Recovered in the 1980s, thanks to the labor of the numerous black feminist theorists and literary critics, as a major writer of the Harlem Renaissance, modernism, and the “feminist literary canon,”1 Nella Larsen has been praised for her exploration of racial, class, sexual, and linguistic dangers and ambiguities.2 However, despite her prominence in literary, cultural, gender, and race studies, Larsen has not yet entered into the canon of philosophical aesthetics, which predictably tends to reproduce mostly male and mostly white writers as its exemplary figures. And yet the structure of Larsen’s novel interrogates the crucial philosophical questions of art’s autonomy and its vexed relationship to race and gender politics, a relation termed “art and propaganda” in the mid and late 1920s by the Harlem Renaissance’s most important critics and artists. As Thadious Davis argues, Larsen took the art side of this battle and announced that choice publicly in her reviews, interviews, and letters. The choice of art over propaganda does not mean, however, that Larsen relinquished the task of exploring art’s vexed relation to politics, female desire, and racial/sexual violence; rather, it means that such exploration exceeds the available means of language and thus cannot propagate explicit political or philosophical ends. By taking us to the limits of linguistic expression and bodily injury, Larsen exposes the mythical legitimation of white supremacy through a misappropriation of the biblical curse of Ham. What Larsen’s experimental modernism transforms is the originary, violent division within language itself between malediction and benediction, curse and promise, the founding exclusion and inclusion, bodily damage and abstract racist laws. It is these binaries that establish the borders of the racist polis and its excluded outside. By opposing the curse of racism, Larsen’s experimental black modernism transforms the performative violence of discourse in order to reclaim the foreclosed possibilities of inauguration—the conditions of a black female renaissance as such. Such an aesthetic transformation of the entire register of racialized, gendered language not only contests racist law but also enables the emergence of female desire and a utopian black community in the midst of the disaster perpetuated by racist violence. Thus the question Larsen’s experimental modernism poses is how the destruction inflicted by racist violence upon bodies, language, and communities can be transformed into conditions of inauguration. What kind of risks does this task of aesthetics involve? What kinds of interconnection between damaged speech and bodies does it have to invent?
Art or Propaganda; or, On the Aesthetic and Sexual Dimensions of Racial Politics
Larsen’s recovery in the 1980s echoes the complex debates about aesthetics, race, and politics in the Harlem Renaissance in the late 1920s and the conflicting relation between modernist and realist aesthetics in trans-Atlantic modernism more generally. Emphasizing the aesthetic side of this divide, Claudia Tate in her seminal essay of 1980, “Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation,”3 argues that Larsen’s texts have been ignored because of their narrative complexity and figurative ambiguity. Tate was one of the first critics to praise the enigma of Larsen’s novels, which defy not only the conventions of realism and the narrative structures of the “tragic mulatto” but also the possibility of interpretation.4 According to Tate, another marginalized aspect of black textuality is sexual desire: “the racial protocol for African American canon formation has marginalized desire as a critical category of black textuality by demanding manifest stories about racial politics.”5 Significantly, Tate proposes the term textual enigma to designate the “enigmatic surplus” of desire and language over collective black “master narratives” of social protest.6 Interrogating the relation between aesthetics and gender/racial politics in Larsen’s novels, Hazel Carby underscores unresolved contradictions that mock clarity and legibility. Reflective of the contradictions between freedom and racial, gender, and class domination, Larsen’s refusal of textual resolution, most evident in destructive, “abrupt,” or “unearned” endings so often criticized by her interpreters, is, according to Carby, a hallmark of her texts’ political complexity and artistic achievement.7
This conflicting relation between political struggle and artistic innovation is at the core of the intense debates on art and racial politics in the mid and late 1920s among the Harlem Renaissance’s intellectuals and artists. As Davis argues, “although the Art versus Propaganda battle had been waged in the pages of Crisis in 1926, the debate about the portrayal of African Americans in literature was ongoing as the Renaissance progressed.”8 While W. E. B. Du Bois or Claude McKay underscored complex relations between art and propaganda based on aspirations to freedom, others, like James Weldon Johnson or Alain Locke, advocated artistic experimentation.9 For instance, in his essay on the revolutionary impact of African masks on experimental European painting, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” Locke concludes that “any vital artistic expression of the Negro theme and subject in art must break through the stereotypes to a new style, a distinctive fresh technique, and some sort of characteristic idiom.”10
Discussions of art, racial politics, and propaganda in the mid and late 1920s among Harlem Renaissance intellectuals show complex affinities with and differences from the debates on modernism and capital between Brecht and Lukács in the 1930s and their subsequent elaboration by Adorno and the Frankfurt school. Nonetheless, these two modernists’ articulations of aesthetic theory have rarely been discussed together, despite the new emphasis on trans-Atlantic studies of modernity. The juxtaposition of Harlem Renaissance aesthetic theories with those of their European counterparts not only brings together critiques of racism and class exploitation but also enables different articulations of the political functions of aesthetic autonomy—or what Theodor Adorno calls the contradictory status of modern art as “the social antithesis of society” (AT, 8). In a significant departure from Adorno’s pessimism about the possibilities of political praxis, W. E. B. Du Bois rejects Booker T. Washington’s program of accommodation and articulates instead the political strategy of the black struggle for freedom and racial justice. Consequently, the subversive function of black art and literature is closely intertwined with the collective, organized struggle against the crimes of white supremacy. As Du Bois puts it in his 1926 “Criteria of Negro Art,” “how is it that an organization like this, a group of radicals trying to bring new things into the world, a fighting organization which has come up out of the blood and dust of battle … can turn aside to talk about Art?” (CNA, 317). One needs to appreciate the political and the theoretical novelty of Du Bois’s analysis of the relation between aesthetics and politics. For Du Bois, the question is not whether art can preserve the possibility of praxis unavailable in society; but rather why the militant movement needs art in the first place. Despite the controversial claim that all art is propaganda, Du Bois does not imply an instrumental subordination of art to politics, but turns to art in order to emphasize a creative, noninstrumental dimension of politics itself. For Du Bois, the group of radicals has to consider art in the midst of the political urgency of “the blood and dust of battle” in order to preserve a noninstrumental dimension of politics itself beyond its commodification.
Du Bois articulates two different senses of art as propaganda: the first one unmasks the racist ideology of seemingly apolitical Western art, the second articulates the innovative dimension of political struggle. First, Du Bois unmasks the destructive racist propaganda of supposedly autonomous Western art and key concepts of aesthetic theory such as taste, beauty, or genius. It is such racist propaganda that, for example, excludes “a village of the Veys in West Africa” from the category of beauty, which is embodied in Western monuments such as the cathedral at Cologne (CNA, 319). In Quicksand Nella Larsen interrogates the tragic consequences of the ideological perversion of aesthetic categories like taste and beauty. The main character of the novel, Helga Crane, is a person of “rare and intensely personal” aesthetic taste, which helps her to create “a small oasis in a desert of darkness” (Q, 1). This aesthetic taste is consistently undermined and assaulted by the world of white racism. For instance, in the demeaning and patronizing sermon to the black Southern college, the white preacher “praises” the students for their “good taste.” Having nothing to do with the appreciation of art, such “good taste” is supposed to show future black intelligentsia their proper “place” as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” (Q, 3). For Du Bois, such overt or implicit ideology means that supposedly disinterested aesthetic judgments of taste are in fact pronounced by “a white jury” (CNA, 325). That is why, prior to “aesthetic taste,” Du Bois advocates a judgment of “distaste” for the “ugly” (CNA, 319) world of racism, poverty, and sexism. Second, the racist and sexist ideology of art excludes dominated peoples from the possibility of artistic production. Like Virginia Woolf, Du Bois claims that recognized black artists represent merely “the remnants of that ability and genius among us whom the accidents of education and opportunity have raised on the tidal waves of chance” (CNA, 323). In an implicit argument with Kant, Du Bois points out that genius is therefore not the free expression of the greatest abilities of an individual artist or the people, but a matter of historical accident or political privilege. Consequently, the racist propaganda of Western art restricts and destroys the “endless” possibility of the perception and creation of beauty in the world (CNA, 319). By contesting the racism of Western art, by expanding the notion of beauty, and by calling for “free and unfettered judgment,” black art is always already a counterpropaganda. Its political function, which it shares with “radical” black politics, is to contest the racist oppression and exclusion of African Americans from full human rights.
Yet, for Du Bois, art as propaganda is not limited to a contestation of the racist ideology of Western aesthetics; it also has the positive function of revealing and safeguarding the creative function of freedom. Paradoxically, art as “propaganda” reveals an aesthetic dimension of politics. It opens the utopian possibility of a free, beautiful world, for the sake of which the political battle is waged in the first place: “pushed aside as we have been in America, there has come to us not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we had the true spirit; if we had the Seeing Eye, the Cunning Hand, the Feeling Heart; if we … lived in a world where men know, where men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life” (CNA, 319, emphasis added). Beyond the contestation of the ugly world, politics needs a utopian category of the beautiful in order to protect political freedom from the instrumental values of the “free market” and consumption. The “infinite” variety and “endless” possibility of beauty (CNA, 319) reveals the transformative role of freedom, which is not only different from modern consumerism but ultimately more capacious than the struggle against the color line. It is precisely this creative function of freedom that compels the political organization, that is, the “group of radicals trying to bring new things into the world … to talk about Art” (CNA, 317).
Du Bois’s emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of political practice recalls and reworks in a black idiom Marx’s use of aesthetics to articulate the difference between transformative praxis and its degradation into commodity production. As we have seen in chapter 2, Marx similarly argues in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that practice in a liberated society would not be limited to production, but would encompass the entire process of self-transformation and the realization of freedom in a community. Thus, despite the critique of aesthetic ideology, both writers presuppose a certain autonomy of art from the market in order to set up beauty and sensibility—“the Seeing Eye, the Cunning Hand, the Feeling Heart” (CNA, 319)—rather than profit as the aspiration of political struggle. As we have seen, Adorno also shares this critique of the commodification of the political, and that is one of the reasons why he so strongly opposes the integration of Western autonomous art into “a profit-driven industry” (AT, 18). Yet Adorno and Du Bois draw radically different conclusions regarding the autonomy of art: for Adorno, such autonomy separates art from the commodified field of politics tout court, for Du Bois, it reveals the most creative aspect of politics, not yet colonized by consumption. Thus if art for Adorno preserves the utopian possibility of a better praxis still impossible in reality, art for Du Bois reveals the most innovative aspect of the political battle for freedom.
While the most original contribution of Du Bois to modern aesthetic theory lies in his analysis of the aesthetic aspect of freedom and political action, his main limitation consists in his choice of romance to exemplify such a creative dimension of politics. As Hazel Carby argues, romance promises an imaginary reconciliation of economic, class, racial, and sexual contradictions, often by evoking the romantic figure of the folk.11 By citing Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” as an example of romance, Du Bois claims that “the romance of the world did not die and lie forgotten in the Middle Age” (CNA, 320). Romance posits an idealized heroic black masculinity at the center of the political striving for the creation of a beautiful world. For instance, Du Bois sums up the military achievements of black soldiers fighting in a heroic battle in German Africa with the comment that “such is the true and stirring stuff of which Romance is born” (CNA, 321). According to Tate, romance allows Du Bois “to idealize the members of the NAACP as dusty, blood-stained crusaders. … Fighting in this crusade on the behalf of an ideal, traditionally figured as feminine.”12 By promising an imaginary reconciliation of contradictions in the ugly world, this black romance also counters the racist rhetoric of the primitivism and exoticism associated with black female sexuality and provides a chivalric idealization of black femininity. As Tate argues, such a reappropriation of the chivalric codes of romance performs two functions: first, it posits feminized black beauty as both the sexual object and aesthetic ideal of reconciliation of political conflicts. Second, it counters the chivalric rhetoric of white honor symbolized by idealized white femininity in the supremacist propaganda of the Ku Klux Klan. Thus, paradoxically, the “chivalric idealization of female sexuality was the means for inciting and representing both the Klan’s racist propaganda for white supremacy and Du Bois’s counterpropaganda for racial equality in The Crisis…. Du Bois retaliates by using The Crisis to (re)appropriate chivalric imagery so as to idealize himself and others fighting for racial equality.”13
This brief discussion of Du Bois’s definition of propaganda as the aesthetic dimension of politics illuminates the stakes of Larsen’s choice of experimental modernism. Her rejection of propaganda was deeply influenced by the critique of heterosexual romance and its racial, sexual, and textual politics of beauty. As Carby puts it, Larsen stressed the “unresolvable” and “contradictory nature of the search for a female self by refusing the romance.”14 Larsen first of all refused the heterosexual male model of romance and freedom. Rather than providing an antidote to the capitalist confusion of freedom with consumption, romance is an aesthetic manifestation of the commodification of female bodies. As Quicksand shows, the entanglement of romance, commodity, and beauty has tragic rather than liberating consequences for black women. By replacing heterosexual romance with explorations of female bisexuality and lesbian eroticism in Passing, Larsen not only eroticizes beauty but questions its role of reconciliation.
By rejecting romance, Larsen’s experimental modernism explores what cannot appear in the free, beautiful world disclosed by propaganda. The aesthetic function of propaganda is insufficient because it does not interrogate the violent racialized and sexualized exclusions that establish the boundaries of the polis, the world, and language. Thus what cannot appear in the beautiful world are not only unresolved political contradictions but also founding acts of exclusion and their ritualized, brutal articulation in flesh and language. Often the threatening disturbance of such nonappearance is signified in Larsen’s fiction through the tropes of enigma, danger, and ghostly shudder. In the previous chapters I have interrogated the political boundaries established through the violent oppositions between homo sacer and the citizen, bare life and political forms, and social death and viable forms of living. Larsen moves this discussion in a new direction by diagnosing and contesting the political and discursive borders of white supremacy, in particular, the oppositions between the curse and the promise, the suffocating horror of racist violence and the torn letters of experimental black modernism. Larsen’s aesthetic acts of trespassing not only contest the tragic entanglements of the color line, gender, sexuality, and commodification but also subvert the boundaries of the world in which such violent entanglements operate. By taking us to the edge of the world and the limits of language, Larsen’s black modernism explores alternative possibilities of a poetic disclosure of the world apart from the violent mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, curse and benediction. In so doing, she attempts to reclaim the foreclosed possibilities of the inauguration of the world, literature, and language. Yet, how can the destruction inflicted by racist and sexist violence be transformed into inauguration, that is, into the very possibility of renaissance? What kind of mediation does it perform between bodily injury and viable forms of living?
Torn Letters, Racist Violence, and the Commodification of Female Bodies, or, The Politics of Larsen’s Experimental Aesthetics
Larsen has not left us a sustained manifesto of a black feminist aesthetics that would be equivalent to Du Bois’s, Locke’s, or Woolf’s essays. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the question of aesthetics is still a marginalized topic in Larsen’s fast-growing body of criticism. For instance, in her introduction to the Norton critical edition of Passing, “Nella Larsen’s Erotics of Race,” Carla Kaplan writes that Larsen is “hailed for helping create modernist psychological interiority, expanding our uses of irony. … Most importantly, Larsen’s work is now prized for its portrayal of black, female subjectivity and for its depiction of the social and psychological vertigo caused when identity categories break down.”15 In Kaplan’s long list of Larsen’s artistic achievements, there is little reference to aesthetics other than irony or revision of the familiar tropes, such as the tragic mulatta or passing narrative conventions. And, while Kaplan herself provides a brilliant analysis of the way Larsen shifts focus from the ethics to the erotics of race,16 she omits from this discussion the question of the aesthetics and interpretive judgments that Larsen’s earlier critics, such as Claudia Tate, have raised. The only essay on aesthetics included in the Norton critical edition, Thadious Davis’s “Nella Larsen’s Harlem Aesthetic,” focuses less on Larsen’s own artistic practice and more on the “somewhat inexplicable area of motivation and intention,” that is, on Larsen’s desire for social recognition, which ultimately produced a destructive “split between her work as a creative process and her work as a source of public recognition.”17
Nonetheless, the question of aesthetics is crucial to an understanding of Larsen’s project, even if this question is resistant to conceptual pronouncements or manifestos. In place of a conceptual articulation of a female black aesthetics, Larsen gives us an immanent vision of literature—that is, embedded in the self-reflexive moments of the texts themselves—and its vexed relation to desire, freedom, commodification, and racist/sexual violence. And one of the most significant tropes through which Larsen articulates her sense of aesthetic form is the figure of the letter, deployed in a double sense: first, as the enigmatic trope of nonsignifiable violence, freedom, and desire and, second, as an intimation of a literary praxis exceeding the existing conditions of reception and interpretation.
It is perhaps not an accident that Larsen’s most sustained discussion of black aesthetics begins with her own polemical letter written in defense of black experimental texts, just as her last published novel, Passing, begins with the arrival of an equally disturbing letter. Solicited by Opportunity editor Charles S. Johnson, and written in response to a negative review of her friend Walter White’s 1926 novel Flight,18 Larsen’s letter is an articulation of her own aesthetic vision, which sides with African American and transnational experimental modernisms rather than with realism or propaganda. Larsen critiques the realist assumptions of the negative review of Flight by critic Frank Horne and argues that it is experimental rather than realist literature, which promises the most daring expression of racial and sexual freedom.19 Larsen’s letter opens with her “violent” objection to the aesthetic “blindness” of the reviewer, who lacks the “ability or the range of reading to understand the book which he attacked with so much assurance”:20 “It is the blindness, not the abuse which annoys me” (LCJ, 159). First, Larsen attacks the reviewer’s political limitations, which blind him to the sexual and racial complexity of the struggle for freedom of White’s female character, “the rebellious, modern Mimi” (LCJ, 159). Similarly to Du Bois’s critique of commercialized whiteness, Larsen argues that the reviewer fails to understand that “it is the white race which is lost, doomed to destruction by its own mechanical gods” (LCJ, 159) because it confuses political freedom with material possessions.
This narrow political vision of freedom comes from the equally limited view of aesthetics based on anachronistic realist standards of legibility and identity of character. Adopting the realist criteria provided by “Mrs. Wharton” rather than the criteria of the experimental fiction of Conrad, Proust, or Mann, the reviewer “grumbles about ‘lack of clarity’” and “faulty sentence structure” (LCJ, 160). To show that the reviewer completely misses the linguistic complexity of the modern novel, Larsen reminds her readers that even Galsworthy “opens his latest novel with a sentence of some thirty-odd words” (LCJ, 160), not to mention the syntactic complexity of Conrad or Proust. Larsen’s most “violent objection” concerns the reviewer’s expectations of an aesthetic resolution to political conflicts. According to Larsen, the ending of Flight is “perfect” precisely because it leaves the protagonist suspended on the verge of the promise of new freedom without providing narrative reconciliation of political and psychological contradictions (LCJ, 160). Eluding direct representation, narrative completion, and the existing parameters of interpretation, such an act of inauguration can only offer an inconclusive disclosure of an unknown trajectory, which nonetheless calls for freedom of the imagination: “Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own” (LCJ, 159).
Larsen’s juxtaposition of the rebellious side of the Harlem Renaissance, here represented by Walter White, with the European modernism of Galsworthy, Conrad, Proust, or Mann, and her comparison of the reviewer’s aesthetic standards with American realism, represented by Edith Wharton, situates her future work in trans-Atlantic, experimental modernism and modernity. The epigrams from Harlem Renaissance poets, from Langston Hughes in Quicksand and from Countee Cullen in Passing, complicate this transnational trajectory by underscoring the role of the African Diaspora both in the Harlem Renaissance and in European modernism.21 In Quicksand Larsen foregrounds different modes of these conflicting trans-Atlantic exchanges in modern aesthetics. On the one hand, her main character, Helga, is revolted by the demeaning representation of black femininity by an aspiring European painter according to the stereotypes of exoticism, primitivism, and commodification (Q, 69, 70, 74). On the other hand, she is inspired to return to Harlem after recognizing the familiar motifs of African American spirituals in Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, entitled From the New World: “Her definite decision to go was arrived at with almost bewildering suddenness. It was after a concert at which Dvořák’s ‘New World Symphony’ had been wonderfully rendered. Those wailing undertones of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ were too poignantly familiar” (Q, 92).
Larsen’s critique of realism and the heterosexual propaganda of romance is also at work in the self-reflective moments of her early stories written under the male pseudonym “Allen Semi”—the anagrammatical reversal of Larsen’s married name (Nella Imes). From her early texts to her mature novels, Larsen consistently associates the aesthetics and politics of heterosexual romance with racism and the commodification of women. As Thadious Davis observes, Larsen’s masculine pseudonym of Allen Semi implies a partial or misleading meaning.22 Larsen’s anagrammatic play on her husband’s last name Imes/Semi ruins property and the paternal signifier as well as interrupts a kinship structure based on the exchange of women. A prefix rather than a complete word in its own right, semi, or quasi, assumes a feminized function as it cannot signify on its own but only in relation to some other proper name. In contrast to the exchange of commodities, the modifying proximity of semi turns everything to which it relates into something partial, imperfect, similar, but not quite so, as, for instance, semiautobiographical, semifictional, semitransparent. Larsen’s pen name, Semi Allen, performs her first act of gender/sexual trespassing, which ruins and mocks the dominant identity of what it passes for. As the ironic interplay between the title of the story and the pseudonym suggests, a woman passing for a “Semi”-male turns masculinity into “The Wrong Man,” just as a black woman passing for semiwhite ruins the signifier of whiteness and its pretension to mastery and universality.
The title “The Wrong Man,” and the fictitious name of the author, “Allen Semi,” anticipate the dangerous trajectory of the letter, which disturbs gender and generic conventions of romance and political propaganda. Unlike the circulation of women and commodities, letters in the early stories never arrive at their intended destinations—they either reach a “wrong” reader (“The Wrong Man”) or, like the dead letters in Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” arrive belatedly when the addressee is already dead (“Freedom”). By undercutting the aesthetic criteria of clarity and by ruining heterosexual plots, the trajectory of letters is also at odds with Du Bois’s notion of romance. Instead of the free world the politics of racial liberation is fighting for, Larsen’s letters threaten to disclose the secret of romance: romance does not provide an alternative to commodification but is, in fact, the very “soul” of the commodity. The main protagonist of “The Wrong Man,” Julia Hammon, a successful artist, fears the revelation of a secret about her past: in her youth Julia was discovered and “rescued” from homelessness and poverty by a famous explorer, Ralph Tyler, who paid for her art education in exchange for sexual favors. Similarly to Helga and Clare in Larsen’s novels, Julia circulates among men: her former lover, her wealthy husband, and an unknown third party, the “wrong” man, who receives her letter. Yet she has to conceal this trajectory in order to maintain her value as a successful female artist and respectable married woman. Her artistic success depends on her capacity to hide the shameful history of racial, sexual, and class exploitation, of which she herself has been a victim. By contrast, her former lover is well versed in the art and danger of bringing the buried secrets of the glorious past back into the light of “civilization.” Considered dead, he returns from a dangerous journey to the underground and brings with him the revelation of a “buried city” and lost Oriental treasure.23 Ralph’s triumphant return from the dead is juxtaposed with Julia’s dread of sinking into social death, a situation reinforced by Larsen’s recurrent use of the proverbial saying “someone walking over my grave” (WM, 5).
As a figure of black female aesthetics, the letter of the story is at odds with the gendered conventions of the political romance, in particular, with the masculine disclosure of achievements of civilization and the feminine concealment of its barbarism. The ending of Larsen’s story neither discloses the past nor keeps it secret but rather preserves a threatening enigma associated with danger and death. Neither buried nor disclosed, a traumatic past haunts the narrative. At odds with the logic of concealment or disclosure, Larsen’s letters leave us in a dangerous suspension between the “menacing shadows” of the past and the uncertainty of the future. They neither reveal the secrets of the dead nor guard their silence, but take us to “the edge of nowhere,” to an encounter with the impossible—a word that recurs repeatedly in the story (WM, 5–6). As is the case in Passing, sexuality, racism, and the impossible enigma of writing are intertwined with dread and danger. On the one hand, such a dangerous enigma points to foreclosed catastrophes, traumas, and violent contradictions, which cannot appear either in the beautiful utopian world or in the glory of the past. On the other hand, the impossible is a signifier for the alternative possibilities of the aesthetic disclosure of the world, of the unrestrained blaze of color and musical improvisation—“wild and impressionistic … primitive staccato understrain of jazz” (WM, 4)—which accompanies the scene of writing.
The debate between art and propaganda continues to be waged in Larsen’s novels, especially in Passing, but the stakes of these debates change: if, in the early stories, the opacity of the letter exposes and opposes the deadly secret of commodified female beauty, in the novel, illegible letters bear witness to the traumatic past of slavery, bodily injury, and linguistic dispossession. As Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Alexander Weheliye argue in different ways, the trauma and devastation of slavery are not only historical phenomena but also the continuous unfolding of the suffering and dispossession that “engenders the black subject in the Americas.”24 According to Weheliye, “as opposed to being confined to a particular historical period, echoes of new world slavery rest in many contemporary spaces.”25 In Larsen’s novels, the more muted these echoes are the more powerful and destructive their effects. More explicit in Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, references to the violence of antiblack racism function more like a palimpsest—a hidden subtext—that disarticulates the letters and narrative structure of Passing. Consider, for example, a bitter condemnation of America for the horrors of antiblack racist violence in Quicksand by the main protagonist, Helga:
Never could she recall the shames and often the absolute horrors of the black man’s existence in America without the quickening of her heart’s beating and a sensation of disturbing nausea…. The sense of dread of it was almost a tangible thing in her throat.
(Q, 82)
The existence of ignominy which the New World of opportunity and promise forced upon Negroes … more black folk to suffer indignities. More dark bodies for mobs to lynch.
(Q, 75)
Helga’s outrage is echoed in Passing by Irene’s husband, Brian, who views racist America as “the hellish place” that he wants to leave (P, 232). It is this horrific reality that Irene, in her structural function as the main character and as the unreliable narrator, tries to suppress. She forbids Brian from talking to her sons about lynching, which she calls, euphemistically “the race problem,” because she wants to maintain the illusion of family happiness and safety (P, 232). Nonetheless, the repressed fears of lynching and racial trauma reappear in a displaced and distorted form as Irene’s “primitive paralyzing dread” over Brian’s imaginary affair: “Her hands were numb, her feet like ice, her heart like a stone weight. Even her tongue was like a heavy dying thing” (P, 233). Echoing Helga’s dread of the terror of antiblack violence, Irene’s frozen body is a symptom of the unspeakable horror of black bodies brutalized by white mobs.
These passionate expressions and suppressions of the brutality of antiblack racism are crucial for the interpretation of Passing. The narrative of Larsen’s second novel centers on the ambivalent relationship between two black female characters: Irene, the unreliable narrator who is a self-proclaimed race woman but who occasionally passes for white “for the sake of convenience” (P, 227), and her orphaned childhood friend, Clare, who, when she loses kinship ties to the black community, passes for white. Their accidental encounter as married adult women passing for white in the Drake Hotel in Chicago leads to an unpredictable and eventually tragic circulation of nonnormative female desire and letters. The narrative abruptly terminates with the death of Clare, the novel’s enigmatic subject of eroticism, beauty, and writing, at the very moment when she plans to return to Harlem.
As even this brief summery implies, the aesthetic composition of Passing foregrounds the violent split between the “promise” of the New World and “the absolute horrors” of black existence, between the world of opportunity and the threat of bodily dismemberment, between the affirmation of a new beginning and the destruction of possibilities. Such a split reveals the material devastation of language itself and the transmission of racist and sexual violence in the torn letters of female experimental writing and in the suffocating tongue—the bodily instrument of voice. Consequently, the form of the novel oscillates between ostensible surface legibility and its subterranean nauseating paralysis, between ordinary letters and the alien suffocating object. In particular, the figure of the tongue “like a heavy dying thing” evokes Helga’s dread of lynching like “a tangible thing in her throat” (Q, 82). At the most extreme, the proximity of horror obliterates the distinction between the signifier and suffocation, between the symbolic realm, which includes politics, and what psychoanalysis calls the realm of the real (or what is foreclosed from signification). At the limit of signification, the speaking tongue turns into a paralyzing, nauseating “thing” that, in its suffocating materiality, bears the traces of tortured and sexually violated bodies reduced to bare life. The depth of this painful inexpressibility is unavailable to the idealized language of propaganda. Thus what is most at odds with the romance of propaganda is the disjointed, experimental structure of Passing, which conveys and contests the political violence inflicted on black bodies and languages in its narrative form, its main figures, and its abrupt tragic ending.
In Passing the painful enigma of damaged materiality is announced by the figure of the torn letter. The novel begins with the arrival of the dangerous but seductive letter, which signals Larsen’s own arrival as an African American novelist—a woman of letters—and evokes her first polemical letter, which launched her artistic career in 1926. From the outset the narrative stages the conflict between realism—the ordinary “clearly directed letters” (P, 181)—and the experimental “illegible” script of black modernism, provoking fear and desire. A detailed description of the letter stresses its materiality, foreignness, and illegibility: “thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl” (P, 143). Only belatedly attributed to Clare, the anonymous letter repeats in fictional form the struggle against the aesthetics of propaganda that Larsen already waged in the pages of Opportunity. Reproduced in narrative structure as the ambivalent and conflicting relation between two main characters, Clare and Irene, this struggle between “clearly directed” letters and the “almost illegible scrawl” (P, 143) exposes the violent, racialized, and gendered exclusions on which legibility and the promise of freedom in the New World depend.
Ironically, Larsen names her most enigmatic character “Clare,” as if to suggest that both the trauma of social death and the inaugural possibilities of freedom are inaccessible to the expectations of legibility. From the Latin clarus, “Clare” means not only “clarity” but also “brightness” (we might recall here Woolf’s incandescence), a light that can be blinding. In a dialectical opposition to her name, Clare’s bodily expression at moments of narrative crises is “so dark and deep and unfathomable that she had for a short moment the sensation of gazing into the eyes of some creature utterly strange and apart” (P, 172). This juxtaposition of Clare’s name with her “illegible scrawl” and her “unfathomable,” dangerous bodily expression stages the tragic conflict between the aesthetic propaganda of the beautiful world and that which cannot appear in such a world: the unpredictability of female desires, the injured bodies reduced to bare life, and the suffocating horror of racist violence. In a further twist, Irene, the figure of the reader in the text, shares the expectation of legibility that the letter refuses to fulfill. Irene claims to know contents and the identity of the writer without opening the envelope: “Not that she hadn’t immediately known who its sender was” (P, 143). In her “knowing” without reading, Irene suppresses any contradiction, or any “break,” as Fred Motten suggests, between the traumatic “scream” of the commodified flesh and the promise of freedom—any contradiction between expression and a dying tongue.26 However, Irene’s insistence on the immediacy of meaning is undermined by the belated and only partial disclosure of the dangerous contents of Clare’s last letter—of its numerous pages there are just a few fragments, which Irene tries to “puzzle out” (P, 145). What delays even this partial reading is Irene’s involuntary recollection of Clare’s painful past: her poverty-stricken childhood, her rebellious defiance, and the death of her father. These initial narrative acts—the arrival of the dangerous letter, the recollection of death, and Clare’s disappearance—set the narrative in motion and call for a connection between an expressive voice and a dying tongue.
Although Irene’s claim to immediacy of knowledge is denied by a rather classical dialectical form of the negation of the negation—“not that she hadn’t immediately known who its sender was” (P, 143)—the aesthetic mediation in Passing does not work according to a dialectical model, but rather assumes an aesthetic movement of trespassing. In its subversive aesthetic function, trespassing cannot be limited to the “passing plot,” which, as many commentators note, simultaneously undermines and preserves class, heterosexuality, and white supremacy. Trespassing also differs from the political contestation of racist and gender domination, although such a struggle is the important first step “on the edge of danger” (P, 143). Moving further on the edge of intelligibility, trespassing crosses the boundaries of the inhabitable world to contest the violent founding exclusions of the racist, patriarchal polis. Through transgression and transformation, the traversal of the limits of signification aims to reestablish the severed link between expressive voice and a dying tongue. In so doing, Larsen’s experimental aesthetics not only bears witness to black suffering but also reclaims the foreclosed possibilities of inauguration: the “revolutionary” possibilities of renaming, desire, and community.
By opposing such a dangerous aesthetic and political movement of trespassing, Irene repeatedly suppresses any contradiction that calls into question her insistence on imaginary knowledge and security, which are based on the denial of the danger of racism, the material opacity of writing, and nonnormative desires. Irene’s violent destruction is directed at any text that presents a threat to her “safe” middle-class world of respectability. One of the most haunting scenes of obliteration—which, according to David Marriott, is a figure of failed mourning27—occurs on the train when Irene, having witnessed the humiliation to which Clare and her friends are subjected by her racist husband, tears to pieces Clare’s letter, which expresses love and asks Irene for forgiveness. Instead of forgiveness, Irene “tore the offending letter into tiny ragged squares that fluttered down and made a small heap in her black crêpe de Chine lap. The destruction completed … she dropped them over the railing and watched them scatter, on tracks, on cinders, on forlorn grass, in rills of dirty water” (P, 178). What is striking in this passage is the emphasis on the fragmentation and scattering of the text beyond any possibility of its recovery. The same fate meets the second letter, the last letter, which, in violation of chronology, appears in the novel first: “Tearing the letter across, she had flung it into the scrap-basket…. The basket for all letters, silence for their answers” (P, 191–192). If Virginia Woolf’s Orlando has been called the longest love letter in literature, Nella Larsen’s Passing is the shortest one, shredded to pieces, and scattered over the ashes.
Beyond the psychology of the characters, the destruction of letters is Larsen’s version of the death of art, bearing witness to the horrors of social death, the brutality of racism, and the commodification of female bodies. By recalling the epigram from Countee Cullen’s poem, “Heritage,” that opens the novel: “One three centuries removed/From the scenes his fathers loved, /Spicy grove, cinnamon tree./What is Africa to me?” (P, 140), the destruction of writing on the train journey between the two centers of African American Renaissance, Chicago and New York City, is haunted by the trauma of the middle passage. This is especially the case since the work of destruction is not limited to literature but extends to the world itself. The world, receiving the fragments of the letter, becomes an ugly, abject, and scorched wasteland; even the beauty of nature is destroyed by the scars of destitution and violence. By expelling beauty into dirt and waste, the work of art, instead of opening the world, tears apart its false, beautiful facade. The incorporation of the recurrent destruction of letters and waste into the composition of Passing makes visible the death of art repressed by the dominant American literary and political traditions, that is, the destruction of freedom and black female creativity by white supremacy.
By making the suppressed violence visible, Larsen moves beyond the single artwork toward an interrogation of the role of this destruction in the formation of literary history: she reconfigures the significance of the tear and disaster at the heart of American letters. The tear in the text resonates with the ghostly echoes of the African origins of languages and cultures on American soil. Through acts of burial and mourning of which the characters are not capable, the return of the remnants of writing, in a negative evocation of diaspora, is an act of the sowing of seeds. Although diasporic sensibility is refused by Irene, who defensively proclaims herself as an American (P, 235) and vehemently opposes her husband’s desire to emigrate to Brazil, the act of scattering the letter, the scattering of language and cultures, incorporates traces of diasporic memory into the composition of the text. Bearing witness to such dispersed traces, the destruction of this particular letter of African American female writing also points to an impossible future that might arise from the scene of its destruction. If Clare’s last letter stands in a metonymic relation to the novel as a whole, then it implies that the death of art always already haunts the beginning of African American female writing and, conversely, that a new beginning can emerge from such destruction. Since proliferating refuse, waste, and ugliness are presented as essential elements of the work of art yet to come, they also raise a question about the status of the novel as a dispersed gathering of the material traces of racist violence, waste, and destruction: how can such a gathering be transformed into the possibility of a female renaissance?
“On The Edge of Danger”: Trespassing the Curse/Benediction Divide
In order to see how potentiality—the tour de force of Passing— can emerge, like the Phoenix from ashes, from destruction and ruin, we need to reread the trajectory of the destroyed letter as a response to the catastrophe of slavery and the legacy of the black struggle for freedom. The main figure through which the notion of America as a “hellish place” is inscribed in the novel is Noah’s mythical curse of slavery. The curse points to the transmission of racist and sexual violence and to the expulsion of cursed bodies from the realm of signification. By choosing this particular signifier of slavery, Larsen recalls not only the long barbaric history of religious/cultural legitimations of the enslavement of Africans and African Americans but further develops her idea of aesthetic “trespassing” as well. Larsen’s struggle with the bodily and linguistic violence of the curse reveals the main political function of her experimental black aesthetics: such aesthetics attempts to contest and transform the linguistic and bodily force of devastation into new modes of signification. Yet the difficulty of such a transformation lies in the fact that the mythic act of cursing cuts language itself into the suffocating tongue and the “cursed” signifier of whiteness. The traversal and transformation of the cursing/cursed language is the task of the countermovement of trespassing, motivated by a desire to subvert the persisting effects of death, linguistic dispossession, and racist violence. It is one of the reasons why the narrative structure of Passing is organized around the recurrence of the curse and different modalities of tres-pass, from defiance to mockery, from laughter to writing, all of which transform the curse into a feminine “cursive” scrawl. Thus, from the opposition between propaganda and the experimental script of black aesthetics, we move to a far more dangerous disjunction between the circulation of the torn letter and the transmission of the curse—a chasm that the numerous acts of literary trespassing attempt to bridge and eventually transform into new possibilities of signification.
According to Houston Baker Jr., the task of transforming cursed language is shared by most black writers of the Harlem Renaissance. In his revaluation of the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, Baker discusses the relevance of the curse in the context of the discursive strategies of black modernism, which he defines in terms of multiple tensions between the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery. In his rereading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Baker views Caliban’s curse as always already a metacurse, deforming the nonsense of white mastery and speaking of the dispossession of indigenous speech. African American writers, according to Baker, share the task of Caliban, since they also “must transform an obscene situation, a cursed and tripled metastatus, into a signal self/cultural expression. The birth of such a self is never simply a coming into being, but always, also, a release from a BEING POSSESSED.”28 Although Larsen also disarticulates the cursed language of white mastery, for her the paradigmatic case of the curse is not The Tempest of the British Renaissance, but the more primordial curse of Noah in the biblical book of Genesis—that is, the role of the curse in the Western genesis of the world. By traversing the origins of the world, Larsen does not produce a “metacurse” but develops further the transformative possibilities of aesthetic trespass.
Evoked in the novel as the origin of slavery and patriarchal domination, the curse of Noah, also called the curse of Ham, refers to the long history of racist misappropriations of the biblical text. The paternal curse makes its first appearance in the first chapter of the novel immediately after the arrival of Clare’s letter and is pronounced by Clare’s own drunken father. In the second chapter, however, the curse assumes a religious and mythical status by becoming explicitly associated with the biblical story of Noah cursing the future generations of his youngest son, Ham, into the eternal damnation of slavery (Genesis 9). The racist appropriation of Noah’s curse occurs when Clare, after the death of her father, is removed from the black community and sent to live with her white aunts. To justify the racist abuse of their niece and the domestic exploitation of her labor, the aunts evoke Noah’s curse: “The good God … intended the sons and daughters of Ham to sweat because he had poked fun at old man Noah once when he had taken a drop too much. I remember the aunts telling me that old drunkard had cursed Ham and his sons for all time” (P, 159). What Clare’s white relatives are referring to is the biblical text of Genesis 9: “When the Noah awoke from his stupor he learned what his youngest son had done to him, and said: ‘Accursed be Canaan, /he shall be/his brothers’ meanest slave.’/He added: ‘Blessed be Yahweh, God of Shem, /let Canaan be his slave!’” (Genesis 9:24–27).
In her ironic retelling of the racist reappropriation of biblical text, Clare mocks Noah as the drunken “old man” who violates the divine promise of peace and life and introduces instead the curse of eternal slavery into the world. In so doing, she “pokes fun” at the mythical curse of the white father while, at the same time, bearing the brunt of the curse. The biblical curse is also internalized by Irene, who, at the moment of the psychological crisis in the “Finale” part of Passing, acknowledges for the first time the brutality of racism: “It was a brutality, and undeserved. Surely, no other people so cursed as Ham’s dark children” (P, 225).
Like the torn letter, the figure of Ham’s cursed “dark children” frames the narrative structure of Passing. By tearing the narrative screen of legibility at the beginning and end of the text, the curse refers to the long history of racist misappropriations of the biblical text of Genesis 9 to justify slavery in America. The relation between Noah’s curse and the justification of slavery is well known to both biblical scholars and historians of slavery; it is surprising, therefore, that Noah’s curse has not played a more significant role in the numerous interpretations of Larsen’s text. As David Davis argues in Inhuman Bondage, the story of Noah’s curse in Genesis 9 is “absolutely central in the history of antiblack racism. No other passage in the Bible has had such a disastrous influence through human history as Genesis 9:18–27.”29 Similarly, David Goldenberg, a biblical scholar, writes that the story of Genesis “has been the single greatest justification for black slavery for more than a thousand years.”30 Focusing primarily on the American legacy of Noah’s curse, Stephen Haynes demonstrates that “the scriptural defense of slavery had evolved” by 1830 “into the ‘most elaborate and systematic statement’ of proslavery theory.”31
The racist interpretations of Genesis 9 stressed the dual—political and bodily—effects of the linguistic curse, which “generated both slavery and blackness,”32 despite the absence of any references to skin color in the Bible. Confronting this tradition, Larsen examines both the performative and the “epidermal” force of the curse. The curse fuses into the same utterance the linguistic violence, bodily injury, and religious/juridical justification of that violence. Signifying, according to the OED, male-diction, excommunication, or symbolic death, the performative violence of the term curse is the opposite of “blessing,” or bene-diction, and, as we have seen, of the promise of the New World. As the opposite of bene-diction, the curse can be read as the exemplary and originary performative act of male-diction. Prior to any signification, the curse is an act of violence expelling bodies from the political realm and reducing them to bare life. Such an expulsion instantiates the borders of communal life and social death, speech (bene-diction) and dying tongue (male-diction), being-in-common and the destruction of community. Because the curse inscribes the limits of politics and speech on bodies, Larsen’s black female writing not only trespasses the color and gender line but also redraws the borders of the political beyond the male-/bene-diction divide. Such an art gathers material remainders that have been violently expelled from the social constitution of meaning and reduced to nonsignifying waste—the torn letters, the dying tongue, the scorched landscape, the broken cup from the Underground Railroad (P, 221–222)—and treats them as sources of resistance, remembrance, and nonconceptual expressivity.
Racist appropriations of Noah’s curse recall Patterson’s interpretation of enslavement as excommunication and Agamben’s interpretation of banishment as the original political act, both of which establish the caesura between inclusion and exclusion in the political community, discussed at greater length in chapter 4. American readings of Noah’s curse also underscore the substitution of slavery for “immediate death” and interpret skin color as the bodily effect of this substitution—as the mark of degradation and punishment. As Stephen Haynes argues, in the American context the curse of slavery—“the antithesis of honor”—was a “substitute for death.”33 Consequently, Noah’s curse signifies in American cultural imaginary “the absolute horror” of what Orlando Patterson calls social death, Agamben terms “bare life,” and Hortense Spillers discusses as the hieroglyphics of wounded flesh exposed to unlimited violence.
Since Noah’s curse performs and transmits “social death” through generations, it also destroys what Arendt calls the principle of natality, understood in the broadest terms as the principle of a new beginning in political life. As the destruction of genealogy and history, as an exclusion from the past as well as from the future, the loss of natality marks the cursed person not only as socially dead but also, to recall Patterson’s analysis of natal alienation, as an unborn being (SSD, 38). Consequently, the malediction of the curse annuls the claims of birth, the symbolic meaning of the name, and the future for the children of Ham. This cruel inversion of natality to social death in Larsen’s novels turns the scene of birth, the moment of a new beginning, into a moment of death for mother and child. In Quicksand Helga “saw, suddenly, the giving birth to little, helpless, unprotesting Negro children as a sin, an unforgivable outrage. More black folk to suffer indignities. More dark bodies for mobs to lynch” (Q, 75). This indictment of birth as “an unforgivable outrage,” which resonates with Clare’s own sense of the cruelty of motherhood, stands in sharp contrast to the affirmative signification of Winold Reiss’s painting of The Brown Madonna, which was used as a frontispiece for the first edition of Alain Locke’s The New Negro anthology in 1925. As Baker suggests, the choice of this particular painting of “the energized portrait of a Madonna who gives life to succeeding generations” emphasizes the relationship between the family and the foundation of a new nation of African Americans.34 By contrast, Larsen’s representation of the “outrage” and trauma of black motherhood not only points to the fragility of such national foundations but also exposes the disavowed, destructive legacy of natal alienation.
The use of Noah’s curse as a religious justification for and legitimation of the slave law points to what Agamben calls an “archaic link” between law, religion, and magic. According to Agamben, law itself grounds its efficacy not in rationality but in a “prejuridical sphere in which magic, religion, and law are absolutely indiscernible from one another” (TR, 114). For Agamben, the paradigmatic expression of this archaic link is the act of oath. As exemplary benediction, oath creates contractual bonds and obligations. Yet, if the exemplary benediction belongs to the most archaic areas of prelaw, then its opposite is curse, which annihilates all communal links. In contrast to oath, the curse of Ham performs a radical act of expulsion that instantiates the borders of communal life, speech, and being-in-common. Through expulsion from the realm of symbolization, from the polis as well as from kinship, this “archaic” act of malediction institutes the border between collective life and speech, on the one hand, and utter illegitimacy, death, and suffocating tongue, on the other hand.
The liminality of Noah’s curse resonates with Orlando Patterson’s discussion of the slave’s marginal position. However, in contrast to the biblical expulsion, Patterson points to another function of liminality, namely, to the transgressive possibility of trespassing the deadly border between human order and inhuman chaos. Because the enslaved being “was marginal, neither human nor inhuman … neither dead nor alive,” she could traverse “the deadly margin that separated the social order above from the terror and between chaos of the underground” (SSD, 48). It was one of the contradictions of slavery that the most powerless position enabled the most dangerous mediation between the human and the divine, cosmos and chaos. Since such crossing of limits cannot be controlled, the act of passing turns in Larsen’s novel into a transgressive trespassing. The possibility of trespass is also inscribed in the biblical story, but it is limited to the opaque sexual transgression of the son, who, by witnessing his drunken father’s exposed genitals, puts paternal mastery in question. The son’s transgression, therefore, is what precedes the male-/benediction divide, whereas the reactive reinstatement of paternal, sovereign authority is based on that divide.
Associating these dangerous possibilities of trespassing with the daughter’s rather than the son’s act, Larsen transforms the force of exclusion enacted through Noah’s curse into an inaugural possibility of new signification, community, and desire. Understood as a traversal or a transgression of the borders of intelligibility separating the habitable world from its excluded outside, the act of trespassing does not lead to a reconciliation but perverts and corrupts the existing boundaries and, in so doing, destabilizes their structure, exposing their arbitrary violence as well as their impermanence. This dangerous crossing of the border between the living and the dead is consistently figured as “walking on one’s grave” or becoming “the second grave digger” (P, 219). However, the corroding effects of transgression point not only to danger but also to the possibility of redrawing the crumbling boundaries of the common world from the position of those who have been excluded or marginalized. By inscribing gender as well as the “race problem” within the biblical curse, Larsen assigns this dangerous task to the impossible, unlivable position of the “daughter of Ham,” who contests the vitiated structure of racialized paternity in its mythical (the real in Lacan’s terminology), symbolic, and imaginary functions.35 As Clare confesses to Irene in their first encounter, she “was determined get away, to be a person and not a charity or a problem, or even a daughter of the indiscreet Ham” (P, 159). The determination not to be “a problem” evokes Du Bois’s problem of the color line, symbolized by double consciousness,36 and Alain Locke’s proclamation in The New Negro that one of the tasks of the Harlem Renaissance is to transform the old “Negro problem” created by racist white culture into the “artistic self-expression of the Negro today.”37 Yet, for Larsen, what stands between “being a problem” and “being a person” is a triple disaster: the mythic curse, bodily injury, and damaged language. The dangerous task of black female aesthetics is to transform all three of these traumatic impasses into possibilities of a new “genesis.”
The mutually exclusive relation between being “a person” and a “daughter of Ham” situates the ambiguous struggle with racialized fatherhood at the center of the narrative structure of the novel. Already, in the opening chapter, Clare’s mulatto father is presented as a defective, but still violent, replica of the drunken biblical father: “Her drunken father, a tall, powerfully built man, raged threateningly up and down the shabby room, bellowing curses and making spasmodic lunges at her which were not the less frightening because they were, for the most part, ineffectual” (P, 143–144, emphasis added). The implicit reenactment of Noah’s curse splits Clare’s father into the untenable and unlivable contradiction between a pathetic replica of the white mythical father and the humiliated black son who, despite his university education, works as a poverty-stricken janitor, deprived of symbolic authority and mocked even by black children. Both of these positions—the humiliated imaginary father and the faulty semblance of the mythical father—fall short of the symbolic function of (white) fatherhood, which usurps signification and writing.
The association of Clare’s father with a defective, but nonetheless threatening, semblance of the cursing Noah shows how the violence of the curse situates the biracial child always already on the “edge” of danger, on the “farthermost” border of home, kinship, subjectivity, and the world. Even as a child, Clare refuses “allegiance” to the mythical father, staring down at the mythical facet of fatherhood “with a sort of disdain” and greeting the news of its death with “an outpouring of pent-up fury” (P, 144). In this first childhood act of open defiance, Clare already fights for artistic expression, symbolized by the transgressive act of making her own dress, despite the danger “to herself and her work” (P, 144), and struggles, later, for freedom, writing, and desire in the public and private spheres. If Clare contests the mythical violence of fatherhood, she simultaneously defends her own biracial father, who is humiliated by the same curse: “she would fight with a ferocity and impetuousness that disregarded or forgot any danger; superior strength, numbers. … How savagely she had clawed those boys the day they had hooted her parent and sung a derisive rhyme, of their own composing, which pointed out certain eccentricities in his careening gait!” (P, 145). Clare’s revolt against the paternal curse and paternal ridicule are the first acts of the daughter’s struggle, not yet supported by linguistic transformation.
When the narrative of Clare’s “passing” moves away from the black community, the struggle against Noah’s curse becomes more explicit. In a distant echo of the plantation house, Clare’s white female relatives pronounce the biblical curse of Noah to justify their exploitation of Clare’s domestic labor. In a twist of the passing plot, they force Clare to pass for “white” in public, forbidding her to visit the black community or to speak about “Negroes to the neighbors” (P, 159). Mythical white fatherhood is thus intertwined with a perversion of kinship and a further bracketing of symbolic possibilities. In a vicious circle of the passing plot, Clare, passing for white, ends up marrying another version of the cursing Noah. Associated with the violence of antiblack racism and patriarchy, the act of bellowing curses, first performed by Clare’s own father, is inscribed in Clare’s married name, Bellew. This lack of distinction between the violence of the curse and the symbolic value of the (im)proper name splits Clare’s linguistic and bodily being. Furthermore, the dubious escape from economic exploitation and the loss of family occur at the exorbitant price of living with racist humiliation in married life. By marrying a racist international banking agent, a specialist in symbolic and financial capital, Clare, instead of becoming a person, becomes the incestuous daughter/wife/commodity of obscene Noah.
As these impasses suggest, contestation of the destructive legacy of social death cannot be limited to a struggle with mythical, symbolic, and imaginary fatherhood within the convention of the “passing plot.” That is why the struggle in Larsen’s work against deadly effects of the paternal curse is intertwined with the transformation of language itself: in opposition to the paternal curse, the cursive letter of black aesthetics traverses linguistic liminality, suspending the borders of the racist patriarchal order from without and from within so as to expose and oppose the racist patriarchal terror upholding the structures of exploitation. Each self-authorizing act of crossing the “edge” of danger and the edge of language suspends the boundaries of the racist patriarchal order and shows their permeability, despite the racist terror upholding their structures. Such a linguistic traversal of the limits of being, signification, and the world not only bears witness to black dispossession but also creates alternative “revolutionary” possibilities of renaming, desire, and resignification. Despite the tearing apart and scattering of Clare’s letter and the mutilation of her beautiful body, the novel, through witnessing, recording, and incorporating “scraps” of language and traces of bodily injury into its own composition, opens the possibility of interpreting the scene of dispersion as the sowing of the new seeds of an alternative, utopian black community and female desires. By initiating an insurgent movement, Passing restores the destroyed conditions of renaissance, the possibility of rebirth. Yet, as Irene’s erotic nickname, Rene (evocative of the French re-née), signifies, such a possibility of genesis no longer occurs under the auspices of the name of the father but emerges from erotic relations among women.38
Such a traversal of the borders of intelligibility separating the habitable world from its excluded outside renders the division between bene-/male-diction, and its correlatives—bare life/polis, dying tongue/expressive voice, violated flesh/commodity form—inoperative. What is then the dimension of language that is revealed through the subversion of the performative violence of benediction and malediction? What the bene-diction/curse doublet obscures is, according to Agamben, the primordial event of language, which exceeds not only the performative power of law but also the sovereign decision on the state of exception that suspends and confirms juridical status (TR, 136–137). In the context of Agamben’s analysis, we could say that the binary of Noah’s curse and blessing both points to and conceals a more originary dimension of linguistic performativity, namely, a primordial event of language that precedes any determined signification (TR, 134–135). According to Agamben, there are two opposed ways of approaching the event dimension of language: the first operates according to the oath paradigm to “ground contract and obligation” (TR, 135). The second moves beyond the paradigm of the oath toward “a pure and common potentiality of saying … open to a free and gratuitous use of time and the world” (TR, 136). By rendering the opposition between malediction and benediction inoperative, the movement of trespassing in Larsen’s novel follows the second path in order to disclose a communal, open and free, possibility of embodied speech. What in Passing keeps the event of language open is the intertwining of female enigmatic writing with mocking laughter, which turns the authority of the cursing father into a joke.
Laughter, Jokes, and Common “Things”
To transform cursed language into the common event of speech, the “scrawl” of female letters repeatedly provokes insurgent laughter. Although in the biblical text the “transgression” of laughter justifies the curse of servitude and slavery, in Larsen’s text this relation is reversed: laughter not only undermines mastery and the oppositions between bare life/political forms that support it, but, more importantly, annuls the per-formative power of malediction. Indeed, jokes, mockery, derisive laughter, and irony are frequent insurgent responses to false authority and to racist violence. The black artist, Dave Freeland, and his wife, Felice, are known for their irony, witticism, and mockery. Yet it is Clare, the figure of aesthetic and erotic beauty, enigma, and writing, who is most often associated with both seductive and mocking laughter: “Clare laughed for a long time, little musical trills following one another in sequence after sequence” (P, 199). That is why she admires the defiant writing of Dave Freeland, “the author of … devastating irony” (P, 221). Clare’s laughter is mixed with “poignant rebellion” (P, 196), seduction, and disdain. More enigmatically and more threateningly, Clare also seems to be laughing “at some secret joke of her own” (P, 210), a joke that cannot yet be disclosed but awaits its public dissemination in the black community and, in so doing, calls for a utopian “Freeland.”
To approach the insurgent force of Clare’s laughter I would like to juxtapose the white fears of rebellious black laughter in racist American interpretations of Noah’s curse with Freud’s discussion of jokes’ subversive, political, and sexual function. According to Haynes, mockery and laughter at the father were a prominent theme in American proslavery interpretations of Genesis 9: Ham’s derisive laughter was often viewed as sufficient justification for the curse. What makes Ham’s transgression intolerable is his contempt and mocking laughter at his father’s exposed/emasculated body. Such a transgression is also intolerable for Irene, who is horrified by the possibility that Clare’s deadly disdain for her father can reenact the symbolic murder of her racist husband: “She saw again the vision of Clare Kendry staring disdainfully down at the face of her father, and thought that it would be like that that she would look at her husband if he lay dead before her” (P, 196). Haynes argues that mocking laughter occupied this prominent position in the interpretation of the biblical text in the American antebellum South because it signified white fears of black insurrection and rebellion. In fact, laughter was regarded as the first sign of resistance and revolt.39 As such fears imply, laughter, rather than being the cause of the curse, signifies insurrection against paternal authority and white supremacy. Ham’s laughter implies, therefore, that the curse of eternal slavery is not an originary sovereign ban, but rather a response to the opaque and enigmatic transgression of the son, who, by gazing at his drunken father’s exposed genitals, puts paternal sovereignty and honor in question. It is thus the transgression associated with laughter and sexuality that seems to be an originary act, whereas the reinstatement of the paternal and sovereign authority through the curse is reactive and secondary. Reclaiming such transgression, Larsen explores not only the rebellious aspects of black laughter but also its power to reshape language, sensibility and community.
White fears of black insurgent laughter resonate with Freud’s discussion of the subversive function of political jokes that undermine and disparage political authority, unjust institutions, and power structures. In Freud’s words, the political jokes of subjugated groups represent a conscious and, more significantly, unconscious “rebellion against that authority, a liberation from its pressure.”40 Although they incite pleasure, political and hostile jokes stem from the experience of bitterness, which through such jokes, is transformed into a sense of liberation and libidinal enjoyment: “By making our enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him—to which the third person … bears witness by his laughter” (JTRU, 122). That is why Freud suggests that jokes are related to the struggle for freedom: “freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom” (JTRU, 7).
What black political jokes make possible is an attack on racist white power, an attack that might otherwise be impossible. At first glance, jokes seem harmless since they make a transfer from explicit political struggle to the libidinal enjoyment of “nonsense.” Yet, thanks to their verbal wit, jokes liberate not only foreclosed and suppressed libidinal possibilities of enjoyment but also new linguistic and political means of struggle. This conversion of impossibility into new opportunities of subversion and libidinal pleasure occurs thanks to the verbal nonsense, duplicity, and ambiguity in the structure of the joke. The linguistic play with nonsense conceals another target of the joke: the nonsense and the injustice of ruthless power.41 As Freud puts it, “thanks to their façade they [jokes] are in position to conceal not only what they have to say but also the fact that they have something—forbidden—to say” (JTRU, 126). Thus what is most subversive politically in the case of black laughter is an exposure of the nonsense and stupidity of the political power of whiteness. Evocative of the enigma of Clare’s letter, the verbal play and duplicity in the structure of the joke allow those who are humiliated by ruthless authority to “avenge the insult” by turning “it back against the aggressor” (JTRU, 124). Freud illustrates the verbal ambiguity and political subversion of jokes by referring to the famous verbal play of “translator-traitor” (JTRU, 36). Like an illegible scrawl of black female modernism, cynical jokes, which attack the ruthless authority of the rich and powerful, are not only most treacherous politically but also most duplicitous linguistically. If the targets of the joke’s attack are political authorities, then such a revolt “can only be made under the mask of a joke and indeed of a joke concealed by its façade” (JTRU, 129, emphasis added). Duplicity and the facade of verbal nonsense allow those who tell and laugh at the jokes to expose “another piece of nonsense” (JTRU, 66)—the nonsense of political authority. In Passing the joke transforms the curse itself into a piece of nonsense. Opposed to the curse, the nonsense liberated and disseminated through laughter is thus the counterfigure of linguistic and libidinal liminality, a figure that suspends the borders of the racist patriarchal order from without and from within. Thus, by rereading Freud with Larsen, we can say that subversive jokes, thanks to their exposure of the nonsense of political authority, linguistic wit, and shared laughter, open alternative possibilities of collective resistance, sensibility, and enjoyment.
In Passing the most cynical, treacherous, and duplicitous joke is ironically called a “priceless joke” (P, 171). During the scene of the worst humiliation inflicted on Clare and her friends by her racist husband, such a cynical joke subverts the cruelty of the racist joke within which it is concealed. When Clare asks her husband to explain to her guests why he calls her “Nig,” Bellew jokingly declares that Clare, who used to be white, is now “gettin’ darker and darker” and that one day she might turn completely black (P, 171). It is only as a joke that Jack can betray his unconscious attraction to Clare’s blackness. Bellew unwittingly speaks the unconscious truth of his and Clare’s own desires for blackness, but only by laughing at it as “nonsense.” The novel’s priceless joke takes as its target the racist and obscene joke of Clare’s husband, another figure of cursing Noah, and treacherously subverts its cruelty by exploiting Bellew’s ambivalent desire for Clare’s “darkness.” In this scene the joke works as both traitor (betraying white supremacy) and translator moving between different codes of power, language, and desire. Irene assumes that the joke is on Clare, as it reveals the concealed humiliating truth of her marriage. But the joke is also on Irene, who, in her function as the unreliable narrator and witness, fails to comprehend that Clare’s becoming darker entails a “dangerous” desire for Irene and for the black community of Harlem—a desire incompatible with Irene’s need for safety. Clare’s counter-response to her husband’s roaring laughter with “ringing the bell-like laugh” of her own, followed by Irene’s uncontrolled explosion of “gales of laughter,” make Bellew’s aggression and ignorance the butt of his own joke. As Ralph Ellison suggests in his “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” the joke stages here the complex, unconscious confrontation between black and white Americans and changes the terms of that confrontation: “It is across [the] joke that Negro and white Americans regard one another.”42 With each turn, “the priceless joke” starts to acquire a different, more cynical, more hostile, and more erotic significance (P, 171)—and the full menace of the joke is delayed until the end of the novel when the “dark” Clare confesses that she could kill her husband should he block her desire for Irene and accepts her own death as the price of that desire. Thus, masked within the envelope of a racist joke, the novel’s “priceless joke” “translates” the biblical curse into a piece of white patriarchal nonsense and subverts its cruelty through laughter. By turning Noah’s racist curse against itself, the “priceless” joke liberates new possibilities of insurgent signification and libidinal jouissance.
Like the enigma of Clare’s writing and bodily expression, the nonsense liberated through the plural modalities of laughter circulating in Passing—irony, mockery, jokes, witticisms, play—not only annuls the performative violence of the racist curse but also enacts alternative social relations within the black community. The subversion of the malediction/benediction divide and its correlatives—exclusion/inclusion, bare life/citizenship, social death/political life—initiates a new, insurgent movement toward a utopian black community, feminine desire, and a free, common event of language. In wanting to be with Irene and to live in Harlem, Clare, like Dave Freeland, wants to participate in the “experimental” act of founding a utopian black “Freeland” in order to inaugurate new possibilities of political, artistic, and erotic freedom.
As the libidinal aspect of the joke suggests, such alternative modes of being in common emerge not only from the shared struggle for freedom but also from the sensual pleasure of sharing common wit and talk. As Freud argues, we cannot laugh at the joke alone—the circulation of the joke requires the explicit or implicit witness of a third party. Thanks to their linguistic ingenuity, jokes lift internal or external inhibitions, and, vice versa, by lifting inhibitions, they liberate the collective, sensual character of linguistic play from the constraints of rational communication. By developing Freud’s insights, we can say, therefore, that new modalities of community emerge not only from the triangular structure of the joke but also from its liberation of quasi-political, sexual, and aesthetic freedom. In Larsen’s novel the collective performance of the utopian community of freedom through participation in laughter, pleasure, and linguistic play takes place in the “Finale” part of the novel, during the all-black party. This extremely fleeting occurrence of the common event of language precedes and disarticulates the binary oppositions of curse and oath. Inserted “in passing,” such an event is bracketed by the presence of disaster: the bitter discussion of lynching at the beginning of the chapter and Clare’s tragic death at the end. Yet, between the recurrence of murderous violence, Larsen includes a brief moment of aesthetic and libidinal pleasure in shared laughter, talk, and sensuous linguistic play. The participants gathered at the party experiment with different ways of being in common by throwing “nonsensical shining things into the pool of talk, which the others, even Clare, picked up and flung back with fresh adornment” (P, 237, emphasis added). What is most striking in this collective event, implied by the figure of the “pool of talk,” is not only the subversion of mastery and the “dissolution” of oppositions between curse and blessing but a liberation of sexual pleasure in the materiality of language and collective nonsensical play. The “pool of talk” brackets the language of struggle and communication and transforms it into the festive event of sharing “nonsensical shining things” (P, 237). What each participant of this event adds is not a new meaning but a “fresh adornment” for the sensible—shall we say feminized?—body of language. The fresh adornment of language created in common repeats and resignifies the initial scene of the novel when, as a child, Clare is cursed by her drunken father for creating a new adornment—a red dress—for her own body.
This collective participation in the common event of language, sensibility, laughter, and improvisation performs a resignification of the most ambiguous and dangerous word in the novel—things. On the one hand, “things” belong to the world of commodities, which include both alluring and injured female bodies and desires, yet, on the other hand, “things” are associated with the violated black flesh, stripped of its social value and reduced to bare life. “Things” are also the material remainders of the destroyed African American female writing expelled from the American literary tradition. In all of these cases, things are synonymous with what I have called, in chapters 4 and 5, damaged materialities violently severed from collective forms of signification and subjected to violence. Already in the first paragraph of Passing, Clare’s letter is indistinguishable from the “thin sly thing” (P, 143) provoking Irene’s anxiety. Clare confesses in the most ambiguous manner that she wants “all the things” she “never had” (P, 159): things like kinship, love, and belonging that she assumes were freely available to Irene in the black community. Irene misinterprets this enigmatic desire for things as the desire for commodities and money because, for her, the accumulation of commodities provides a false protection against the dangerous “thing,” the cause of nonnormative desires, which she repeatedly wants to kill (“But it [the thing] would die. Of that she was certain”; P, 188, emphasis added). Even more so, the glittering world of commodities becomes for Irene a defense against the most horrific things, the material traces of racist violence that petrify her tongue and her body.
In the last chapter of the novel, however, these damaged materialities stripped of value—brutalized bodies, torn letters, and destroyed things—are retrieved from the circuit of commodities and the cycle of violence and returned into the common “pool of talk.” Steeped in language and laughter, damaged materialities receive a new form—“fresh adornment”—thanks to which they become “shining nonsensical things.” What is the status of such “shining nonsensical things”? Though they circulate among the members of black community, they no longer function as commodities split into the naturalized use value and violent abstraction of exchange value masquerading as alluring immediacy. They are neither bare, paralyzing objects of dread—what Hortense Spillers calls lacerated black flesh, stripped of gender and collective identities—nor are they signifying objects, since, like jokes, they bring forth pleasure in linguistic nonsense. Rather, in the shortest imaginable parenthesis between recurring racist and gender violence, damaged materialities are transformed into collective objects of enjoyment freely drawn from the pool of talk. Although they bear traces of violence, such shining objects, like the sparkling wit of Dave Freeland or the vital glow of Clare’s body, are characterized by the dynamic interconnection between form (“fresh adornment”) and materiality (“things”), sensibility and expressivity, sense and nonsense. By contesting the violent abstraction and separation of form in politics and aesthetics, such a dynamic exchange between form and materiality restores the sensible and erotic dimension of collective language.
Participation in the shared event of talk and laughter requires nothing other than the most minimal utterance of a “yes” (P, 233). In a crucial turn of the narrative, Clare responds with such a repeated “yes” to Irene’s warnings about the dangers of being “unmasked” as a black passer by her racist husband: “‘Yes.’ And having said it, Clare Kendry smiled quickly, a smile that came and went like a flash, leaving untouched the gravity of her face” (P, 233). The repeated “yes” in the novel surpasses any answer that can be given in response to Irene’s questions and reenacts instead the affirmative power of the event of language. As the terminus of the traversal/transformation of the anomaly of social death and its spectral duration, the sheer semantic indeterminacy of a yes indicates a dimension of language beyond the oppositions of malediction and benediction, negation and affirmation, potentiality and actuality. As Derrida points out in a different literary context, yes indicates nothing in itself; it refers to nothing outside itself and yet is a preperformative condition of all performative acts.43 As a counter to Noah’s curse, Clare’s yes precedes the very possibility of differentiating discursive acts into curse or blessing, inclusion or exclusion. Having no meaning in itself, yes merely modifies the movement of the trespass and the force of embodied, sensible talk. Clare’s yes approaches, therefore, a modality of language that is neither referential (signification and meaning) nor performative (an act of curse or benediction), but manifests itself as the shared event that can subvert the historical and political determinations of the context in which it occurs. Nonetheless, it restores what the curse eliminates from language, namely, the address to the other. If yes is the condition of possibility of all performatives, it implies that even curse presupposes a response from the other who can counter its act of malediction with laughter and expose its violence as nonsense. Like the triangular structure of the joke, Clare’s yes calls for a community.
On the edge of extreme danger, the traversal of language in Passing crosses—both in the sense of canceling out and trespassing—the violent oppositions between curse and blessing, social death and citizenship and transforms them into the subversive, affirmative possibilities of writing (Clare’s letters, Dave Freeland’s books), community (collective talk), and sensibility (laughter, play, desire). Although opposed to the more explicit political dimension of propaganda and romance, Larsen’s choice of experimental literature transforms the petrification of bodies and language into a possibility of art, freedom, and nonoedipal female desires.44 This traversal/transformation of language, from the romance of propaganda to the enigmatic script of black female modernism, from the destructive curse to jokes and laughter, from torn letters and the petrified tongue to the collective “pool of talk,” constitutes the most subversive aesthetic and political dimension of Passing. Haunted by the spectrality of social death, signified in the novel by the figure of “walking on my grave,” such a traversal leads toward the liminal experience of language that both the romance of propaganda and the violence of the curse obscure. The curse can indicate the liminality of language and being only through the ritualized exclusion that grounds the authority of law, religion, and power. Although the heterosexual romance of propaganda contests the authority of racist power, it fails to interrogate its own exclusions and presuppositions of linguistic clarity, heteronormativity, and the masculine ideal of self-creation. At the edge of danger and the edge of signification, Passing reaches a radically different dimension of liminality before it solidifies into racialized and gendered oppositions between inclusion and exclusion, male-diction and bene-diction. By suspending the reification of language into the paternal law and its juridical qualifications (inter-diction, male-diction, bene-diction), the threshold of signification in Passing is coterminus with “unfathomable” diction itself, which, as the Latin etymology of this word suggests, embraces both writing and orality, style and intonation, form and sensibility, sense and non-sense. As sensible eloquence without mastery, diction reveals the potentiality of the word as a creative event that no longer/not yet determines what is allowed to be (benediction) and what is foreclosed from being (malediction). Rather, such an event, to use Agamben’s formulation again, manifests itself as a “common potentiality of saying, open to a free and gratuitous use of time and the world” (TR, 136). This affirmative, sensible dimension of language prior to negation and affirmation, inclusion and exclusion, benediction and malediction, opens up a collective, aesthetic, and political potentiality of freedom. Such freedom in Larsen’s novels is at once frightening and exhilarating because it proclaims that “anything might happen…. Anything” (P, 236).
In the ending of Larsen’s novel the affirmation of the radical possibility of feminist freedom and black community—yes, anything can happen—is negated as soon as it is proclaimed. Ironically, it is in the apartment of the Freelands, at the very moment when “Dave Freeland was at his best, brilliant…. and sparkling” (P, 237) that Clare finds her death. As the ambiguity of the novel suggests, perhaps the act of claiming freedom in all its manifestations is inseparable from the choice of death.45 Despite Irene’s wishes or actions, Clare could have chosen death for herself as the ultimate price and ultimate danger of freedom itself. The possible choice of death is implied in Clare’s willingness to meet “the great conditions of conquest, sacrifice” (P, 236). Nonetheless, although Clare’s letters are destroyed and her beautiful body broken into pieces, the affirmation of possibility and laughter remains inscribed on the pages of Passing. And they signify as yet unknown possibilities of writing, desire, and collective freedom that are yet to come from future generations of women writers. This is Larsen’s tour de force, her transformation of impossible destruction into an aesthetic possibility, which affirms that “anything can happen,” anything can come to pass.