lawrence, Fiedler, Morrison In linking individual pain to modernization, social life, and specific public and political events, the concept of trauma opens new forms of psychoanalytic cultural criticism, distinct from (though linked to) the central Freudian theoretical innovations of the unconscious and infantile sexuality. In Freud’s writings, for example, trauma and related concepts dominate works such as Totem and Taboo (1913), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), “Group Psychology” (1921), and Moses and Monotheism (1938), all of which make broad anthropological claims about social organization, political power, modernity, and the relationship between fantasized violence, material violence, and daily life.

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Interestingly, major works of psychoanalytic criticism addressed to U.S. literatures, by D. H. Lawrence (1923), Leslie Fiedler (1966), and Toni Morrison (1992), have also emphasized the traumatic, and pursued similarly ambitious cultural critiques. These works also make a significant theoretical innovation in associating trauma with racialized historical crimes such as black slavery and Native dispossession and genocide, and with the maintenance of racial hierarchies amid national-ideological avowals of political and social equality. Their shared sense that literature offers an important vantage on the psychic effects of historical events distinguishes them from Freud’s own, psycho-exegetical writings on art and literature, and from much Freudian and Lacanian literary criticism, while their century-spanning attention to belated memory and radical injustice undercuts trauma studies’ claim to theoretical originality. Moreover, this idiosyncratic constellation of terms—psychoanalysis, trauma, race—was also present at the inception of “American Literature” as an academic field, a disciplinary innovation whose chronology overlaps both with Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten’s careers, and with early Freudian cultural criticism.37 Though the invention of “American Literature” turned on institutional developments such as the shift to modern languages, and on post–Great War ideas about the United States’ global role,38 it also found an early comprehensive statement in D. H. Lawrence’s 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature. Lawrence’s selection of major texts, his identification of important critical problematics, his vigorous distinction between European and U.S. writing, and his conviction that the U.S. (with Russia) had “come to a real verge” of modern innovation codified both the “American” literary canon and subsequent U.S. literary criticism.39 The work’s effects are still evident in the major anthologies that today introduce undergraduates to U.S. literatures. Lawrence’s work also reflected serious psychoanalytic study. Though his discussion does not use “trauma” (or any other noticeably technical jargon) as a critical term, Lawrence emphasized the “extremity,” the “new voice . . . [that] hurts horribly,” the “displacement . . . like a cut finger” in colonial and American Renaissance works such as Franklin’s Autobiography, the “Leatherstocking Tales,” The Scarlet Letter, and Two Years Before the Mast. These books were traditionally dismissed as “children’s books,” just as fort/da is a child’s game, but Lawrence saw them differently. For him, their repetitious return to the enormous, fully racialized violences that founded the United States define the works’ aesthetic value and ensure their radical distinction from British and Continental

introduction  /  11

literatures. Indeed, like Freud watching his grandson play “gone,” Lawrence seems fascinated by the unfinished business that haunts the works of Crevecoeur, Poe, Melville, and others. Calling it a “swaddled infant of truth,” he suggested that Modernist writers could make use of a radical tradition that had previously gone unrecognized.40 Lawrence also asserted, however, that “American” literature had itself misrecognized its own radical character, particularly in its range of responses to racial, sexual, and class oppressions. For example, a fascinating reading of Whitman’s ideal of “American Democracy” details the poet’s failure to offer real “sympathy” to “the negro” (slave) or “the prostitute” (poor woman).41 The “good gray poet” failed to admit real equality with anyone socially demarcated as irreducibly different from himself. Instead, he replaced them with himself: “Whitman came along and saw the slave, and said to himself: ‘That negro slave is a man like myself. We share the same identity. And he is bleeding with wounds. Oh, oh, is it not myself who am also bleeding with wounds?’ ”42 Whitman’s Christological yearning necessitates what it intends to reject—suffering black bodies that guarantee white supremacy—and in this respect Lawrence’s analysis anticipates important work on nineteenth-century sentimentality and race by Lauren Berlant and Saidiya Hartman.43 But he also anticipates contemporary trauma theory, in the uncannily familiar language of “wounds,” and in emphasizing the difference between formalist reiterations of trauma and “workings-through” that convert traumatic repetition into a search for justice. Psychoanalytic literary critics following Lawrence across the next four decades, such as Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, Alfred Kazin, and Leslie Fiedler, continued to pursue his dual aim of defining the “democratic” national literature and listening to its unconscious reiterations of losses, failures, and racist crimes. However, some replaced Lawrence’s creative critical engagement with psychoanalytic theory with the fully systematized and standardized Freudian dogmatism known to mid-twentieth-century U.S. psychoanalytic practitioners. Thus, for example, Fiedler titled his study Love and Death in the American Novel, a formula that rendered the admittedly speculative, and highly contested “life” and “death” drives expounded in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as central terms, much as “capital” is a central term of Marxist theory. Psychoanalytic criticism could also demonstrate a certain middlebrow, technocratic modernism in declaring itself a “reasonable use of ‘the psychological awareness that our own age has conferred on us.’ ”44 These mid-century critics often addressed general audiences as much

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as, or even in preference to, specialist audiences, and that address formed an essential element of their critical practice. They also often presumed to diagnostic authority, and not infrequently lent both rhetorical and substantive support to the homophobia and sexism that characterized the psychoanalytic enterprise in their day. However, their psychoanalytic theory was also a weapon against New Critical theories of literature. New Criticism celebrated an autonomous art object, one for which “history . . . recede[d] into the text as literary material, while continuing to remain outside it as chronology.”45 New Criticism thus had little interest in the political and ethical questions attached to the idea of trauma. But in any case its ideal of hermeneutic plenitude precluded the traumatic as such. There could be nothing missing from a great work, and a work from which something was missing could not be great. Thus, when Leslie Fiedler published an essay called “Come Back to the Raft A’gin, Huck Honey,” treating of interracial homoeroticism in Twain, in the Partisan Review in 1948, he both reopened the text to wideranging historically and politically invested critical play and radically undermined New Critical authority as such. Across his works, Fiedler emphasizes the importance of “the reader’s genuine emotional response to fiction.”46 Though himself a lifelong academic, he positioned 1960’s Love and Death, like Studies in Classic American Literature decades earlier, as a challenge to received wisdom and academic authority. This enormous study, whose readings range from canonical texts like Huckleberry Finn to bestsellers like Marjorie Morningstar, draws on the interrogating force of that which is customarily excluded from power, education, even from rationality. And Fiedler’s writing, with its neurotic, personalized verve, was often deliberately inflammatory, identifying the critical impulse as such with transgression, defiance, and intimate awareness of the obscene. His readings of Huckleberry Finn, for example, not only reiterated its transracial, homoerotic content, but also stressed the implication of such fantasies in past and present practices of white supremacy. His exegesis of Twain’s excessive abasement of Jim, and his scorn for the white child-hero’s “dream of his acceptance at the breast he has most utterly offended,”47 strike not merely at the heteronormative, but at the “Sentimental Love Religion” and the “Good Bad Boys”48 of national culture— that is, the twin ideals of heterosexual love and childlike innocence that guarantee the interlocked categories of whiteness and U.S. exceptionalism. Even goodness, even children, even love, he argues, enact hypocrisy,

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expropriation, and racist dehumanization, and when we avoid realizing these things we merely reenact mastery once more. Fiedler, like Lawrence before him, also assumed that U.S. literature had special claims on modernity. Nothing (I know, as all writers suspect and any teacher is aware) will drive some readers back from the certainties of textbook explanations to the difficulties of the work of art itself; but others, less resolutely insensitive, will, I hope, be troubled enough by suggestions of new possibilities in old works, so that (whether ultimately they accept my views or not) they will never again be able to halfread Huckleberry Finn or The Last of the Mohicans [both texts in which Fiedler identifies whites’ transracial homoerotic desire] in the state of cultural torpor they have taken for cultural security. American literature is distinguished by the number of dangerous and disturbing books in its canon—and American scholarship by its ability to conceal this fact. To redeem our great books from the commentaries on them is one of the chief functions of this study.49 Fiedler is not only convinced, in other words, that American literature is subversive. He also argues that this subversion is not political in the received sense, but rather a psychic and personal “danger and disturbance” that repeats and transmits political and historical realities and that remains currently available to any reader. Fiedler’s critical program of “redeem[ing] our great books” from normalizing interpretative practices thus allies him with much later work on U.S. literatures by feminist scholars, proponents of an expanded canon, queer theorists, scholars of ethnic literatures, and poststructuralists. Yet, because his work was not directly associated with either institutional change or extra-academic social movements, it also has a certain Ozymandian character: isolated, fragmentary, egotistical. Ralph Ellison, for example, critiqued Fiedler’s reading of Twain much as Lawrence did Whitman’s references to “negroes”—as the triumph of a sentimental white masculinity over an authentic engagement with racial injustice. Ellison says Fiedler “leaped squarely into the middle of that tangle of symbolism which he is dedicated to unsnarling, and yelled out his most terrifying name for chaos [sex between men]. Other things being equal, he might have called it ‘rape,’ ‘incest,’ ‘parricide,’ or—‘miscegenation.’ ”50 Coming back to the raft with Huck and Jim, in other words, allows us to ignore what Ellison calls “miscegenation”—the daily, demotic realpolitik

14  /  introduction

of mixture, ambivalence, and sexual violence. Though Fiedler reveals the instrumentality of sexual transgression for racial mastery, he also lets (presumptively white) readers fantasize a racial politics that exists solely on the plane of desire, without material involvement. Toni Morrison’s 1992 Playing in the Dark attempts what Lawrence only indicated and Fiedler failed to achieve—a comprehensive description of the links among psychic fantasy, trauma, and race in U.S. novels. In addition to their common concerns, these three critics all rose from working-class backgrounds into a literary and academic establishment in which they often felt an acute sense of alienation. Similarly, all three emphasize emotional response, over and against established traditions or schools of reading, as the paramount critical value. Each also had (or is having, in Morrison’s case) an intense critical vogue that influenced every sector of literary study in the United States. Thus, both in their critical texts and paratextually, all three of these figures introduce an unusual degree of discontinuity, even a shock-effect, into disciplinary practice. In Morrison’s case, amid her worldwide fame, this shocking quality may not be immediately apparent. Playing in the Dark addresses canonical, white-authored texts almost exclusively, and it also self-consciously employs the voice of an established novelist, one with special license to explicate craft and tradition. Like both her predecessors, Morrison stages a conversation among psychoanalytic theories of relationality and consciousness, literary representations of desire and subjectivity, and the peculiar social and psychic facts of historical slavery and the post-Emancipation color line. However, she frames this inquiry in conservative terms, as an apprenticeship to modernist masters. Extensive close readings of both mid-twentieth-century modernist authors, such as Cather and Hemingway, and several nineteenth-century authors who became heroes of modernism, such as Poe and Twain, are presented with very little historical context. Where Lawrence saw an unformed, chaotic future in the “classics,” Morrison lays out an apparently orderly past. At the same time, though, she insists on reckoning with what is absent in these works, and in U.S. literary studies generally. There is a part of the U.S. past that is not allowed to exist in literary terms, even while its absence is present across the literary and scholarly canons. I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge

introduction  /  15

holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of the culture’s literature. Moreover, such knowledge assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular “Americanness” that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence.51 So explained, such “knowledge” is absurd—and yet it was characteristic of the late-twentieth-century, U.S. literary scholarship that cited, but never really incorporated, Lawrence’s and Fiedler’s readings. What Morrison calls the “Africanist presence”52 was rewritten forcefully as absence in published scholarship and teaching. Hence, her reiteration of the modern canon becomes a forensics of disavowal. Though it lacks many of the appurtenances of scholarship, Morrison’s discussion shows significant debts to literary theory, including works by James Snead,53 Christopher Miller, and, via Miller, Edward Said. Snead’s work on Faulkner’s Compson novels emphasizes the co-implication of rhetorical structures with the extreme public racism of the Jim Crow era. Following on his methodology, Morrison examines the “dark, abiding, signing”54 black figure whose presence figures racial hierarchy and activates white subjectivity. For example, in a scene from Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not,55 a character that the narrator describes as “the nigger” demands sympathy for his own physical suffering even while the white hero, Harry, is himself wounded “ ‘worse.’ ” Harry, silent, courageous—Hemingwayesque—is nonetheless very like Lawrence’s palpitating Whitman and Ellison’s hysterical Fiedler: a white man who bears wounds on behalf of a black man, in the process revalorizing a sentimental white masculinity inextricable from white supremacy. Moreover, the incident exemplifies a discourse that exceeds both Hemingway and literary and industrial modernity. The cowering black man embodies all the ambivalence and fear that Harry does not have, relieving the hero, and the presumptively white reader, of that humiliating psychic burden, in an affective displacement that mimics the geographic displacement of expropriation and bondage from the white West onto Africa and African slaves. Christopher Miller, a scholar of French literature, calls this displacement “Africanism.”56 Miller draws on Said’s

16  /  introduction

account of “Orientalism” in his methodology and his coinage, but he also argues that, whereas Orientalism thrives on belittling and salacious clichés, Africanism posits the continent as a “blank darkness,” an absolute absence of human value. There was no such thing as African culture, religion, history, law, or personal honor in the eyes of Europeans, as Miller documents in great detail across three centuries. This assumption, in turn, lent slavery a ready alibi, gave African colonialism a fantastic origin in cultural superiority, and guaranteed not merely racism, but the location of black Africans at the very bottom of an elaborated, global racial hierarchy. Morrison alters Miller’s term significantly, to “American Africanism,” in a qualification that both undercuts the patriotic and celebratory connotations of “American Literature” and emphasizes the historical specificity of U.S. slavery. Removed generations from the Middle Passage, often located in domestic and private spaces, and emplotted around intimate contact between whites and blacks (sometimes, but not always, masters and slaves), American Africanism generates an ambiguous text that identified its own racism with the plenitude of art: “American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to engage and escape, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless.”57 It is not the traumatic force of violent racism, or the troubling awareness of past human bondage that assigns American Africanism to these endless, never-progressing, fort/da oscillations between absence and presence. Rather, the formal patterns of compulsive repetition—a minor black character “inscribed and erased,” an injustice written in the mode of disavowal—are themselves recast as signs of mastery. Morrison, with Lawrence and Fiedler behind her, thus not only turns our attention to a traumatic scene that has received less attention than those of twentieth-century European literatures. She also offers thoughts that contemporary trauma studies has not been able to anticipate, despite the latter’s intense philosophical and theoretical commitments, its crescendoing concern for critical ethics generally, and its effort to prohibit uncritical reiterations of traumatic formulae in particular. The field has, as yet, no tools for addressing what Lawrence explains about Whitman’s poetic persona, Fiedler about Huck, or Morrison about Harry: that trauma can be appropriated, can serve mastery. Texts at the center of the U.S. canon expound a traumatic that does not solicit witnesses to injustice, as the Caruthian account would have it, but instead perpetuates it in figurative form. That is a notion that can truly “traumatize theory,”58 opening it to something for which it has no prior preparation.

introduction  /  17

Chapter Summaries This study’s five chapters all address traumatic figurations of nineteenth-century black slavery in U.S. modernism. The four novels and one photographic project under consideration here all address the persistent, negative psychic, social, and cultural effects of chattel slavery. Each at once subjects slavery’s psychic legacies to critique, and expounds them as constituents of national identity that defy public and individual efforts at remembering or working-through. Unlike the works that Morrison, Fiedler, and Lawrence studied, moreover, these works evince a reflexivity that reads traumatic effects even as they are reproduced, in sophisticated demonstrations of the “overlap” Derrida describes between traumatic inscription and critical writing. Beyond these fundamental congruences, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also present distinct and divergent perspectives on the value and implications of a traumatology focused on black slavery in the U.S., such that the contrasts between their works are equally instructive. My readings are therefore grouped by author, with chapters 1 and 2 addressed to Faulkner, chapter 3 and 4 to Larsen, and chapter 5 to Van Vechten. The two wayward Faulkner texts under discussion here—the pulp Sanctuary (1931) and its sequel, the post-Nobel critical failure Requiem for a Nun (1951)—not only describe the importance of women and women’s bodies for any theoretical account of trauma in U.S. literature, but also offer complex, demanding accounts of the relationship between psychic experience and national ideology. Together, these novels constantly interrogate feminine-bodily metaphors for psychic experience, especially womblike and vaginal figures of enclosed space, the racialization of male sexual conquest, and both figurative and actual rape. Chapter 1, “ ‘Little Black Man’: Repetition, the Lesbian Phallus, and the Southern Rape Complex in Sanctuary,” investigates the problem of trauma’s transmission from history into the future, and especially the inter-implication of racial difference and racial marks with sexuality. Temple Drake, the young white woman protagonist of Sanctuary (1931), suffers both a vicious rape and a long series of related sexual violations at the hands of a misogynist community. Her only act of resistance is her near-psychotic retreat into a pleasurable fantasy of “whipping” an imaginary “little black man.” Her racial fantasies are not idiosyncratic, however, but recognizably shared across the white community, which reenacts a racialized lynching ritual against an innocent man, despite the fact that every person involved in the incident was white. Indeed, the

18  /  introduction

violence of fantasy and the violence of lynching together preserve white supremacy even in the absence of African Americans. Sanctuary thus explicates the racialization of trauma as a discursive phenomenon. Not necessarily a description of any given experience, social form, or historical eventuality, fantasized violence against black bodies becomes a way of imagining the body, and the nation, as such. Chapter 2, “ ‘Which Tooth Hit You First?’: Nation, Home, Women, and Violence in Requiem for a Nun,” examines Faulkner’s later (1951), under-read, formally experimental novel, a sequel to Sanctuary. Requiem is structured around the sudden death of an unnamed white baby girl, Temple Drake Stevens’s daughter, and the impending execution of the black domestic servant Nancy Mannigoe for her murder. The novel also alternates between dramatic and historical modes, paralleling scenes of Nancy’s sentence, the wait for her execution, and an unsuccessful plea for clemency with major historical events in an imagined Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Requiem’s discussions of race, women’s sexuality, and the relationship of violence to nurturance, especially in its depictions of the religious mystic Nancy, push at the limits of psychoanalytic epistemologies. Yet the novel also demands that exceedingly private, feminized, and racialized traumas be written into history. Like its predecessor, however, Requiem also equates blackness to lack, and implies that meaning as such depends on a violently literalized, original trauma. Taken together, these two novels demonstrate both Faulkner’s protostructuralist and protofeminist thinking about the role of racial and sexual violence in white national identity, and his fatalistic sense that an unjust social order cannot be transcended. Chapters 1 and 2, therefore, seek both to demonstrate the considerable intellectual resources of Faulkner’s works for theorizations of trauma, and to underline the tendency of his texts toward social conservatism. Compared to the Faulknerian text, meanwhile, Larsen’s small corpus (Quicksand [1928] and Passing [1929]) is the more theoretically radical work, informed not by regretful acquiescence to the established order, but by a sustained effort to name its aporiae. Larsen’s work, focused on the ironies of subjectivity, illuminates the illegibility of black women within psychoanalytic theory with notable intellectual rigor. Larsen worked amid the ferment of the Harlem Renaissance, which articulated a new aesthetic for “New Negroes,” African Americans in the wake of the Great Migration. Harlem Renaissance works were often urban and Northern,

introduction  /  19

often psychological, sometimes primitivist, sometimes folkloric, but usually firmly distanced from the antebellum Southern past. Chapter 3, “ ‘Anyone With Half an Eye’: Blackness and the Disaster of Narcissism in Quicksand,” discusses Helga Crane, a young biracial woman who actively remakes herself along New Negro lines. Attracted to emotional expressivism and aesthetic intensity, Helga likes to see herself in primitivist terms. However, she also clearly recognizes the Africanist vogue as the traumatic return of the sexual commodification of black women under American slavery and racism. Helga resolves the painful overlap between knowledge of the traumatic and trauma itself by undergoing an ecstatic religious conversion, marrying a black Southern preacher, and bearing children beyond her strength in the rural South, acts of self-negation that reinstate the very sexual and racial oppression so assiduously denied by her earlier urban and middle-class existence. Chapter 4, “ ‘A Having Way’: Fetishism and the Black Bourgeoisie in Passing,” continues to investigate the instrumentality of black women’s sexuality for U.S. racial hierarchies. Here, however, the association between blackness and historical trauma is not something that disconcerts the black women characters, but rather something that they can manipulate to their (limited) advantage, given pervasive, white-supremacist fetishization of black sexuality. Passing’s Clare Kendry, an extremely light-skinned and extraordinarily beautiful African American woman, has “passed over,” taken up the social perquisites of a white woman, precisely by catering to her racist husband’s fetish for black abjection and white mastery. Clare also holds sexual attraction for her similarly passable, black woman friend Irene Redfield, but Irene cannot bear the sexual and moral confusion Clare represents. Horrified by the possibility that pleasure and desire can be disarticulated from bourgeois marriage, and from the absolute racial distinctions that subtend black bourgeois respectability, Irene ends their ambiguous friendship by murdering Clare. Larsen thus demonstrates that the traumatic is not outside, but indissoluble from, class formation and the sexual commodification of black women. Larsen’s explorations, in her two novels, of black women that defy social definition, are unimaginable in the Faulknerian patriarchal universe; but like Faulkner, who denied Temple Drake any justice and condemned Nancy Mannigoe to hang, Larsen also makes the formal and narrative closure of her novels simultaneous with the endless, unchanging repetition of the racial traumatic. Helga seems doomed in the last pages of

20  /  introduction

Quicksand, and though Clare’s defiant spirit may live on, she herself is thrown out the window at the end. To acknowledge historical trauma seems to mean acceding to conservative limits on imagination for the two novelists. Van Vechten’s photography, in contrast, deploys the signs and narratives of historical trauma as tools for eliciting a sense of shock in viewers, shock that in turn suggests unpredictable and creative alternatives to the present order. Chapter 5, “ ‘To Glorify the Negro’: Photographic Shock and Blackness in Carl Van Vechten’s Portraiture,” examines several of Van Vechten’s portrait photographs, with special emphasis on the symbols of blackness—from African and primitivist art, to the kitsch and ephemera of his own day—that Van Vechten habitually deployed as props in his signature, neo-Victorian poses. Deliberately anachronistic, profoundly camp, avowedly irresponsible to any moral or political dogma, Van Vechten’s works surround his sitters with dense patterns of complex meaning, sometimes approaching symbolic or allegorical content and sometimes moving equally close to abstraction. His one constant message was the “glory” of his (extraordinarily diverse) sitters. Van Vechten’s photography is the only political effort under consideration here, yet his politics are highly idiosyncratic, and hence difficult to “take seriously,” as a recent critic has commented.59 His encyclopedic portraiture project, pursued between 1932 and his death in 1964, emphasized African American artists and writers and sought, both within individual images and by the accretive force of the whole, not so much to counter as to evanesce fatal judgments and racist distinctions in an endless series of brief, intense moments. References to racial difference, to past slavery, and to racist violence sometimes manifest with the force of what Walter Benjamin called photographic shock, asking viewers both to realize blackness as such in the mode of a traumatic return and to consider the possibility that trauma can be transformed into celebration. These copious visual texts (perhaps 20,000 individual prints are extant) offer a much more enigmatic, open-ended statement to be translated into theory, offering clues as to what a new trauma studies can accomplish. In leaving behind the novel, can we also abandon the conservation of racial trauma that both Faulkner’s and Larsen’s texts enact? Or will any writing, including photo-graphy, that inscribes race inevitably reinscribe the past? Though Van Vechten’s oeuvre, defiant of formal completion or unity, cannot fully answer these questions for us, it does allow us to consider

introduction  /  21

the theoretical and cultural-political stakes of the desire finally to escape the traumatic past, and to enjoy writing race without repercussions. This closing chapter considers whether such transcendence is possible or desirable, in the specific case of the traumas of slavery, segregation, and violent anti-black racism in the United States, or for modern historical trauma generally.

1  /

“Little Black Man”: Repetition, the Lesbian Phallus, and the Southern Rape Complex in Sanctuary

Prologue: Psychoanalysis, Blackness, and U.S. Literature in the 1920s and 1930s Freudian theory has specific, original engagements with racial difference, albeit often entwined with its theorizations of sexual difference and sexuality. However, these irregular moments, when early psychoanalysis imagined bodies crisscrossed with physical differences and power differentials that radically exceed the classic Oedipal scene, are not so much a body of theoretical investigation as a collection of ambivalent, intermittent, and strangely static responses to racist institutional and social contexts. For example, Sander Gilman’s rich work demonstrates the degree to which the imperative to manage and defer anti-Semitic reactions, both within the medical profession and in Viennese society more generally, influenced Sigmund Freud’s accounts of sexual difference and sexuality.1 Psychoanalysis thus enfolded race, despite its historical and cultural complexities, into an ahistorical, universalist narrative of sexual knowledge; in effect, Freud and other early psychoanalysts overwrote specific racial politics with psychoanalysis’s own crises of authority. This pattern is particularly clear in their references to Africa, the African diaspora, and anti-black racism, most of which derive from U.S. and British literature and popular culture. Freud’s writings, in fact, seem only to address blackness as a literary object, showing no knowledge of the lived experience of any black person or people, but calling on familiar, Africa-

“little black man”  /  23

linked figures of racial violence in the course of theoretical explication. Hence the well-known comparison of women’s sexuality to “a dark continent,” a phrase appearing in English in The Question of Lay Analysis,2 and evidently referring to popular and journalistic accounts of British imperialism. As Mary Anne Doane’s classic essay explains, the “extraordinary condensation of motifs” in the phrase “dark continent” equates (white) women’s sexuality, that which psychoanalysis has failed to master, not just to an unknown continent, but one conventionally assumed to lack meaning.3 “Africa” was legible only in and through European conquest, and in European discourse its sub-Saharan inhabitants’ skin color both literalized and offered proof of their presumed lack of history and culture. So too, women’s sexuality becomes an undifferentiated object of imperial conquest for psychoanalysis. This fantasy, however, is different from fantasies not marked by racial hierarchy; as Christopher Miller points out, such colonialist tropes are a kind of realizable dream-work, a wish-fulfillment that can come true, given imperialist power differentials.4 Africa can indeed be conquered. It is not merely a metaphor of the unknown, in other words, but the identification of exploration with conquest that drives the “dark continent” comparison. Interestingly, Freud’s writings also contain several references to U.S.specific literary tropes of racial distinction and racial hierarchy. There is, for example, the comparison in “The Unconscious” between “derivatives of the [Unconscious] instinctual impulses” and “individuals of mixed race who . . . resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other.”5 The idea neatly encapsulates the tragic-mulatto plot, identifying racial “colour” with irrepressible instinct and moral transgression. Similarly, a brief, unelaborated mention, in “A Child Is Being Beaten,” of European patients’ sexual attachment to violence in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, presumably to the scene of Tom’s death, casts blackness as not a lived experience, but a useful story, an instrumental fantasy.6 Noticeably, these U.S.-derived references to blackness are more personalized than the “dark continent” metaphor; they conjure up, not a blank landscape, but a specific person—a black man—who serves to manage sexual excess, whether that excess manifests theoretically or clinically. They also refer much more directly to subjectivity, foregoing territorial and intellectual empires in favor of immediate encounters with desire and satisfaction. In other words, Freud engages the complex literary strategy that Toni Morrison, following Miller, calls “American

24  /  “little black man”

Africanism.”7 In many nineteenth-century and modernist U.S. novels, minor, ignoble black characters manage both structural, novelistic failures and moral failures on the part of white protagonists; for example, a black man cries with pain in a Hemingway novel, while the white man protagonist, who is likewise injured, maintains stoic silence.8 “Africanist” figures thus free both white protagonists and presumptively-white readers from the necessity of acknowledging weakness, cowardice, and other threatening emotional and moral realities, such as non-normative sexuality. So too, references to American literary clichés about blackness, such as the tragic-mulatto plot or the scene of Tom’s death, freed psychoanalytic authority from the necessity of acknowledging its own theoretical limitations. Nor was this American Africanism specific to Papa Freud. During the 1920s and 1930s, second-generation analysts, many of them women, also had frequent recourse to received ideas about blackness, as Jean Walton documents in her fascinating 2001 study, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams. Addressing questions such as the physiology and psychology of female orgasm (as did Marie Bonaparte) or the psychic costs of displaying proper “womanliness” (Joan Riviere), women clinicians and psychoanalyticallyoriented intellectuals often reproduced “white women’s fantasies of racial difference” uncritically.9 In particular, they often associated blackness with male violence and social transgression, even as they also sought to expound political anger as a component of (presumptively white) women’s (hetero)sexuality. Black men thus figure the very possibility of psychoanalysis’s translation into feminist terms, even as they are themselves excluded from analysis. The starkest example of this tactic is Joan Riviere’s article “Womanliness as Masquerade.” Riviere, the earliest English translator of Freud’s writings and an important explicator of Kleinian theory, eventually became a clinician and training analyst of formidable reputation. Riviere’s central case study in this essay was a white, middle-class woman from the southern United States—a successful “intellectual,” a writer and public speaker who was nonetheless uneasy about intruding on traditionally male fields of endeavor. Riviere emphasizes the woman’s constant feelings of rivalry and resentment, guilt, and fear, prompted by her own violation of gender norms. The analysand’s major strategy for deferring both the rejection she feared, and her own negative feelings, was to assume a “mask” of womanliness, “both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it.”10

“little black man”  /  25

Riviere makes it clear that both this woman’s feelings and her “masking” strategy were shared by many other professional women analysands. However, this particular woman also expressed her anxieties in the form of a recurrent fantasy, “very common in her childhood and youth.”11 The fantasy is strikingly culturally and historically specific: she imagined herself sexually appeasing and controlling—in effect, seducing—a violent “Negro” rapist. Importantly, Riviere’s overall aim in the piece was to reveal “intellectual” women’s flirtatious behaviors, their “womanliness as masquerade,” as not a direct expression of sexual desire, but instead as a psychic translation of their fears about defying gender norms. She thus rendered (white) women’s sexual fantasies and sexual expression in political terms, in direct contradiction of the argument encapsulated in Freud’s “dark continent” metaphor, which depicted women’s sexuality as uniform, undifferentiated, and subject to (male) analytic conquest. Yet she also ignored the racial content of her central case study, making no remark on either the transgressive individual fantasy or the sexually saturated social fantasy that the southern cultural critic W. J. Cash called the “Southern rape complex”12—distributed globally in such popular literature as Thomas W. Dixon’s novels and the 1915 film Birth of a Nation—that undergirds it. Instead, Riviere identified the “Negro” as a father figure to whom the analysand wished to make reparation. The analysand seduces her fantasized black rapist “not merely to secure reassurance by evolving friendly feelings toward her in the man; it was chiefly to make sure of safety by masquerading as guiltless and innocent. It was a compulsive reversal of her intellectual performance.”13 Given the brutal realities of the lynching era, such bracketing of racial difference is ethically questionable. However, there is nothing in the article to indicate that Riviere found the southern analysand’s scenario more, or differently, fantastic than any other daydream. As Walton argues, “[It] is as if treating perceived and fantasized racial difference as potentially constitutive of psychic development would have been too threatening to the integrity of the psychoanalytic project—suggesting that this integrity was, after all, based on its unacknowledged racial whiteness, by which I mean the whiteness of both its analysts and objects of study.”14 To Walton’s point I would add another. In addition to postulating whiteness as an unmarked category and a universal norm, these failed, uncritical, conventional references to blackness in early psychoanalysis also define blackness in terms of traumatic violence. These metaphors

26  /  “little black man”

and unexamined transcriptions of fantasy encode highly sexualized narratives of violent, perpetual, white/black conflict. The phrase “dark continent,” the tragic mulatto as a figure for instinct, the unexamined attachment to Uncle Tom’s violent death, as well as Riviere’s southern analysand’s “Negro attacker” daydream, all depend on fantasized sexual violence that transgresses the color line for their intelligibility.15 Only a “Negro” attacker need be resisted absolutely; only “Africa” can be conquered utterly; only a “coloured” person is inevitably reduced to instinct; only the murder of a slave can be enjoyed without moral cost. These tight, simple racist clichés mark an extraordinary, and to date largely unthought, convergence of literary discourse and psychoanalytic praxis. The task before us is, therefore, not merely to eliminate these problematic, peripheral fantasies of mastery and degradation from psychoanalytic theory. Rather, it is to return to the literary and its relationship to psychoanalytic theory. Can examining U.S. literature reveal something about these raced and violent figures that haunt early psychoanalysis? How does literature circulate images of racial violence, and what is the relationship between such images and psychoanalytic efforts to depict psychic experience? Why is blackness not merely neglected within psychoanalytic theory, but apparitional, reappearing in awkward figures and brief, violent vignettes that resist integration with their contexts? Why, in short, does blackness return as a trauma in early psychoanalytic writings?

Literature and Racial Figures William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, published in 1931 but first drafted contemporaneously with the publication of “Womanliness as Masquerade,” articulates similar questions to Riviere’s about women’s sexuality, psychic experience, and fantasized racial blackness, albeit in fictional mode. It is also a similarly marginalized text, under-studied until quite recently, infrequently taught, and long a literary-historical shorthand for the contradictions of Faulkner’s authorial corpus, which oscillates between the most cerebral innovation and the lowest scatology, between Great American Novel and pulp grotesque. Seeming not to know whether, or to what extent, to take it seriously himself, Faulkner half-facetiously described Sanctuary as a cynical effort to make much-needed money, and in particular to cash in on the public’s desire for sex and violence.16 Though, as Florence Dore points out, it scrupulously respected the

“little black man”  /  27

letter of obscenity laws, Sanctuary gave readers sensation galore: “coeds” sneaking out after curfew, rampant alcoholism, shoeless southern poverty, organized crime, bootlegging, a senile old man and a comatose baby, murder, rape, voyeurism, prostitution, kidnapping, more alcoholism, the hypocrisy of the white middle classes, the corruption of the courtroom, and a lynching.17 Winning both immediate, lasting popular success (it remained in print during the late 1930s and early 1940s, even when all of Faulkner’s other works did not), and a certain highbrow acclaim,18 the novel was also adapted in 1933, by a risqué, pre-Production Code Hollywood whose scriptwriters added visual and aural codes for Sapphic debauchery and patrician degenerescence to the mix, as well as a theme of righteous vengeance and a happy ending.19 In fact, Sanctuary’s plot is a baroque, canny, endlessly inventive elaboration on Riviere’s southern analysand’s dilemma, and it encompasses a rich and dense version of her fantasy. Confronted with the anxiety of social change, and especially changes in the roles of women, the novel stages a continual traffic between individual fantasies and communal beliefs, one that need not respect moral rules even as it is unable to escape the gravitational pull of well-worn stories such as the “Southern rape complex.” Temple Drake, the white, southern (anti-)heroine of Sanctuary is, like Riviere’s analysands, caught up in the need to “masquerade womanliness” as her only avenue to social power. A “coed” attending the University of Mississippi and the daughter of a socially prominent family, Temple dates widely, attending dances and going for joyrides. She puts enormous effort into seeming at once sexually desirable and sexually unattainable. Unlike Riviere, however, the novel insists on the potential for realworld power relations to interrupt and determine psychic fantasy. Riviere’s analysand held the essentially metaphoric concept of “rape” endorsed by her class and culture and guaranteed by the clichéd fantasy of a nameless “Negro” assailant. When the analysand imagined danger, what she pictured was actually an index of her capacity to disappoint others and lose their love. Temple’s sexual performance, however, her bare legs, coltish energy, and “taut, toothed coquetry,” doesn’t translate well for the white gangsters and bootleggers she meets while stranded by a car accident, who do not share the upper-class ideal of white female virginity and who cannot access the social power that circulates in chaste flirtations.20 Temple is, as the former prostitute Ruby states, only “ ‘playing at it’ ” (61), pretending to sell her sexuality to men without understanding

28  /  “little black man”

that her body could be taken by force. Temple’s understanding of sexual violence is initially a simple disavowal: “ ‘Things like that dont happen. Do they?’ ” (56). They do happen. Temple is raped, and moreover survives the attack, as well as a long subsequent period of imprisonment and sexual abuse. Thus, where the southern woman analysand rewrote the cultural script in a perverse, defacing fashion, simply imagining herself voluntarily doing exactly what was supposed to be the greatest insult to her white womanhood (seducing a bestial black man), Faulkner, through Temple’s survival, radically rewrites an ideology of imperiled white womanhood that not only mandated the torture and murder of black alleged rapists, but also asserted that “there is no such thing (or there should be no such thing) as a rape survivor.”21 In films and popular fiction, white women were expected to struggle to the death or to commit suicide after being raped; in historical lynchings of black men, property disputes, physical confrontations, economic competition, and consensual relationships were often, as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her posterity document, retroactively invented as the “rape” of a white woman, with no victim extant. Temple Drake the survivor ought not to have existed, but she did. The final pages of the novel see her seated beside her father in the Jardins de Luxembourg in Paris, apparently restored to a middle-class existence (316–17). Even as it develops an aggressively naturalistic account of rape and its repercussions, however, the novel also continues to draw on the fantasmatic that drove white-supremacist fictions and daydreams. Based on a real Memphis gangster with protruding eyes,22 the rapist Popeye is not black in the sense of having visible African ancestry. But as many commentators have noted, he is relentlessly coded as “black” in the sense of being evil or Satanic—standing in the shadow, wearing black clothes, looking at others with “two knobs of soft black rubber” (4), and repeatedly named as “ ‘that black man’ ” by Temple herself (42, 49). Popeye is also revealed, in the novel’s last pages, to suffer from some congenital mental and physical disability that renders him susceptible to sadistic impulses (308–9). Thus, under the guise of metaphor, every particular of a bestial, “black” rapist is fulfilled. Temple also gives, in the novel’s dénouement, misleading testimony against an innocent white man in her rape case, which leads to his death in a lynching. In other words, while the characters and plot of Sanctuary are clearly distinct from the “Southern rape complex,” its metaphoric economy is not. Though blacks appear only as peripheral figures in the novel (35,

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144–45), pivotal moral transgressions (Popeye’s rape of Temple, Temple’s false testimony) are represented in terms of an overfamiliar, inevitably racist scenario (a “black” degenerate rapist, a fatal white woman). But even as the novel arrogates this conventionally sensationalist plot to itself, it also refuses to endorse that plot’s (equally conventional) moral certainties, and particularly refuses a simple notion of white womanly purity. Unlike Riviere’s and other cursory psychoanalytic references to fantasized racial violence, the novel explores the relationship between fantasized and actual violence in some detail, and even gives Temple Drake herself—the rape survivor who ought not to have existed—a voice.

Temple: Madness, Women’s Sexuality, and Blackness Though it may seem out of place in Yoknapatawpha, Judith Butler’s concept of the lesbian phallus offers an elegant means for addressing these difficult relationships among bodily difference, violence, and representation.23 Indeed, the terms of Butler’s discussion of the limits of the body in Freud (particularly, “On Narcissism” and The Ego and the Id) uncannily mirror Temple Drake’s own efforts to depict and understand the traumatic sexual violence she has undergone. This similitude between Faulkner’s pulp fiction and Butler’s high-theoretical psychoanalysis will require some in-depth preliminary explication. Freud argues that the body acquires boundaries and a psychic presence through the narcissistic investment of libido in bodily discomfort, and maintains that “the prototype” of an uncomfortable organ is “the [male] genital organ in its states of excitation.”24 The phallus thus conceptualized is masculine, but his formulation maintains the possibility that some other organ besides the penis can be uncomfortably excited, and Butler further notes that the association of pain with pleasure maintains an ambivalence, rather than a sexist triumphalism, about the power of that organ to compel the psyche. That ambivalence is tied to trauma; the repetitious awareness of a wound, like repeated blows to the sexual organ, invests the body with libido. Butler’s qualifier “lesbian,” though in part reflecting a discussion of the politics of lesbian sexuality,25 is intended to continually emphasize the arbitrary and negotiable site of the phallus on the body. It also serves to radically undermine any attempt to reintroduce normalization—that is, to reintroduce the Oedipus complex as a resolver of subjective trauma, the substitution of one love object for another as a means of making good

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on an irrecuperable loss, and the assumption of one’s sex as an answer to the ambivalence of bodily investment through trauma. In other words, “lesbian phallus” unites in a single figure trauma’s involvement with the physical body and its implication in representational practices, while resisting the temptations of an idealized, pre-traumatic body and a conservative narrative of Romance. The subject with a lesbian phallus resists certain impositions of normative authority: she cannot have her phallus taken away from her (for instance, by the fact that she does not have a penis), and she cannot have her trauma taken away from her (for instance, by the construction of a “normal” sexual life). She is on her own, both in the sense of having an unusual power of psychic self-determination, and in the sense of having no safety in the world. Temple Drake has these things: an impressive power of self-invention, a near-total vulnerability, and, as we shall see, a curiously literal “lesbian phallus.” This seems appropriate, for, “indeed, ‘the’ lesbian phallus is a fiction, but perhaps a theoretically useful one, for there are questions of imitation, subversion, and the recirculation of phantasmatic privilege that a psychoanalytically informed reading might attend” (85). But for Temple, this play of differences and trauma takes racial difference as well as, and simultaneously with, sexual difference, as its opportunity for “imitation, subversion, and the recirculation of phantasmatic privilege,” and this racialization (over-)determines the limits of her performativity within an extraordinarily violent social world, one predicated on material and metaphoric rapes. Indeed, while Temple’s rape is the central incident of the novel, the crime is difficult to disengage from the general condition of her life. We see nothing of her education as such, only its function as a stage for her “womanly masquerade,” and she almost never appears alone. Even when she thinks she is alone, she is often under voyeuristic surveillance (70, 91–92, 210). Her body is in constant, explicitly sexual exchange among boyfriends, bystanders, bootleggers, a bootlegger’s common-law wife, a madam, lawyers, her brothers, her father (“the Judge”), and finally, in a climactic courtroom scene as she gives misleading testimony against an innocent man, the public institutions of the law. Temple is always a prisoner, and her story has strong resonance with the captivity-narrative tradition. In these biographical or autobiographical narratives, a white person, often a woman, details her experiences while isolated among Native Americans. Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 account is often considered the first such narrative,26 but the form, often fictionalized, persisted across the nineteenth century. In a captivity

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narrative, the woman captive’s survival and eventual return to her community of origin served to mask the violence of white colonialism with the image of a white woman’s sexual vulnerability, papering over the transformation of the land into a commodity with the feared transformation of one, ideologically-freighted body into a commodity. Sanctuary takes place a century after the first intensive wave of white colonization in North Mississippi, and (except for toponyms and architecture) makes no reference to either Native dispossession or black slavery, but as this résumé of Temple’s circulation shows, almost every white patriarchal institution extant is guaranteed by sharing her out among powerful, wealthy white men or their representatives. Faulkner thus implies what many scholars of captivity narratives have asserted: that an attachment to white women’s sexual vulnerability marks and disavows white colonial appropriation of non-white land, labor, and lives. Imagining that woman as traumatized, as continually undergoing the same, endless fear and pain, is constitutive of U.S. national identity. Autobiographical captivity narratives did allow their authors to claim a certain voice; Rowlandson, for example, interpreted her experiences by means of a dense engagement with Puritan theology, emphasizing how “the Lord preserved me in safety!”27 Temple’s only first-person account of her experiences, however, reiterates Faulkner’s strategy of revealing racialized social myths as, paradoxically, both inadequate to specific events and the source of a phantasmagoric metaphoricity that overwrites experience. The novel’s only extended examination of the status and meanings of her body, her drunken monologue retells her unexpected survival by juxtaposing sexual frankness with expressions of a radical passivity bordering on insanity (214–21). To Horace Benbow, a lawyer defending the man falsely accused of raping Temple, she describes cowering, defenseless, in a room at the bootleggers’ house. Temple has been drinking heavily, but she still manages to deflect Benbow’s search for usable evidence or testimony. Instead, compulsively, she narrates her trauma, her repetitive, circular experience of the fear of rape, attempted rape, and rape at the bootleggers’ house, drafting Benbow as a kind of psychoanalyst28 and insisting on the importance of her interior life, hitherto ignored by absolutely everyone. But then, and without pause or transition, she also begins describing her fear’s translation into something else: That was when I got to thinking a funny thing. You know how you do when you’re scared. I was looking at my legs and I’d try to make

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like I was a boy. I was thinking about if I just was a boy and then I tried to make myself into one by thinking. You know how you do things like that. Like when you know one problem in class and when they came to that you look at him and think right hard, Call on me. Call on me. I’d think about what they tell children, about kissing your elbow, and I tried to. I actually did. I was that scared, and I’d wonder if I could tell when it happened. I mean, before I looked, and I’d think I had and how I’d go out and show them— you know. (216–17) Notably, the fantasy of gaining a penis is opposed in affective substance as well as in form to the fantasy of castration. Instead of a childhood memory retrospectively given the gleam of disastrous, unassimilable sexual knowledge, as in classic Freudian accounts of the primal scene, it comes out as childish fantasy of normal accomplishment. Yet the monologue nonetheless generates extreme anxiety in Benbow, as well as in many readers, and it is this anxiety that points to the status of Temple’s fantasy-penis as a lesbian phallus. Temple describes, over the course of her monologue, many imaginative strategies for avoiding the rape to which, she believes, she is subject simply by virtue of her sex (thinking hard about being a boy, kissing her elbow, counting to a hundred, holding her breath, wearing a phallic, spiked chastity belt) for some time. Though her imagined penis is not material, not an organ literally engorged with pain and thereby erotically invested, the continual doubt in which it exists is like enough to such pain. “It” is always gone, and always appearing, always indicating by this repetition the presence of an unnamable trauma, and the “uncomfortable excitation” in/of an organ that doesn’t exist is like the collapse of “ fort . . . da” into one long scream.29 Not the transformation itself, but its deferred (im)possibility, is traumatic. Temple keeps saying “You know . . . you know” about her story, eliciting agreement with her fantasy of the body transformed by mere thought, and when she finally refers directly to her magic penis, it is itself named as “you know.” (No direct reference is made to vaginas anywhere in the book.) Once we accede to this naming of the fantasized organ as what “you” (we) “know,” and as in fact the only thing we can know or acknowledge about sexual difference—and there is no way not to so accede, without closing the book and renouncing its reading right there— it is a penis. Moreover, that penis has become, not merely the token of sexual difference on the body, but the body itself, and the pain investing

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that body. Temple’s monologue thus translates psychic trauma into material trauma, social discourse into bodily experience, in direct defiance of conventional epistemological procedures. Moreover, Sanctuary figures a sex that is indissoluble from racial difference, and especially blackness, just like Riviere’s analysand’s fantasy, and the “Southern rape complex” generally. Temple’s lesbian phallus, construed as literal penis, is also “black,” even more literally so than Popeye, her white but sartorially and spiritually “black” attacker. And I’d lie there . . . and me jerking away in front of his [Popeye’s] hand and I’d think what I’d say to him, I’d talk to him like the teacher does in school, and then I was a teacher in school and it was a little black thing like a nigger boy, kind of, and I was the teacher. Because I’d say How old am I? and I’d say I’m forty-five years old. I had iron-gray hair and spectacles and I was all big up here like women get. I had on a gray tailored suit, and I never could wear gray. And I was telling it what I’d do, and it kind of drawing up and drawing up like it could already see the switch. Then I said That wont do. I ought to be a man. So I was an old man, with a long white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler and I was saying Now. You see now. I’m a man now. Then I thought about being a man and as soon as I thought it, it happened. It made a kind of plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward. (219–20) Temple’s fantasy is difficult to follow, both because its collapse of socially-circulated racial and sexual binaries is far more radical than Riviere’s analysand’s daydream of seducing a “Negro” rapist, and because Temple herself is at a dual psychological crisis, drunk and disoriented as she tries to recount the past, but also attempting to explain the severe breakdown she experienced under the threat of rape. Approached for the first time by Popeye, she responded not with violent resistance, but with an almost total withdrawal into her own mind. The fantasy of owning the penis seems to have been given up, and replaced with a fantasy of disciplining it, in the guise of a white, monstrously female (“all big up here”), teacher disciplining a black child. The child is nonetheless referred to as “it” and seems to be identical with the penis. Not only is the newly detached penis “like a nigger boy,” but it “[draws] up,” becomes erect, under the threat of “the switch,” the repeated blows of corporal punishment. The sadistic-teacher fantasy is then itself replaced by the fantasy of being a white man threatening a “little black man,” and when the “little

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black man” diminishes in the presence of the white man, Temple’s penis “happens.” The lesbian phallus—the phallus that cannot be, that must fail to found meaning—is part of Temple’s reality, and becomes so only through a crucial citation of white supremacy. In other words, for Faulkner, the political content of white women’s fantasies, and specifically their psychic capacity to resist misogynist oppression and to negotiate modern cultural shifts in feminine roles, is always mediated by racial violence. Temple cannot name what has happened to her; not only is she unable to describe being raped, but she also has no conceptual tools for comprehending or negotiating the contradictory demands her culture and class placed on white women’s sexuality. So on the site of that failure, she invents the “little black man,” a fantasy figure that both burlesques the “Negro rapist” cited by Riviere’s analysand, and upholds that conventional, collective fantasy beyond its historic-cultural conditions of being. The centrality of African Americans to Faulkner’s social vision has been detailed by Thadious Davis, James Snead, Theresa Towner, and others, but here we see it written onto the psychic. Temple’s imagined “little black man” literalizes Morrison’s discussion of the utility of narrow, denigrating black stereotypes for Modernist psychological investigations; he is “an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnamity,”30 and both Temple and the novel need him to survive. At once threat and victim, he crystallizes the destructive potential of changing social mores, and he can be cast safely away from consciousness, cast into the darkness beyond.

Temple’s Madness and Social Critique Deborah Barker has recently given important historical depth to the social crises that form Sanctuary’s sensational ground. Bootleggers camped in rotting plantation houses, women going to college and displaying their legs, class conflict, corrupt officials, and a public culture organized around the obscene “ritual” of lynching31—all these are the staples of pulp fiction and pre-Production Code Hollywood, but they are not therefore mere cardboard fetishes of the popular imagination. All refer directly to the early-Depression collapse of the cotton economy, which forced the foreclosure of many black-owned farms and sent even more Southern blacks to the urban North in search of work . . . corn, not cotton, [was] the South’s new cash crop, in the

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form of illegal bootleg whiskey . . . the former plantation, now in ruins, ironically becomes the perfect secluded “hideout,”’ the Southern gentleman becomes the consumer (not the producer), the belle [Temple] becomes the degraded gangster’s moll, and two threatening lower class white stereotypes emerge: the urban gangster [Popeye] and the rural hillbilly moonshiner.32 Temple’s monologue, despite her lack of a political vocabulary, answers this socioeconomic crisis. Its vanishing black man, dislocated white men and women authority figures, and perverted gangster Popeye reflect the destruction of post-Reconstruction socioeconomic certainties, even as a pseudo-traditional racist mythology persists as the only available coordinates of sexual morality. Faulkner’s novel thus goes well beyond naturalistically delineating the effects of community standards on individual minds. He suggests, rather, that this racial ideology, the “Southern rape complex” is continually reproduced and rearticulated, even in the absence of its material supports, even in the literal absence of African American men. Except for unnamed jail inmates (114–15), servants, and passers-by, no black men appear in the novel at all. Temple’s fantasy, however, has neither practical effects for the events of the plot, nor moral legibility for the other characters. Temple passed out just at the point of the penis’s realization, as well as breaking off her monologue at that point. Horace Benbow also fails to comment on it, seeming instead to construe her monologue primarily as an expression of her radical sexual availability. At the point of their interview, Temple has not only been raped and begun to recover from her injuries, but remains imprisoned in Miss Reba’s Memphis brothel. Not paid in any conventional way, and prevented from leaving her room, Temple instead becomes what Barker describes as a “moll,” recipient of expensive gifts from Popeye but also subject to his demand that she engage in sexual intercourse with another man, a junior gangster called Red, as he watches. These practices, which Miss Reba sharply condemns as “funny” and appropriate only to a “French joint” (255, 258) were instigated with an unclear degree of consent on Temple’s part, but eventually pursued by her with a self-negating passion. Temple even pursues Red behind Popeye’s back, and in preference to escaping from the gangsters entirely. Her rapture with him is described as itself a series of overpowering, grotesque, orgasmic traumas: He came toward her. She did not move. Her eyes began to grow darker and darker, lifting into her skull above a half moon of white,

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without focus, with the blank rigidity of a statue’s eyes. She began to say Ah-ah-ah-ah in an expiring voice, her body arching slowly backward as though faced by an exquisite torture. When he touched her she sprang like a bow, hurling herself upon him, her mouth gaped and ugly like that of a dying fish as she writhed her loins against him. (238) The very machinery of representation here seems to break down, as both Temple’s “figure”—her body, “rigid,” “expiring,” “writhing”—and figural language—the rapid-fire descriptions “a half moon,” “a statue’s eyes,” “as though faced by an exquisite torture,” “like a bow,” “like a dying fish”— seem to shake themselves to pieces in their wild, indiscriminate energy. It is as if not only the purity of the southern white woman, but metaphor as such, were undergoing an endless, radical violence. Where Faulkner’s play with such binary identities as white/black, or man/woman, often excites critical commentary on his formal mastery, his careful confusion, in the figure of Temple’s sexual ecstasy, of the ethical binaries choice/compulsion and pleasure/pain has tended to produce commentary on the moral value of literary criticism. Cleanth Brooks, for example, for many years a towering presence in Faulkner studies, read Sanctuary as a Christian reckoning with the problem of evil, with the clear implication that sexuality as such is inextricable from sin. Brooks’s interpretation, as Donald Kartiganer describes it, “commits his enormously subtle powers of reading to the service of a social vision that in many respects compromises them.”33 Hence Brooks’s fairly extensive discussion of Temple’s monologue expounded, not the trauma of being raped, but the trauma of discovering one’s own inherent sinfulness.34 He notes in particular her “detachment and even pride”—that is, her lack of properly womanly behavior, her lack of either seductive attempts or shame—in recounting her story, and he understands her sexual experiences, both compelled and chosen, as motivating the false testimony that convicts an innocent man of her rape.35 Brooks was, as Linda Wagner-Martin explains, representative of a critical generation, profoundly influenced by New Criticism and Agrarianism, that saw the Faulknerian oeuvre as essentially closed and autonomous, a reflection of immemorial tradition. Based perhaps in Malcolm Cowley’s stitched-together history of Yoknapatawpha (in The Portable Faulkner, originally published in 1946), sustained across the 1960s and 1970s in magisterial works by Brooks, Michael Millgate, and others, this tradition gave way suddenly, as Wagner-Martin recounts the story, to

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“deconstruction and feminist criticism,” whose Frenchness Miss Reba might disdain in vain.36 Work by Minrose Gwin, Judith Bryant Wittenberg, Dianne Luce Cox, and Kelly Lynch Reames, among others, found in Faulkner (and most often in Temple Drake specifically) new and complex ways to understand the writerly possibilities of voice, dialogue, intent, and gender.37 Cox in particular strongly disputed the Brooksian moral condemnation of Temple, in the course of a careful account of Temple’s and her family’s continuing vulnerability to Popeye’s threats and blackmail, while Wittenberg and Reames discussed the character’s ability to speak and write about sexuality in Requiem for a Nun. Within Faulkner studies, and for students and teachers of his works, then, Temple Drake’s power to narrate her world has long been, and remains, an important mode for examining the moral weight of literary language generally, and the novel has served a purpose not unlike that of “Womanliness as Masquerade,” as a means for teasing out the complexities and contradictions of changing gender roles and values. Metaphoric references to racial violence in Sanctuary, however, have not been an object of critico-moral concern, either to Brooksian critics or to their feminist revisionists (though this situation is significantly different with regard to Requiem for a Nun, to be addressed in the next chapter). Yet such references, like the “little black man” of Temple’s monologue, continue to pattern the remainder of the novel, and particularly to manage readers’ anxieties about modernity, traditionalism, and social conflict. When an innocent man is arrested for the initial rape, Temple testifies in a manner that is used against him, parroting words supplied by a corrupt lawyer with a total lack of affect, “her eyes blank and all pupil above the three savage spots of rouge” (289). The innocent man, Lee Goodwin (one of the “rural hillbilly moonshiners”38) is later himself raped and burned alive in a lynching, and mob members even threaten Horace Benbow with murder and rape as well: “ ‘Put him in, too. There’s enough left to burn a lawyer.’ ‘Do to the lawyer what we did to him’ ” (296). Goodwin’s death fulfills the form of the “Southern rape complex” in every particular except his whiteness, and even that can be remedied: the burning to which his body is subjected literally blackens him. The lynching duplicates Temple’s assumption of her lesbian phallus— placing an imaginary black men at the center and then abjecting him— and indeed, African American writers’ depictions of lynchings, such as Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” and The Long Dream, and James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” have strongly emphasized the equation of a lynched man’s body to a homoerotically-invested phallus.

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Sanctuary, however, exceeds a diagnosis of the sexual pathology of white supremacy. There are also the strange analogies, of Temple’s vengeful fantasies to those of the crowd, and of the “little black man” of her fantasy to Goodwin’s murdered corpse. These analogies reveal, not a closed equation, as the Brooksian generation would have it (“the devastation of the South—figured as the embodied ‘Temple’—during and after the Civil War”39), but a restless fictional “patterning,”40 the novel shuttling obsessively, from fantasy to body, and from body to fantasy, from interpretation to violence, and from violence to interpretation. Blackness is thus, not something traced by this patterning, but a sign or figure of interpretation’s endless transitivity, irresolvable and repetitious. For example, there is a particularly obscene irony, one whose figure returns and returns, defying interpretive labor, in the fact that when Temple is first raped, it is with an object, an artificial penis. Popeye is impotent due to a hereditary condition, and had to improvise when he cornered Temple in a corncrib. The object, a corncob (and recall Barker’s point about the sudden shift from cotton to corn whiskey production in the early Depression) is later the main exhibit, waved around with histrionic drama, at trial: “[The prosecutor] held in his hand a corn-cob. It appeared to have been dipped in dark brownish paint” (283). This corncob is darkened with her blood and thus literally hers, literally created as part of her body at the same moment as it violates it, and at the same moment at which it is darkened. That which is used to rape Temple can only be called a phallus, and its “dark brownish” color is the sign that tells us about its arbitrary relationship to her body. Color marks where interpretation must shift. In its literality, this corncob is also, retrospectively, the motivator of the whole interrogative endeavor: Temple’s monologue comes after the fact of her rape, and after she stops bleeding. She describes the little black man after she met the corncob man41; she can use the traumatic figure of blackness only after she has already been traumatized. Florence Dore describes this recursive storytelling structure’s implications succinctly: “In Sanctuary there is an idea that the novel reproduces aspects of its own social world, but there is also a thwarting worry that the novel’s own successful representation will spell that social world’s disaster. Faulkner depicts representation as a threat to that which nonetheless compels it.”42 Representation’s threat even endangers author-ity as such; Ernest Hemingway, for instance, once referred to Faulkner derisively as “Corncob.”43

“little black man”  /  39

The End? The close association that Sanctuary develops among figures of blackness and racial violence, traumatic violence, reading, and the phallic seems hopelessly degenerative, offering no direct solution either to the violence the novel identifies as central to white Mississippian culture in the 1930s or to the phallocentrism that its language delineates but cannot dodge. The thing one has to remember, though, is that “perhaps the promise of the phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.”44 Butler’s critical task, for example, is always to “acknowledge that failure from the start and to work that failure for its uses and to suggest that something more useful than the phallic ideal may come of the analysis.”45 Staying very close to the body, ‘phallus,’ she points out, never quite escapes from ‘penis’: it remains an unlocatable quantity without the bodily example, yet pretends, in Lacanian theory at least, to precede and control the signifiable.46 “The phallus,” it is essential to understand, “is a signifier,”47 and moreover a privileged signifier, the one without which we would not have all else. There is thus a struggle between the penis and the phallus, insofar as “the phallus not only opposes the penis in a logical sense, but is itself instituted through the repudiation of its partial, decentered, and substitutable character.”48 The phallus is also analogous to the psychoanalytic myth of the primal father and his cannibal sons in Freud’s Totem and Taboo, a work that likewise takes women’s sexuality as its central crisis and that strongly marks the difference between a white modernity of sexual moderation and a nonwhite primitivism of sexual violence. These prehistoric, indeed mythic, sons joined together and murdered an all-powerful father who had kept all the women for himself. They ate his flesh to consolidate their bond, and distributed their mothers and sisters as property. Yet each also vowed, out of guilt, never to become like him, never to seek total mastery. Figured as an animal totem, the memory of their dead father became the basis of a sacrificial religion, and hence of social order: a fullness of which any one man was only a part or a representative. The phallus ate the penis, in other words; the social overtook and did violence to the body, and it is always trying to forget that it did so, always trying to retrospectively reorder the past such that this original violence disappears. And because Freud’s mythical account, drawing both on a body of anthropological work and on a broader discourse of the primitive, is so powerfully racialized, that which is at the origin and which must be forgotten for society to endure is also what is not white, what is

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racially darkened, blackened, black. Temple Drake’s invention of a penis for herself, therefore, is a technique of resistance to her status as an object of exchange among men; but because she accedes to the identification of racial difference with trauma, she cannot—and the novel cannot—imagine her story, or her community’s history, escaping its binding origin in such violence. So too, to come back to our original concerns, psychoanalytic references to literary figures of racial violence, such as Riviere’s case study, or Freud’s metaphoric references to blackness, mark a foreclosed origin, a sense of something in back or beyond that guarantees systematic meaning. Yet such references also figure the limits of the psychoanalytic project—not only the immediate, practical limit, noted by Walton and many others, of psychoanalysis’s near-total incompetence to address racial differences, racism, global histories of racialized oppression, or even the daily experience of nonwhite individuals, but also an internal, theoretical limit or failure. Psychoanalysis cannot, it seems, escape its own patriarchal genealogy; though critical adjustments, such as Riviere’s concept of “womanliness as masquerade,” are certainly possible and permissible, the system of filiation and patriarchal allegiance remains intact. No use of psychoanalytic tools, or so it seems, can dismantle the psychoanalytic masters’ house. Hortense Spillers’s 1996 essay “ ‘All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race” is an effective counter to any such totalizing view of the psychoanalytic. Its very title, which re-voices Charles Mingus’s title for one of his works, jokes about black men, white women, and legitimate ancestry. Spillers’s piece consistently emphasizes process, exchange without final resolution, translation without final authority. In stark contrast to the static, traumatic and traumatizing, dead-yet-alive figures of nameless black men at the heart of both Riviere’s analysand’s and Temple Drake’s selfnarrations, her essay encompasses a wide range of literary, historical, theoretical, cultural, and personal figurations of racial difference. While this complexity indicates Spillers’s deep investments in (and reveals Riviere’s and Faulkner’s ignorance of) black culture, it also implies a sharply different understanding of modernity and of the relationship of social change to psychic life and psychoanalytic topographies. The nameless analysand and Temple, after all, each imagines herself transformed—the analysand as a seductress of “Negroes,” Temple as “a boy”—not in order to resist, but as a gesture of acquiescence to their culture’s white-supremacist ideology and its contradictory demands on

“little black man”  /  41

women’s sexuality. Neither can imagine other myths, and neither can imagine any social order other than the one they belong to. Spillers, however, can locate myths in the field of historical and material relations, and in particular she can locate the racially marked phallus, the obscene father and his cannibal sons. Drawing on work by the Lacanian analysts Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues, and the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux, she points out that many African societies locate laws, prohibitions, and the forbidden in a broad, horizontal field of many incorporeal entities. Both the vertical, intergenerational violence, father-to-sons and sons-to-father, and the forward-lurching, backwardglancing chronology of Totem and Taboo’s mythography are illegible in a context where the unknown powers that demand interpretation may be, but are not necessarily, fathers, origins, and enemies. So, too, the national and spiritual significance that both the novel itself, and generations of its readers, have attributed to Temple Drake’s rape is only comprehensible in a world overshadowed by a primeval father; in some other world, some world of more broadly distributed authority, she might have been able to escape from the bootleggers, or indeed to escape “womanliness as masquerade” entirely. This is not to argue, however, for a historicist view of psychoanalysis as merely an effect of a certain moment in European social history. On the contrary, the link between blackness, racial violence, and Freudian mythography suggests the possibility of a broader psycho-analysis of Western modernity. The story of Totem and Taboo, after all, has its materialized counterpart in the effects of European slaving on African societies. The profitability of slave trading made those of junior status, often the young, in West African communities within the trade’s orbit vulnerable to the avarice of their elders, who might sentence them to enslavement for small or nonexistent crimes or debts. As Spillers explains, The execrable trade, in radically altering the social system in Old and New World ‘domestic community,’ is as violent and disruptive as the never-did-happenstance of mythic and oneiric inevitability. In other words, this historical event, like a myth, marks so rigorous a transition in the order of things that it launches a new way of gauging time and human origin: it underwrites, in short, a new genealogy defined by a break with Tradition—with the Law of the Ancestors and the paternal intermediary.49 Importantly, Spillers is not only interested in describing the instantiation of a European, capitalist familial order on non-European societies

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via colonialism and the African slave trade—the “execrable” endeavor of four centuries that fueled Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, that made Western modernity, and particularly made Faulkner’s Mississippi, both the material one he lived in and the imagined one he owned and controlled. She also designates the violent, exclusionary character of that order, in all its geographic extensions, as “the psychoanalytic difference that has yet to be articulated.”50 In other words, not any specific form of racial difference, but the fact that human difference can be instantiated historically, is what remains to be theorized within psychoanalysis. Not blackness, but the violent history of the black diaspora, traumatizes psychoanalysis. Faulkner’s novel makes no overt theoretical claims at all, while the present essay’s contribution is genealogical in the Foucaultian sense, delineating the circumstances and ideological supports of a racial fantasy that has radically interfered with theoretical investigations of race and psychic experience. That fantasy, specific to the post-Reconstruction United States and exemplified in “Womanliness as Masquerade” and Sanctuary, exploits the violence encrypted in banal, racist images of African racial difference to forestall and manage both (presumptively white) women’s sexuality and the anxieties attendant on psychoanalytic theoretical innovation itself. Recognizing the instrumentality of this racial fantasy for psychoanalysis and for U.S. modernist literary innovation will mean not only reconsidering the utility of psychoanalytic procedures for explicating the strange knot of race and sexuality in U.S. literature, but also reframing the literary character of psychoanalysis itself. But in its strange, fantastic daring, its aggressively marginal self-situation combined with a subtle grasp of the lived consequences of modernity, Sanctuary does at least offer a cure for what Avital Ronnell has recently called “the misery of theory without poetry.”51 A completed theory—for example, a psychoanalysis that fully integrates racial difference, that as carefully accounts for embodiment in dark skin as it does embodiment in sexed bodies—is the fantasy of so much cultural criticism. That fantasy is conjured up to dispel unbearably anxious questions, such as “When and how shall we use theory?” and “What legitimates our theoretical endeavors?” Such questions are perhaps particularly acute for critics working in and on the United States, with its history of disjunction and miscommunication between the academy and the political process, and its living heritage of gross racial injustices. But this novel will never become that miserable prospect, a “substantial work or project of asserted nonalienation and secured returns—a political work or project mirroring the

“little black man”  /  43

narcissistic totality of a state.”52 It will never become the Great American Novel. Instead, as André Bleikasten explains, the Faulknerian text is a sorting-out, a patterning, a way of trying to make sense of the world. But rather than reaching out for the clarity of neatly conceptualized certitudes so as to bring consciousness to rest, it keeps deferring the moment of closure, turning backward and inward, brooding over the confusions of experience and memory, lingering in uncertainty, and staying as close as possible to the astonishment and sense of outrage of which it was born.53

2  /

“Which Tooth Hit You First?”: Nation, Home, Women, and Violence in Requiem for a Nun

Prologue. Not Even . . .  One of the most frequently-quoted lines in William Faulkner’s work is an aphorism taken from the otherwise little-read 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun : “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”1 Barack Obama, president-elect as of this writing, paraphrased it in his March 2008 “speech on race in America” entitled “A More Perfect Union.” Speaking in Philadelphia, at a time when his nomination was not yet assured, and in response to vocal condemnations of his pastor Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, Obama asserted that history, and especially African American historical experiences of oppression, remains relevant to contemporary political debates. His invocation of Faulkner’s literary authority thus preempted a mass-mediated political discourse which strenuously disavows racism generally, and anti-black racism in particular. Yet the (mis)quotation also resembles a Scripture lesson, laying out unequivocal, transcendent law: “Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, ‘The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.’ ” Perhaps because it so skillfully reiterates established themes, “A More Perfect Union” has become something of an instant classic, for instance being immediately anthologized in textbooks intended for first-year Composition courses.2 Obama disparages Wright’s “anger,” sympathizes with working-class families’ financial difficulties, invokes patriotism and Christian belief, mentions any number of ordinary heroes, and

“which tooth hit you first?”  /  45

omits all mention of reparative or redistributive justice. Certain aspects of the speech are unusual, however, and highly pertinent our present concerns. Obama’s references to “complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through,” to “old racial wounds,” and to African Americans’ crippling “memories of humiliation and doubt and fear,” define contemporary racial politics in the United States in terms of a multigenerational, psychological trauma. This trauma was instantiated by African slavery, and continues to be propagated down the generations by various forms of institutionalized racism. Obama is thus in basic agreement with the critical tradition that includes D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1961), and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). These critics all agree that the extreme violence done to nonwhite individuals and peoples in the course of past U.S. territorial and economic expansion has determining effects on majority-white, modern and contemporary U.S. literature and culture.3 However, the presidential theory of trauma also diverges sharply from their pedagogical motive in stating flatly that too much public articulation of trauma can be detrimental to the political process. Obama describes Reverend Wright’s political philosophy as “a profoundly distorted view of this country,” “not only wrong, but divisive,” “simplify[ing] and stereotyp[ing] and amplify[ing] the negative to the point that it distorts reality.” In other words, Obama takes quite literally the notion that representations of past violence can fracture the present and perpetuate the disaster. Traumatization is no mere trope in “A More Perfect Union”; it’s an ambivalent power that deserves wary, suspicious respect precisely because it can potentially harm liberal political goals, even liberal democracy itself. The speech therefore labors to reassert Obama’s authority over African American history, contemporary racial politics, and the black Christian rhetoric of justice. It critically reframes racial difference in terms of trauma, and then answers that traumatic threat with the promise that such critical knowledge can be made to serve a renewed centrist progressivism—or “hope,” in the campaign’s ubiquitous slogan. “A More Perfect Union’s” pivotal citation of Requiem for a Nun is perhaps more appropriate than the candidate and his speechwriters knew, for the novel engages an uncannily similar intellectual project. Aiming both to explicate, and to limit, traumas “not even past,” Requiem likewise cites slavery and institutionalized anti-black racism (as well as the removal of Native peoples) as foundational, structural determinants of

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national history. Though it offers a rich, engaging historical account, stretching from the early days of Mississippi statehood through 1950, and integrating such matters as Indian expulsion, the slave economy, the ecological catastrophes of cotton farming and lumbering, Southern regional identity in relation to U.S. nationalism, and the role of sexual violence in maintaining U.S. racial and class hierarchies, the novel also limits and encloses direct testimony to traumatization. Its most traumatized character, the poor black woman Nancy Mannigoe, is criminal, mentally disturbed, religiously fanatic, and incapable of taking part in normal political and social life. The plot consigns her to prison, silence, and execution by hanging; the white characters’ witness to her oppression (as well as that of presumptively-white readers) is thus radically depoliticized. Without the constraints of electioneering, however, Faulkner’s novel also turns its analytic eye back onto this seemingly necessary quarantine of trauma, systematically examining the conditions of writing about trauma and traumatization, and speculating about the relationship between traumatic writing and state power. Thus, while the novel finally capitulates to a conservative (and specifically racist) historiography, it also offers an analytic address to trauma politics unavailable elsewhere.

The Critical Archive Formal experimentation as well as recurring characters, locations, and events are defining features of Faulkner’s oeuvre; but Requiem for a Nun intensifies both of these characteristics. An explicit sequel to Sanctuary (1931), the novel also returns to families, locations, characters, and incidents from “That Evening Sun” (1928), The Sound and the Fury (1929), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942). Its narrative also alternates between two chronologies, one rendered in Faulknerian prose and the other in dramatic form (dialogue and stage directions). The novel thus gives at least two pasts that have not passed, and it refers tangentially to many more, in a digressive excess, an “overflow [of] traditional generic boundaries,” that Richard Moreland reads as a critical revision of Faulkner’s earlier, high-modernist monuments.4 The kernel story, set eight years after the events of Sanctuary (roughly 1938), centers on the conviction and execution of Nancy Mannigoe, a black domestic servant, for the murder of the now-married Temple Drake Stevens’s nameless infant daughter. Temple and Gavin Stevens

“which tooth hit you first?”  /  47

(Nancy’s lawyer and Temple’s uncle by marriage, a recurring character in several other novels, and the one who declares that the past is “not even past”) both believe that Temple herself shares some culpability for the infant’s death, which took place amid Temple’s attempt, in the company of a lover, to take the baby and leave her husband and older son. The two try, unsuccessfully, to get Nancy’s death sentence commuted to life in prison on these grounds. This limited series of events is rendered as a play, subdivided into Acts and Scenes. Contrasting sharply with the austere dramatic conversations, however, are long prose prologues to each of the three Acts. These prologues locate Yoknapatawpha’s courthouse, the state capitol, and the Jefferson town jail in a radically inclusive, broad chronological sweep from geologic time to the present of the novel’s completion, emphatically named as “A.D. 1950” (548). Most important, however, is the history of whitedominated Mississippi. Beginning in the 1830s, at a time when the great cotton plantations were only just being founded (Faulkner’s own plantation house, which he renamed “Rowan Oak,” was built in 1838), the three prologues all address a mythic South, but emphasize “transition from one social order (with its own characteristic ways of organizing both its internal and its external boundaries) to another, differently ordered society.”5 Though usually read in terms of an unusual compositional process,6 and/or its author’s continuing efforts at formal innovation,7 the novel’s “seeming disjunction,” as Marnie Parsons notes, “encourages a reading process which duplicates the ‘making’ of the past.”8 Readers are asked constantly to compare private, personal conversations and memories to a public, collective history, to question how each shapes the other, and finally to construe the two as inseparable, interdependent. Indeed, between the narrative prologues that privilege the Cotton Kingdom, and the dramatic dialogues of circa 1938, a complete century is demarcated and memorialized. As many critics have noted, this reiterative, pedagogical impulse also reflects the humanist convictions expressed in Faulkner’s Nobel acceptance speech. Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict

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with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again.9 In this speech, delivered from the midst of work on the Requiem manuscript, Faulkner not only expounds “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths” as such,10 but he also tries to reassure a Cold War generation locked into presentist anxiety that there is something “worth writing about” other than eschatological anxiety, that there is a past, a human heart, truth, and the universe, and that they can indeed write them. So too, when Requiem assigns its readers the Faulknerian task of weaving together the historical with the private, and thereby reconstituting Mississippi’s first century, it reasserts that duty over and against global, nuclear anomie. The past “never dead . . . not even past” can be, in other words, redemptive of a failed, frozen present. Until at least 1980, however, Requiem, and especially its redemptive impulse, met with little patience or respect. Though reviews were by no means uniformly negative, the most influential intimated that Faulkner was past his artistic peak and that Requiem reflected embarrassingly middlebrow intentions. Malcolm Cowley, for example, read Requiem as evidence of a fundamental shift away from aesthetic radicalism and toward moralism: Once, there was an unregenerate Faulkner, careless of his readers but not unwilling to shock them; the author of novels about incest, rape, arson and miscegenation. Now there is a reformed Faulkner, conscious of his public duties, who has become the spokesman for the human spirit. . . . Soon his readers on the five continents will have to decide which of the two they prefer.11 This characterization is curious on its face; Requiem’s plot involves at least as many social and personal transgressions as do other Yoknapatawpha novels. Cowley soon gives his doubts a locus in the character of Nancy Mannigoe, however. Though she freely accepts responsibility for murdering Temple’s baby daughter, Nancy is also suffused with Christian belief. Gavin Stevens asserts that she murdered the child in order to save and preserve it in heaven, and to protect the remaining Stevens family, especially Temple’s other child, on earth (589). Meanwhile, Nancy herself is powerfully assured of her own salvation (655–67), and Temple actively seeks her spiritual counsel (658, 661–63). Contemporary reviewers also

“which tooth hit you first?”  /  49

understood Nancy as a moral exemplar and a source of redemption, and the 1959 Broadway adaptation by Ruth Ford (who starred as Temple in a short-lived production) strongly endorses that interpretation.12 Cowley, too, perceived Nancy as a sacred or Christlike figure; he was unimpressed, however, describing her as a flaw in “logic,” a judgment that other influential critics echoed, calling it “implausible” and “mere sentimental piety.”13 Cowley’s unsatisfactory “reformed Faulkner,” in other words, orchestrates banal social fictions where he had previously questioned readers’ values. Noel Polk’s 1981 monograph on Requiem for a Nun was the first real challenge to this consensus. Polk insisted that there was no textual basis for the identification of Nancy as a messianic figure—only evidence that she was herself so deluded, and that other characters use her delusion as a means of controlling and humiliating a rebellious, intelligent Temple Drake Stevens. Rigorously distinguishing between what the characters say and what the novel establishes as fact, Polk radically rearticulated the novel’s moral discourse: he strongly condemns Nancy as both “madwoman” and murderer,14 details Gavin Stevens’s prurience and hypocrisy,15 and champions Temple’s moral authority.16 On the basis of his reading, a small renaissance in critical essays on Requiem for a Nun was launched in the mid-1980s. Interestingly, most of the post-1981 literature on Requiem for a Nun, Sanctuary, and the character of Temple Drake (Stevens) is avowedly feminist, much of it is explicitly psychoanalytic, and several of the most influential articles deal extensively with traumatic symptomologies. As Linda Wagner-Martin explains, the new critical prominence of these formerly marginal novels was only one aspect of a massive epistemological shift in Faulkner studies, away from Agrarian idealism and toward feminist and deconstructive critical methodologies.17 Indeed, few other fields of U.S. literary study have so completely assimilated the deconstructive insight that a text is not identical to itself. Where the William Faulkner of, for example, Cleanth Brooks’s massive studies in the 1960s stood firmly and self-consciously for patriarchal, Christian, and (white) Southern nationalist values, the name “Faulkner” today marks a rich textual reservoir of the contradictions, ambivalences, and buried, violent histories that the recent invention of “traditional values” serves to obscure. Important recent criticism of Requiem for a Nun often builds on the startlingly revisionary character of Temple: whereas in Sanctuary she had almost lacked speech and will, reduced by fear to inanities like “ ‘My father’s a judge,’ ” in the later novel she often expresses herself with densely

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concentrated wit, as in this killer retort to Gavin’s criticism of her mothering: “Dont the philosophers and other gynecologists tell us that women will strike back with any weapon, even their children?” (524). Collapsing the Medea, self-hatred, a mockingly medicalized obscene reference, and a diagnosis of Western philosophy as gynophobic into nineteen words, this and similar lines bespeak both Temple’s anguished sense of kinship with Nancy, the convicted child murderer, and her awareness of language itself as a medium of power. The “voice of the woman eiron” thus opens intimate violences, on stages as small as the patriarchal household and as large as the nation, to political readings.18 Yet Temple’s words have no effect on Nancy’s fate; the governor listens politely, even sympathetically, to her midnight plea for leniency but refuses to consider a commutation. Nothing changes because Temple spoke. Leigh Ann Duck takes up this point, arguing that “Temple suggests not only a post-traumatic perspective, but also, more profoundly, that this history cannot be assimilated to the time of the state. . . . Requiem . . . stages her frustration that such understanding is restricted to a private realm, perhaps potentially beneficial for her but irrelevant to Nancy.”19 Duck reads the novel, in other words, neither as a failed moral pedagogy, as did the first reviewers (and, more recently, Stephen Weisenburger), nor as a complex, irresolute ethical drama, like Polk, Parsons, and other feminist Faulkner scholars (notably Judith Bryant Wittenberg, Kelly Lynch Reames and Doreen Fowler),20 but instead as a statement about the political limits imposed by an intransigent gap between private traumas and public events. The remainder of this essay will pursue Duck’s insight further, examining public/private distinctions in the novel and arguing that Faulkner predicates the public sphere as such on the occultation of domestic and private traumas.

The Prologues’ Examination of Written Law and Geography Requiem writes a single century, from the flowering of white planters’ dynastic ambitions in the 1830s to a present moment in which the plantation houses rot and Gone with the Wind plays in local movie houses (645). As Robert Penn Warren wrote in a perceptive early review, the difference between the play and the context gives a shock. It is not merely a difference in method; or rather, the difference in method seems to indicate a more drastic difference. Under the bemusing power of the voice we enter into the word of old

“which tooth hit you first?”  /  51

Yoknapatawpha, not to identify ourselves with it, for there is always a sense of history, or irremediable pastness, but to yearn toward and believe in its fullness and significance.21 The prose sections, prologues to each of the three “Acts,” demonstrate a promiscuous mixture of social, economic, ecological, and political history strongly reminiscent of W. J. Cash’s 1941 essay in cultural criticism, The Mind of the South. Like that work, their aim is to identify what persists in the face of constant, radical, political, and economic change. In contrast to the dramatic sections, moreover, whose static conversations are characterized by unremitting anxiety, pique, cynicism, injustice, and existential dread, the prologues hold out the promise of an essentially comic, progressive story—if an often absurdist one, as the rapid slide from the Cotton Kingdom to Hollywood shows. Each prologue is titled after a building that embodies state power (“The Courthouse,” “The Golden Dome” [the Mississippi state capitol], and “The Jail”). In the course of telling “old Yoknapatawpha,” however, the prologues relentlessly return to another way in which a U.S. community is written—records, deeds, treaties, ledgers, letters, licenses, advertisements, contracts, signatures. There is a subtle, persistent tension between the prologues themselves and these documents, for it is difficult to determine which is the subject of readers’ and characters’ yearning toward and belief in “fullness and significance.” Which is realer, which more consequential: the story about building the Courthouse, or the legal papers stored in the Courthouse? “Act I: The Courthouse” begins just “before the law”22—some three decades after a treaty concession from Spain added Mississippi’s territory to the United States, and fifteen or sixteen years after statehood, but some time before the removal of Native groups to Oklahoma and thus well before the slave-worked cotton plantation’s antebellum acme of economic power and cultural significance. Interestingly, before the law can really be the law, it must be given its own house: The settlement had the records; even the simple dispossession of Indians begot in time a minuscule of archive, let alone the normal litter of man’s ramshackle confederation against environment—that time and that wilderness;—in this case, a meager, fading, dogeared, uncorrelated, at times illiterate sheaf of land-grants and patents and transfers and deeds, and tax and militia-rolls, and bills of sale for slaves, and counting-house lists of spurious currency and exchange rates, and liens and mortgages, and listed rewards for escaped or

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stolen Negroes and other livestock, and diary-like annotations of births and marriages and deaths and public hangings and land auctions, accumulating slowly for those three decades in a sort of iron pirate’s chest in the back room of the postoffice-tradingpost-store until that day thirty years later when, because of a jailbreak compounded by an ancient monster iron padlock transported a thousand miles by horseback from Carolina, the box was removed to a small new leanto room like a wood- or tool-shed built two days ago against one outside wall of the morticed-log mud-chinked shakedown jail; and thus was born the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse: by simple fortuity, not only less old than even the jail, but come into existence at all by chance and accident. (475) Even the naked theft of land from the Chickasaws “begets” documents; even enslavement, with its dehumanization (bills of sale) and perversely utilitarian acknowledgments of resistance (rewards for the capture of escapees), makes a “minuscule” archive. But a building is necessary to mark off a polity from the more indistinct space and collectivity of the thirty-year-old “settlement.” This process of drawing borders has much in common with the maps of Yoknapatawpha included in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Portable Faulkner (1967; 1st ed., 1946). These maps of a square imaginary county square away the disasters that Requiem enumerates, such as Native dispossession and African enslavement, the degradation of the natural environment, and many crimes against women. Instead, they mark only those matters also recorded in the archive: claims of ownership, crimes, marriages, legal decisions, business enterprises, and deaths, in legends such as “Old Frenchman Place where Popeye murdered Tawmmy” and “Hunting & fishing camp where Wash Jones killed Sutpen. Later owned by Major De Spain.”23 The Absalom, Absalom! map even jokingly transformed authorship itself into property rights: it was signed “William Faulkner, sole owner & proprietor.”24 As Édouard Glissant remarks, the maps show an author “content to clarify merely the possibility of the work in question and . . . to choose to conceal the deferred, the already buried intentions, and the impossibility of writing.”25 In fact, the “Old Frenchman Place” was also where Temple was raped in Sanctuary, while both the hunting camp and Sutpen’s Hundred were the sites of Thomas Sutpen’s extreme abuse of enslaved black people, white women relatives, and subordinate white men such as the French architect (who also appears in Requiem, building the

“which tooth hit you first?”  /  53

Courthouse, under the name Louis Grenier). But only the legally significant is noted, written; only what Audre Lorde would call “the master’s house”26 is marked on the map. The 1946 map goes so far as to ignore the fact of Indian removal and note only Indian ownership, in legends referring to “Issetibbeha’s Chickasaw Patent” and Ikkemotubbe’s horsetrading with an early Compson settler. In contrast to the documents and the maps, Requiem’s prose sections unfold the impossible and the unwritten, emphasizing illegitimacy and ambiguity. They do not offer readers the capacity or the opportunity to dismantle these masters’ houses, but they do explain how they were built. They do reveal that the Courthouse, the State Capitol, and the Jail were built out of contingency, compelling force, and willful forgetting, acquiring their aura of inevitability only after the fact. The “true” story of the naming of the city, offered in the prologue to Act I, carefully spells out how the truth falls out of the telling, and more importantly, how essential its disappearance is to historiography. The city’s name, Jefferson, though it suggests the “Founding Father” Thomas Jefferson, was actually a propitiatory offering to the mailman, intended to prevent him from reporting the theft of a padlock in a jailbreak, and hence to head off federal interference, while still keeping the mail coming. It was intended, in other words, to balance a limit on the law with the benefits of circulating written documents; the settlers thought they could negotiate with, and hold themselves separate from, the modern state. As Moreland points out, Faulkner avoids reading their resistance as tragic, instead turning to frontier humor in order to suggest multiple and unanticipated possibilities.27 Hence such conversations as the following, between a settler and the troublesome mailman: ‘Ratcliffe says your name’s Jefferson,’ Peabody said. ‘That’s right,’ Pettigrew said. ‘Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew. I’m from old Ferginny.’ ‘Any kin?’ Peabody said. ‘No,’ Pettigrew said. ‘My ma named me for him, so I would have some of his luck.’ ‘Luck?’ Peabody said. Pettigrew didn’t smile. “That’s right. She didn’t mean luck. She never had any schooling. She didn’t know the word she wanted to say.’ ‘Have you had it?’ Peabody said. Nor did Pettigrew smile now. ‘I’m sorry,’ Peabody said. ‘Try to forget it.’ He said: ‘We decided to name

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her [the city] Jefferson.’ Now Pettigrew didn’t seem to breathe even. He just stood there, small, frail, less than boysize, childless and bachelor, incorrigibly kinless and tieless, looking at Peabody. (492) Subsequent generations will not remember little “Petty-grew,” the childless and fatherless mailman, the low-class migrant from the Upper South, named perhaps illegitimately by an illiterate mother. He did not enter the written records of the city, though the city needs him to facilitate the recordkeeping process. The joke here is the same as every “bastard” joke: when you imagine this odd little man fathering a city, your laugh opens all patriarchal authority to question. The “real story” of “A Name for the City,” the real story of “Jefferson,” in its arbitrary relation to the foundations of the law, points to the arbitrariness of legality itself. Conversely, Pettigrew’s namesake, Thomas Jefferson, is the author of a knot of very un-funny ideas about writing, property, territory, race, sex, fatherhood, and the relationship of all of these to freedom. Jefferson’s name retroactively inscribes the settlement with the Declaration of Independence, a treaty with Spain granting lands east of the Mississippi, and the Louisiana Purchase of the lands to the west (which together fostered enormous growth in slave-worked plantations), and even the relationship, widely rumored even during his lifetime, between the enlightened president and Sally Hemings, an African American woman, likely his legal wife’s half-sister, whom he claimed as his property.28 Future generations will prefer President Jefferson to Pettigrew, will prefer an explicit and recognizable connection to national ideals and national origins. But with that gain they must also accept a covert, unacknowledged yet ineradicable, specifically racialized and sexualized psychic trauma. The Founding Father also will have been the enslaver of his own children and their mother. This retroactive reordering of the past, by means of the network of laws and crimes that “Jefferson” invokes, has strong affinities with the process that Freudian psychoanalysis calls Nachträglichkeit, the “belatedness” by which an early memory, devoid of traumatic or sexual significance, is reordered later in life according to sexual awareness. The revised memory, now understood as both sexual and violent, is submerged in the unconscious, becoming at once an essential structuring element of the psyche and an ungraspable something-disastrous—a psychic trauma— locatable only by the network of compulsive repetitions surrounding it. The classic example is Freud’s 1918 “Wolf Man” case, in which a young man’s nightmare-visions of wolves are unraveled as the memory of seeing his parents’ coition.29 When, as an older child, he understood what he

“which tooth hit you first?”  /  55

had witnessed as an infant, he was unconsciously horrified both by the apparent violence against his mother, and by the realization that that act between his parents constituted his own origin. Freud is careful to note that there can be no independent confirmation of his analysand’s experience. But analysis requires that a “primal scene,” giving both a story of origins and an originary terror, be assumed and named. In the same way, “Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha Co.” cannot understand its own origins, amid actual violence and expropriation, except by imagining, and identifying with, a powerful father, one who gives both law (the Declaration, the treaty with Spain, and the Louisiana Purchase) and terror (Native groups’ dispossession and the institutionalized ecological and human rape of the plantation régime)—Thomas Jefferson. Faulkner (a small man who was once a notoriously devious and intransigent postmaster30) understands this violent paternal law as a fiction, but one that, as “the settlement” became a city, destroyed the forest, expelled Native peoples, purchased black people as slaves, and developed a network of cotton plantations, nonetheless authorized a regime of material traumatization.

Women’s Bodies in the Law Freud’s description of Nachträglichkeit is resolutely Oedipal, relying on sexual difference and, indeed, on the woman’s subjugation within a patriarchal household for its analytic coherence. However, the only women who appear in the prologue of “The Courthouse” are the Indian matriarch Mohataha, soon to be exiled to Oklahoma, and her slave (of unknown race or racial mixture). Women are implied, in the marriage certificates in the “pirate’s chest” and in the children who need a school, and some are specifically mentioned as the dead family members of white men (for instance, Pettigrew’s “ma”). But women may not be necessary, for Requiem is a text filled with feminized and vaginal spaces, and with metaphors of virginity, patriarchal possession, and rape. Anything that can be violated is something like a woman’s body. Consider, for example, this discussion of the mail pouch, placed under lock for no reason except that it seemed fitting: So less than ever would the pouch need a lock in the back room of the trading-post, surrounded and enclosed once more by civilization, where its very intactness, its presence to receive a lock, proved its lack of that need during the three hundred miles of rapine-

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haunted Trace; needing a lock as little as it was equipped to receive one, since it had been necessary to slit the leather with a knife just under each jaw of the opening and insert the lock’s iron mandible through the two slits and clash it home, so that any other hand with a similar knife could have cut the whole lock from the pouch as easily as it had been clasped onto it. (481) The pouch didn’t need to be protected by a lock, in fact was damaged by it; but that lock preserved the male settlers’ sense of control, and especially the opposition between their own lawful possession and the “rapine-haunted Trace” (the Natchez Trace, an overland trade route along which possessions circulate freely, sometimes in the hands of bandits, far from settled homes and towns). It is this lock’s disappearance, moreover, that is recuperated with the propitiatory invention of the city itself as a “she,” Pettigrew’s symbolic virgin daughter: “Only her name’s Jefferson now. We cant ever forget that anymore now” (493). This dizzy conceptual wandering across boundaries and spaces, slits and knives, intactness and invasion, virginity and enjoyment, renders Derrida’s idea of “invagination” uncannily literal. His essay “The Law of Genre” pursues the thought that what marks a text as belonging to its genre is not precisely of that text, but is rather a turning of the text on itself, its examination of its own name. This fold of the narrative back on itself generates an enclosed space, an “invagination” wherein “it is . . . impossible to decide whether an event, account, account of event, or event of accounting took place”31—that is, a space where writing and eventuality become indistinguishable. Just so does this novel turn back on itself, examining the city’s name and naming process in order to reconsider the truth of Yoknapatawpha’s origins. And within these prose prologues, telling public events, the private trauma is enclosed, encapsulated. The sudden death of Temple’s nameless, six-month-old daughter occurs before the novel begins, and the execution of Nancy Mannigoe, a middle-aged, poor black woman, after its end. Thus, the dramatic sections are literally “without beginning or end, without content and without edge.”32 Nothing happens in them but the double trauma of those deaths, one bygone and the other not yet arrived. Then again, that same drama is nothing but the mark or boundary formed by those deaths, the fold they make within the larger, progressive story (the story of the prose prologues) of the City and the State. Faulkner’s gesture is not so much meta-literary as meta-national, a turn on the nation, and its implications are twofold. The prologues plunge

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forward with, as Warren described, an intense nostalgic pleasure, almost wholly liberated from questions of guilt and historical responsibility and instead free to simply be themselves, engaging, witty, intellectually dense, and often aesthetically gorgeous invented histories. But inside them, enclosed within their historical comedy, is a feminine space wholly occupied by the illegitimate violence of the father and haunted by the terror of origins as such. This buried, repressed trauma largely consists, moreover, of violence against white and black women, sometimes material, such as the abuse Temple and Nancy endured, and sometimes imagined, fetishized, or badly understood, as in later generations’ attachment to the idea that the city was named for Thomas Jefferson. Hence the novel’s two generic registers: a play, a disastrous story that potentially happens as a performance in the audience’s own time, is both enclosed within and the guarantor of the comic prose narrative of founding fathers and their designs.

Inside Out Though a classical structure—its two colonnades imported from Italy, its bricks baked of local mud (500), its Square central to and centering of the community for the century to come—soon replaces the lean-to as a house for legal documents, the Jail stands unchanging throughout the novel’s century. Even though one wall was dismantled early on by a gang of Trace bandits, whose jailbreak left it “resembling an outdoor stage setting” (484), its other three log walls nonetheless persisted, albeit eventually covered over by more modern construction and discernible only as an unaccountable thickness. Indeed, the Jail remains as a “stage setting” for Jefferson’s collective efforts to maintain its own legal boundaries both throughout the prologues’ century and throughout the immediate time of the drama. This drama takes place on that stage and no other: all the while, as readers learn about the State’s emergence, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the New South and the Depression; all the while, as Temple and Gavin argue and threaten and talk past one another, the black woman Nancy Mannigoe, convicted of smothering a white baby girl in her crib, waits in the Jail to die. Moreover, just as the Courthouse’s legal documents give way to stories, such as the tale of Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew, that undermine patriarchal authority as such, so too the Jail’s space of extreme confinement gives way to stories of unruly, unconfined women. For example, Nancy’s death sentence prompts this exchange between Temple and Gavin:

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temple . . . apparently I know something I haven’t told yet, or maybe you know something I haven’t told yet. What do you think you know? (quickly; he says nothing) All right. What do you know? stevens Nothing. I don’t want to know it. All I— temple Say that again. stevens Say what again? temple What is it you think you know? stevens Nothing. I— temple All right. Why do you think there is something I haven’t told yet? (526–27) These fragmentary, staccato sentences, threaded through with the doubly contradictory words “know” (aurally, also “no”) and “nothing” (“no-thing,” as well as “know-thing”), refer to something that these two middle-class white characters will not say (“ . . . apparently I know something. . . . I don’t want to know it”). In fact, what Gavin and Temple are talking about, without saying it, is Temple’s extramarital affair with a man connected to her Sanctuary past, a situation that destabilized the family to the point that Nancy claims she smothered the baby to recall Temple to her senses. Thus, their shared silence is also a shared responsibility, a share in the guilt for Nancy’s coming death and for the child’s past death. In other words, just as with the Wolf Man, what is horrible, what is understood retrospectively as a disaster, and what remains unsayable is a mother’s sexual encounter. But in radical distinction from the case study, which despite its violent register simply confirmed Oedipal normativity, the novel concerns itself with material acts of violence—the

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baby’s murder and Nancy’s execution—that seem to be senseless or gratuitous, but for which the two women, Nancy and Temple, nevertheless take responsibility. The novel thus forces a confrontation between two aspects of trauma, which Dominick LaCapra has distinguished as (1) structural trauma, which is “related to (even correlated with) transhistorical absence (absence of/at the origin), and appears in different ways in all societies and all lives,” and (2) historical trauma, which is “specific and not everyone is subject to it or entitled to the subject-position associated with it.”33 The Wolf Man’s trauma, the primal scene, is a structural trauma, a subjective and retrospective “loss” that nonetheless lends form to personality and direction to desire. The baby’s and Nancy’s deaths, on the other hand, are “historical” traumas, in the sense of being uniquely incomprehensible events, impossible to integrate with social or psychic order. LaCapra’s concern in drawing the distinction between structural and historical trauma is to preserve “victims, perpetrators and bystanders” of historical crimes as mutually exclusive categories, a consideration he deems crucial to “working through” the past.34 He imagines the latter as not only a psycho-therapeutic (in the original, Freudian sense of “working-through”), cultural, or literary process, but also “structural change in the polity, economy, and society”35—that is, as practical measures of testimony and reparation. Faulkner’s novel, submitted to La Capra’s schema, reveals several interesting features. Perhaps most obviously, Temple’s and Gavin’s fractured conversation about the recent death of the baby, and the coming execution of Nancy, would display structural trauma in this schema: they are talking around something that motivates all their speaking but itself refuses enunciation. Meanwhile, the century-long catalogue of violence, dispossession, and dehumanization that comprise Requiem’s chronicle of Yoknapatawpha (including what little we learn of Nancy Mannigoe’s life) represents historical traumas, occurring at specific times and places, to specific people. Yet at the same time, the prologues radically defer questions of structural change and of justice, even of the historical record as such. They suggest, in fact, that the political, economic, and social structure is founded on and maintained by a psychic and structural trauma—whether the Jail with its prisoners, the Courthouse with its documents, or Thomas Jefferson with his progeny-slaves—that underpins all wealth, ownership, and power in the city, and hence will not easily yield to demands for confrontations with injustice. The racial violence that made possible the United

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States’ settlement of Louisiana Purchase territory and the growth of the Cotton Kingdom cannot be readily addressed within a cultural and political structure not willing to admit serious critique of its Constitution or its Declaration of Independence. The idea of reparations of any kind for Indian removal, for enslavement, or for the long years of anti-black oppression and violence that followed Emancipation, has made hardly any headway in the American public sphere. Obama’s speech, for example, opens onto a deep chronology only to disavow historical analysis, asserting that “the answer to the slavery question lay embedded within our Constitution . . . a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.” Indeed, the novel suggests that La Capra’s schema, in which structural and historical traumas are sharply distinct, is incomplete or inappropriate as a heuristic for U.S. culture.

Religion and Trauma: Yes, Lord One of the ways that the novel contests the distinction between structural and historical trauma is by making historical trauma speak in the person of Nancy. As even contemporary reviewers noted, this is a problematic gesture: why should African American figures bear this burden for white authors and readers? Morrison would identify Nancy as an “American Africanism,” a cipher forced to bear the moral and psychic burdens cast aside by white characters. Fiedler might discern a certain lesbian eros in Temple’s visit to Nancy in prison, her desperate efforts to secure a Governor’s pardon for her, and her impassioned desire to share Nancy’s faith. Certainly, Temple’s fascination with Nancy, and with all the black prisoners in the jail, indulges her voyeuristic pleasure and reiterates a racist social order without even imagining the possibility of a non-racist alternative: temple The jail . . . in Jefferson, everything going to the graveyard passes the jail, or going anywhere else for that matter, passing right under the upstairs barred windows—the bullpen and the cells where the Negro prisoners—the crapshooters and whiskey-peddlers and vagrants and the murderers and murderesses too—can look down and enjoy it, enjoy the funerals too. Like this. Some white person you know is in jail or in a hospital, and right off you say, How ghastly: not at the shame or the pain, but the walls, the locks, and

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before you know it you have sent them books to read, cards, puzzles to play with. But not Negroes. You dont even think about the cards and puzzles and books. And so all of a sudden you find out with a kind of terror, that they have not only escaped having to read, they have escaped having to escape. So whenever you pass the jail, you can see them—no, not them, you dont see them at all, you just see the hands among the bars of the windows, not tapping or fidgeting or even holding, gripping the bars like white hands would be, but just lying there among the interstices, not just at rest, but even restful, already shaped and easy and unanguished to the handles of the plows and axes and hoes, and the mops and brooms and the rockers of white folks’ cradles, until even the steel bars fitted them too without alarm or anguish. (605) Importantly, though, Temple’s distinction is not simply between those who are poor and black and those who are neither. Rather, she locates the prisoners in relation to the presence or absence of traumatic symptoms, and in relation to writing. For the black prisoners, the jail is a place of “rest,” but for the whites, the locks and doors are “ghastly”; for the black prisoners, nothing is missing when they are closed up alone with themselves, but for the white prisoners, writing (books, magazines, puzzles, and cards) is missing. Thus, freedom and writing belong to those who are never at rest, while peace belongs to those who are not free and cannot read. Like a white prisoner or hospital patient, Temple frets and questions, explains and demands, describes and reconsiders futilely. Nancy, meanwhile, who is a black prisoner, simply waits. No writing, words, or reading will ever be enough for Temple, while Nancy apparently needs none. The drama, the novel’s internal pocket of delay and self-difference, thus both reiterates the failure of legitimacy revealed in the story of the city’s name, and opens the question—albeit in a racist mode—of Nancy’s relationship to such paternal names. Curiously, what Nancy says when she does speak is a total confirmation that sends all lack away: she endorses her own death. Her first words, responding to the judge’s sentence that “you be . . . hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy upon your soul,” are a “(quite loud in the silence, to no one, quite calm, not moving) Yes, Lord” (507). Nancy’s religious surrender is difficult to approach, difficult to disentangle from the ideology and the historical specifics of gendered racist oppression. She endorses a God who abases her, as the men in her

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life—abusers, pimps, johns, and employers like Temple’s husband Gowan, who calls her, quite gratuitously, a “nigger whore, drunkard, dopefiend” (518)—abase her: “I can get low for Jesus too. I can get low for Him too. . . . Jesus is a man too” (656). The white characters find this theology shocking—Temple cautions Nancy against blasphemy (656)—yet, in a genteel, sexually repressive mode, they also endorse it. When Gavin asks Nancy, close to the time of execution, about her religious beliefs, she confides her hope in heaven, stating simply, “I can work,” and he embroiders thereupon a vision of her soul in the great plantation in the sky: stevens The harp, the raiment, the singing, may not be for Nancy Mannigoe—not now. But there’s still the work to be done—the washing and sweeping, maybe even the children to be tended and fed and kept from hurt and harm and out from under the grown folks’ feet? (he pauses a moment. Nancy says nothing, immobile, looking at no one) Maybe even that baby? (659) Only Nancy’s silence in response distances the novel as a whole from this hyper-literalization of plantation-tradition celebrations of faithful slaves. The more literary Gavin’s response to Nancy’s spiritual testimony becomes, the less he has to hear; the more he can condescend to her and link her with known clichés, the less he need worry about her actual life or her coming death. Indeed, as Kelly Lynch Reames has argued, in this novel “reading” is a patriarchal practice.36 Just as the legal documents filed at the Courthouse, and the maps Faulkner drew of his imaginary county, occult the facts of dispossession, enslavement, ecological disaster, and the abuse of women, so too Gavin’s literary effort to read Nancy into a plantation novel renders the traumatic—the deaths of the baby and of Nancy, and the violence, insults, and sexual assaults undergone by Nancy and Temple—illegible. It tells a story about white male mastery in the place, on the site, of those unnameable traumas.

Change the Joke Thus is Nancy read. What can Nancy write? What can Nancy make for others to read? Temple assumes that Nancy is illiterate and we have no

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evidence otherwise. Confined to her cell and to the American Africanist task of binding and neutralizing white anxieties, she brings almost no force to bear on the development of the plot. However, on one occasion Nancy does speak, in a way that confronts the literary with a violence it cannot document, cannot render legal, cannot file or locate on a map. Though Nancy recounts it only briefly, and with prompting, the story of how she was once beaten into a miscarriage by a white man (an episode borrowed from Faulkner’s Compson family story, “That Evening Sun”) suggests her rejection of patriarchal and white systems of intelligibility. Gavin asks whether her attacker was the father of the fetus. But Nancy, who provoked the beating by demanding publicly that the man pay her for past sexual encounters, replies with some annoyance: “Any of them might have been. . . . If you backed your behind into a buzz-saw, could you tell which tooth hit you first?” (661). This elicits no response but silence, and pointedly ignoring Gavin, Nancy then resumes her religious dialogue with Temple (about meeting one’s dead child in Heaven). It seems likewise to have elicited no comment from academic readers and reviewers to date. Yet Gavin, and any reader, ought to have been able to hear and respond to Nancy’s story, since it is essentially the same story as that of Pettigrew—a bastard joke revealing the constructed nature of all patriarchal origins—despite being much more sexually frank and much more willing to name the human costs of white male dominion. In Shoshana Felman’s terminology, we might say that Nancy speaks “beyond [the novel’s] means” in this joke, beyond what its writer, reviewers, or readers anticipate.37 In Ralph Ellison’s U.S.-specific and African American terminology, however, we would say that Nancy has “changed the joke”—she has taken control of the situation, both refusing to play a subordinate role and suggesting that the white man’s moral purity is itself a pose or falsehood.38 Like Temple, who has the measure of “philosophers and other gynecologists,” Nancy neatly inverts the classic, gynophobic figure of a toothed vagina, thus revealing Wolfman-type fears (of the origin and of the mother’s sexuality) as one more ruse of patriarchal mastery. Further, in linking the personal, racist, and misogynist violence of her own experience with the saws that cut the Mississippi forests and built plantation houses, government buildings, and the log-walled Jail in which she waits to die, Nancy confirms and endorses the novel’s reading of the past century as systematic, unending, human and ecological exploitation, over and against the comic and nostalgic impulses present in the prologues.

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Nancy’s joke does not merely challenge the conventions of the Faulknerian text (though one is hard-pressed to think of any other woman character, of any race, who makes a joke in his work). It also undermines the purpose of dirty jokes generally. As Freud explains, these are generally told by one man to another, about a woman, and they reproduce, in verbal form, the social exchange and control of the female body among men: When the first person finds his libidinal impulse limited by the woman, he develops a hostile trend against that second person and calls on . . . the third person as his ally. Through the first person’s smutty speech the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido. And here at last we can understand what it is that jokes achieve in the service of their purpose. They make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way.39 In this classic form, then, dirty jokes not only fully support patriarchal systems of legitimacy, law, and exchange, but they also provide compensation for those men (the great majority) who do not fully realize the system’s promise. A dirty joke pays back tellers and hearers for the losses of repression in the form of enjoyment. Such jokes can render women sexually accessible to men even when physical access is not socially permissible. They make vaginal spaces out of words. Nancy’s joke, though, explodes this conservative, patriarchal premise. Her joke confirms nothing, pays nothing, and its address is radically uncertain. At first it seems similar to the jokes Freud describes; when she asks Gavin, “If you backed your behind into a buzz-saw, could you tell which tooth hit you first?” (661), she does not expect an answer from Gavin, but rather expects someone else to hear her question and be amused. Nancy also figures Gavin as a woman in her joke, or perhaps as a feminized, degraded man, inviting him to imagine his “behind” invaded by many, many men. However, Nancy’s joke also opens up the very idea of sexual scarcity to ridicule. Nancy herself, a poor black woman, was not inaccessible to white men, but rather fully accessible—a prostitute whom, as the story “That Evening Sun” details, they could even avoid paying. Who are the listeners for Nancy’s joke? Who will enjoy her display of aggression against Gavin Stevens, this limited man who clings to notions

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of historical responsibility and a “past . . . not even past,” often taken as a stand-in for Faulkner himself? Who will laugh at Nancy’s attack on him and his authority? Who will be Nancy’s ally? She might be making this joke for Temple, who is also in the cell, but Temple registers no response. Readers, reviewers, critics, might also be the audience for her joke, but given the violent crudity of her metaphor, and the traumatic character of the experiences (including racialized poverty, prostitution, misogynist physical abuse, late-term miscarriage) that it glosses, the very idea that “If you backed your behind into a buzz-saw . . . ” is a joke is one many readers would reject. These things aren’t supposed to be funny. Yet when Nancy’s joke transfers that enclosure, that “invagination,” that internal space of pain and negation, onto Gavin, it is the only escape from a static logic of sexual and racial identification, inevitably also a logic of sexual and racial stratification, that the novel allows. The novel chokes off its own possibilities in Nancy’s death by hanging—a sardonically conservative, anticipatory refusal of Ellison’s idea that changing the joke could help black culture “slip the yoke” of minoritization. But if you can learn to laugh with Nancy, you will have done something different than reiterate her pain, abjection, and hopelessness again. You will have moved beyond an unchanging, traumatic mode of writing in which the “past . . . [is] not even past.” You will have stepped beyond the text’s means, beyond its intentions, beyond its self.

3  /

“Anyone with Half an Eye”: Blackness and the Disaster of Narcissism in Quicksand

Prologue: On Critical Failure and the Harlem Renaissance Can there be a reading of literature that calls into question our ability to read literature? Are there texts that do not reflect back to us an image of our own mastery? Such uncomfortable questions are, perhaps, behind the elaborate salving of doubts about historical, artistic, and moral values by both defenders and detractors of national-literary “canons.” We have an uneasy, sub-articulate suspicion that there is not, in fact, any necessary relationship between what we read and why we read it. We suspect, in ourselves, a certain narcissism, and we fear it; in particular, we fear that the relationship of academic literary study to the defense of culture and the search for social justice will be deferred or imperiled. These halfknown thoughts often prompt, in turn, zealous efforts to legislate our relationship to literature through curricular and polemic means. Seriously to address the possibility of a narcissistic limit to literary criticism, though, means more than just the production of bureaucracy and cynicism within the humanistic project. For, as Charles Shepherdson writes: Is not the entire apparatus of doubt and belief, documentary evidence and theoretical vigilance, already part of the narcissistic story, in which recognition and misrecognition, seeing and believing, play their deadly game, mixing the imaginary and the real at the heart of the constitution of the subject?1

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In other words, all criticism is speculative, both an open-ended inquiry and, as etymology indicates, a reckoning with and through the “seeing” that structures our thinking so fundamentally. Criticism therefore risks not only incomprehension or illusion, but also the perfect coincidence of the two—Narcissus’s double mistake, the discovery, in the sight of his own reflected face, of both everything he has ever wanted and all that he can never know. Shepherdson describes narcissism, critical and otherwise, as “deadly,” “disaster,” “catastrophe,” and above all, “trauma.” Such language, which makes complex metaphoric appeals to death, fate, and physical injury in order to describe a psychic and literary event, perhaps carries the fear of narcissism with it, but it also gives theoretical elaboration to the critical extreme that narcissism represents. Both psychoanalysis and the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies define “trauma” as an event whose violent singularity overwhelms the psyche’s capacity to assimilate or represent it. Trauma may, on the one hand, accompany normality and serve as a structuring principle for the psyche, as in the traumas of Oedipality; on the other, it may arise from the physical and psychic violence of assault, war, genocide, racism, and in its extremity challenge the very survival of the psyche. But the question trauma poses to both the one traumatized and to any witnesses is never simply one of rational, reparative response to a violent world. Rather, figures of the unknowable traumatic, from diverse sources, repetitively intrude into the midst our knowing, making demands on our thought that can neither be denied nor readily satisfied. Freud’s examples of such compulsive repetitions, in 1920’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, included children’s games of loss and absence, played over and over, neurotic patients’ repetitive acting-out, veterans’ recurrent, troubling dreams, and, most importantly for our present concerns, poetry, in a discussion of Tasso that identifies the “moving” quality of his epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata with its figure of a magically repeated wound.2 Acknowledging “trauma” as the common term of such diverse attempts at representation—as contemporary trauma studies does, in an ever-expanding critical literature—thus means examining the critical impulse itself. What happens to criticism when we move with such radical freedom among psychic structures, historical events, and literary representations? What do we gain? And, conversely, what incompletion or illusion do we risk? Narcissism gives an answer (not the answer) to these questions, by

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organizing critical effort, understood as ongoing and repetitious, around an absolute failure to know. One begins any critical work knowing that it has already failed, that all one’s thought has failed to adequately articulate “documentary evidence and theoretical vigilance,” that oneself and/or others will endlessly begin it again—and yet one cannot, all the same, truly have this knowledge, for it is unbearable. Ovid’s Narcissus died amid the realization that his beloved was himself, wishing pitifully for his illusion of a separate lover, beneath the water and waiting to be wooed, to return.3 The possibility of critical narcissism carries the traumatic thought—traumatic for the thinker but also itself revelatory of a traumatic repetition—that a working-through will never arrive, that our private speculations will never enter history, that we will never truly love literature, but only illusory selves. In other words, the thought of narcissism, though it can defer and mystify the connections among psychic, historical, and literary traumas, can also open serious inquiry into their mutual articulations. In what follows, I examine Nella Larsen’s quasi-autobiographical Quicksand, a 1928 novel of the Harlem Renaissance, or “New Negro,” era. Though the term “New Negro” predated his belletristic definition, Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology The New Negro made visible a movement of mostly middle-class, Harlem-based intellectuals, writers, and artists during the 1920s and1930s. Larsen was one of many who imagined that culture, and specifically literature, could be at once a political tool for legal and material betterment and an expression of an already-available psychic freedom, or in the white academic Carl Van Doren’s blithe prescription, “a happy balance between rage and complacency.”4 Though Larsen’s idiosyncratic, intensely ironic style, subversive of bildungsroman optimism and full of traps laid for critical sympathy, renders this novel particularly suited to an inquiry into critical narcissism, Larsen’s reputation in the contemporary academy also prompts my reflections. The renascence of Larsen’s two short novels, Quicksand and Passing (1929)—all but unknown until the 1986 Rutgers one-volume reissue edited by Deborah McDowell, thence ascending rapidly to such dizzying heights of canonicity as multiple articles in American Literature and PMLA, paperbacks offered to the higher-education market through some half-dozen publishers, and Quicksand’s inclusion, unabridged, in both the Norton Anthology of American Literature and the same publisher’s Anthology of African American Literature—has few contemporary parallels. These are novels that, for many scholars and students of women’s and African American literature, unite the lapidary detail

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and metropolitan complexity of high modernism with unambiguously feminist and anti-racist politics. Conversely, for readers lacking such commitments, they offer an unambiguously African American fictional universe that nonetheless avoids both direct racial violence and the technical and intellectual demands of an often unfamiliar African American vernacular. Certainly W. E. B. Du Bois’s caution that “White folk will not like this book [Quicksand]” has been amply disproven; the majoritywhite American academy has fallen in love with both novels.5 Yet a curious sense of incompletion characterizes the critical corpus. Certainly the two novels’ ends, both in the literal sense of plot and in the sense of an aesthetic, intellectual, or political goal, dissatisfy. These fictions both detail women’s lives that escape from conventional categories of race, culture, gender, sexuality, or class, and intimate that such lives, often unrecognizable and unthinkable, are likewise unlivable. Perhaps for this reason, the most durable moves in Larsen criticism are declarations that her works are: (a) determined by the nineteenth-century “tragic mulatta” stereotype (as in most critical mentions prior to 1986, and Sherrard-Johnson’s 2004 article6); (b) torn between immoral desire and moral domesticity (“The novel, like its protagonist, would seem to want two lives . . . : as female sexual confession and novel of racial uplift”7); (c) incapable of speaking directly (“Larsen masked her most subversive concerns. . . . only after half a century are readers beginning to explore the tentative answers her novels insinuate”8); (d) marked by psychological pathology (“[Quicksand’s] enactment of the protagonist’s virtual suicide . . . [is] seemingly invested with sadomasochistic pleasure for Larsen”9); and/or (e) intellectual and political failures (“[Larsen] seems close to reifying the exotic, ambiguously raced heroine as the black feminine ideal”10). Attentive scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American and U.S. literatures will note that (b) through (e) are not different from, but only aspects, of (a), the “tragic mulatta” stereotype, making for a curiously circular and repetitive critical literature. Meanwhile, three recent biographies speak of Larsen’s “invisible” or “veiled” quality, or imply that the subject escapes the biographer.11 Some very recent articles designate an unthought, unspoken, incomplete, or impossible aspect of her works,12 in various attempts to appropriate the newly-canonized novels to high-theoretical projects. Thus, the academy finds only doubts and deferrals in Larsen’s work, even as her astonishing institutional success is further consolidated. My reading of Quicksand’s central scene—the painting of Helga

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Crane’s portrait amid complex articulations of the white, European artist’s perspective with that of the biracial American model—will demonstrate Larsen’s identification of critical reading with narcissistic trauma. This is a novel whose readers must fail to read it, must find only their own reflections on its surface. Further, I will demonstrate the particular salience of Larsen’s novelistic interest in the entrapping play of critical eyes—watching, being seen, watching oneself being seen, seeing oneself see—for the politico-cultural project of the Harlem Renaissance, its effort to find “a happy balance between rage and complacency,” a way for African-American artists to work beyond, and yet remain ethically responsible to, the oppressions of earlier generations—slavery and the political disappointments and racial violence of the post-Emancipation era. Quicksand anticipates a reader aching for identification, correspondence, completion, the lovely stranger in the reflection—and it deliberately sets her up for heartbreak. Meanwhile, Helga’s parallel search for somewhere to call home and something to love leads, like that of the original Narcissus, to spiritual annihilation and death.

Self and Image In the exact middle of Quicksand, Helga Crane, an educated and beautiful, but impecunious, biracial American woman, is visiting rich Danish relatives and posing for her portrait with dashing avant-gardiste Axel Olsen. A moment of social flux and artistic effervescence, appearing in a novel of manners written to high aesthetic standards, the scene reads initially as a conventional instance of modernist self-reference— the novel looking at itself. Both Narcissus and the modern novel believe that the most beautiful can find desire’s end only in self; indeed, the only difference is that a novel must doubt or fail of its own perfection. Larsen is well aware of this tradition; Sherrard-Johnson notes briefly, and Keyser explores in detail, Quicksand’s debts to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).13 Helga Crane, crossed and re-crossed by racial, gender, and class conflicts, aspires to, but never achieves, the wealthy aesthete Dorian’s exquisite decadence, and indeed she may represent Larsen’s pointed political critique of the decadent ideal. However, the kernel idea, of material prosperity, intelligence, and unfocused desire as forming together an entrapping mirror image, is highly pertinent to our concerns. Certainly, Wilde’s double description, of a developing critical understanding and a concomitant, peculiar psychic failure in the beautiful model Dorian, is reinscribed in Larsen’s novel. But Quicksand’s ironic

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anti-theatricality refuses to stage this recognition in the portrait-sitting scene, and the “change from ignorance to knowledge, bringing the characters into either a close bond, or enmity, with one another, and concerning matters which bear on their prosperity or affliction,”14 that has such gothic significance in Wilde is thwarted. As a model, Helga, unlike Dorian, is silent and obedient, expressing no opinion of the artwork and initiating no conversation with the artist. Indeed, our attention is pointedly drawn to the contrast between her carefully maintained, utterly static self-possession, and the sloppy, excessive, questionable speech of the artist: True, he [Olsen] had made, one morning, while holding his brush poised for a last, a very last stroke on the portrait, one admirably draped suggestion, speaking seemingly to the pictured face. Had he insinuated marriage, or something less—and easier? Or had he paid her only a rather florid compliment, in somewhat dubious taste? Helga, who had not at the time been quite sure, had remained silent, striving to appear unhearing.15 He gets no response; she seems not to have been moved or altered, as Dorian was, by the finished portrait. In her silence, her deliberate “striving to appear unhearing,” Helga seems no more animate or changeable than the painting itself. Meanwhile, the artistic process itself is described as no Wildean meditation on beauty, desire, and death, but as merely the context for a proposition. Yet something has happened; Helga has recognized something, changed “from ignorance to knowledge,” though this fact may evade the reader at first. The above passage is a particularly good instance of Larsen’s slippery style, and especially of the complex traps she lays for her readers. For example, “one admirably draped suggestion” arrives as if a detached, omniscient narrator were driven to a sardonic amusement by the perfect compositional agreement of pretension and prurience in Olsen—an amusement not unlike that of the critical reader, and one of which Helga, with her dithering “Had he [meant one thing?] . . . Or had he [meant another]?” might seem to remain naïve. But at the same time, the sentence in which it appears is also Helga’s thought: “True, he had made, one morning, one admirably draped suggestion” dramatizes her directionless musings as she sits posing for him over days that all seem alike. The turn of phrase also evokes the nude model’s drape, and with it a historical analysis of Western art, in which the college teacher Helga presumably shares, that recognizes the conventional scene of painting

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from life: a male artistic genius giving meaning to inert female bodies. Though it is never explained how much clothing Helga wears in the sittings (or indeed how, and how much of, her body is depicted), it is clear that Olsen is such an artist, and that Helga is, in her body’s availability to a specifically sexual inscription, just such a nude. In this offhand display of wit, “one admirably draped suggestion,” she collapses her own thoughts into the artwork, and both into an ongoing history of art, offhandedly articulating the psychic, the representational, and the historical. Helga does not need to recognize her portrait; she already sees it for what it is. This irony of recognition in Quicksand—Helga’s apparent misrecognition, and the reader’s superior understanding, itself undercut by Helga’s sly critical intelligence—is repeated in and through Larsen’s description of events. No reversal, no dramatic “complete swing in the development of the action” takes place,16 and commentators often note the directionlessness of Helga’s story. Instead, the same thing happens over and over, and is forced upon Helga’s recognition again and again, without change or development—a crude sexual proposition that must be refused, the antithesis of the complex process of schooling desire that Wilde depicts in Dorian Gray. Olsen, understanding Helga’s silence in the face of his proposition as a nineteenth-century gambit for respectability, finally makes a formal proposal of legal marriage, in a further attempt to possess and control her body—first on the canvas, then through an illicit sexual relationship, and finally through legal and socially acceptable means. He even explains to the biracial Helga that, because of her dual biological heritage, comprising the “ ‘warm impulsive nature of the women of Africa’ ” and the “ ‘soul of a [European] prostitute’ ” (87), this relationship of control and possession is natural and inevitable. Helga not only refuses him, but introduces a new idea, announcing the racial solidarity that she had previously downplayed. “But you see, Herr Olsen, I’m not for sale. Not to you. Not to any white man. I don’t at all care to be owned. Even by you” (87, emphasis added). Here, indeed, is a “reversal”—not in narrated events, but in critical understanding, as a historical analysis of race overtakes a naturalized sexism. Helga’s answer forces the reader to recognize the ongoing, apparently endless repetitions of a New World racism inextricably tied to the legacy of slavery (she emphasizes: “I’m not for sale. . . . I don’t at all care to be owned”) as the truth of a novel that had seemed, momentarily, to resolve itself around a conventional, optimistic, European marriage–plot of social advancement. The novel reveals, in other words, the specific history of

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African American women’s sexual trauma as both continuous with, and an interruption of, the general, structural imperative—get married— that both the bourgeois novel and the Oedipus complex share. There is, for Helga, no distinction to be made between getting married and being purchased; in her experience, the “traffic in women”17 that organizes society is neither a structuralist fiction, nor a historical contingency, but the paradoxical coincidence of the two. To marry Olsen, or “any white man,” would be at once to escape the violent historical legacy of race in North America and to embrace it; there is no division between mind and plot, thought and violence, psychic trauma and historical trauma, in the novel. Larsen thus requires that we understand critical insight itself, and perhaps particularly the minute and searching concern with artistic and cultural images of African Americans that characterized the Harlem Renaissance, as the repetitive, immobilizing arrival of something that is never quite adequately anticipated, never quite fully resolved (“Helga . . . had not at the time been quite sure, had remained silent, striving to appear unhearing . . . ” [84]). We must understand criticism as, in other words, traumatic. Therefore, we must also participate in the hero(ine)’s plight in some way other than the cathartic “pity and fear” that greets the king’s self-inflicted wound in Oedipus Tyrannus, the tragedy at the heart of both Aristotle’s Poetics and psychoanalysis.18 Reading Larsen’s novel entails enduring the thought that katharsis, and its ordered reconciliation of the law with human limitations, will never come. In the portraitpainting scene, Larsen seems to imply, in fact, that racial identity—being an African American—consists precisely in that experience of endless repetition. Apropos of such forebodings, and of tragedy, Olsen states: “I don’t entirely understand you, yet in a way I do too. And—[ . . . ] I think that my picture of you is, after all, the true Helga Crane. Therefore—a tragedy. For someone. For me? Perhaps” (88). Though Olsen seems, again, merely ridiculous here, pulling together his dignity as best he can, we may also detect a hint of Wilde’s Picture, and its warnings against vanity, in Olsen’s characterization of the painting as “the true Helga Crane” and the scene of its creation as “a tragedy. For someone.” He also tells, as we know from the arc of Helga’s life in the completed reading of the novel, the simple truth: it ends horribly, it may well be a tragedy, for someone— for Helga, or possibly for ourselves as readers. Even Helga herself can sense disaster: on refusing Olsen, she was “aware that in the end, in some way, she would pay for this hour. A quick brief fear ran through her,

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leaving in its wake a sense of impending calamity. She wondered if for this she would pay all that she’d had” (87).

Narcissism’s Moment This sense of doom is all the more important because Olsen’s proposal is itself only a repetition of what has happened elsewhere in the novel, its own, textual “perpetual recurrence of the same thing”19: Helga’s rejection of possible lovers. Prior to traveling to Denmark, she has abandoned two African American men, a “nice” fiancé, her fellow teacher James Vayle, and an intense older man, Dr. Anderson, a college administrator; she of course refuses both to be the mistress and to be the wife of Olsen, and after her return to Harlem she will reject Vayle and Anderson each once more. Though this relentlessly symmetrical patterning of encounters and re-encounters among a small group of characters serves Larsen’s formal arrangement, it was also a social truth in an era when professional African Americans numbered, nationwide, only in the thousands. David Levering Lewis cites the contemporary historian and sociologist Carter Woodson: “[In 1934] he placed the number of Afro-Americans in the professions at 135,694. But the cream of the professions—dentistry, medicine, law, college teaching and administration, banking and commerce—populated the head of a pin with statistically invisible architecture, engineering, and science. There were 1,748 Afro-American doctors, 1,230 lawyers and 2,131 academics and administrators.”20 Larsen’s characters Helga, Anderson, and James Vayle are all college teachers and administrators, while Larsen herself was married for fourteen years to the “statistically invisible” Elmer Imes, a physicist who worked on quantum theory.21 This small and self-enclosed world, Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth,” despite its limitations, assumed total responsibility for the cultural and legal defense, education, and financial betterment of “the race,” all African Americans everywhere, and at times for all nonwhite persons worldwide; “race men” (and women) considered themselves custodians of history in the widest possible sense (“ ‘Uplift,’ sniffed Helga contemptuously, and fled before the onslaught of Anne’s harangue on the needs and the ills of the race” [52]). From her community’s elite, Olympian perspective, Helga’s restlessness recalls that of Ovid’s original Narcissus, son of a nymph, a minor deity whose “pride so cold” could not find a worthy lover among all the youths and maidens of Boeotia.22 Her repeated refusals of marriage

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are understood as not black feminist analyses of power, but simple arrogance, a refusal to acknowledge her fate that brings on the wrath of the gods. James Vayle upbraids her in these terms in the course of his second marriage proposal: “ ‘But Helga! Good heavens! Don’t you see that if we—I mean people like us—don’t have children, the others will still have. That’s one of the things that’s the matter with us. The race is sterile at the top. Few, very few Negroes of the better class have children’ ” (103). His position, like Olsen’s, is silly and self-serving, for just as the European artist masks cultural imperialism with a faux-worldly equation between prostitution and marriage, so the conscientious young race man masks sexual desire, “his mute helplessness against that ancient appeal by which she held him” (8), with Helga’s eugenic racial duty to bear children. Indeed, there is little difference between them: while the effort to control Helga’s body may echo the history of racialized enslavement in the Western Hemisphere, it arises equally from black and white men. Yet Vayle too voices a perverse prophecy. Childbearing, and her inextricable involvement with the “others,” the African American poor, will be the source of Helga’s final catastrophe. But when, exactly, did Helga tempt fate? When did she look into the pool and lose her ability to relate to anyone but herself? As with the evidence of her intelligence, the reader may easily pass over the moment, which Larsen does not stage as an event, but rather encodes as an ironic mode of seeing. Just as Dorian Gray once, “in boyish mockery of Narcissus . . . had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him,”23 so too Helga Crane went to view her portrait after it was finished: The picture—she had never quite, in spite of her deep interest in him, and her desire for his admiration and approval, forgiven Olsen for that portrait. It wasn’t, she contended, herself at all, but some disgusting sensual creature with her features. Herr and Fru Dahl had not exactly liked it either, although collectors, artists and critics had been unanimous in their praise and it had been hung on the line at an annual exhibition, where it had attracted much flattering attention and many tempting offers. Now Helga went and stood for a long time before it, with its creator’s parting words in mind: “ . . . a tragedy . . . my picture is, after all, the true Helga Crane.” Vehemently she shook her head. “It isn’t, it isn’t at all,” she said aloud. Bosh! Pure artistic bosh and conceit. Anyone with half an eye could see that it wasn’t, at all, like her. (89)

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True, her relationship to the painting does not take the simple form of loving the image; but it does construct an autoerotic fantasy of self-plenitude in its very condemnation of Olsen’s sexy painting. Her evaluation, for example, replicates the terms of the narcissistic scene: Helga describes the resemblance, not in terms of greater or lesser artistic skill, or a more or less realistic style of painting, but of self and other, or rather, self and the disavowal of any other. It was not, she says, “herself ”; she is disappointed and contemptuous because the painting is not “herself.” This formulation both gives the painting a life of its own and reveals that Helga’s only desire (which is, properly speaking, not desire at all) is for “herself.” She attributes an active sexuality to the painting, calling it a “sensual creature,” autonomous and capable of taking the same pleasure in the material world as she does herself, and she gives it much the same place in the social world as that she occupies: somewhat at odds with her wealthy aunt and uncle, and the recipient of “much flattering attention and many generous offers” from the rest of Copenhagen. Indeed, the critical evaluation itself becomes, as Shepherdson would have it, “part of the narcissistic story.” Faced with this dissatisfying image, Helga neither generates some alternative inner picture of what “herself” really looks like, nor fantasizes the usurpation of creative power, nor questions the ideal of a self-present art object. Rather, she denies, fastidiously, all of these, designating “herself” only as doubly negated, both absent and invisible: “Anyone with half an eye [any blind person] could see that it wasn’t, at all, like her.” Having denied her image to all others, Helga becomes fully available only to Helga herself, in a far more perfect “narcissism” than that of the conventionally feminine life marriage would offer. She isn’t there; you can’t see her. She is the only one to see herself, and the trauma of this narcissism, its repetitive enactment of violence to the very possibility of meaning and representation, extends both outward, to the reader, and inward, to Helga herself. In the Ovidian scene, Narcissus not only turns to his own image, but turns away from the nymph Echo, who desires him but cannot give him any but his own words back.24 Helga’s rejection of Olsen’s portrait follows the same logic as the youth’s rejection of the nymph: she does not want the sign of love to come from elsewhere, and particularly not from someone who parrots what they do not understand and meddles in what does not belong to them. She wants it to come only from herself. When Olsen described her skin as “yellow,” for example, amidst rapid, effusive, near-nonsensical Danish praises of her beauty (“ ‘[s]uperb

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eyes . . . color . . . neck column . . . yellow . . . hair . . . alive . . . wonderful’ ” [71, ellipses Larsen’s]), he was probably unaware of the racist sexual meanings attached to the term,25 and indeed the narrator also prefers an aesthetic, deracinated “yellow” to describe Helga’s physical attributes and to intimate something rich and strange about her, for instance, stating that Helga has “skin like yellow satin” (2). But Helga does not critique or rebut the callousness Olsen shows toward her racial identity or the tired stereotypes he mindlessly reproduces, though she is more than capable of both of these. She does not show a reasoned response to an/other’s limitations, which would likewise hold out the possibility of improved communication in the future. Rather, in a more radical refusal even to speak, respond, see, recognize, Helga before the painting insists on “herself,” in a perfection of narcissism that neither Dorian, with his guilt, nor even Ovid’s Narcissus, with his belated, tragic realization, can rival, resisting the Other as such.

Self-Reflection and Critical Practice An analysis like the present always runs the risk of appealing to popular and received, rather than rigorous and speculative, theories of psychic life. To describe a single, self-possessed, black woman character as “narcissistic” within academic discourses that remain overwhelmingly white, male, heterosexual and upper-class, is always to court misogyny, racism, and a quietist economic and social politics. When that character is also highly educated, highly mobile, representative of bourgeois and liberal values, and present in a historical moment when to be all these things at once was rare and precarious, the risk is the more intense, and to fail is to fail ethically as well as intellectually. Simply to open this novel to speculation is not enough, is indeed already to honor misreading in the breach; and indeed, to study Larsen professionally has meant, ever since her reappearance in the canon, to constantly shore up one’s own readings against willful nonsense. For example, my own consuming interest in Larsen was born the day a scholar whom I knew to be disciplined, creative, intellectually assured, read Quicksand in one of my first graduate seminars as the straightforward demonstration of a very crude popular Freudianism. Helga Crane would not, so the reading went, have wandered so widely, attracting so much attention with her strange clothes and stranger efforts at intimacy, had she not been sexually frustrated. No other motivation for her actions was addressed, nor were sexualized racial stereotypes mentioned.

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At first, I thought that the trauma structuring that class was simply the infra-Althusserian call to intellectual hypocrisy that such absurdly retrograde notions directed to the members of the seminar. But as the incident replayed itself in my mind over and over, and without setting that necessary critique aside, I gradually began to suspect that the troubling thing returning to me was also a structural aspect of criticism itself. Silent, striving to appear unhearing, I could not reconcile my own interest in Helga with my professor’s, nor could I disentangle our perspectives, and I was forced to acknowledge that my own critical procedures were not less fantastic than those I abhorred. I had an enthusiastic crush on Helga, with her silk dresses and her skin “like yellow satin,” her anxiety and perverse sang-froid, her headlong commitment to the aesthetic (at one point, she goes without food in order to buy “a book and a tapestry purse” [32]). I loved Larsen, the vanished author of exquisite sentences. But, really: was my reading at all different from that other anxious, violent effort to wrest the secrets of Helga’s sex from her? I had felt caught out, exposed in my own excessive attachment to the novelist and her character by the seminar leader’s reading; questioning another’s need to master the text inevitably meant questioning my own. In my dawning realization of “the narcissistic story, in which recognition and misrecognition, seeing and believing, play their deadly game, mixing the imaginary and the real at the heart of the constitution of the subject,”26 I began to speculate that I could not escape my self in criticism, that indeed, I probably sought it there. We may in any case set the autobiographical plaint aside and still acknowledge women’s desire and its relationship to artistic representation as questions evoked within psychoanalytic theory by Helga’s narcissism. Moreover, her figure also insists on the salience of racial difference for such an examination, and hence has the potential to substantially refine critical practice. Indeed, these same elements are already articulated through race in a classic psychoanalytic text, one uncannily close in publication date to Quicksand. In several key respects, Larsen’s fictional scenario of desire and visibility, race and critical power, recalls that confronting the painter Ruth Kjär, described in Melanie Klein’s 1929 casestudy, “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art.” Klein’s case-study was of major importance, both for the development of her own theories and for the widespread, wide-ranging, theoretical contestation over women’s desire that reverberated through the psychoanalytic establishment in the late 1920s. Klein’s patient, a white European woman, melancholic, feeling herself empty, filled in a blank space on her wall

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with her first painting, “the lifesize figure of a naked negress [sic].”27 The picture not only gave Kjär a new sense of purpose, but also brought her the awed respect of men family members, who pronounced it advanced work. Her identity as an artist dated from that moment. Helga, on the other hand, confronted with the life-size picture of herself as a (metaphorically or literally) “naked negress,” inserts both blindness and a blank space, denying the picture visibility as well as denying herself the ability to see or create. Helga also meets with pity and disapproval from men such as James Vayle and Axel Olsen. Here, in crossing from Klein to Larsen, from psychoanalysis to literature, is narcissism visible as literally a “reflection,” not only in the sense, familiar to us now through Lacan’s account of the Mirror Stage, of “an illusion,” but also in the more basic sense of “mirror image,” an uncanny reversal. The fiction does not only contradict the feminist optimism of the clinical text, but also follows, and reverses, its every theoretical point by making literal the racialist metaphorics of “blackness.” Kjär liked to look into the “black” depths of self, and derived from the experience the license to make representations; but Helga, presented with such a “black” reflection from elsewhere, refuses representation itself. Kjär’s story, incorporated into psychoanalytic discourse, serves to expand theory, but Helga’s story devolves, in the second half of the novel, into an apparent, and apparently meaningless, ignominious death. Kjär is cured; Helga is sick unto death. A little narcissism, filtered and estranged through a racialist erotics, is a tonic for a white woman; but give the same to a black woman and the catastrophe of narcissism seems actually to come to pass: Helga sees herself in Olsen’s portrait, and she dies.

(M)others I have examined, in turn, Helga’s marriage proposal, her critique of Olsen’s portrait, and her relationship to the psychoanalytic feminism of her era, and in every case, the unfolding of events and ideas has frozen into an endlessly repetitious figure of psychic and material lack. But while this novel is traumatic, it is not totalizing. There are glimpses of other vistas, hints at other stories that could have been told, and suggestions that trauma is neither inevitable nor unbearable. In particular, there is one other with whom Helga speaks about herself and her portrait, one very marginal, minor Other/other. Helga asks her aunt’s maid, a minimally defined character, what she thinks of the painting, that deadly, addictive concoction of “the imaginary and the real.” Marie’s reply is “Of

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course, Frøkken, I know Herr Olsen is a great artist, but no, I don’t like that picture. It looks bad, wicked. Begging your pardon, Frøkken” (89).28 These are the only words Marie ever speaks in the novel. This strange little tableau, the deferential, shadowy, working-class Danish woman in conversation with the defiant, glamorous, African American woman privileged by the painter’s gaze, calls to mind Manet’s “Olympia” (as Sherrard-Johnson notes), in which a nude white prostitute, confronting the artistic gaze that would make her a goddess of/in irony, is attended by a shadowy, fully clothed black woman servant carrying an expensive bouquet. In each case, the nude’s power to defy or deform artistic and cultural convention is consolidated by her displayed financial power to employ a maid, and her sexual transgression—Olympia’s scandalous direct gaze, signaling availability; Helga’s scandalous averted eyes, signaling refusal; both equally challenges to patriarchal efforts to take women’s bodies as property—is doubled as the displayed racial difference between mistress and maid, especially the way the maid looks shamelessly toward the mistress’s naked, reclining body. (In one of Marie’s earlier appearances, opening the curtains as Helga awakes on her first morning in Copenhagen, she stole covert glances at an indulgent Helga, never having seen a dark-skinned person before [67–68]). Both the Manet painting and the novel indicate a larger social confusion through the microcosm of these two women’s confusingly commercial and confusingly racial bodies. Marie also “cuts down” Helga’s evening gown, at her aunt Fru Dahl’s request, “until, as Helga put it, it was ‘practically nothing but a skirt’ ” (70), assisting silently at the creation of the exotic Helga that entices Olsen, yet never intruding herself significantly on Helga’s desires except as a proxy for others. She is, in other words, one of those figures Jane Gallop describes in her work on the “Dora” case: a threshold person, both inside and outside the family, doing the work of nurturance and discipline that the family requires for its preservation, yet also contingent, held by ties, not of love or duty, but of money, and able either to depart or to be sent away with two weeks’ notice. The maid has a decisive, structural relationship to psychoanalysis in general. Psychoanalysis [ . . . ] works because of the transference, because the patient transfers previous relationships with others onto the psychoanalyst, reactivates the emotions, and can work them out in analysis. Later Freud will theorize that all relations to others merely repeat the child’s original relation to the mother, the first other.29

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Marie’s only words (“no, I don’t like that picture”) do seem to function therapeutically, eliciting both Helga’s gratitude and her succinct, unique articulation of antipathy: “Thanks, Marie, I don’t like it either.” Much of Helga’s whimsical dissatisfaction throughout the novel, her repetitive seeking after something new and better, is driven by her inability to voice anger or even disagreement with anyone, her silence and “striving to appear unhearing.” Speaking to the maid, to whom she owes nothing but money, Helga is able, for once, to acknowledge her hatred for Herr Olsen. “Marie” is already the most motherly of names, but it was also the name (though more often spelled “Mary”) of Larsen’s white, Danish mother, who was a dressmaker. Similarly, Helga Crane’s mother was “a white immigrant,” beautiful, and perhaps never legally married to her black father, “a gambler.” After her remarriage, out of financial necessity, to another white Dane, her daughter Helga was subject to “the savage unkindness of her stepbrothers and sisters, and the jealous, malicious hatred of her mother’s husband” (21). Dead by the time the novel begins, Helga’s mother is in fact more irretrievably lost to her black American daughter than she would have been through death alone, since the whole world disavows each of them in relation to the other, absolutely denying that there can be any structure of kinship to support their lives.30 Helga is, for example, advised by an older, “lemon-colored” (35) black woman, “in a too carefully casual manner, ‘And by the way, I wouldn’t mention that my people were white, if I were you’ ” (41). If the Danish maid “Marie” is also an opportunity for Larsen to speak her mother’s name, it offers us some traffic among structural, literary, and historical traumas. The lost mother, whom everyone loses through Oedipality, becomes both the obscenely real, repetitive loss of Helga’s/ Larsen’s mother to poverty and racism, and the therapeutic possibility— denied by the novel’s plot, but a theoretical possibility nonetheless—of their joint working-through. In other words, while the bulk of the novel pitilessly articulates her repetitive, endless failure, at the thought of her mother Helga is able to imagine something other than the “perpetual recurrence of the same thing.”

Making Generations The transferential invocation of a beloved, lost mother, though, only marks the beginning, or the possibility, of a working-through that the last pages of the novel deliberately leave unfinished. The final three chapters

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of this cosmopolitan novel of manners take a quixotically Faulknerian turn as Helga’s story drags on in a painful series of grotesque bodily disasters that seem at once to continue the compulsive repetitions of a psychic and literary trauma whose origins remain obscure, and to deny absolutely any form of trauma other than the physical. Helga, after a final falling-out with her final swain, Dr. Anderson, converts suddenly and dramatically to an African American storefront church, marries its fat, dirty minister, moves to rural Alabama. Unable either to resist her husband’s sexual appeal or to obtain and use reliable birth control, she bears four children in rapid succession. The novel ends in a strange state of suspension, permitting her to survive, yet offering no hope of escape from the endless repetition of her pain; for while Helga has just barely survived a life-threatening childbirth, the last lines announce that “hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child” (135). Readers thus end up exactly where they began, confronting the Harlem Renaissance’s central artistic problem: how to work beyond, and yet remain responsible to, the African American community’s historical experience of extreme deprivation and oppression. This time, though, as Helga takes up the task of childbearing that Gayl Jones’s Ursa was unable to perform, “making generations” that bear witness to the survival of the past,31 representation is no longer a matter merely of images and gazes, seeing and being seen, but one of African American women’s lives and bodies, and of an obscene physical trauma and its endless repetitions. I am not alone in describing these final chapters in terms of psychic and literary compulsions and trauma; many critics dismiss them as evidence of Larsen’s loss of artistic and intellectual control when faced with sexual matters. I would like to suggest, however, that their traumatic structure serves a critical function. As Shepherdson writes toward the end of his essay: If narcissism repeats itself compulsively like a destiny or fate that every narrative and every philosophy would bear within it in a more or less visible way, this means that we cannot confuse the symbolic and imaginary presentation of this trauma with the enigmatic structure that essentially comprises it. And if narcissism points us toward this constitutive “event,” the thinking that aims at narcissism itself would have to consist . . . in a task of thinking

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whose effort would be to remember—to repeat, remember and work-through—a trauma that has always already claimed it in advance.32 In other words, by showing us the shadow of what is unimaginable— trauma—narcissism sets a task for imagination and points the way to a more usable, livable memory. And the narcissist Helga’s life-threatening fourth pregnancy is, as Larsen ensures by breaking off her text after naming it, unimaginable for her and for us. Helga has self-consciously retained sole possession of herself to this point, but that traumatic psychic structure must always be understood in the working-through of the novel’s materially traumatic truth: her sexual and childbearing body is never her own. In these final chapters of intense physicality and withheld tragedy, Larsen is particularly attentive to the means, psychic but also social, historical, and bodily, by which “trauma . . . has always already claimed [thinking] in advance,” and her delicate articulation of these means represents a virtuosic response, avant la lettre, to Shepherdson’s search for “the thinking that aims at narcissism itself.” We cannot know who will be born out of this trauma. A major strategy of Larsen’s “thinking aimed at narcissism itself” in these final chapters is direct mythological allusion, especially to the cult of Bacchus/Dionysus. These allusions are profoundly important to a novel that opens with the heroine alone and despairing, Ariadne-like, at a school called “Naxos.” Ariadne gave Theseus the spool of thread he used in penetrating the Labyrinth and defeating the Minotaur. Theseus abandoned her, however, on an island named Naxos, where she later met the god Bacchus/Dionysus. The story of an abandoned woman who meets the god of intoxication is also joined to the problem of narcissism by the associative logic of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (completed 7 AD), a poem made up of interlocking tales of transformed gods and human beings that is a major source for Greco-Roman mythological references in Western literature. I have followed classicists in taking Ovid’s recounting as the primary Narcissus story, for example. Shepherdson notes that the tale of Narcissus is “a story in which blindness and sexual difference are brought together, and a story of punishment as well.”33 Now, the tale immediately following the death of Narcissus is also about the god Bacchus, the various transformations he works on those who do not respect his rites, and, most particularly, how he compelled his madwomen-devotees, among them the king’s own

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mother, to tear the blaspheming king Pentheus limb from limb. This, too, has the same elements—blindness, sexual difference, punishment. Here, though, they are articulated not as heterosexual failure and strange knowledge, but as descent, reproduction, parentage, piety. Moreover, with Bacchus, the traumatic merges into the sacred, the sacrificial, and the traumatic in/of motherhood: Pentheus’s mother literally rips off his head as he begs her for mercy.34 So, too, Helga Crane’s final metamorphosis is into a figure of religion, motherhood, sacrifice. One day, quite accidentally, Helga goes down into a storefront Harlem church to get out of the rain. Her visit is described as trespass upon a feminine experience of the sacred: “Little by little the performance took on an almost Bacchic vehemence. Behind her, beside her, before her, frenzied women gesticulated, screamed, wept and tottered to the praying of the preacher, which had gradually become a cadenced chant” (113). Having crossed impiously into the sacred space, the international sophisticate undergoes a conversion experience, a transformation at least as sudden and violent as those of women (Daphne, Procne, Niobe) into trees or birds or springs of water in Ovid. Helga experiences her own body, actions, and even speech, as traumas arriving from elsewhere: She had eaten nothing since yesterday. She fell forward against the crude railing which enclosed the little platform. For a single moment she remained there in silent stillness, because she was afraid she was going to be sick. And in that moment she was lost—or saved. The yelling figures about her pressed forward, closing her in on all sides. Maddened, she grasped at the railing, and with no previous intention began to yell like one insane, drowning every other clamor, while torrents of tears streamed down her face. She was unconscious of the words she uttered, or their meaning: “Oh God, mercy, mercy. Have mercy on me!” But she repeated them over and over. (113–14) This “unconscious,” yet desperate call to God peremptorily ends the novel’s, and Helga’s, consideration of contemporary “modern” manners and mores, and of Dorian Gray-like aesthetic narcissism. She converts in that storefront church, marries the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green, and devotes her life to a sacred task of childbearing and service in his hometown, a rural Alabama black community described as “‘the vineyard of the Lord’ ” (118), in a phrase that evokes at once the Old Testament God,

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an ideological understanding of the Civil War as a struggle for black freedom in the South (via Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”), and the god of wine and madness. Helga’s married sexual life, especially, is described as a continuation of her conversion’s “Bacchic” frenzy: “And night came at the end of every day. Emotional, palpitating, amorous, all that was living in her sprang like rank weeds at the tingling thought of night, with a vitality so strong that it devoured all shoots of reason” (122). Ironically, Olsen’s racist and sexist invocation of “the warm, impulsive nature of the women of Africa,” James Vayle’s horrified vision of “the others” having too many children, will have been indeed the true, or at least the final, Helga Crane: a poor black woman at the mercy of her fertility. It is difficult to imagine any result of this plot turn other than the annihilation, the payment of “all that she’d had” (87) that Helga once feared would be the result of her self-willed choices. Furthermore, it is tempting for the reader, knowing that this is the Alabama of the lynching era, to agree with Helga’s earlier, expatriate self, who “saw [ . . . ] the giving birth to little, helpless, unprotesting Negro children as a sin, an unforgivable outrage. More black folk to suffer indignities. More black bodies for mobs to lynch” (75). In other words, we would much rather that this mother and her children not exist at all than that they exist in an obvious, helpless, hopeless suffering which invites both identification and despair—that is to say, a profoundly narcissistic reading—in Larsen’s most committed feminist and African Americanist readers. Once clearly put, of course, this is clearly not an acceptable way of reading: we cannot ask Helga, who looks as though she might die of sexual and racial oppression, just to die already and get it over with. And aside from the moral and ethical failure of such a reading, we might also ask what critical possibilities it cancels. What would it mean, instead, to read this narrative openness as openness? To read Helga’s living death as not merely a literal death, with a grave and mourning, but as a case of what traumatic experience human beings can endure and fiction can represent? To imagine Helga Crane, with her many little children, her self-satisfied, sloppy husband, her disintegrating silk nightgowns and dog-eared copy of Anatole France (129–31), surviving at least for a time in the South at the beginning of the Great Depression, and long prior to the Civil Rights era? What would it cost us to hang on to the lost cosmopolitanism, the multicultural inheritances, of this rural Southern black woman?

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“Helga,” with its excessively Scandinavian sound to American ears, translates as “holy”; from this we may infer that her lostness, her cultural in-between-ness, her (self-)sacrifice, her weird, prehistoric religious apotheosis—her sacredness—is integral, not incidental, to the novel’s social vision. There is something like this in Cane’s story of the black woman with a Jewish father, Fernie May Rosen, with her “Semitic” nose and voice like “a Jewish cantor singing with a broken voice”35; something too in Faulkner’s visions of cosmopolitan and Creole cultures gone to seed amidst the ruins of Mississippi plantation houses (Haitian and New Orleans French in Absalom, Absalom!, Mexican and Spanish in Light in August). A similar sense of the past’s sacredness, baroque complexity, and inevitable reality in the present also motivates such critical projects as Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, and more recently, Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and William Pietz’s important genealogical work on the fetish and the Atlantic slave trade.36 Perhaps there is in Quicksand some attempt to imagine slavery itself as a traumatic return; in its original instance it was hardly a lesser uprooting and destruction of individuals’ cultural being than what is visited on Helga Crane, and generations endured it without any hope but their bare lives. Helga’s reflection on her own unfreedom and her surviving children’s futures, for example, emphasizes the African American family’s persistence amid the unendurable: “They were all black together. And they would have their father . . . to leave them would be a tearing agony, a rending of deepest fibers. She felt that through all the rest of her lifetime she would be hearing their cry of ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy’ through sleepless nights” (135). Perhaps there is, in this novel’s long, extravagant prelude to Helga’s entrapment, an attempt to give to history that which it will not, customarily, acknowledge—to give another life to a poor, black Southern mother, certainly, but also to give to history the sense that “progress” is a dangerous metaphor, that history’s traumas can, and do, repeat themselves on both the psyches and the bodies of those they have always already marked. Helga Crane has puzzled her whole life long over the connection between the structural traumas of her lived biracial identity and the historical extremities of racism and enslavement. At last, as she is more and more humiliated in body and deprived in spirit, this history returns to her, on her body, through the opening that the social and psychic traumas of racism had made on her soul. It may be that this novel acquires currency in the contemporary academy, and especially in contemporary lower-division college teaching,

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because it seems to elide questions of communal violence and social justice in favor of the novel of manners, replacing the political with the merely personal; but it may also be that we do not yet know how to read the traumatic return of those realities on a black woman’s body in the last pages of this novel. It may be that we do not know what it is for Helga Crane to look at herself.

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“A Having Way”: Fetishism and the Black Bourgeoisie in Passing

Prologue: Failures of Reading Literary trauma studies often identifies traumatic writing with modernist formal experimentation, particularly estranging, unsympathetic, anti-traditionalist gestures. “The breakage of the verse enacts the breakage of the world,” as Shoshana Felman writes in her foundational “Education and Crisis”1: the psychic disposition of the person reading a difficult text approximates that of the person subject to traumatic eventualities, and thus literature does not only represent, but also transmits traumatization. This and other familiar axioms of trauma studies are not only theoretical concepts, but also technical and ethical precepts: they introduce a technique for reading traumatic texts and assert the reader’s responsibility to master that technique, as part of a broader duty to reckon with the traumatic character of recent history. For Felman, “broken,” elliptical, unlyrical verses call for the technique of close reading, a tightly focused hermeneutics that crafts a fuller, more nuanced readership by narrating a series of critical judgments about a single text. Felman also highly values expansive participation in the project of close reading, and accordingly, her explicitly pedagogical essay both offers a number of exemplary close readings and invites readers to join the trauma-theoretical project. Curiously, these technical and ethical imperatives admit no possible failure; presumably, insofar as close-reading techniques can be taught, anyone can reckon responsibly with trauma. There is little or no recognition, in Felman and in contemporary trauma studies generally, that

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readers might generally fail to recognize traumatic writing, that authors might fail to render the traumatic in difficult or experimental modes, or indeed that the theoretical assertion of a formal equivalence between traumatized psyche and traumatic text might fail fully to describe a text’s engagement with historical disaster. Many critiques of trauma theory and the field of trauma studies have remarked its strange, impervious critical optimism, and some suggest therefore that trauma studies has reached the limit of its usefulness.2 Rather than discard theoretical inquiry into the relationships among writing, violence, and the psychic, however, we may profitably shift literary grounds. In moving from mid-twentieth-century European masterworks to a less-familiar literature that follows on the heels of historical disaster, the African American “passing” novel, we also move from technical and ethical certainties—a(n ostensibly) transparent close-reading technique and a universal(ist) condemnation of genocide and related historical crimes—to unforeseen technical demands and the ethical situation W. E. B. Du Bois famously designates the “problem of the color line.” Failures of reading, and particularly the majority-white culture’s consistent failure to recognize centuries-deep black traumatization, are constitutive of the African American novel generally, and of the “passing” theme in particular. Careful examination of these works’ engagement with that prior failure to read can therefore move trauma theory beyond its original, unreflective expectation that every good reader wishes to see justice done. There are radical political and formal differences between early African American novels and the European modernism that remains trauma studies’ preferred topos. African American novels written between the 1850s and the Depression do not often make testimonial appeals related to white-supremacist terrorism, racialized poverty, or the imposition of Jim Crow. Moreover, with the important antebellum exceptions of William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter and the recently rediscovered Bondswoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, they remain almost silent about the slave regime itself. Such omissions in the postbellum novelistic tradition reflect crescendoing public racism in the U.S. after the failure of Reconstruction; amid disenfranchisement, spectacle lynchings, Thomas W. Dixon, and Plessy v. Ferguson, even implicit black demands for justice were at best ignored in a white-dominated public sphere. At worst, they placed their authors at risk of violent reprisals. Nor are many early African American novels experimental works. Most show a startlingly literal fidelity to the classic novelistic project

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of inventing a bourgeoisie. Often woman-authored, often feminist,3 these novels describe black professionals, black political leaders, black marriages, virtuous and sentimental black domesticity, black towns, churches, and communities, and black regional and national cultures, in a great representational push that “essentially brought the black literary and social body into being”4 as a distinct, bounded, visible, and internally organized entity. Rather than attesting to the shattering force of historical trauma, in other words, these early African American novels imagined—and, insofar as they helped create a national black public sphere, instantiated—a new whole. They thus meet a violence that persists in material as well as psychic forms with an insistence on the power of cultural representation to create a hopeful future. Early black novelists often depended heavily on mass-mediated, normatively white bourgeois class markers and moral imperatives, even when illustrating communitarian and culturalist theses; for example, Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 eponymous heroine Iola Leroy, like many a fictional good girl, chooses the more virtuous suitor—and likewise chooses a middle-class black man over a white doctor.5 Peculiarly African American themes also existed, however, and these both challenged bourgeois values and addressed African American historical experience. “Passing,” the practice whereby light-skinned African Americans allow themselves to be mistaken for white, whether for limited, immediate advantage, or as an irrevocable choice involving severed kinship ties and elaborate deception, is one of the most important such themes. As M. Giulia Fabi explains, stories of successful passing “[capitalize] on the contrast between the brilliant career open to the white-looking passer and the less glamorous conditions of the multiplicity of visibly black characters,” and thus necessarily give the lie to the notion of bootstraps success.6 Passing themes can coexist with conventional plots—Iola’s white doctor asked her to pass, for example—but they also introduce a subtle irony into the novel form itself, not only debunking specific conventions from within, but presenting the cross-racial manipulation of conventionality as a viable strategy, one that in many instances parallels or actually competes with the standard strategies of embourgeoisement. Survival can be a matter of canny disguise. Passing themes also introduce readers to a specifically African American historical analytics focused on the historical construction of the color line and the slow development of a nationwide black public sphere. Beginning with Clotel’s painstaking description, in 1853, of the nationalized economics and geography of the slave trade via the speculative

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biography of Thomas Jefferson’s black daughters and granddaughter, and continuing through Nella Larsen’s 1929 portrait of Clare Kendry, an educated woman who chose to pass at a young age to escape poverty and her black community’s sexual double standard, stories about passable women and men sketch complex historical arguments about such questions as the relationship between racial oppression and misogyny. Quite aside from their dramatic possibilities, in other words, passing themes direct both technical and ethical imperatives at the readers of African American novels. To read these books properly, one must have at least a minimal grasp of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history, as well as a sincere engagement with (bourgeois) black politics, including intra-community sexual politics. Passing, Larsen’s brilliant, canny, and valedictory 1929 passing novel, has the peculiar value, for scholars based in contemporary trauma theory, of uniting fidelity to the established themes and devices of the African American novel with a high-modernist interest in approximating psychic structure in writing. Written in diamond-hard, pervasively ironic prose, it reiterates and deepens the technical and ethical demands of its African American predecessors, but it also pursues a properly psychoanalytic insight that bears directly on trauma theory generally and that offers new means for articulating trauma studies with postbellum African American literature. Larsen detects an internal consistency to the absurdities of the color line, a repeated pattern to the ways in which both black and white characters repeatedly fail to acknowledge racist violence. At every level of the text, the disavowal of black traumatization leads to sexual fetishism. Fetishization, in turn, extracts pleasure and profit from the act of ignoring the past, and thus institutionalizes and commodifies a pervasive ethical failure. By marking the translation of trauma into fetishism, Larsen joins a tradition of black feminist inquiry into sexuality and the commodification of black bodies. However, she also offers trauma studies, a field deeply committed to ethical witness, an instructive case of traumatic discourse recuperated to reactionary ends.

Rethinking the Fetish: Race, Trauma, and Prostitution Sexual exploitation was an abiding concern for Larsen; her women are always at risk of being mistaken for prostitutes, and likewise always at risk for becoming such through desperation.7 The theme had sources in her early experience; biographer George Hutchinson has located several childhood addresses in the red-light district of Chicago.8 Larsen’s

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mother, half-sister, and stepfather were white, and no other housing was available to a mixed-race family. This was because racial transgression, prostitution, and poverty were not merely associatively, but causally linked in the popular culture of the time; the common presumption was that a white woman with a black child was necessarily a prostitute, and the family likely suffered any number of financial difficulties and social slights as a result. As Hutchinson points out,9 the poverty/prostitution theme is particularly marked in Larsen’s two early stories, which appeared pseudonymously in 1926 in Young’s Realistic Stories Magazine, a pulp intended primarily for working-class women. “Freedom” and “The Wrong Man” both followed a plot formula that identified sexual tension with class conflict, and both used presumptively white characters. “Freedom” described a man’s suicide after learning of his impoverished mistress’s death in childbirth, while “The Wrong Man” revealed its middle-class, married woman protagonist’s darkest secret: she had once been kept as a mistress by a wealthy man. These are not “realistic stories” by either literary or sociological standards, of course, and yet their insistence on sex-for-money transactions and the sexual double standard as the fundamental truths of heterosexuality strikes out against bourgeois ideas about the purity of hard work and the desirability of true love. Julia Romley, the protagonist of “The Wrong Man,” used her lover’s money to go to school, found her own decorating business, and gain entrée to “the envied gay life in one of Long Island’s most exclusive sets” (5), while the nameless, wealthy protagonist of “Freedom” abandoned his mistress because he fell in love with her and was revolted at the thought of long-term commitment (14). The “wrong” things have always already happened in these stories, and instead of being mutually constitutive, as the bourgeois novel paradigmatically claims, morality and class status are decisively at odds. Similarly, Passing repeatedly designates the past as a space of moral compromise, consistently depicts social position as the direct result of hypocrisy and deception, and turns on disastrous sexual revelations. The novel moves well beyond the stories’ lurid gossip, however, because it explains the links between sexuality, money, and a hidden past in terms of fetishism. In the Freudian account, fetishes—feet, shoes, undergarments, velvets, furs—both symbolize the “woman’s [mother’s] penis that the little boy once believed in,” and cover over the “fact” of her castration.10 Maternal castration is horrifying because it implies that the “little

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boy” himself could lose his capacity for erotic pleasure; hence, an overvalued, too-desirable fetish serves both to disavow his own vulnerability and to install a belief in women’s and mothers’ phallic lack. The psychoanalytic concept thus addresses the same nexus of intense attachment, fear, and social transgression as do the pulp stories, but it also opens onto serious questions about the relationships among individual desire, social values, and sexual difference. And Passing reiterates its critical inquiry; as many scholarly readers have pointed out, Larsen describes pervasive fetishistic behaviors among her striving black characters in such familiar forms of misrecognition or overvaluation as bourgeois materialism, commodity fetishism, and the use of financial rhetoric to describe moral values.11 She also clearly articulates a black bourgeois fetishization of whiteness.12 Furthermore, she describes sexual desire, both conventional and transgressive, only in terms of fetishistic behaviors and fantasies. In introducing racial difference to the more general problem of fetishism, however, she confronts an aporia in psychoanalytic theory. There is little purchase in Freud’s account for questions about the cultural history or political contexts of fetishism (and little discrepancy between early [Three Essays, 1905] and late [“Fetishism,” 1927] theoretical accounts). Indeed, the perversion itself forestalls such inquiries; fetishes are individualized, portable, fungible, concealable, and reliable.13 They have a social dimension insofar as they pervade normal sexuality in dilute form,14 but they also offer their subjects an atomized erotic self-sufficiency. Because fetishism drafts material objects (including disjoint body parts) in support of its psychic drama of disavowal and investment, the fetishist’s desires are never subject to contestation or rearticulation. Having translated a fantasized relationship with another person into a relationship with a thing, one simply acquires that thing to achieve satisfaction; private property is the perfect lover. Larsen mounts no moral argument against fetishism, nor does she depict any alternatives to black embourgeoisement. Her interest, rather, is in fetishism’s specific political implications for middle-class black women. Its equation of people to things erases distinctions between the pre-Emancipation past and the present—the very distinctions that the post-Emancipation black novel sought to enforce—and once historical guideposts disappear, the figure of a woman-as-chattel becomes both frightening and desirable. Most importantly, she becomes profitable. The process is brilliantly illustrated through the character Clare Kendry,

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“the nearly perfect human embodiment of a fetish.”15 Her husband, John Bellew, is unaware that his blonde wife is a black woman passing for white . . . or is he? He calls his wife “Nig.” “Tell them, dear, why you call me that.” The man chuckled, crinkling up his eyes, not, Irene was compelled to acknowledge, unpleasantly. He explained: “Well, you see, it’s like this. When we were first married, she was as white as—as— well as white as a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out, she’ll wake up one of these days and find out she’s turned into a nigger.”16 Bellew, indeed, is almost too conventional a fetishist. “Nig,” blackness construed as lack, is that to which he is sexually attached, and which apparently never ceases to entrance him. But because Clare’s race is totally independent of phenotypic markers, Bellew’s fetishism also demands ongoing psychic work to generate a symbol that will maintain his disavowal of, and attachment to, black trauma. His behavior is not unlike the patient Freud describes, in his 1927 essay “Fetishism,” who saw a “gleam” of light on the noses he loved. Freud’s patient, bilingual in German and English, had transformed the English “glance” into the German Glanz, “gleam,” which he then literalized in a visual hallucination; thus, the “gleam” he saw on those noses was his own “glance.”17 Likewise, when Bellew claims to see his wife’s skin darkening, he hallucinates his black object of desire. He sees his own looking. The racial content of his fetishistic quest is far less important than the intimate racial politics it enacts, however. Bellew’s words are nothing special; here and elsewhere his speech is overloaded with conventional, empty phatic phrases, such as “Well, you see, it’s like this.” Likewise, his fetish for black women (including its expression in a racist use of “nigger”) is as banal as a shoe fetish. Far more important is Clare’s delicate titration of her husband’s enjoyment. She both opens her husband’s fetishistic pleasure once more (“Tell them, dear, why you call me that”), and displays her control over it, and over him. In fact, she parades her husband’s kink publicly, crafting a social event (afternoon tea) specifically for that purpose and inviting two childhood friends, the novel’s protagonist, Irene Redfield, and another woman, Gertrude Martin. Both are also passable, well-educated, and relatively leisured black women. Bellew is plainly unable to acknowledge that even one such person exists, however, let alone three:

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“My goodness, Jack! What difference would it make if, after all these years, you were to find out that I was one or two percent coloured?” Bellew put out his hand in a repudiating fling, definite and final. “Oh, no, Nig,” he declared, “nothing like that with me. I know you’re no nigger, so it’s all right. You can get as black as you please as far as I’m concerned, since I know that you’re no nigger. I draw the line at that. No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be.” Irene’s lips trembled almost uncontrollably, but she made a desperate effort to fight back her disastrous desire to laugh again, and succeeded. (171) Notice the abundance of N’s, and the alternation of “nigger” with the ambivalent homonym “no/know”: “Oh, no, Nig . . . I know you’re no nigger . . . I know that you’re no nigger . . . no niggers . . . never . . . never. . . . ” Bellew’s speech is nearly as automatic as Irene’s giggles, and it is equally “disastrous,” disavowing fear and anger even as it preserves them in its own disruptive force. (We will return to the question of Irene’s laughter and its relation to trauma.) Bellew’s fetishization of blackness is thus not different from sexual fetishism generally, but it is distinct insofar as racial injury is both historically located and accessible to moral discourse in a way that women’s putative “castration” is not. Where the Oedipal child escapes, in Freud’s account, responsibility for his mother’s castration, the white, U.S. racial fetishist cannot escape some implication in the damage he imputes to blackness (if indeed his pleasure is not the more intense for that sadistic frisson). Beth Coleman’s 2003 essay “Pimp Notes on Autonomy” argues, in fact, that white erotic attachments—fetishes—determine public memory of black slavery. A successor to Lawrence, Fiedler, and Morrison’s psychoanalytic theories about the relationship between racism and pleasure in U.S. literatures, Coleman rearticulates the theoretical problem posed by historical slavery in terms of a specifically African American strategy for managing the fetishistic pleasures of mastery. She calls this strategy “pimping.” As Coleman explains, black people are perceived, from the standpoint of white mastery, as women’s bodies are perceived from the standpoint of phallocentrism: themselves damaged, they also threaten damage to the normative (white and/or male) subject. Therefore, a “pimp” sells details, parts, segmented, stylized, and commodified pieces of black people; he transforms the black body, once literal chattel, into a fantastic and

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fantasmatic form of private property—a fetish, a twentieth- and twentyfirst-century, specifically sexual “fast-food slavery for a commodities market.”18 Indeed, the only difference between Coleman’s description and Clare Kendry’s management of her husband is the fact that the latter is pimp and prostitute at once; she has to manufacture the dark and darkening “Nig”—herself as a desirable piece of property—daily. Clare is always hustling.

Fetish Politics: Black Women’s Relationships and the Salvific Wish Bellew’s fetishism, itself critically negligible, creates some strange new alliances among the very light-skinned, genteel black women who witness it. Irene and Gertrude, for example, immediately and unquestioningly form a united front under Clare’s direction, returning polite nothings to Bellew’s racist diatribes, suppressing their laughter and their fear, maintaining his wife’s deception at all costs to their own dignity. Clare’s mad tea party even gives her a long-term black ally; while Gertrude declares her hostess “plumb crazy” (175) and disappears from the story, Irene continues to meet and socialize with Clare, eventually giving Clare surreptitious access to her home, her husband and children, and black Harlem society. Irene’s relationship with Clare is all the more surprising, given her investment in what Candice Jenkins has recently described as a “salvific wish,”19 a passionate desire to preserve the black community from the dehumanizing (and ultimately murderous and terroristic) sexual fetishism of whites. The salvific wish built on Christian and Victorian imperatives to chastity and “respectability” to forestall and deny, not only white men’s sexual predation on black women, but also those women’s sexuality as such. It was expressed not only as vocal resistance to external violence, but more often as self-discipline against sexual pleasures and intimacies that would reflect poorly on the community. Despite its moralism, then, the salvific wish is similar Clare’s “pimping,” insofar as it likewise reduced black women to a part of themselves, to only their bodies. Requiring women to “pay with their bodies, or rather with the concealment and restraint of those bodies, for the ultimate ‘safety’ of the black community as a whole” (13–14), the salvific wish likewise represents an effort to negotiate unjust social relations that appear impervious to political challenge. Indeed, the two approach formal equivalence insofar as, under each, “the black person mirrored for the [white and nonwhite] society around her what a human being was

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not.”20 Both “pimping” and the salvific wish render up a person-madething for the epistemological convenience and erotic pleasure of those in positions of dominance. The figure of Clare Kendry thus delivers a delicately nuanced version of the cynicism driving Larsen’s early pulp stories: there is no fundamental difference, for women, between marriage and prostitution. There is, however, a strategic difference. Pimping has a plan; it exploits white fetishism for profit and elaborately displays its own mastery over racism. Though it must resort to what Coleman describes as “anal” rituals of (self-)control,21 it does regard resistance as effective and satisfying within certain narrow limits. By contrast, the salvific wish has no plan, nor even a sense of its own limits; it merely articulates an anxious account of the endless ways in which racism penetrates emotional life. Because “one’s black body is always already assumed to be signifying desire, the added vulnerability that comes with expressing . . . sexual attraction, filial affection, human tenderness, or need, takes exposure to a painful extreme.”22 Potentially, the entire black psyche is radically subject to white violence. Pimpology makes white fetishism pay, but the salvific wish pays continually, in the form of unlimited anxiety, for sexual pleasure or any other form of black intimacy.

“Damn being safe!”: Risks and Rewards of Intimacy Larsen’s novel belongs, genealogically, to the bourgeoisie and the salvific wish. But she also reopened an exchange between middle-class black discourse and what it excludes. She lets Clare talk to Irene. As Samuel R. Delany has recently argued, while the two women’s friendship is neither uniformly positive nor long maintained, it may be the most important lesson that the novel offers.23 Similar in age, appearance, and social role, they may initially seem interchangeable, as the idealized portraits of (often light-skinned) black women who appeared on the covers of 1920s middle-class black periodicals such as the Crisis are interchangeable. The fact that they are not interchangeable, but must forge a relationship, is precisely what conventional emplotment discounts. From the first, Irene is nonplussed by the mere existence of Clare Kendry, who should not have escaped the punishments by which Irene’s social world is ordered. She can’t imagine, for example, how Clare has successfully managed to “pass over,” marry, and have her child acknowledged as legitimate:

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“What about background? Family, I mean. Surely you can’t just drop down on people from nowhere and expect them to receive you with open arms, can you?” “Almost,” Clare asserted. “You’d be surprised, ‘Rene, how much easier that is with white people than with us. Maybe because there are so many more of them, or maybe because they are secure and so don’t have to bother. I’ve never quite decided.” Irene was inclined to be incredulous. “You mean that you didn’t have to explain where you came from? It seems impossible.” Clare cast a glance of repressed amusement across the table at her. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t.” (158) As Clare notes, whiteness requires no origin to secure itself; in a white world, no one needs to know “where you came from.” More important than that theoretical point about kinship and whiteness, however, is the intra-racial, political character of Clare’s “repressed amusement.” It follows, not merely from Irene’s naïveté about white social mobility in the United States, but from Clare’s awareness that the middle-class black community she left behind as a teenager almost unanimously took her disappearance as evidence that she had become a prostitute to white men (154–55). Irene’s shock, in fact, is not so much at Clare’s passing for white, but at her passing for “wife”—her escape, however provisional, from being publicly adjudged a whore. As if to make up for others’ omission, Irene repeatedly makes that identification herself, judging Clare’s smiles at waiters as “too provocative” (149), noting tsk-tskingly that she socializes with men other than her husband (170), suggesting to Clare’s face that she could be mistaken for a “[lady] of easy virtue looking for trade” (199) if she attends a charity ball without an escort, and finally concluding that Clare has seduced her own husband, Brian Redfield (217), in the absence of any evidence other than cordial relations between the two. Many commentators, building on Deborah McDowell’s and Judith Butler’s foundational readings,24 have identified an occulted lesbian desire in Irene’s curiously intense attention to Clare, her personality, her physical beauty, and her willingness to express strong desire. Even Irene’s denigrations of Clare as sexually dirty and mercenary indicate a certain fascination in their very excess, and sometimes her words and thoughts evoke the other woman’s physical presence in almost religious praise: “ ‘Dear God! But aren’t you lovely, Clare!’ ” (194); “She

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remembered . . . Clare, exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting” (203). As H. Jordan Landry notes, such moments of homoeroticism are important, not only because they give queer possibilities to reading generally, but because they demonstrate a relationship between black women that escapes a hyper-conservative heteronormativity whose ultimate origin is whiteness.25 More important than Irene’s desire as such, in other words, is the fact that it offers her, and the African American novel generally, an alternative to the narrow, misogynist ideology of wives and mistresses. Though she never directly acknowledges her own (or any other’s) sexual desires, Irene knows perfectly well that her relationship with Clare fundamentally challenges the “salvific wish” to have and provide total safety for the black middle class. “It was as if Clare Kendry had said to her, for whom safety, security, were all-important: ‘Safe! Damn being safe!’ and meant it” (194). Irene often dismisses the other woman as childish and unformed: “Clare—she had remained almost what she had always been, an attractive, somewhat lonely child—selfish, willful and disturbing” (202). But even though she imagines Clare as the one who can’t control herself, Irene cannot deny the mounting evidence of her own “willful, selfish” behaviors in Clare’s presence. Irene’s first meeting with Clare as an adult, for example, linked the fulfillment of desire to the absence of proper self-control. Proud of her position in, and political commitment to, the black middle class, Irene never seeks out opportunities to pass (see 168–69), but when she feels faint—almost passes out—in the summer heat, a cabby suggests the whites-only rooftop restaurant of a major hotel as a place to cool off. Arriving there without acknowledging her own desires and intentions (she describes her arrival as being “wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world” [147]), Irene soon finds herself staring at a stranger, “[a]n attractive-looking woman” (148)—Clare, of course, though Irene cannot identify her at first. When Irene ceases to guide her body and her thoughts by the salvific wish, in other words, she gets things that she wants but was ashamed to ask for. What she desires from the strange woman in the restaurant is, moreover, frankly sexual, though expressed indirectly26: A waiter was taking her order. Irene saw her smile up at him as she murmured something—thanks, maybe. It was an odd sort of smile. Irene couldn’t quite define it, but she was sure that she would have classed it, coming from another woman, as being just a shade too

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provocative for a waiter. About this one, however, there was something that made her hesitate to name it that. A certain impression of assurance, perhaps. The waiter came back with the order. Irene watched her spread out her napkin, saw the silver spoon in the white hand slit the dull gold of the melon. Then, conscious she had been staring, she looked quickly away. (149) As Irene’s gaze shifts from the other woman’s actions to her body and associated objects, it dwells on items—the napkin, spread on the lap, the “white hand,” caressing other objects, the silver spoon, which in such a nice restaurant is always already in the patrons’ mouths, the “gold” melon, “slit,” perhaps juicy—which read as classic Freudian fetishes, displaced representations of the vulva. Like John Bellew’s obsessional references to his wife “Nig,” however, the sexual content is less important than the political exchange that these glances found. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, the fetishist “like[s] to have it both ways,”27 both accepting and rejecting established power relations. Just after the most directly suggestive fetish-object, the “slit melon,” is described, Irene, “conscious that she had been staring . . . looked quickly away.” Staring is rude, of course, but Larsen is interested in the ways that loss of control gives enjoyment. (Indeed, she figures this mechanism in the reading itself. Our experience as readers coincides with Irene’s for that series of descriptions, insofar as we, like the eyes we “stare” through, cannot not look.) Having called attention to herself by first staring, and then withdrawing her gaze, Irene soon finds that woman’s “dark eyes” (149) staring back at her. For a moment, she fears being discovered passing: “Did that woman, could that woman know that here before her very eyes . . . sat a Negro?” (150). But then Clare speaks, naming first Irene and then herself (149–51). The unknown, desirable woman not only spoke to her, but knew her; Irene’s erotic interest was not made to pay, but rewarded with a risky black women’s intimacy.

“The sardony of it!”: Repetition and Intensification Throughout the novel, Irene always triangulates her love of Clare with the risk of racist punishment, and this coerced conflation of intimacy with vulnerability also affects Irene’s other intimate encounters and relationships; indeed, Clare’s seductive magic seems to be the only effective deferral of the salvific wish in the novel. In the other, public and dutiful

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parts of her life, Irene can’t ever “have it both ways”; she may try, for instance, pursuing bourgeois material pleasures and perquisites despite pervasive racism, but every alternative ultimately collapses into another iteration of one black traumatic that cannot be arrested by even the most stringent disavowals. In a later scene that strongly corresponds to her initial “staring” at Clare, Irene is eating breakfast with her husband: They went into the dining-room. He drew back her chair and she sat down behind the fat-bellied German coffee-pot, which sent out its morning fragrance, mingled with the smell of crisp toast and savoury bacon, in the distance. With his long, nervous fingers he picked up the morning paper from his own chair and sat down. Zulena, a small, mahogany-colored creature, brought in the grapefruit. They took up their spoons. (184) Hilarious and yet ominous, Larsen’s deadpan conveys, with brilliant economy, how little satisfaction there really is in this couple’s material success. The whole scene parodies enjoyment, giving its letter while denying its spirit. Where she had desired to savor melons, Irene now forces herself to ritually consume a bitter fruit, and where she had spoken to a “lovely creature” who called her by her childhood nickname, ‘Rene (151), she now eats opposite someone “nervous” who addresses her as “madam” (183) and reads instead of looking at her. Though she can have anything for breakfast, there’s nothing she wants at that table. For Irene, of course, every grapefruit spoon in her well-appointed house is a bulwark against the memory of disaster, a fetish that marks a buried awareness, not of sexual organs and sexual desire, but of massive historical trauma. The wife of a doctor and hence a member of the postMigration Harlem upper class, Irene is on the run from the memory of oppression, refusing to answer her young sons’ questions about the racism to which they are subject on the street and at school, and even resorting to yelling and tears when her husband mentions a lynching reported in a later morning’s paper (231–32). Like some of Larsen’s contemporaries, such as Alain Locke, Irene measures the “New Negroes’ ” progress by their ability to forget what came before, to “rise from social disillusionment to race pride, from the sense of social debt to the responsibilities of social contribution, and offsetting the necessary working and commonsense acceptance of restricted conditions, [to believe] in ultimate esteem and recognition.”28 She measures herself by the extent to

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which others, both white and black, perceive her to be proud, productive, and happy. In other words, not the things at her table, but she herself, and her husband Brian, are the fetishes in this scene: these two people, apparently an ideal couple, stand as the cancellation of the past of oppression and its transformation into enjoyment. As Coleman writes: “The machine by which blackness is produced in America does not rely on the genitals or teeth or hands but the whole thing. There is no particularity to the object (this shoe or this ribbon or this garter), only the generic position holder of black. Instead of a small thing being substituted for the whole person, as in a normal perversion, in this case the person is shuttered down.”29 Being a racial fetish, as Coleman explains, involves a global self-mutilation, by which the whole person stands for “black,” signs race without being fully present. Thus the Redfields’ auto-fetishization, played out for the audience of their dark-skinned maid (and by extension for the larger, working-poor and recently-migrated black Harlem community who pays Dr. Redfield’s bills), “shutters down” their own capacities for pleasure. In particular, such free, creative plays of desire as Irene’s glances at Clare’s hands and lap and “slit melon” are absolutely forbidden. The husband and wife must be only what they are supposed to be, and eat only what they are supposed to eat. Thus, the conjugal breakfast-table is a scene of ideological production, or rather of a kind of reverse-Žižekian ideological backflip. Racism, in Žižek’s now-axiomatic analysis, reflects the corrosive fantasy that “others” enjoy themselves more than “we” do.30 But being an exemplary member of the new black middle class—a Talented Tenther, an uplifter, a race woman, a “New Negro”—requires mimicking enjoyment, as Larsen’s catalogue of the sights and smells of breakfast makes clear, in the full knowledge that only someone else is really enjoying. It leaves the racist fantasy intact, in other words, simply inverting the terms without questioning the identification of blackness with fetishistic enjoyment. In this sense, a woman like Irene does not only feel vulnerable at every turn to racist injury; as a figure of black enjoyment, she is infinitely exposed to the trauma recorded in her husband’s daily paper. Though there is both textual and biographical evidence that Larsen was familiar with Freudian theory,31 she of course had no access to the work of Jacques Lacan during the composition of Passing. Yet Larsen’s novel recognizably shares some of the motivations of Lacanian theory, reinventing words to get closer to experience’s structure and honoring the close inter-implication of body, unconscious, and language. Her

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invented noun “sardony” is perhaps her best such effort; it describes something like an encounter with the Real. Here is Irene trying to understand her own psychology, and specifically why she finds it so easy to abandon race pride and the salvific wish in Clare’s presence: Why hadn’t she spoken that day? Why, in the face of Bellew’s ignorant hate and suspicion, had she concealed her own origin? . . .  Irene asked these questions, felt them. They were, however, merely rhetorical, as she herself was well aware. She knew their answers, every one, and it was the same for them all. The sardony of it! She couldn’t betray Clare, couldn’t even run the risk of appearing to defend a people that were being maligned, for fear that defense might in some infinitesimal degree lead the way to final discovery of her secret. She had to Clare Kendry a duty. She was bound to her by those very ties of race . . .  (182) Sardonic refers etymologically to a Sardinian plant supposed to produce convulsive laughter ending in death, and sardony is hence allied with traumatic repetition. Yet sardony is emphatically not irony, not an element of tragedy. Where irony (a mismatch between expectations and eventuality) can be directly answered with politics, sardony (subjection to meaningless repetitions) cannot. Larsen’s new word thus maintains the idea of a repetition compulsion, but refuses both the pathos and the moral discourse conventionally associated with the traumatic. Irene’s loyalty to Clare was not a political decision, but evidence of a compulsion that politics fails to address. Retrospectively, one realizes that ambiguous laughter is a keynote throughout the novel. Irene not only did not contradict Bellew’s racism, but responded with ridiculous, inexplicable giggles (171–72); perhaps even more importantly, she did not recognize Clare Kendry at their first meeting, until Clare laughed, “a lovely laugh, a small sequence of notes that was like a trill and also like the ringing of a delicate bell fashioned of a precious metal, a tinkling . . . ‘Clare!’ ” (151). Clare laughs at Irene’s primness and prudery all the time; her laugh is disruption itself, even when it translates itself into her equally ravishing tears (see 196), and it intensifies across the novel. Thus, Larsen’s “sardony,” like the Lacanian Real, is strongly associated with psychosis and the threat of death.

The Ends of the Fetish Perhaps no dénouement could fully address Passing’s exquisite articu-

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lations of limitless anxiety and pervasive fetishism; yet the end, when it does come, does not fail to shock. Clare falls out the window; it is unlikely that Irene did not push her.32 The final scene takes place at a party in Harlem, where Clare chats with Brian to Irene’s fury, until her own husband John Bellew barges in, having been finally undeceived in his wife’s race by a chance meeting with Irene and a darker-skinned woman friend, the hostess of the party.33 Sardony is present at the scene of the crime, for Clare smiles at all her enemies irrepressibly, mocking Irene’s anger and her husband’s wrath. It was that smile that maddened Irene. She ran across the room, her terror tinged with ferocity, and laid a hand on Clare’s bare arm. One thought possessed her. She couldn’t have Clare Kendry cast aside by Bellew. She couldn’t have her free. Before them stood John Bellew, speechless now in his hurt and anger . . . . What happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly. One moment Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone. There was a gasp of horror, and above it a sound not quite human, like a beast in agony. “Nig! My God! Nig!” (239) Both Irene and Bellew respond to Clare’s death with invocations of their fetishes—his “Nig!” designation of blackness, her litany of light and glory—almost as if to conjure her back. Meanwhile, the reader scans madly for the final three pages of the book, both trying to assign guilt, and trying to avoid doing so. But Clare is dead, and for Irene, “Then everything was dark” (242). What is this death of Clare’s? The novel’s ending seems conservative, intended to limit or even punish Clare’s passing and sexual transgressions, just as Irene has always invoked her punishment. But it’s worth noting that Clare’s death, unlike the abstracted and generalized deaths of enslavement and lynching that underpin both “pimping’s” account of white fetishism and the salvific wish’s disavowal of black oppression, does not become subject either to moral or political discourse, or to economic capitalization. No one is declared guilty for it, and likewise no one profits from it. Death is by no means the end of interpretation for this novel, in either sense of “end.” The dead, after all, are not gone for good, any more than Clare (“fair and golden, like a sunlit day” [205]) is gone forever. Speaking

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with particular emphasis on black literature, Sharon Holland has suggested that the dead offer possibilities that the academy can’t anticipate: “The dead truly acknowledge no boundary, and their unruly universe is worthy of critical examination.”34 Like trauma and the Real, the dead return, but unlike both, they return in a different, more meaningful form, as spirit, as messengers both excessive of, and integral to, culture. Indeed, as spirit, the dead Clare bears an important relation to the original meaning of the word “fetish,” as it arose in the seventeenth-century West African interzone, where European sailors first met African merchants to trade manufactured goods for gold, and later for slaves. As William Pietz has shown in his important philological essays,35 white traders saw Africans making material objects to which spiritual power was imputed and called those things “fetishes,” from a Portuguesederived pidgin for “witchcraft.” Fundamentally, a fetish was alive even though it was inert, spiritualized even though it was material. Because traders needed a common ground for faith and promises, fetishes also became guarantors of contracts and other business relationships. Whites tended to condemn them, but they also trafficked in them and by means of them regularly. Fetishes, in other words, have always mediated the relationships among black people, white profit, and spiritual values. Further, as the anthropologist David Graeber has recently remarked, they evince a hermeneutic motility and social creativity that Western concepts of culture and tradition often reject or disavow. Why not, in other words, make a sacred object right now? A fetish, Graeber asserts, is “a god in the process of construction,”36 a cultural concept in the making, and its partial and incomplete appearance is a function of its, and our, limitations in the present. Similarly, when we describe Clare Kendry’s fascinating, “golden” body and its claim on the love of another black woman, we are describing an attempt to do culture differently. Scholars have already identified a discourse of spirit in Larsen’s work. Caroline Rooney, a specialist in sub-Saharan African novels, has described Clare, and especially her association with flame, flowers, red and gold, as an essentially African figure of spirit animating the world and enabling transformation.37 So too, Merinda Simmons, in a discussion of Quicksand’s heroine Helga Crane, argues that an African-diasporic, “significantly corporeal religious expression . . . a kind of spiritual physicality” informs both Helga’s religious choices and her sexual expression. Simmons links Helga’s beautiful clothes and powerful magnetism with the Vodou loa Erzulie Freida, a goddess of sexual love usually depicted

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as “an exotic mulatta, adorned with elaborate jewelry and clothing.”38 Incarnating perfection for men, but cruel to women, Erzulie Freida makes women’s sexuality both praiseworthy and dangerous, in dual opposition to white and middle-class standards of chastity and passivity. Clare Kendry, with her “priceless” silks (196) and “madden[ing]” sardonic smile (239), if anything, more fully embodies this deity than Helga, emphasizing even in her death the radical ambivalence of sexual power. Rooney’s and Simmons’s readings of African and African-diasporic spiritual values in Passing have, on the one hand, little support in biographical or bibliographical scholarship. Larsen, as an educated woman, a librarian, a voracious reader, a black Harlemite, and a personal acquaintance of the important black woman anthropologist of Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston, could have had direct experience of non-Western spiritual practices, and was more than capable of researching them, but we have no direct evidence she did so. On the other, though, the spirits in question were always transmitted without the warrant of the dominant culture, and often secreted in its vehicles; such is the nature of the postslavery African diaspora, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that, if Erzulie Freida can manifest in Haiti, so too she can incarnate herself in Larsen’s novel. In any case, Larsen’s descriptions of Clare consistently attach powerful significance to clothing and jewelry, items traditionally discounted in Western culture as merely feminine, grossly material, and designed only to serve the low aim of seduction. (Clothing, for example, is a major means by which Coleman’s pimp retools black bodies into sexual fetishes.) Hutchinson has sensitively linked such references to Larsen’s mother’s work as a dressmaker, and Larsen’s own, lifelong practice of self-definition through exquisite clothing,39 but we can equally understand this emphasis, through the example of a syncretic, half-hidden goddess like Erzulie, as a form of positive fetishism, a linkage of blackness, materiality, sexuality, and spiritual meaning that does not reduce to profit, prostitution, or enslavement. Just as the dead are not simply gone, in other words, so too are beautiful, entrancing fetish items not only or finally for buying and selling. Moreover, this other fetishism manifests in surprising ways. Consider, for example, this penultimate glimpse of Clare, chatting at a boring tea party that Irene has thrown for a charity: “ . . . Isn’t she stunning today?” She was. Irene couldn’t remember ever having seen her look

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better. She was wearing a superlatively simple cinnamon-brown frock which brought out all her vivid beauty, and a little golden bowl of a hat. Around her neck hung a string of amber beads that would easily have made six or eight like one Irene owned. Yes, she was stunning. (220) Read from within the perspective of the black bourgeois novel, this can seem like a description of Irene’s catty jealousy at the Bellews’ wealth— that is, as merely an extension of the logic that makes women equivalent to things and demands that their sexuality be subjected to stringent patriarchal discipline. Read in terms of a creative fetishism, however, every part of this short description of Clare’s clothes is dense with other meanings; indeed, the description itself wittily transforms Western literary greatness into clothes. There is, at the most elementary level, Larsen’s balanced, sibilant prose (“superlatively simple cinnamon-brown”), often (like Clare’s dress) so understated as to slip below notice. Beyond that, though, “cinnamonbrown” recalls Countée Cullen’s incantatory “Spicy grove, cinnamon tree / What is Africa to me?”40—the novel’s epigraph, taken from his long poem “Heritage,” lines that call on African ancestors’ powers, and specifically their sexual potency and capacity for delight. Her “little golden bowl of a hat” calls on Henry James’s masterpiece The Golden Bowl, with its elaborate account of marriage in terms of class conflict and Oedipal investment. Yet it also sets James askew, making his central figure—the only-seemingly-perfect bowl, a wedding present—subject to Clare’s power, rather than she subject to it. The two references map Larsen’s literary ambitions as well, both identifying her novel with the Harlem Renaissance and naming its debt to the Jamesian psychological tradition. Most important are the beads—yellow, amber, they perhaps turn the pale, blonde Clare herself into those organic jewels, associated with Scandinavia, Ibsenian women, and Larsen’s own maternal origins. An early title for the autobiographical Quicksand was Cloudy Amber, in fact.41 But the beads’ greatest power is their reference to Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me.” To quote from Hurston: At certain times, I have no race. I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner,

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has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race or time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.42 Hurston’s declaration is, among other things, a serious discussion of the fetish as a god-under-construction. She takes real places and things as adequate vessels for the “cosmic,” and suggests that both identity and history are impermanent, subject to modification. Importantly, the power so invented is “feminine.” Hutchinson suggests a biographical connection between Larsen, Hurston, and Hurston’s essay,43 but even without that link, Zora’s hat is surely Clare’s hat, Zora’s beads surely Clare’s beads. “I have no race. I am me.” Clare may be dead, in other words, but she also survives beyond all traumatic effects, including the seemingly inexorable link between black trauma and white fetishism. She is in the process of becoming a goddess, a power in the world, separate from the time and place and people that made her, reducible to no moral or motive. She is.

5  /

“To Glorify the Negro”: Photographic Shock and Blackness in Carl Van Vechten’s Portraiture

Prologue: Photography and the Political Meaning of Shock Effects Photography, for important modern and contemporary cultural theorists, is strongly associated with psychological shock. Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” (1931) is the germinal text: “The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative mechanisms in the beholder.”1 Photography for Benjamin was one of many transformations of material culture (discussed at various points in his multifoliate oeuvre) that irrevocably changed the individual’s relationship to the passage of time by institutionalizing experiences of shock, including “the invention of the match and of the telephone, the technical transmission of information through newspapers and advertisements, and our bombardment in traffic and crowds.”2 Inaugurated in the mid-nineteenth century, but ongoing, accelerating, and multiplying, for Benjamin modern shock effects both “paralyze” conventional ways of making sense of the world and demand new critical practices. Photography has a special status within Benjamin’s general theory of modern life, however, because its shock effect is neither merely instrumental (as a telephone ringing: Brring!), nor simply eventual (as a traffic accident: Pow!). Rather, photographs (and film) “raise shock to a formal principle.”3 Photographs contain a repository of astounding information, such as the “fleeting,” true disposition of the human body in mid-stride,

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or the “secret” mathematical forms common to human architecture and plant structure.4 They fix images that exceed both the photographers’ intentions and the normal operations of the human eye, and this excess organizes the information that a photograph conveys. Such detailed information about the relationship between human intentions and the physical world, was not, of course, literally hidden. Formerly excluded by the nervous processes that weave perception into a continuous whole, it was rather rendered legible by means of an analytic technology. Benjamin’s theoretical account of photography, therefore, directly analogizes photographic criticism to psychoanalysis, suggesting that photographs reveal an “optical unconscious” to the attentive viewer.5 Importantly, such examination involves close attention, not to past events as such, but to the present’s retroactive interpretations of the past. His guiding precept is that photographs acquire their meaning in the moment of viewership, not in the moment (Click!) that an image was made. As Eduardo Cadava explains, Benjamin sees photography as history, history in his own, renovated sense of the word: an open interpretive crisis demanding responsible intellectual address.6 His goal is not, therefore, to order photographic events in a chronicle, but rather to use photography as a heuristic device for examining Western culture’s relationship with its ongoing, past-present-and-future modernity. The “Little History of Photography” describes, not a series of events related to or recorded in photographs, but rather a shift in human consciousness facilitated by photographic technologies and the new perceptions of eventuality they permit. Benjamin’s 1931 essay itself figures the retrospection it recommends, surveying photography in a centennial sweep.7 His discussion ranges from the original, competing claimants to the technology in the late 1830s, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépsce, whose “patenting difficulties” allowed the French state to “[assume] control of the enterprise and [make] it public, with compensation to the pioneers,”8 through such early 1930s milestones as August Sander’s typological project and the posthumous publication of Eugène Atget’s Parisian street scenes (each describing class stratification, and each appearing under the shadow of Fascism). Across these topics, Benjamin pays careful attention to the relationship between photographic viewership and governmentality, for the visual encounter with new, unexpected information about the past is always a moment of political theorization as well: it is always an opportunity to reconsider what the relationship between human desire and the material world has been, and what it should be.

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Though significant portions of the “Little History” note politically quietist uses of photographic imagery, particularly advertising, family albums, and some forms of fine-art photography,9 Benjamin hopes photography will help viewers replace conservative myths of continuity with an awareness of immediate events and violent ruptures, leading in turn to a renewed demand for justice: “It is no accident that Atget’s photographs have been likened to those of a crime scene. But isn’t every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isn’t it the task of the photographer—descendant of the augurs and haruspices—to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures?”10 Benjamin ends the essay only a few lines after these rhetorical questions, but the inference is inescapable: in history, in photography, in the “optical unconscious,” lies the future, the truth, the revolution, waiting to be discovered. Such is the famous Benjaminian optimism. As the anthropologist Alan Klima points out, however, “the political meaning of [photographic] shock effects is a complex subject,” particularly when the photograph’s revelatory force is framed as a moral imperative and directed at a broad community of viewers.11 Closing on the assertion that another world is not only possible, but already visible, Benjamin elides such questions as: Who, exactly, shall see differently in and through photographic shocks? What specific “crimes,” what hidden injustices, can photography reveal? Is “shock” necessarily productive of innovative political consciousness, or can it be recuperated to conservative ends? This chapter addresses these questions through a reading of portrait photographs of African Americans by the lesser-known, indeed, historically exorbitant, gay white New Yorker Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten’s body of work is peculiarly suited to an interrogation of the political value of shock effects, both because Van Vechten’s portraits themselves school the viewer to seek out the optical unconscious, and because the photographer’s avowed intention was to generate a “counter-archive,” in Shawn Michelle Smith’s terminology,12 a record of black culture intended to contest both cultural and institutional racism. Van Vechten’s enormous, idiosyncratic oeuvre is by no means an uncomplicated resource for antiracist politics and theory, since it both defers explicit political advocacy and indulges forms of humor and eroticism integrally related to racialist and racist ideologies. But his ceaselessly improvisatory method deserves recognition as an effort to enable active photographic viewership as a form of resistance. Further, Van Vechten’s portraits integrally relate the “political meaning of shock effects” to the interpenetration of psychic trauma and public

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identification in the portrait genre. Photographic shock in his work is neither an objective trace of reality (as Benjamin implies), nor a purely subjective event (as some later critics, most notably Susan Sontag, have argued). It is not even associated with a call to witness psychic or historical trauma as such. Rather, Van Vechten mandates a serialized, segmented form of viewership, in which each image both invokes and defers the intimacy and personal identification that domestic portraiture conventionally elicits. His photographic ethos proceeded both from a signature style and from his remarkable strategy of bypassing both fine arts and popular markets for photography, instead donating thousands of prints to academic libraries and museum archives, where they would be available indefinitely. Under these conditions, viewership inevitably becomes a reiterative, all-but-endless experience of dislocation and discontinuity, whose connection to the racialization of the portraits’ black sitters is indirect, complex, centered around the enjoyment and celebration of black culture, and implicitly opposed to schematic accounts of black suffering or “cultural trauma.”13 Van Vechten’s project also reflects a queer sense of the “political” that Benjamin might not have recognized, one that emphasizes renewed and expansive networks of personal relationships as an alternative to, or even a correction of, communal identifications or collective movements. His belief that individualized photographic experiences of aesthetic intensity and repeated rupture could address and work-through a national trauma as massive as anti-black racism can be, as a recent critic has noted of his oeuvre generally, “hard to take seriously”;14 in particular, Van Vechten’s emphasis on pleasure in and connoisseurship of black cultural production can seem irresponsible, or worse, another invitation to racial fetishization. Yet the absence of political melancholy in Van Vechten’s portraiture makes for a subtly compelling new grounds for trauma theory. Acknowledging trauma, his project suggests, need not always entail a (conservative) project of (purely discursive) guilt and reparation; it can also be culturally and psychically generative.15 A preliminary section of this essay will further investigate “shock” in Benjamin and in his influential follower Susan Sontag. The major portion will discuss Van Vechten’s images, their institutional life and various audiences, and their involvement with the project of racial identity in the mid-twentieth-century United States.

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Shock as Structure: Photographic Criticism, Trauma Studies, and Oedipality As a theoretical term, “shock,” especially when Benjamin invites us to read photographic “shock experiences” in psychoanalytic terms, is already very like “trauma” in its undeniable, irruptive force, and in its important relationship to retrospective reorderings of experience. Indeed, the identification of traumatic experience with photographic and filmic works is axiomatic in trauma studies, particularly in discussions of twentieth-century wars, genocides, and other intersections of traumatic experience with mass media and state power. However, Benjamin also suggests that photographic “shock experience” is equally available to every viewer, at any time, in the absence of traumatizing events, and divorced from any conscious interest in trauma, victimization, or the attempt to do justice. Hence photographs’ political instrumentality: they communicate across experiential and social barriers, and even across the boundaries of the subject as such, bringing messages for which no one is prepared. Benjamin’s optimistic sense of photographic shock as an element of modern citizenship is difficult to reconcile either with trauma studies proper or with the highly influential photographic criticism of Susan Sontag. Sontag’s 1976 On Photography was an explicitly Benjaminian project, even closing with “A Brief Anthology of Quotations [Homage to W.B.],”16 a selection of short passages on photography assembled in imitation of the Arcades Project, but it does not hold out any political hope for, or by means of, photography. Rather, Sontag suggests (long before the constitution of trauma studies as a field) that photographs cannot be fully experienced. The medium, in her reading, inevitably consigns its subjects to a deathlike sphere of abstraction and aestheticization, and hence infinitely defers the viewer’s ethical engagement with the content of any given exposure. To some extent, Sontag’s psychological account of the act of viewing photographs accords with Benjamin’s, since it can include a moment of shock, or “negative epiphany” in her terminology. “Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously,” she writes, describing an encounter, at the age of twelve, with documentary images of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.17 However, Sontag disclaims that “cut,” asserting that the interpretive system it instantiates is degenerate: “Most photographs do not keep their emotional charge. . . . Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most

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amateurish, at the level of art.”18 In other words, photographic shockeffects are not the property of any particular image, but rather a feature of viewership. No special information is conveyed by a particularly disturbing photograph; its “shock” is finally driven by the viewer’s psychic disposition. On Photography’s analysis illuminates an important aspect of Benjamin’s original essay: his account of photographic shock is inhabited by a certain comfort with disaster, a developing familiarity with the supposedly “radical” break. As one of his most extensive photographic readings reveals, a seemingly spontaneous desire for photographic evidence of disastrous events actually follows a familiar script. Or you turn up the picture of Dauthendey the photographer, the father of the poet, from the time of his engagement to that woman whom he found one day, shortly after the birth of her sixth child, lying in the bedroom of his Moscow house with her veins slashed. Here she can be seen with him. He seems to be holding her, but her gaze passes him by, absorbed in an ominous distance. Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will realize to what extent opposites touch, here too: the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us.19 This picture’s “shock” is the fact that it has caught, in Benjamin’s reading, a “secret and fleeting image,” the unnamed wife’s suicidal depression, signaled by her escaping glance. But this is a secret unlike the more neutrally scientific examples mentioned elsewhere in the essay (enlargements and ever-briefer exposure times that bend perceptions of space and time). It is not simply that the human eye doesn’t catch her posture unaided; indeed, over what would have been a fairly long exposure, her attitude would have been readily apprehended by any bystander. Rather, a complex assemblage of social codes (including, very likely, early portrait photographers’ conventional instruction to sitters, to look above and beyond the lens so as to avoid a “ ‘dolorous, dissatisfied’ ” expression20) fail to perform as intended. Instead of heralding a happy marriage, they forecast suicide. This is the image’s “magical value”: its very conventionality delivers, after patient “immersion” in the image itself and in the historical task, evidence of the traumatic. Benjamin’s reading of this double portrait was, in his own account, occasioned by a kind of compulsion, a need to search the past for evidence

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of the future, “an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency . . . to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”21 He thus closely mimics the Freudian analytic of a “primal scene.” In his most famous explication of the primal scene, the case study “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” Freud postulated that his analysand, subject to compulsions that repeated some unknown traumatic experience, had observed his parents’ sexual act as an infant, but at a later age retrospectively reinterpreted that unconscious memory as both a disastrous scene of paternal violence and maternal suffering and as the truth of his own origin. Thus, an ordinary event, incomprehensible to a baby, was belatedly and retroactively (nachträglich) given a meaning that was both necessary (that is where I came from) and traumatic (I cannot stand to remember that!). Benjamin’s analysis is likewise Oedipally located, between a powerful father (“Dauthendey, the photographer and father of the poet”), and a suffering mother, and it too implicates the viewer, even constitutes him as a critic. The difference is simply that the repressed memory which psychoanalysis posits as a necessary fiction—Freud is very clear that there exists no objective support for his interpolation22—has been replaced with a physically extant image, the photograph. Both the photographic shock-effect described in this reading of the Dauthendeys’ engagement portrait and the primal scene proper are what Dominick La Capra calls “structural” traumas: psychic events “related to (even correlated with) transhistorical absence (absence of/at the origin) and appear[ing] in different ways in all societies and all lives.” La Capra is deeply concerned to maintain the distinction between structural trauma and what he calls (in a non-Benjaminian sense) “historical” trauma, the trauma attending specific, material, verified events. He warns that an uncritical conflation of the two can lead to “fetishized and totalizing narratives that deny the trauma that called them into existence by prematurely (re)turning to the pleasure principle, harmonizing events, and often recuperating the past in terms of uplifting messages or optimistic, self-serving scenarios.”23 Though Benjamin’s essay does not have recourse to any “uplifting messages,” and though it primarily addresses quotidian and domestic scenarios (as opposed to war, state violence, and genocide, La Capra’s primary concerns), it undoubtedly annexes this and other readings of photographic shock to an optimistic account of modern consciousness, one that privileges the possibilities of new modes of perception over and against awareness of violence. And surely Benjamin’s

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description of his “irresistible urge” to look at the photograph implies a drive toward satisfaction. La Capra and Sontag thus seek to enforce an uncrossable boundary between the individual, affective response, and a collective, objective political sphere. Yet Benjamin’s “Little History” is delimited, not by the formal qualities of the photographic medium, nor by a chronicle of photographic practices and technologies, nor even by any specific series of events subject to photographic inscription, but rather by photography as a constituent of modern political subjection, and especially of class stratification and class conflict. It is about nothing but the ways that photography exceeds the distinction between personal and public meanings, between psyche and history. As Allan Sekula has argued, in portrait photography “the private moment of sentimental individuation, the look at the frozen gaze-of-the-loved-one, [is] shadowed by two other, more public looks: a look up, at one’s “betters,” and a look down, at one’s inferiors.”24 Whether domestic and affectionate (as in family photographs), or public and disciplinary (as in the police mug shot, on one hand, and mass-mediated images of the wealthy and powerful, on the other), portraiture—displaying its subjects’ faces, listing their names, and encoding their class, gender, and race—articulates a social and political order, and gives that order material representation in the form of an archive. Benjamin’s quasi-Freudian reading of the Dauthendeys’ engagement portrait thus both explicates the psychic mechanism by which portrait photography situates viewers within an unjust social order, and explores the politico-theoretical possibilities inherent in the photographic archive’s capaciousness, its power to enfold and integrate every photograph regardless of content or intent. The critic is, on the one hand, (Oedipally) attached to this portrait, and to the identificatory project of portrait photography generally. But on the other, his very attachment proceeds from photographic shock, from the minute, yet inescapable, failures of conventionality that signal the possibility of broader changes in political life. He in fact links photographic portraiture to his most intense political wishes, arguing (with reference to August Sander’s typological project) that “sudden shifts of power such as are now overdue in our society can make the ability to read facial types a matter of vital importance. Whether one is of the Left or the Right, one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one’s provenance. And one will have to look at others the same way.”25 “[Getting] used to being looked at,” as a pragmatic public practice, means not defining photographic viewership as inevitably incomplete, à la Sontag, but rather mounting a “counter-

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archive that reconfigures the contours of institutional knowledge.”26 It means accepting others’ irrational and partial “readings” of portraiture as an integral element of political life, as well as taking up the task of influencing those readings, and even creating and compiling physiognomic images as a means of resistance.27 Carl Van Vechten’s encyclopedic portrait project, which encompassed (but was not limited to) a politico-cultural quest “to glorify the Negro,”28 was deliberately conceived as just such a counter-archive. The broad range of Van Vechten’s work, as well as his explicit engagement in a politics of increasing visibility and expansive relationality, will allow us to further examine Benjamin’s belief that portrait photography held liberatory political potential. Examining these portraits also demands, however, a certain shift. Though largely uninterested in the class stratification that preoccupied Benjamin, Sander, Atget, and others, Van Vechten’s portraits are powerfully ambivalent documents of racial identity, racial violence, and racism. Particularly because of the association between African American identity and dark skin color in the United States, the relationships among photographic shock, the political possibilities of the photographic archive, and the public identities of photographer, subjects, and viewers require a different articulation here.

Van Vechten and the Optical Unconscious Carl Van Vechten had already had a prolific career as a novelist, dance and theater critic, notorious queer, cat person, saloniste, bon vivant, and semi-official patron to writers and visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance when he began photographing publicly noted friends, acquaintances, and strangers in his New York apartment. Between 1932, when a friend introduced him to the 35mm Leica29—a handheld, pointand-shoot camera that used cheap film, the very “smaller and smaller” instrument whose “fleeting and secret images” Benjamin heralded in 1931—and his death in 1964, Van Vechten took portraits of writers of all stripes, painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians (both classical and popular), opera singers, actors (both stage and screen), dancers, choreographers, composers, journalists, athletes, academics, politicians, diplomats, activists, editors, heiresses, directors, royalty, sailors, strippers, beautiful young men, miscellaneous theater people, lovers, and personal friends. Building on an already-extensive personal and professional network among African American public figures, he also made a special effort to acquire “Negroes prominent in the Arts and Sciences” as

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subjects.30 Most prints were stamped, dated, and inscribed with the sitter’s name, for Van Vechten understood himself to be making an important historical record, a kind of public family album for the edification and enjoyment of future generations. Van Vechten exhibited little during his lifetime, never published a major collection of work, and (possessed of independent means) virtually never sold individual pieces. Many prints (and all negatives and slides) he simply archived immediately, at first in his New York apartment, and later at institutions such as Yale’s Beinecke Library. Consequently, neither the scholarly attention nor the financial value that has since accrued to some of his contemporaries, such as Man Ray, Walker Evans, George Platt Lynes, and Minor White (all of these, incidentally, his acquaintances or friends), has attended Van Vechten. His work is more often cited than critically considered. Indeed, the sheer volume of his output daunts critical endeavor; at least twenty thousand prints are divided among forty major institutions,31 and the several coffee-table books published since his death reproduce only a tiny fraction of the total output.32 Yet some of Van Vechten’s images have achieved iconic status. A portrait of Zora Neale Hurston laughing, with a white feather on her hat, became an element in a U.S. postage stamp issued in 2003, and his work is frequently used for author photos in academic editions (for example, on the cover of the 2007 Norton Critical Edition of Nella Larsen’s Passing). Van Vechten’s signature portrait style is usually instantly identifiable: a praxis of extreme artifice and resourceful improvisation, encompassing patterned backdrops (usually printed cloth or crinkled Mylar), a very compressed picture space, props, furniture, costumes and dramatic lighting, deliberate anachronisms and visual puns, and often a dynamic, animated sitter. While Van Vechten himself, like his friend Gertrude Stein, credited some of his anti-realistic gestures to the influence of Matisse,33 the art historian Thomas Waugh has also suggested that this obviously camp-indebted sensibility reflects “gay distrust of the more severe abstractionist modes of High Modernism,”34 which tended toward a universalism that in practice excluded many. John Raeburn, meanwhile, points out that Van Vechten’s early work constituted a kind of engaged critique of the 1930’s vogue for celebrity portraiture, epitomized in Edward Steichen’s work for Vanity Fair.35 The careful cultivation of particularity is the overarching goal of Van Vechten’s studio environment, for while it rigorously excluded the contingencies of the larger world, it also worked to emphasize and heighten an intimate sphere fully inhabited by the individual sitters, whose unique

figure 1. Portrait of Peter Abrahams by Carl Van Vechten. (Courtesy Van Vechten Trust and Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

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physicality, gestures, clothing, and affect are often framed as repetitions of or variants on their emphatically artificial surroundings, as in this portrait of the South African novelist Peter Abrahams (see Figure 1). The backdrop and his elbow echo each other, giving an impression of overall rhythm and movement that tends both to re-present the person as an element in a formal composition and to stage that composition as itself fleeting or serendipitous, lively, alive. Notably, Van Vechten’s approach to the markers of class that Benjamin, Sander, and others considered central to the political effect of portraiture was relentlessly anti-realistic. A lifelong disdainer of Marxism as ugly, joyless, and inhumane,36 Van Vechten instead deliberately evoked the artificial Victorian portrait studios, “with their draperies and palm trees, their tapestries and easels—which occupied so ambiguous a place between execution and representation, between torture chamber and throne room,” as Benjamin derisively describes them.37 Like those nineteenth-century commercial studios, his work privileges self-invention over self-documentation, resorting to costumes, performative tableaux, and allegorical props to allow maximum fluidity for the sitters’ identities. Producing each portrait as a saturated field of distinct, yet related figures and movements, some meticulously planned and some apparently spurof-the-moment, Van Vechten sought to control, exploit, and promulgate an intensified version of the Benjaminian “optical unconscious,” almost an optical paradis artificiel, where every element not only deferred social conventionality, but suggested the possibility of escaping it entirely. Interestingly, albeit problematically for contemporary sensibilities, Van Vechten frequently staged his portraits of “Negroes” such that the sitters’ racial identity organizes other aspects of the image, enforcing visual links between black sitters’ bodies and the props and backgrounds surrounding them. For example, the black dancer Carmen de Lavallade is playfully compared to the black crow in her printed backdrop (see Figure 2). This image demands that viewers recognize that constellation of racist and anti-racist meanings in and through the photograph—the visual confusion of foreground and background, living person and mass-produced cloth, cultural intervention and cultural surround. Importantly, those meanings include traumatic eventualities—the quotidian dehumanization and terroristic threats of the Jim Crow régime—even though no actual violence is depicted in the image. Thus, the viewer, like Benjamin before the Dauthendeys’ engagement portrait, is subject to a certain Nachträglichkeit, a certain retrospective reordering of meaning, wherein the innocuous must be

figure 2. Portrait of Carmen de Lavallade by Carl Van Vechten. (Courtesy Van Vechten Trust and Philadelphia Museum of Art)

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re-read as a sign of the traumatic. Unlike a more conventional “family” picture, however, the image refers, not to Oedipal arrangements, but to public racism and racial violence. Van Vechten’s portraits also encompass a range of subjective responses beyond the pathos that Benjamin located in a nineteenth-century domestic portrait, and these other responses are also associated with more complicated, and ambivalent, readings of racial violence. The de Lavallade portrait, for example, both provokes laughter and declines to provide any moral guardrails for that laughter, offering viewers no secure means to identify with an anti-racist viewpoint and disidentify with racism (or vice versa). Just as there is no firm distinction between foreground and background, so too there is none between the individual photograph and the culture that supports it, including the racist elements of that culture. Similarly, the dancing black figures in the eighteenth-century-style printed chintz hanging behind Claude McKay (Figure 3), dressed in rags amid fields, are undoubtedly slaves. Their citation in the Jamaican-born, black Marxist poet and novelist’s portrait could indicate primitivist theories of black creativity, an ironic critique of the same, or indeed a deep ambivalence unable to choose between these options. Such portraits force acknowledgment that, as Michael North has recently argued, “the optical unconscious of so many [modernists] . . . seems to have been occupied by a figure with dark skin,” but they pointedly decline to offer analysis of that figure.38 The most baroque of Van Vechten’s explorations of power relationships between black and white individuals appear in a series of privatelycirculated homoerotic nudes taken in the early 1940s (and studied in detail by the art historian James Smalls39), which deal extensively in scenes of torture, bondage, and mastery. Though many of these tableaux invert conventional expectations by subjecting a white model to pain and captivity at the hands of a black model, several such nudes, as well as many of the portraits (see, e.g., Figure 4) and Van Vechten’s private collage-scrapbooks,40 indisputably circulate primitivist tropes of black simplicity and sexual availability. As Smalls argues, the nudes firmly link homoeroticism with cross-racial desires, at once analogizing each form of transgression to the other and suggesting that their simultaneity heightens erotic pleasure. Van Vechten’s male nudes defy certain conventions of mass-market pornography, for example, never showing erections, but they undoubtedly annex public chronicles of traumatic history to immediate private pleasures, while refusing conventional moral discourse entirely.

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figure 3. Portrait of Claude McKay by Carl Van Vechten. (Courtesy Van Vechten Trust and Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Resistance to narrative, chronology, and public moral standards is, in fact, one of the defining characteristics of Van Vechten’s photographic archive, making it “counter” to even some well-known African American counter-archives. Unlike the folios of frontal and profile portraits of middle-class African Americans assembled by W. E. B. Du Bois for

figure 4. Portrait of Feral Benga by Carl Van Vechten. (Courtesy Van Vechten Trust and Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

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display at the Paris Exposition in 1900,41 Van Vechten’s portraits makes no claim to scientific objectivity. Unlike his contemporary, the black Harlem professional photographer James Van DerZee, Van Vechten’s portraiture was not linked to public events in the Harlem community, such as graduations, lodge meetings, parades, Sunday-school picnics, or political rallies, or even to the black bourgeoisie as such. While many Van Vechten portraits commemorate specific productions of operas, plays, and ballets, such as this portrait from a series commemorating Ethel Waters’s role in the Broadway production of Cabin in the Sky (see Figure 5), most were shot in his private studio rather than in a public venue, and they tend to segment the act of performance into discrete moments of expressive intensity, rather than developing the iconic star power of particular performers. His work systematically defers all institutional contexts, in other words, seeking rather to always inhabit its own sphere of exceptionality, genius, and artifice. Van Vechten’s guiding assumption, to borrow Scott Herring’s description of his literary criticism, was that “exoticism is also a form of realism”42—or, more broadly, that the singular is as worthy of representation as the typical, perhaps more so.

Picture after Picture: The Portraits Viewed Serially Though his dogged pursuit of subjects and meticulous filing of prints seemingly held out the promise of a comprehensive archive, Van Vechten’s actual production, distribution, and storage practices were very flexible. He seems to have both expected and intended his audience to encounter his portraits individually, in an arbitrary sequence, in the context of a personal relationship with the photographer, or according to their own peculiar interests and preferences. Similarly, he also embraced his own peculiarities and preferences, readily excluding those he disliked from the project, no matter how great their reputations.43 Meanwhile, some desired subjects, such as Ralph Ellison, emphatically refused to sit.44 Van Vechten created many institutional and informal opportunities for others to view the portraits. While his works’ entrance into libraries and museum collections (often by means of personal introduction to librarians and curators) certainly reflects multiple forms of privilege, it also bespeaks his effort to ensure stable, permanent access for students, scholars, and the general public, and more broadly to influence the photographic archive as such. Undertaken at a time when photography had relatively little purchase on art museums, galleries, or high culture generally,

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figure 5. Portrait of Ethel Waters by Carl Van Vechten. (Courtesy Van Vechten Trust and Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Van Vechten’s institutional donations both reflected nineteenth-century notions of “the terrain of the photographable . . . as roughly congruent with that of knowledge in general,”45 and demanded that moneyed bastions of cultural privilege pay attention to people and artworks they had previously ignored. For example, Van Vechten’s portraits of black sitters

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were part of the James Weldon Johnson Collection, his unprecedented and unparalleled bequest (inaugurated in 1941) of manuscripts, letters, artwork, and documents related to twentieth-century African American culture to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.46 Making the donation “principally because they have nothing along this line,”47 Van Vechten hoped (quite prematurely) that the material would encourage Yale to found a “chair of Negro life and culture.”48 At the same time, though, personal and private networks of viewership existed alongside, and perhaps even overshadowed, Van Vechten’s institutional archives. The Johnson collection is generally accepted as authoritative, for example, particularly since it includes Van Vechten’s negatives, color work, scrapbooks, and homoerotic studies, materials not duplicated in any other collection. But his lover of many years, sometime lighting assistant, and lifelong friend Mark Lutz individually received thousands of Van Vechten prints across the three decades of the project. Lutz bequeathed over 12,000 to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (though an unknown number of homoerotic works were also destroyed on his instructions49), and it is not clear whether these duplicate the Yale holdings or not. (As of this writing, both the Philadelphia Museum and the Beinecke have restricted access to their collections due to renovations.) Van Vechten also freely distributed postcards and 8x10 prints among the friends, friends-of-friends, family, lovers, acquaintances, and strangers with whom he maintained a vast correspondence, selecting works that would appeal to the recipient and sometimes fulfilling specific requests. Having begun working in color as early as 1940, he also sometimes showed color slides in his home.50 His work was at least as much a private currency among friends as it was a public, politically motivated archive. This dissemination pattern deprives critics and scholars of accustomed standards of authenticity and authority, even as it also brings others to our attention. Moreover, while a full survey of extant works falls well outside the scope of the present study, there is an uncanny similarity between the photographer’s original, idiosyncratic means of distributing his works, and the fragmented yet broad access to Van Vechten portraits afforded by the World Wide Web today. Any student of Van Vechten’s work today can move easily and rapidly across hundreds of official reproductions, and many unofficial or semi-official reproductions, with a fine disregard for hierarchies of canon, monetary value, and the sitters’ relative notoriety or prestige, in images posted by the Library of Congress, the Beinecke, and the New York Public Library, as well as on eBay, in manuscript dealers’ catalogues, and on private websites.51 The

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Web thus both intensifies and etherializes the trans-institutional and interpersonal networks that originally distributed and granted access to the portraits. Though he could not have anticipated cyberspace, in other words, Van Vechten’s archival practices have a cybernetic character, since they allow viewers to formulate and direct the series of images, and to integrate them with larger associative networks. Blake Stimson has recently described a similar pattern with reference to The Family of Man (1955), an international traveling exhibition curated by the professional fashion and celebrity photographer Edward Steichen.52 Family of Man, a Cold War document par excellence, turned Benjamin’s Left vision of politicized photography to decidedly conservative ends, using portraiture to demonstrate (or invent) a cross-cultural and trans-racial common human experience; photographs by professional photographers were chosen to represent visibly distinct classes, cultures, and races, and then blown up and grouped according to a narrative of sexual reproduction (couples kissing, childbirth, babies, children, etc.). Subjects were not identified by name. Like Van Vechten’s disseminatory project, the exhibit invited viewers to choose their own path or pattern of viewership by means of an innovative exhibition design that eliminated both conventional artist/title captions and gallery-style, standardized framing and hanging. Stimson names this self-directed, but institutionally limited, experience of one photograph after another (after another, after another) “seriality,” and he argues that its effect on viewers is distinct from, and more important than, that of any particular photograph. Unlike Benjamin, however, Stimson finds no new opportunities for political thought in photographic experience. The Family of Man offered its audience a continuum of discrete moments of pleasure, of excitation and release, but those moments did not have the historical frame that would allow them to endure, to grow, to develop into sustained and negotiated political and social relationships. The beholder was thus asked to move on to the next photograph and the next, “like a starving man after bread,” as Freud says, ever eliminating the possibility of accumulation, of building a shared history, of negotiating a sustained sympathetic relationship with the other. As such . . . the exhibition inhibited the production of political identity, of identity based on difference, and as such inhibited all political relations.53 Stimson’s analysis is not unlike that offered by Sontag, since it likewise

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posits that photographs foster viewers’ inability to sustain ethical relationships to those photographed. Yet where Sontag stated simply that people are inadequate to the Benjaminian historical task, Stimson depicts an audience enticed outside of both politics and history by a long series of photographs. Like Steichen’s show, Van Vechten’s work asked viewers to encounter individual images only as members of a series, and always with a gap in between (indeed, one of the major effects of Van Vechten’s signature style is to suggest that the image is both self-contained and discontinuous with the larger world). It also reflected a similar, broadly liberal ambition to educate viewers by exposing them to the culturally and racially unfamiliar. But there were important differences. Van Vechten’s viewers were (and remain) primarily private viewers, individuals at home or in libraries, whose viewership was driven by scholarship or personal preferences. Moreover, Van Vechten’s sitters were usually public figures of one sort or another, and always identified by name; they could not be rendered as types in the same way as the deliberately anonymized people of the Steichen exhibit. Importantly, this specificity means that black sitters’ racial identity cannot be willed away in an identification with their gendered or social performances; they are never simply “people,” but always “Negroes prominent in the Arts and Sciences.” Viewers experience the Van Vechten portraits as they might meet persons face-to-face: one at a time, in informal networks, via serendipitous associations, without any possibility of abstraction or generalization, and without foreseeable end to the series. Stimson’s serial viewers gradually abdicate a politics of difference in favor of the continual renewal of their own identity, but Van Vechten’s portraits are always already unlike one’s own quotidian being. Thus, the portraits, as Scott Herring has recently argued in reference to Van Vechten’s fiction, “advanced an alternate model of sociality removed from uplifting racial and social propaganda . . . an ideal of anticommunitarian contact beyond the boundaries of sexual—and . . . racial—gatekeeping of any sort.”54 The “physiognomic” science Benjamin so admired in Sander breaks open into a delirium of examples (photographs of, not one or several representative figures, but every possible “Negro” artist and intellectual), and the narrative of progress that founds so many liberal political projects (including Steichen’s Family of Man) is simply ignored. The work insists that we need not be alike in order to make “contact.” As Herring makes clear, this vision of unbounded relationality is a specifically queer (counter) politics, dedicated to thwarting and evading

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all sociology and deliberately seeking to “[become] unintelligible to prying popular or academic audiences.”55 Portraiture, indeed, represents a particularly rich ground for “becoming unintelligible,” since the genre conventionally equates the representation to the person’s social existence. Gertrude Stein recognized as much when she dedicated her 1934 collection Portraits and Prayers to Van Vechten. “To Carl,” she wrote, “who knows what a portrait is because he makes them and is them.”56 Much remains to be written on the relationship between Stein’s abstract word portraits, which included two studies of Van Vechten, and Van Vechten’s photographs, which included important portraits of Stein and Alice Toklas. It seems clear, however, that Stein understood her friend’s work to be similarly experimental, endorsed the idea that a portrait circulates in the world as a person might, and playfully acknowledged the photographer’s identification with portraiture. What might “becoming unintelligible” mean, however, across different kinds of social difference—particularly the racial difference that Van Vechten, far more than Stein, took as an important subject? Images such as Figure 1, or Van Vechten’s cast portraits from the 1934 production of Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, stringently divorce the phenotypic signs of blackness from realistic contexts. At the same time, however, Van Vechten’s portraits also consistently associate blackness with expressive intensity. Such primitivist ideas were typical of the period—Virgil Thomson cast Four Saints, for example, entirely with black performers, in the belief that black performance styles would best engage the opera’s spiritual themes and Steinian wordplay57—but they considerably complicate the relationships among identity, political imagination, and shock experience in the portraits. To what extent do Van Vechten’s images extend the option of “becoming unintelligible” to black sitters? To what extent are his works finally subject to the ideological (and in the final instance, traumatic, because so radically reductive) notion of an unambiguous racial mark? The remainder of this chapter looks at one portrait in detail in order to examine the presuppositions, requirements and prospects of Van Vechten’s photographic management of race. This reading is by no means a conclusive statement on Van Vechten and the racial trauma-politics that inform his work; quite the opposite. It seeks instead to clarify the political and epistemological stakes, as well as the opportunities, of the unique form of photographic viewership that Van Vechten sought to foster.

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One Image Figure 6 is a portrait of Billie Holiday taken by Van Vechten in 1949; the print belongs to the Library of Congress, while a more tightly-cropped (and hence more conventional) version is available through Yale’s digital archive. The sitting was explicitly arranged in order to document her artistic presence for the James Weldon Johnson Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale, and later memorialized in Van Vechten’s 1962 Esquire article, which emphasized the photographer’s emotional connection to a subject he had previously only admired from afar. By that account, her sitting lasted all night, moving from stiff formality through a series of highly expressive clothed, draped, and semi-nude poses, captured in both color slide film and standard black-and-white. This particular image, however, shows the singer dressed in a “plain grey suit and facial expression equally depressing,”58 early in the evening. The exposure thus captures a moment of doubt, the subject’s perhaps, regarding the process of being entered into an archive, and the photographer’s, about achieving the photographic document he desires, one that would convey “inspiration.”59 Placed before several overlapping backdrops, holding her shoulders high and her elbows close in a stiff posture of ladylike containment, Holiday holds up a sculpture of a black woman’s head. This object is owned by the Beinecke, but no provenance is known. Made of wood and opening across the carved hair like a box, it may be a historical or recent artwork from Africa or a Western imitation of African art. It was used as a prop in many other Van Vechten portraits as well, including a nude series of Pearl Bailey, a paired set of portraits (one of a white model, and one of a black model) from the homoerotic series, and a tender seated portrait of an elderly Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), author of Out of Africa. Other Western and African or African-influenced sculptures, particularly busts and small, full-figure statuettes, dolls, and marionettes, were used as props across Van Vechten’s work. Some are works by black artists he patronized, such as Leslie Garland Bolling and Richmond Barthé, while many come from the personal collection of kitsch, reproductions, and anonymous Victoriana held jointly by Van Vechten and his wife, the actress Fania Marinoff. Tableaux contrasting live models with idealized sculptures are as old as photography itself,60 but the specific comparison between a woman and a fragmentary or partial sculpture is strongly associated with Surrealist portraits, nude studies, and fashion photography from the 1920s

figure 6. Portrait of Billie Holiday by Carl Van Vechten. (Courtesy Van Vechten Trust and Library of Congress. Billie HolidayTM is a trademark of the Estate of Louis McKay, licensed by CMG Worldwide. www.CMGWorldwide. com.)

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and 1930s. As photographers like Man Ray and Paul Outerbridge doubtless intended, the motif strongly evokes classic Freudian accounts of fetishism, which emphasize the fear of castration prompted in men by women’s genitalia, and the translation of that fear into an intense desire for objects or discrete body parts that both symbolize and disavow the original moment of revelation.61 Such photographs also conform to the Western artistic convention that women are subject to artistic representation, and men artists, but they reread that convention in perverse terms, at once pointing out the fetishistic translation of women into things and nominating the photograph itself as a superior fetish. Moreover, such photographic fetishism often had a specific engagement with racial blackness. Man Ray’s iconic 1924 portrait “Noire et blanche,”62 for example, paired the white Frenchwoman Kiki de Montparnasse with a tourist-trade, Baule-style mask made of dark wood,63 in a smooth reiteration of a well-established modern identification of the primitive with psychological and representational limits. A (white) woman, the photograph implies, is always already a little bit terrifying and castrating and castrated—that is, she’s always already a little bit black. Van Vechten, however, reworks the Surrealist visual grammar in pursuit of greater indirection, complexity, and ironic self-reference. Though his portrait also includes a glamorous woman, an African or Africanderived object, and an implicitly male gaze, it’s less clear what imagined relation to sexual and racial difference this photograph prompts in its viewers. Given its fetishistic antecedents, however, it seems clear that those politics must concern themselves with psychic trauma and with the subject/object distinction. The bust draws our eye both for formal reasons and because it so clearly indicates racial and cultural difference to Western audiences. It is stylistically consonant with those aspects of African and African-derived art traditions appropriated by modernism and the discourse of the primitive, though its material and construction are different—for example, its scale, short neck, and absence of shoulders evokes Benin “bronzes,” brass funerary busts which were some of the first West African objects to circulate widely in Europe as art (following the British colonial sack of Benin City). Similarly, its smooth surface, abstracted hair and earrings, and classicized, symmetrical features (visible in several full-on photographs not reproduced here) resemble the anti-naturalist idiom of items like the Baule-style mask in the Man Ray photograph. That Africanist, racial blackness is also doubled by its “blackness” in the optical sense, however, since the object is the darkest area in the photograph,

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and likewise the visual center of the composition, with all movements, shadows, and forms spiraling around it—or rather around the space just before its eyes, as if to suggest (contra Lacan) that the inert object has vision and could, if it chose, look back at us. The bust’s double task in the image, then, is not only to draw our attention to the existence of an “optical unconscious” that finds un-looked-for significance in such eventualities as the sculpture’s tone and placement in the frame, but also to emphasize how culturally and historically inflected that “unconscious” is. This is particularly important given the absence of cultural and historical awareness that usually accompanied modernist primitivism. Unable to read them, Westerners instead identified African works with the unfathomable and anti-realistic, with experiences of psychic extremity or fantasies of extreme violence. Such “Africanism”64 identified a continent with the traumatic even while it confined trauma to a depoliticized, aesthetic sphere. From the perspective of Westerners’ twinned cultural illiteracy and political disavowal, in other words, an African art-object is interesting—and useful as a sexual fetish—precisely because it does not resemble anything known, has no politics, and relegates violence to the psychic sphere. Given the centuries-long disasters of the slave trade and European colonization of Africa, the irony is startling. In Van Vechten’s studio, however, as we have seen, everything is like something, representation’s limit is a punctual return rather than a threatening extremity, and politics, though often given over to absurdist stunts, are never absent. Hence, the bust is not contrasted to, but integrated with, his exposition of his sitter. Holiday’s brushed-back hair evokes the sculpture’s smoothness, her polished fingernails the sculpture’s ears and earrings, her lack of expression the bust’s even calm. Furthermore, neither Holiday nor the bust is sexualized beyond indicators of gender such as jewelry and hairstyle, in a direct contradiction of Surrealist convention and an implicit refusal of broader imperatives to commodification. Holiday seems to be, not “being looked at,” but herself looking, captured in the process of examining the bust, peering around as if to look into its eyes, in a gesture that both demonstrates agency and intelligence and furthers the compositional implication that the bust is itself potentially alive. This is particularly significant given Holiday’s status, then and now, as an icon whose image alone holds great financial value; Van Vechten has not only declined to provide a glamour shot, but he has arguably staged the singer’s own engagement with such fetishization by placing her in conversation with this bust.

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Holiday’s status as artist—specifically, a woman blues artist—is also crucial in the reading of this photograph, for looking at the specific portrait is also continuous with (if less sensually dense and sustained than) the experience of being her audience, looking toward her with inchoate expectation just before she begins to sing. Not precisely leaders, women blues artists were, as many black feminist critics from Angela Davis to Hortense Spillers have detailed, spurs to thinking new forms of relationality and identity: “the black woman must translate the female vocalist’s gestures into an apposite structure of terms that will articulate both her kinship with other women and the particular nuances of her own experience.”65 While Van Vechten had no specifically feminist commitments, he was fascinated by performance generally, and especially by the notquite-question that a singer like Holiday gave her audience—How shall you make me over into something you can use? Interestingly, Van Vechten himself first endorsed Holiday’s work unreservedly—“The voice the same, in and out between tones, unbearably poignant that blue voice. That blue, blue voice . . . O Lordie, where were you [ . . . ] on the eve of Easter Sunday, 1948?”66—and then annotated the carbon of this letter with his “reservations” (to the effect that the voice was always the same, and furthermore appealed regrettably to the young). Between the extremes of effusion and rejection, however, we can detect a similar effort to “translate,” in Spillers’s terms, to rearticulate the performance as an expression of political imagination. The letter’s reference to the Christian calendar expands allusively to encompass the spiritual, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?,” and beyond that, the Crucifixion itself. These references also encompass the African American strategy of couching political protest and political identity in religious terms, with special emphasis on bearing witness to the traumatic. Where were you when she sang? Who were they, in her audience? This portrait of Billie Holiday cannot, I would argue, rest with any specific message about race, identity, or the political effects of photographic viewership. Instead, it enlists constant, circulating reconsiderations—and especially new looks, that of the sculpture out of the frame, of Holiday toward the sculpture, of Holiday’s audience toward the blues singer, and of the photographer’s toward his sitter—in the service of a meditation on rupture and recuperation that never rests. A final detail seems to me particularly instructive in this regard: the shadow of the photographer, standing with elbows up and out as he looks through the viewfinder, falls over the sitter and the bust she holds. In fact, the darkness of the

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sculpture, and the way that blackness in the picture seems to spiral into the space between Holiday’s eyes and the object’s, is intensified by this failure of the lighting scheme, which is not as clearly legible in the more tightly cropped version. Here, the photographer himself constitutes an instance of the “optical unconscious”—what exceeded his intentions in taking the picture was literally himself. All the little breaks and holes in this picture, in other words—all the “failures” of representational convention, all the ambivalent echoes, in the photographed scene, of the viewer’s process of looking, all the places in which this does not quite become a documentary, a racially determinative, and/or a technically clean, portrait of Billie Holiday—serve to make “blackness,” or “Africanness,” a pressing question that cannot be answered clearly or easily. The portrait both narrates the way that photography illuminates a thousand small psychic shocks, and disarticulates the viewer, and Holiday herself, from that process.

Conclusion

Paths and Messages Putting Freud to work . . . does not mean trying to find a lesson in him—still less an orthodoxy. Nor is it a matter of choosing one Freud against another, or of “fishing” here and there for a formulation which suits me. Putting Freud to work means demonstrating in him what I call an exigency, the exigency of a discovery which impels him without always showing him the way, and which may therefore lead him into dead ends or goings-astray. It means following in his footsteps, accompanying him but also criticizing him, seeking other ways—but impelled by an exigency similar to his. To put it in more colloquial terms, what is it that makes Freud tick? My answer, my proposition, is this: it is not history. —jean laplanche

My father’s colonnaded, Greek Revival house was built in 1848, overlooking the Mohawk River in Upstate New York. Between his property and the river there is a public bike path, built over railroad tracks that fell out of use decades ago. He sometimes converses with the passersby. Once, a stranger asked about the age of the house and, on hearing the date, asked avidly whether there were any chains in the basement. “Chains? For what?” my father asked. “You know. For them,” the man replied. Eventually, it transpired that the stranger, a white man, had read an article in the local paper describing Underground Railroad stops in the area. Though it’s unlikely that my father’s home was ever so used, black escapees did commonly pass through the general vicinity during the early nineteenth century, going west to Rochester and thence onward to Canada. So the question was logical enough, except for one thing.

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“I don’t think they’d take the chains with them,” my father said. “Oh, they might. They might be used to them,” the man said, unperturbed. I felt quite unheimlich when my father relayed this story to me, for the stranger’s off-the-cuff traumatology is eerily congruent with that of the high-modernist writers and photographer I discuss in “Not Even Past.” He too identifies the past as such with a Manichean racial conflict— black oppression, white supremacy—whose traces persist into the present. Likewise, he links that past to compulsive behaviors (being “used to” one’s chains) that continually restage or re-present the moment of psychic injury. But since he apparently also lacks any artistic or cultural commitment comparable to those of Van Vechten, Larsen, or Faulkner, his will to re-present slavery’s repetitively returning psychic costs—my father says he insisted on the chains determinedly, despite several contradictions—seems wholly enigmatic. What exigency drives his re-vision of the past? To what demand is he responding? Beyond their basic formal similarities, little significant comparison between the stranger’s historiography and the literary and photographic texts is forthcoming. Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten’s references to chattel slavery and anti-black violence are embedded in complex works whose sophistication, internal differentiation, and creative spontaneity—sometimes—release the frozen repetitions of trauma into new possibilities. But the stranger’s static tableau can be read in only one way. The white observer is always beyond the traumatic himself, always only looking on, and the white instantiators of racial violence are obscured. Meanwhile, an undifferentiated, dehumanized blackness (“them”) is rendered as identical to the traumatic symptom (being “used to” chains). A polar racial difference thus simply maps the presence or absence of trauma, and the nuanced questions about modernity, memory, responsibility, women’s roles, and racial politics that characterized the novels and portraits are not so much denied as foreclosed, assumed not to exist. Yet, despite his historical naïveté, limited powers of expression, and ethical callousness, the stranger has a sneakily persistent claim on criticism, on the process of making distinctions and rendering judgments. He has the power to determine the critical agenda in advance. “You know,” he said, “for them,” and the curious thing was that “you” really did “know.” Those four pedestrian words, vague unto meaninglessness, not only conveyed, but perpetuated his schema (trauma = black, witness = white), institutionalizing a racist distinction, which was likewise a reductive formalism, as prior to all inquiry. Even amid his educated and

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principled demurral, for example, my father acceded to, and repeated, the stranger’s racist “them”: “I don’t think they’d take the chains with them.” Nor, for that matter, was I, marooned on the specialist shores of the PhD, able to explain the language problem to my father. The stranger’s racialized traumatology thus constitutes a sardonic riposte to literary-critical disciplinarity, for whereas the latter assumes that specific analyses succeed or fail on their intellectual merits alone, the former reveals the relentless, shaping force of social investment on thought. It was not for lack of vocabulary that I accepted my father’s use of “them.” Likewise, it was not for lack of a sense of justice that he failed to challenge the stranger’s racism. In both cases—and undergraduate instructors will surely recognize the dynamic as well—a preconscious effort to avoid overt conflict preempted direct criticism. Indeed, that same willed neutrality palpably informs the stranger’s imagined scene itself; merely looking on, neither traumatized nor assailant, he is at odds with no one. What makes the story uncanny, in fact, is not simply the unexpected return of a formalist account of racialized trauma beyond the academic milieu, but the stranger’s embodiment of every critic’s narcissistic fantasy. He was absolutely certain that he was safe—that no one could disagree with him. And no one did. In finishing this work, and after some years of teaching conflict-laden subjects, including First-Year Writing and introductory courses in U.S. and African American literatures, at several large public institutions, I have come to believe that this normative, and normatively white, habit of quarantining inquiry away from the interruptions of trauma is of far greater political moment than any specifics of traumatic texts. We— academics and laypeople—keep ourselves too safe, too untouched, amid unprecedented and important considerations of historical trauma and its cultural representations. However, I do not, therefore, counsel some voluntary re-commitment within (or without) the academy to anti-racism, to ethical and methodological vigilance, or to any other inconsequential idealism. Rather, I would like to close by discussing the stranger’s troubling fantasy about U.S., racialized slavery as a fantasy, as a creative—and hence still flexible and contingent—negotiation among subjective desires, cultural and material givens, and important imagined and actual social relationships. I’d like, in other words, to contradict the stranger’s self-presentation as a disinterested observer, and to interrupt his effort to secure the critical agenda in advance. He is not simply seeing, reporting, or analyzing when he imagines that traumatic scene. He is doing something, and making

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new critical use of his imaginative effort does not simply mean deciding which parts of the fantasy are more or less familiar, orthodox, distasteful, or ideologically informed. Rather, it means—as Jean Laplanche explains about the political limitations of the Freudian text—demonstrating the “exigency” to which he responds, the immediate, impelling demand that may well lead him wrong, “into dead ends or goings-astray,” but nonetheless leads him onward.1 It means to search out a new path ourselves, now. All fantasies are political in nature, though the familiarity, not to say banality, of their terms often obscures this fact. The stranger’s irrational Underground Railroad scenario, for example, obviously derives from a mass-mediated, popular U.S. historiography that renders the subtly variegated centuries of North American chattel slavery as Gone With the Wind—a harsh Technicolor panorama that teaches audiences to recognize only white people as resisters and survivors. (In fact, my father’s house does look a little bit like Tara.) A similar involvement of personal fantasy with mass-media representations of U.S. slavery is cited in Freud’s 1919 essay “A Child Is Being Beaten”2: many analysands were sexually attached, as children, to beating scenes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Like Freud himself, whose written references to people of African descent are always only references to literary tropes,3 the stranger may well understand white supremacy, racial violence in the United States, even racial difference as such, only through cultural mediation, that is, only by reference to some third term or external authority. The political character of this fantasy is not, then, its citation of ideology per se, but the relationship to authority it imaginatively enacts. Fantasy’s involvement with authority is, of course, the major concern of “A Child Is Being Beaten,” which traces both the content, and the rhetoric, of a common masturbatory fantasy among Freud’s patients. The remarkable thing about this fantasy was its impersonal phrasing: “a child [not me] is being beaten [by someone unknown or unnamed].” The fantasizer is fully aware of, but removed from, a scene of violence, and seems initially to be unconcerned with the author of that violence. Stowe’s novel fits this schema well—Tom, for example, being beaten to death by minimally characterized henchmen of the overseer—but a range of common texts and situations (fairy tales and cautionary tales, school discipline, etc.) are likewise amenable to the fantasy. As Freud was careful to point out, these invented and borrowed violent scenarios do not reflect sadistic pleasure taken in some other person’s pain, and in

conclusion  /  141

fact actual violence often revolts and distresses the fantasizer. Rather, the fantasy’s pleasure flows from its status as a fiction, an invention.4 In fact, these beating fantasies result from a complex process of revision, “in the course of which they are changed in most respects more than once—as regards their relation to the author of the phantasy, and as regards their object, their content and their significance.”5 In the normative clinical scenario Freud describes, for example, an analysand imagines an indistinct someone-powerful beating an equally indistinct victim in order to mask, and to perpetuate, a highly specific, transgressive wish: she imagines herself so beaten by her father, and this imagined beating is, in the common perception of children, a sexual act as well. That inner scenario is thus “not only the punishment for the forbidden genital relation, but also the regressive substitute for that relation.”6 No statement of neutrality, but a covert operation, the fantasy of watching someone else being punished rewrites desire as alive, despite social prohibitions. Beating fantasies thus represent nothing so simple as a direct, amoral identification with the exercise of mastery. Rather, they exploit the overlap between psychic investments and real-world power relationships, to the immediate end of autoerotic pleasure, but also for the long-range purpose of managing the fantasizers’ own complex relationship to social power and power differentials. Though his insight was limited by his assertion that the whole business confirmed the Oedipal conjecture,7 Freud certainly saw such fantasies in political terms, stating that “these observations can be made use of along various lines: for elucidating the genesis of the perversions in general and of masochism in particular, and for estimating the part played by difference of sex in the dynamics of neurosis.”8 In other words, the way a person imagines authority can formalize her desires for life, and is an important factor in the ways in which bodily differences become psychic and social differences. As has doubtless become obvious by now, both the stranger’s rhetorical presentation of his imagined scene (the indistinct, chained “they,” the unnamed oppressors) and its content of endless punishment strongly recall the “child being beaten” fantasy. Moreover, though we do not have anything like a psychoanalyst’s access to this man’s lived reality, it seems clear that his attachment to the fantasy is strong, so strong that he was moved to articulate it almost without prompting. However, if we are to involve racial difference and U.S. history in this analysis, we must go beyond Oedipality—that is, not only beyond the nuclear family and infantile sexuality, nor even just “beyond the pleasure principle,” but also

142  /  conclusion

beyond metapsychology as such. Whatever made Freud tick, as Jean Laplanche points out, it was never “history,” in the sense of an established chronicle of objective events.9 Unlike the Freudian text, the stranger’s fantasy about chained escapees in the basement makes a strong historical claim; for him, blackness as such is coextensive with the traumatic event of chattel slavery, and psychic life is fully involved with historical contingencies. Indeed, though characterized by vast simplifications, vaster ignorance, and wholly erroneous assumptions, ordinary, non-specialist, majority-white U.S. discourse about race and African American history commonly integrates factual assertions about the past with speculative theories of culture, affect, and memory. This is the new path the stranger, and others like him, offer to psychoanalytic and trauma-studies criticism: a mixed historical and psychological critical discourse, impure according to the standards of classical psychoanalysis, but withal expansive, generative, open-ended. Despite his overt neoconservatism, in other words, the stranger offers us the chance to draw new and unfamiliar distinctions, to make different judgments. Similar historical impurities were, in fact, always implicit in the psychoanalytic project. As Laplanche emphasizes, objective events were already acknowledged, albeit only in passing, in the original Freudian account of the beating fantasy.10 The father’s violence, the violence of authority, has not merely a psychic, but also a material reality; he may well have beaten someone else (a sibling, perhaps) before his daughter’s very eyes, and this act “is not like beating an egg white in the kitchen.”11 It is not quotidian or meaningless. Rather, such paternal violence constitutes a message—an impossibly complex, enigmatic message—comprising promiscuous fragments of social norms, cultural conventions, and the father’s own unconscious motivations. And presented with such confusion, the child does the only thing she can: she translates this message into fantasy, that is, into an orderly, reassuring statement that names authority and positions her as safe and protected within that authority. My father, says the child to herself, beats that other one precisely because he loves only me. The beating fantasy thus encloses and repurposes, but does not erase, the violence of mastery. Similarly, the stranger’s imagined scene of stillchained escapees in the basement contains an external message that his fantasy essays to translate. For him, though, that confusing fragment of the objective world is quite literally “mastery”: it is the awareness that whiteness is secured, in part, by continuing interpersonal, social, and

conclusion  /  143

economic violence against African Americans. Originating in racialized chattel slavery but encompassing post-Emancipation white-supremacist violence, Jim Crow, ghettoization, and the contemporary prison-industrial complex, this violence has happened and continues, not only to happen, but to perpetuate itself in new forms, before the eyes of white people. And just like the Freudian child, all the stranger can tell himself about this violence is that it isn’t happening to him. It happens only to them, those other ones, the denied and forgotten siblings. He believes himself to be loved and protected, and he cannot risk that status by expressing solidarity with those who are not. Mastery is thus perpetuated in fantasy long after the demise of U.S. chattel slavery, not through direct white identification with racial violence, but instead by means of an emotional investment in authority that both explicates and disavows black historical trauma. This dynamic is, perhaps, nothing more than a specialized, ideologically intensive variant of subjectivation as such, another instance in which “an existing, preexisting sense is offered to the subject, of which, however, he is not the master and of which he can become the master only by submitting to it.”12 Furthermore, understanding the stranger’s fantasy as an effort to translate a larger, constitutively racist cultural message will not, in itself, lead to some obvious political benefit or imply a specific political strategy. This analysis does, however, reassert the political as an element in psychoanalytic and trauma-theoretical inquiry, reminding us that political activity is ceaseless, and coextensive with subjectivity itself. It reminds us, in other words, that trauma can never be appreciated or described at a distance, or in purely formal terms. Rather, it irrupts on thought as “enigmatic, traumatizing messages,”13 to which we must respond.

Notes

Acknowledgments 1.  Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 11. The original translation uses “he.”

Introduction 1.  Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 12–17. 2.  Ibid., 13. 3.  Ibid., 12 (italics in the original). 4.  Ibid., 26. 5.  Ibid., 15. 6.  See Derrida, “To Speculate—On ‘Freud,’ ” 323–28. 7.  Ibid., 320. 8.  Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 23; also, 22–24. “Perpetual recurrence of the same thing” translates “ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichens” (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 21). This phrase names the Nietzschean concept more commonly rendered in English as “eternal return.” Freud perhaps cites it sardonically. 9.  Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 10.  See Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 7–9, 244–47. 11.  See Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 142; also, 141–70. 12.  For an account of the archive’s creation, see Geoffrey Hartman, Introduction to “The Humanities of Testimony,” 251–52. 13.  On pedagogy, see Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching.” 14.  See Felman and Laub, Testimony; and Mitchell, “Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of Language.” This and the following bibliographical notes are intended to be exemplary, not exhaustive. 15.  See Zelizer, Remembering to Forget; Baer, Spectral Evidence; Kaplan, Trauma Culture.

146  /  notes 16.  See Feldman, Formations of Violence; Feldman, “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma Aesthetic”; Young, The Harmony of Illusions; Young, “America’s Transient Mental Illness. See also Antze and Lambek, Tense Past; and Robben and Suárez-Orozco, Cultures under Siege. Much of this work is unfamiliar to literary scholars and deserves greater recognition. 17.  See Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling”; Cvetkovitch, An Archive of Feelings. Zwarg, “Du Bois on Trauma.” 18.  See Hacking, Rewriting the Soul; Leys, Trauma; La Capra, Writing History, Writing Trauma. 19.  See Herman, Trauma and Recovery; van der Kolk and van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past”; Raoul et al., Unfitting Stories. 20.  Arruti, “Trauma, Therapy, and Representation,” 3. 21.  Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, 222. 22.  See Feldman, “Memory Theaters.” 23.  See Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling”; Mowitt, “Trauma Envy”; Mandel, Against the Unspeakable. 24.  The term is from Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. 25.  See the essays in Antze and Lambek, Tense Past, particularly, Antze, “Telling Stories, Making Selves”; and George, “Contested Meanings and Controversial Memories.” See also Ewing, “The Violence of Non-Recognition.” 26.  See, e.g., Baer, “Modernism and Trauma.” 27.  See Breihaupt, “The Invention of Trauma in German Romanticism.” 28.  See Caruth, “An Interview With Jean Laplanche”; Eisenstein, Traumatic Encounters; Žižek, “Trauma: A Deceptive Lure”; Radstone, “Trauma Theory.” 29.  See Yaeger, “Testimony without Intimacy.” 30.  La Capra, History in Transit, 89. 31.  See Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts; Mandel, Against the Unspeakable. 32.  Leys, Trauma, 298–99. 33.  My own discussion of Caruth in an early version of chapter 1 is a case in point; see Stringer, “Trauma Studies and Faulkner’s Sanctuary.” 34.  Guyer, “Remembering, Repeating . . . ,” 744. 35.  Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1–2. 36.  See, e.g., Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” 4–5. 37.  See Shumway, Creating American Civilization. 38.  Graff, Professing Literature, 98–110, 130–32. 39.  Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 4. 40.  Ibid., 4–8. 41.  Ibid., 171–87. 42.  Ibid., 184. The reading evidently refers to lines 839–46 of “Song of Myself.” 43.  See Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. 44.  Kazin, “The Language of the Pundits,” 32. 45.  Shumway, Creating American Civilization, 211. 46.  Pomerance, “The Eye’s Frisson,” n.p. 47.  Fiedler, “Come Back to the Raft A’gin, Huck Honey,” 671. 48.  See Fiedler, “The Novel’s Audience and the Sentimental Love Religion” and

notes  /  147 “Good Good Girls and Good Bad Boys,” chapters 2 and 9 in Love and Death in the American Novel. 49.  Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 10–11. 50.  Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” 105. 51.  Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 4–5. 52.  Ibid., 5. 53.  Ibid., 66–67. 54.  Ibid., 5. 55.  Discussed in ibid., 75–75. 56.  Miller, Blank Darkness. 57.  Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 7. 58.  See Ball, “Introduction: Traumatizing Psychoanalysis.” 59.  Herring, Queering the Underworld, 104.

1. “Little Black Man” 1.  See Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender. 2.  Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, 38. 3.  Doane, “Dark Continents,” 212. 4.  See Miller, Blank Darkness, 61–65. 5.  Freud, “The Unconscious,” 191. 6.  Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 180. 7.  See Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 8–9, 18–28. A detailed account of Morrison’s critical program is included in the introduction to the present work. See also Miller, Blank Darkness, 14–32. 8.  See Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 70–76. 9.  Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams, 13. 10.  Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade, 91–95 (quotation, 94). 11.  Ibid., 93. 12.  Cash, The Mind of the South, 115. 13.  Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” 94. 14.  Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams, 2. 15.  My point here is related to, but distinct from, Gwen Bergner’s recent argument, in Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex and Psychoanalysis, that a “miscegenation taboo”—the social ban on depicting sexual contact between white and black people, particularly between a white woman and a black man—”organiz[es] racial subjects’ relation to paternal law” in a manner analogous to the structural effect of the incest taboo (xxvii). Where Bergner reads U.S. regimes of racial differentiation, including their proper violence, within a Lacanian account of the symbolic order, my readings emphasize the traumatic and its tendency to exceed symbolization. 16.  See Faulkner, Introduction to Sanctuary, v. 17.  Dore, “Free Speech and Exposure.” 18.  See, e.g., Johnson, “The Horrible South”; Allen Tate, “The Profession of Letters in the South”; Malraux, “A Preface for Faulkner’s Sanctuary.” 19.  On queer references in the film, see Ramsey, “Lifting the Fog.” On degenerescence, see Barker, “Moonshine and Magnolias.” On happy endings, see Degenfelder, “The Four Faces of Temple Drake.”

148  /  notes 20.  Faulkner, Sanctuary, 48 (hereafter cited in text). 21.  Barker, “Moonshine and Magnolias,” 146. 22.  Arnold and Trouard, Sanctuary: Glossary and Commentary, 5. 23.  See Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary.” 24.  Freud, “On Narcissism,” 84. 25.  Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” 65–66, 85. 26.  See Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. 27.  Ibid., 80 (italics in the original). 28.  In “Temple Drake and La parole pleine,” Judith Wittenberg suggests the comparison of Temple’s monologue to a clinical psychoanalytic encounter. 29.  Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 13–17. See also the discussion of fort/da in the introduction to the present work. 30.  Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 17. 31.  See Harris, Exorcising Blackness, 1–28. 32.  Barker, “Moonshine and Magnolias,” 148. 33.  Kartiganer, “Faulkner Criticism,” 95. 34.  See Brooks, William Faulkner, 133–35, 138. 35.  Ibid., 131. 36.  See Wagner-Martin, Introduction to William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism, x–xi. 37.  Gwin, The Feminine and Faulkner; Wittenberg, “Temple Drake and La parole pleine”; Cox, “A Measure of Innocence”; Reames, “All That Matters Is That I Wrote the Letters.” 38.  Barker, “Moonshine and Magnolias,” 148. 39.  Wagner-Martin, Introduction to William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism, x. 40.  For “patterning,” see Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy. 41.  See Guttman, “Who’s Afraid of the Corncob Man?” 42.  Dore, “Free Speech and Exposure,” 80. 43.  Karl, William Faulkner, American Writer, 771. 44.  Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” 57. 45.  Ibid. 46.  Ibid., 76–78. 47.  See Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 285. 48.  Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” 84. 49.  Spillers, “All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother,” 425. 50.  Ibid. (Spillers’s italics). 51.  See Ronnell, “On the Misery of Theory Without Poetry.” 52.  Ibid., 31. 53.  Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy, 355–56.

2. “Which Tooth Hit You First?” 1.  Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 535 (hereafter cited in text). 2.  Cooley, Back to the Lake; Graff, Birkenstein, and Durst, They Say / I Say. 3.  See the introduction to the present work for an extensive discussion of these critics.

notes  /  149 4.  Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism, 19. 5.  Ibid., 195. 6.  See Polk, Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun,” 237–45; Hickman, William Faulkner and Joan Williams, 43–44, 195–97. 7.  See Cowley, “In Which Mr. Faulkner Translates Past into Present”; Parini, One Matchless Time, 338–42. 8.  Parsons, “Imagination and the Rending of Time,” 446. 9.  Faulkner, “Address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature,” 649. 10.  Ibid. 11.  Cowley, “In Which Mr. Faulkner Translates Past into Present,” 341. 12.  See Ford, Requiem for a Nun. 13.  Cowley, “In Which Mr. Faulkner Translates Past into Present,” 343; Warren, “The Redemption of Temple Drake,” 345; Howe, “Faulkner: An Experiment in Drama,” 339. 14.  Polk, Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun,” xiii, 215. 15.  Ibid., 129–55. 16.  Ibid., 155. 17.  Wagner-Martin, Introduction to William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism, x. 18.  Ladd, “Philosophers and Other Gynecologists,” 498. 19.  Duck, The Nation’s Region, 229. 20.  See Weisenburger, “Faulkner in Baghdad, Bush in Hadleyburg”; Wittenberg, “Temple Drake and La parole pleine”; Reames, “All That Matters Is That I Wrote the Letters”; Fowler, “Reading for the ‘Other Side.’ ” 21.  Warren, “The Redemption of Temple Drake,” 345. 22.  See Derrida, “Before the Law.” 23.  “Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, 1945” [map], in The Portable Faulkner, ii. 24.  “Yoknapatawpha County” [map], in Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, n.p. 25.  Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, 214. 26.  See Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 27.  Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism, 19. 28.  See Lemire, “Miscegenation.” 29.  Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” 30.  See Parini, One Matchless Time, 61–64, 66–67. 31.  Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 67. 32.  Ibid., 67. 33.  La Capra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 76–79. 34.  Ibid., 79. 35.  Ibid., 59. 36.  Reames, “All That Matters Is That I Wrote the Letters,” 141–43. 37.  Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” 21. 38.  See Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” 39.  Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 100–101.

3. “Anyone with Half an Eye” 1.  Shepherdson, “The Catastrophe of Narcissism,” 133.

150  /  notes 2.  Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 24. See also Cathy Caruth’s discussion of this passage in Unclaimed Experience (3–5), and the discussion of fort/da in the introduction to the present work. 3.  Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 156–61. 4.  Van Doren, “The Younger Generation of Negro Writers,” 144. 5.  Du Bois, “The Browsing Reader,” 202. 6.  See Sherrard-Johnson, “A Plea For Color.” 7.  McDowell, Introduction to “Quicksand” and “Passing,” xvii. 8.  Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance, 138. 9.  Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 123. See also Basu, “Hybrid Embodiment and an Ethics of Masochism.” 10.  Sherrard-Johnson, “A Plea For Color,” 837. 11.  See Larson, Invisible Darkness; Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance; Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen. 12.  See Carr, “Paranoid Interpretation, Desire’s Nonobject, and Nella Larsen’s Passing”; Newton, “Incognito Ergo Sum”; Ngai, “Irritation”; Doyle, “Queering Freedom’s Theft in Nella Larsen.” 13.  See Keyser, “We Are Not Savages.” 14.  Aristotle, The Poetics, 43. 15.  Larsen, Quicksand, 84, in “Quicksand” and “Passing” (hereafter cited in the text). 16.  Aristotle, The Poetics, 42. 17.  See Rubin, “The Traffic in Women.” 18.  Aristotle, The Poetics, 37. 19.  Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 23. 20.  Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 158. 21.  See Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, 121–22. 22.  Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 148–49. 23.  Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 123–24. 24.  Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 148–53. 25.  I thank translator Grethe Kvernes for consultation on Danish names, vocabulary, history, and social conventions. 26.  Shepherdson, “The Catastrophe of Narcissism,” 133. 27.  Klein, “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse,” 93. 28.  Frøkken: a term of respect, the Danish equivalent of “mademoiselle,” “fräulein,” or “miss”; now archaic. 29.  Gallop, “Keys to Dora,” 211. 30.  See Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen, 20–21, 238. 31.  See Jones, Corregidora; also, Barbeito, “ ‘Making Generations’ in Jacobs, Larsen, and Hurston.” 32.  Shepherdson, “The Catastrophe of Narcissism,” 140. 33.  Ibid., 139. 34.  Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 175. 35.  Toomer, Cane, 17. 36.  See Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Pietz, “The

notes  /  151 Problem of the Fetish, I”; Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II”; Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa.”

4. “A Having Way” 1.  Felman, “Education and Crisis, Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” 25 (italics Felman’s). Felman’s direct reference is to the works of Paul Celan. 2.  See the introduction to the present work for a detailed bibliographical discussion. 3.  Important discussions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black women’s novels include Christian, Black Women Novelists; Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood; duCille, The Coupling Convention; Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels; Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel; and Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations. 4.  Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations, 21. 5.  See Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 6.  Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel, 5. 7.  See, e.g., the discussion of Quicksand in chapter 3 of the present work. 8.  See Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen, 21. Hutchinson adds: “Many who knew Larsen later in her life were fully aware of the reputation of her birthplace, which became notorious on an international scale in the years after she was born” (21). 9.  Ibid., 197–201. 10.  Freud, “Fetishism,” 152–53. 11.  See Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance; Brody, “Clare Kendry’s ‘True Colors’ ”; Dawahare, “The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing.” 12.  See McLendon, “Self-Representation as Art in the Novels of Nella Larsen”; Thadious Davis, Introduction to Passing; Rottenberg, “Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire”; Landry, “Seeing Black Women Anew through Lesbian Desire in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” 13.  Freud, “Fetishism,” 154–55. 14.  Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 19–20. 15.  Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen, 296. 16.  Larsen, Passing, in “Quicksand” and “Passing,” 171 (hereafter cited in text). 17.  Freud, “Fetishism,” 152. 18.  Coleman, “Pimp Notes on Autonomy,” 73. 19.  Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations, 13. 20.  Spillers, “Interstices,” 155 (Spillers’s italics). 21.  Coleman, “Pimp Notes on Autonomy,” 72. 22.  Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations, 19–20. 23.  Delany, “Letter to Q——,” 171. 24.  See McDowell, Introduction to “Quicksand” and “Passing”; Butler, “Passing, Queering.” 25.  Landry, “Seeing Black Women Anew through Lesbian Desire in Nella Larsen’s Passing,” 26–27. 26.  Landry’s recent reading is similar to mine on this matter. 27.  Grosz, “Lesbian Fetishism?” 115.

152  /  notes 28.  Locke, “The New Negro,” 11. See also Foley, Spectres of 1919, for a trenchant reading of class politics in Locke’s New Negro anthology. 29.  Coleman, “Pimp Notes on Autonomy,” 76. 30.  Expounded in many of Žižek’s works, the idea’s central articulation is in his “Che Vuoi?” 31.  See Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, 310. 32.  See Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen, 308–10. 33.  Hutchinson notes the macabre detail that this minor, unpassable black woman character, schematically named Felice Freeland, has the same address as Larsen and her husband, Elmer Imes (see Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen, 307–8). 34.  Holland, Raising the Dead, 171. 35.  See Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I”; Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II”; Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa.” 36.  Graeber, “Fetishism as Social Creativity.” 37.  See Rooney, African Literature, Animism, and Politics, 124–33. 38.  Merinda Simmons, “Slain in the Spirit,” 97. 39.  Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen, 41. 40.  Cullen, “Heritage,” 910 (lines 9–10). 41.   Van Vechten, The Splendid Drunken Twenties, 143. 42.  Hurston, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” 829 (first italics in original; second, mine). 43.  Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen, 204.

5. “To Glorify the Negro” 1.  Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 527. 2.  Cadava, Words of Light, 102. 3.  Ibid. 4.  Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510, 512. 5.  Ibid., 512. 6.  See Cadava, Words of Light, especially, xix, 3–4, 64–66. 7.  Interestingly, Benjamin’s century of retrospection (1839–1931) is roughly the same as William Faulkner’s in Requiem for a Nun (see chapter 2, this volume). However divergent their political commitments and cultural contexts, both were interested in the traumatic effects of modernity as such. Further, as John Raeburn has recently demonstrated, in the United States the 1930s were marked by renewed interest, among critics, photographers, and the general public, in the history and peculiar characteristics of the photographic medium (see Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, especially chapter 2, “Disestablishing Steiglitz,” and chapter 6, “MoMA’s ‘Big Top’ Show”). 8.  Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 507. 9.  Ibid., 515, 526. 10.  Ibid., 527. 11.  Klima, The Funeral Casino, 190. Klima’s fascinating work discusses the circulation of video and photographic evidence of a 1992 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok. It also encompasses original readings of important Western photographic theorists (such as Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag), an ethnography of Thai photographic praxis, and a sustained, thought-provoking account of the cul-

notes  /  153 tural limits of photographic theory. I thank my brother, James Stringer, for bringing it to my attention. 12.  See Smith, Photography on the Color Line. 13.  See Eyerman, Cultural Trauma. 14.  Herring, Queering the Underworld, 104. 15.  My thoughts here are prompted by Ann Cvetkovitch’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, which argues strongly that women’s and sexual minorities’ cultures “archive” traumatic narratives in order to affirm individual survival and as a tactic of collective resistance. 16.  Sontag, On Photography, 181. 17.  Ibid., 19–20. 18.  Ibid., 17. Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others pursues this argument further. 19.  Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510. The photograph under analysis, a seated couple from the 1840s or 1850s, is reproduced on the facing page in the Harvard edition of Benjamin’s Selected Writings. 20.  See Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 26. 21.  Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510. 22.  Ibid., 36–37. 23.  La Capra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 76–77, 78. 24.  Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 10. 25.  Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 520. 26.  Smith, Photography on the Color Line, 9. 27.  Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 63–64. 28.  Carl Van Vechten to Langston Hughes, 11 October 1959, in Hughes and Van Vechten, Remember Me to Harlem, 304. 29.  See Keith F. Davis, “A Privileged Eye,” 21. 30.  Carl Van Vechten to Langston Hughes, 11 October 1959, in Hughes and Van Vechten, Remember Me to Harlem, 304. 31.  For a list of these institutions, see “Additional Collections of Carl Van Vechten Photographs,” at the Library of Congress American Memory website, http://memory. loc.gov/ammem/collections/vanvechten/vvadd.html (accessed April 26, 2008). 32.  See, e.g., Generations in Black and White: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten (edited by Rudolph P. Byrd); The Passionate Observer: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten (compiled by Keith F. Davis); Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten’s Portraits of Women (compiled by Nancy Kuhl); Portraits: The Photography of Carl Van Vechten (compiled by Saul Mauriber); and The Dance Photography of Carl Van Vechten (selected and with an introduction by Paul Padgette). 33.  Carl Van Vechten to May [Davenport] Seymour, 19 October 1942, in Letters of Cal Van Vechten, 187. 34.  Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 106. 35.  Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, 73–79. 36.  See, e.g., Carl Van Vechten to Langston Hughes, 3 April 1933, in Hughes and Van Vechten, Remember Me to Harlem, 103–4. 37.  Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 515. 38.  North, Camera Works, 210. 39.  See Smalls, The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten.

154  /  notes 40.  On the scrapbooks, which are likewise interesting as verbal texts, see Weinberg, “Boy Crazy”; and Herring, Queering the Underworld, 144–49. 41.  See Smith, Photography on the Color Line, 43–76. 42.  Herring, Queering the Underworld, 110. 43.  The Dance Photography of Carl Van Vechten, 5. 44.  Hughes and Van Vechten, Remember Me to Harlem, 273n3. 45.  Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 55. 46.  Carl Van Vechten to Bernard Knoellenberg, 29 May 1941, in Letters of Carl Van Vechten, 177. 47.  Carl Van Vechten to Langston Hughes, 5 April 1941, in Hughes and Van Vechten, Remember Me to Harlem, 187. 48.  Carl Van Vechten to Langston Hughes, 16 August 1943, in ibid., 222. 49.  See Smalls, The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten, 149n21. 50.  According to Bruce Kellner, quoted in Hughes and Van Vechten, Remember Me to Harlem, 174n4. Van Vechten’s color work, recently made available through the Beinecke Library Digital Collections, used a new technology to intensify his established Victorian-revival procedures of portraiture, and especially to juxtapose many strong colors in a single image, thus giving an uncanny twist to a line in Gertrude Stein’s abstract word-portrait of Van Vechten: “Not to the future but to the fuchsia” (Stein, Portraits and Prayers, 157). 51.  The Van Vechten images available at the Library of Congress website are in the public domain (which is unusual). See “Carl Van Vechten Photographs (Lots 12735 and 12736) Rights and Restrictions Information,” at the website of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/079_vanv. html (accessed February 25, 2007). 52.  Steichen’s enormously popular catalogue remains in print today. 53.  Stimson, The Pivot of the World, 96. 54.  Herring, Queering the Underworld, 111. 55.  Ibid., 115. 56.  Stein, Portraits and Prayers, 7. 57.  See Watson, Prepare for Saints, 199–208. 58.  Carl Van Vechten, “Billie Holiday,” 176. 59.  Ibid. 60.  See Batchen, Burning with Desire, 158–66. 61.  See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; and Freud, “Fetishism.” 62.  See Ray, “Noire et blanche” [photograph], reprinted in Grossman and Manford, “Unmasking Man Ray’s Noire et blanche,” 135. 63.  Ibid., 136. 64.  On the critical terms “Africanism” and “American Africanism,” see Morrison, Playing in the Dark; and Miller, Blank Darkness. See also the introduction to the present volume. 65.  Spillers, “Interstices,” 167. 66.  Carl Van Vechten to Karl Priebe, 29 March 1948, in Letters of Carl Van Vechten, 236.

Conclusion 1.  Laplanche, “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics,” 147.

notes  /  155 2.  Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 180. 3.  See chapter 1 of the present volume for a detailed discussion of this aspect of the Freudian oeuvre. 4.  Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 180. 5.  Ibid., 184. 6.  Ibid., 189 (emphasis in original). 7.  Ibid., particularly 192–95, 203–4. 8.  Ibid., 191. 9.  See Laplanche, “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics,” 141–47. 10.  Ibid., 155–56. 11.  Ibid., 156. 12.  Ibid., 160. 13.  Ibid., 165.

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Index

Africa: artworks from, 133–34; and the slave trade, 41–42, 105–6 American Africanism (Morrison), 15–16, 23–24, 60, 134 Antze, Paul, 146n15 Aristotle, 71–72 Arruti, Nerea, 6 Atget, Eugène, 110–11 Baer, Ulrich, 7, 145n15 Baldwin, James, 37 Ball, Karyn, 16 Barbeito, Patricia Felisa, 150n31 Barker, Deborah, 34–35, 38, 147n19 Basu, Biman, 150n9 Batchen, Geoffrey, 131 Benjamin, Walter, 20, 109–17, 120, 128–29 Bergner, Gwen, 147n15 Berlant, Lauren, 7, 11, 146n17 Bleikasten, André, 43 black: black bourgeoisie, 89–91, 93, 99–103; black feminism, 75, 90, 91, 99, 135; black men, 23–25, 33, 35, 74; metaphoric value, 28–29, 79; racial identity, 3–4, 18, 22–23, 28–29, 39, 72–73, 79, 90–91, 120–22, 138; black women, 19–20, 72–74, 78–79, 85–87, 96–100. See also race, racism, racial violence, white body: childbirth, 75, 82–86; penis, 29, 31–33, 39, 92–3; in psychoanalysis, 29;

skin color, 76; and trauma, 33; vagina, 55–57, 63–65; vulva, 100 bourgeoisie: as literary subject, 90, 92. See also black bourgeoisie Breihaupt, Fritz, 7 Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 93 Brooks, Cleanth, 36, 49 Brown, William Wells, 89 Butler, Judith, 17, 29–30, 98 Cadava, Eduardo, 110 captivity narrative, 30–31 Carby, Hazel, 150n3 Caruth, Cathy, 5–7, 8, 16, 150n2 Cane (Toomer), 86 Carr, Brian, 150n12 Cash, W. J., 25, 51 castration: in psychoanalysis, 92–94, 133. See also body, lynching Christian, Barbara, 151n3 Christianity, 44–45, 48–49, 61–62, 63, 82, 84–85, 96, 135 Coleman, Beth, 95–97, 102 corncob, 37–38 Cowley, Malcolm, 36, 48, 149n13 Cox, Dianne Luce, 37 Crafts, Hannah, 89 Cullen, Countée, 107 Cvetkovitch, Ann, 146n17, 153n15

174  /  index Davis, Thadious, 34, 69, 93, 102 Dawahare, Anthony, 93 Degenfelder, E. Pauline, 147n19 Delany, Samuel R., 97 Derrida, Jacques, 1–2, 51, 56, 65 Doane, Mary Ann, 23 Dore, Florence, 26–27, 38 Doyle, Laura, 150n12 Du Bois, W. E. B., 69, 74, 86, 89, 123 du Cille, Ann, 150n3 Duck, Leigh Ann, 50 Eisenstein, Paul, 7 Ellison, Ralph, 13–14, 63, 65, 125 Eyerman, Ron, 112 Fabi, M. Giulia, 90 fantasy in psychoanalysis, 139–43 Faulkner, William, 15, 17–18 Faulkner, William, works of: Absalom, Absalom!, 52–53, 86; “Address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature,” 47–48; Light in August, 86; Requiem for a Nun, 17–18, 37, 46–65, 152n7; Sanctuary, 17–18, 26–43; “That Evening Sun,” 63. See also Portable Faulkner, The and Story of Temple Drake, The Faulkner studies, 36–37, 49–50 feminist criticism, 24–25, 36–37, 49–50, 68–69, 135. See also black feminism Feldman, Allen, 7, 146n16 Felman, Shoshana, 5, 63, 88, 145n14 fetishism: historical origins of the term, 105–6; sexual fetishism, 91, 92–97, 99–100, 133–34; Surrealism and, 132–34 fetishization: of black people, 93–96, 102, 112; of clothing and jewelry, 106–7; of commodities, 93, 101–2; of whiteness, 93. See also fetishism, pimping, salvific wish Fiedler, Leslie, 11–14, 45, 60 Foley, Barbara, 152n28 Ford, Ruth, 49 fort/da, 1–2, 16, 32, 67 Fowler, Doreen, 50 Freud, Sigmund, works of: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1–2, 67, 141; “A Child is Being Beaten,” 23, 140–43; The Ego and the Id, 29; “Fetishism,” 92–94, 133; “From the History of an Infantile

Neurosis,” 55–56, 58, 115; Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 64– 65; “On Narcissism,” 29; The Question of Lay Analysis, 23; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 93, 133; Totem and Taboo, 39–42; “The Unconscious,” 23. See also castration, fantasy, fetishism, fetishization, fort/da, Nachträglichkeit, Oedipal situation, phallus, repetition Gallop, Jane, 80 Gilman, Sander, 22 Gilroy, Paul, 86 Glissant, Edouard, 52 Gone With the Wind (film), 50, 140 Graeber, David, 105 Graff, Gerald, 10 Grosz, Elizabeth, 100 Guttman, Sondra, 38 Guyer, Sara, 8 Gwin, Minrose, 37 Hacking, Ian, 146n18 Harlem Renaissance, 18–19, 68–70, 74–75, 101–2, 117 Harper, Frances E. W., 90 Harris, Trudier, 34 Hartman, Geoffrey, 145n12 Hartman, Saidiya, 11 Hemingway, Ernest, 15, 38 Herman, Judith, 5, 8, 146n19 Herring, Scott, 20, 112, 125, 129, 154n40 Hickman, Lisa, 149n6 Holiday, Billie, 131–2, 135. See also Van Vechten, Carl, works of Holland, Sharon, 105 Holocaust studies, 5–6 homoeroticism: between women, 98–101; white men’s transracial, 12–13, 37, 122 Howe, Irving, 149n13 Hungerford, Amy, 8–9 Hurston, Zora Neale, 106, 107–8, 118 Hutchinson, George, 69, 91–92, 104, 106, 108 “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art” (Klein), 78–79 James, Henry, 107 Jefferson, Thomas, 53–55, 91 Jenkins, Candice, 90, 96–97, 151n3

index  /  175 Johnson, Gerald, 147n18 Jones, Gayl, 82 jokes, 54, 62–65 Kaplan, E. Ann, 145n15 Kartiganer, Donald, 36 Kazin, Alfred, 11 Keyser, Catherine, 70 Klein, Melanie, 78–79 Klima, Alan, 111, 152n11 Lacan, Jacques, 39, 79, 102–3, 134, 148n47 La Capra, Dominick, 5, 8–9, 59–60, 115–16, 146n18 Ladd, Barbara, 50 Lambek, Michael, 146n16 Landry, H. Jordan, 93, 99 Laplanche, Jean, 7, 137, 140, 142–43 Larsen, Nella, 18–20, 81, 91–92, 106, 118; criticism of, 68–69 Larsen, Nella, works of: “Freedom,” 92; Passing, 92–108; Quicksand, 68–87, 105–6, 107; “The Wrong Man,” 92 Larson, Charles, 69 Laub, Dori, 5, 145n14 law, 27, 37–38, 51–55 Lawrence, D. H., 10–11, 45 Lemire, Elise, 54 lesbian phallus, 17, 29–30, 32–34, 37 Lewis, David Levering, 74 Leys, Ruth, 8, 146n18 “Little History of Photography” (Benjamin), 109–17 Locke, Alain, 3, 68, 101–2 Lorde, Audre, 53 Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler), 11–13, 45 lynching, 17, 34, 37–38, 85 maid (domestic servant), 79–81, 101–2 Malraux, André, 147n18 Mandel, Naomi, 7, 8–9 Manet, Edouard, 80 McDowell, Deborah, 68, 98 McLendon, Jacquelyn, 93 Metamorphoses, The (Ovid), 68, 74, 76, 83–84 Miller, Christopher, 15–16, 23–24 Millgate, Michael, 36 Mind of the South, The (Cash), 25, 51 ‘miscegenation,’ 13–14

Mitchell, Juliet, 145n14 modernism, 2, 46, 70, 88 Moreland, Richard, 46–47, 53 “More Perfect Union, A” (Obama), 44–45 Morrison, Toni, 14–16, 23–24, 34, 45, 60. See also American Africanism motherhood, 49–50, 55, 58–59, 75, 79–86, 91–93 Mowitt, John, 7 Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), 54–55, 115, 120 narcissism (Shepherdson), 66; and criticism, 66–68, 74–79, 82–83, 139 national literature (U.S.), 30–31, 42–43, 44–46, 56–57, 66 Native Americans, 30–31, 52–53 “New Negro, The” (Locke), 3, 101. See also Foley, Barbara Newton, Adam Zachary, 150n12 Ngai, Sianne, 150n12 North, Michael, 122 Obama, Barack, 44–45, 60 Oedipal situation, 2, 22, 29–30, 41, 54–55, 73, 81, 95, 114–16, 122, 141 “Olympia” (Manet), 80 On Photography (Sontag) 113–14 optical unconscious (Benjamin), 110, 117–25, 136 Ovid, 68, 74, 76, 83–84 Parini, Jay, 149n7 Parsons, Marnie, 47, 50 passing, 89, 90, 97–99 Passing (Larsen), 19, 92–108 pedagogy, 44, 68–69, 88–89, 139 phallus, 37–40. See also body, lesbian phallus photography, 20, 109–35; and archival practices, 125–28; and political power, 110–12, 128–30; and Surrealism, 132–33. See also Benjamin, Walter, and Van Vechten, Carl Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 70–73 Pietz, William, 86, 105 pimping (Coleman), 95–97 Playing in the Dark (Morrison), 14–16, 45 Polk, Noel, 49–50 Pomerance, Murray, 12 Portable Faulkner, The, 36, 52–3

176  /  index portraiture, 69–74, 75–76, 117–36 prostitution, 27–28, 35, 62, 64, 72, 91–92, 95–98. See also pimping Quicksand (Larsen), 18–19, 68–87, 105–6, 107 race: and photography, 117, 120–25, 129–36; and psychoanalysis, 22–26, 40, 102–3, 140; and trauma, 2–4, 9–16, 20–21, 26, 30, 73, 101–3. See also black, Native Americans, white racism: association with psychic trauma, 10, 18, 19, 101–3; in literature, 3, 60–62, 69; and psychoanalysis, 22–26, 102–3. racial violence: in African American literature, 89–91, 101–2; in U.S. history, 9, 137–43; in U.S. literature, 10, 33–34, 140; in Van Vechten’s photography, 120–25 Radstone, Susannah, 7 Raeburn, John, 118, 152n7 Ramsey, D. Matthew, 147n19 rape, 17, 25–8, 31–33, 35, 37, 55–57; “Southern rape complex” (Cash), 23, 27, 35 Raoul, Valerie (et al.), 146n19 Ray, Man, 133 Reames, Kelly Lynch, 37, 50, 62 repetition, 4, 32–33, 45, 58, 67–69, 72–74, 81–84, 86, 95, 100–103. See also fort/da, sardony Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner), 17–18, 37, 46–65, 152n7 Riviere, Joan, 24–26, 40 Robben, Antonius, 146n16 Ronnell, Avital, 42–43 Rooney, Caroline, 105–6 Rothberg, Michael, 5, 6 Rottenberg, Catherine, 93 Rowlandson, Mary, 30–31 Rubin, Gayle, 73 salvific wish (Jenkins), 96–97, 103 Sanctuary (Faulkner), 17–18, 26–43, 46–47, 52, 58. See also Story of Temple Drake, The Sander, August, 110, 116 sardony (Larsen), 100–103 Sekula, Allan, 116, 126

sexuality: black women’s, 63–65, 75–77, 82–85, 91; white women’s, 24–25, 27–28, 35–36, 58. See also homoeroticism Shepherdson, Charles, 66–67, 76, 82–83 Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene, 69, 70, 80 shock effect (Benjamin), 109–17, 121–22, 136 Shumway, David, 10, 12 Simmons, Merinda, 105–6 slavery: in African history, 41–2, 105; in U.S. history, 2, 9, 45, 137–38, 141–43; in U.S. literature, 10–16, 51–53, 72–73, 89–91, 93, 95–96 Smalls, James, 122 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 111, 116–17, 154n41 Snead, James, 15, 34 Sontag, Susan, 112, 113–14, 116, 128–29, 153n18 South (U.S. region), 25, 27, 34–35, 38, 47, 50–55, 57, 84–85 Spillers, Hortense, 40–42, 96–97, 135 spirituality, 48–49, 61–62, 84–85, 86, 105–8 Steichen, Edward, 118, 128–29 Stein, Gertrude, 118, 130, 154n50 Stimson, Blake, 128–29 Story of Temple Drake, The (film version of Sanctuary), 27 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), 10–11, 45 Suàrez-Orozco, Marcelo, 146n16 Surrealism, 132–33 Tate, Allen, 147n18 Tate, Claudia, 150n3 Toomer, Jean, 86 Towner, Theresa, 34 Trachtenberg, Alan, 114 trauma: as critical concept, 9, 67–68; definitions of, 2, 7, 59–60, 67; “historical” versus “structural” (La Capra), 59–60, 115–16; as normal experience, 2, 29–30 (see also shock effect); physical, 33, 37–38, 58, 62–65, 82–83, 101, 104; psychic, 29, 31–34, 54–55, 72–73, 81, 86–87, 111–12, 138 (see also fetishism, narcissism); and racial difference, 2–4, 9–16, 20–21, 44–45, 86 (see also sardony); and racism, 18, 19, 33–34, 37–38; and sexual violence, 29–34, 55–57, (see also rape)

index  /  177 trauma studies, 4, 5–9; and anthropology, 105, 111, 146n25; critiques of, 7–9, 89; as an interdisciplinary field, 6–7; and literary criticism, 5–6, 8–9, 88–91; and photography, 112–17, 131–36; and U.S. literature, 10–16 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe), 23, 140 van der Hart, Onno, 146n19 van der Kolk, Bessel, 146n19 Van DerZee, James, 125 Van Doren, Carl, 68 Van Vechten, Carl, 20–21, 107, 111–36; archives holding his works, 125–28, 154n51 Van Vechten, Carl, works of: Portrait of Peter Abrahams, 119–20; Portrait of Feral Benga, 122, 124; color slides, 127; Portrait of Billie Holiday, 131–36; Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, 118; Portrait of Nella Larsen, 118; Portrait of Carmen de Lavallade, 120–21; Portrait of Claude McKay, 122–23; Portrait of Ethel Waters, 125–26 Wagner-Martin, Linda, 36–37, 49 Wall, Cheryl, 93

Walton, Jean, 24, 40 Warren, Robert Penn, 50–51, 149n13 Waugh, Thomas, 118 Watson, Steven, 154n57 Weinberg, Jonathan, 154n40 Weisenburger, Stephen, 50 Whitman, Walt, 11 white: racial identity, 23–26, 47, 50–55, 98; white women, 24–16, 78–79. See also black, homoeroticism, race, racism, racial violence Wilde, Oscar, 70–73, 75 Wittenberg, Judith Bryant, 37, 50 “Womanliness as Masquerade” (Riviere), 24–26 women, 55–57; and sexual desire, 35–36, 58, 78–79, 96–100. See also black, body, homoeroticism, prostitution, rape, sexuality, white Woodson, Carter, 74 Wright, Richard, 37, 146n36 Yaeger, Patricia, 7 Young, Allan, 7, 146n16 Zelizer, Barbie, 5, 145n15 Žižek, Slavoj, 7, 102 Zwarg, Christina, 146n17