In the previous chapter, I identified one dimension of the problem of historical desire confronting the contemporary narrative of slavery: Its object is elusive, its resolution is impossible. Here is a second dimension: In the contemporary narrative of slavery, the desire for liberation is inextricably entwined with a desire for the reenactment of punishment and pain. This seeming contradiction occurs because the fantasy of liberation, of and from the slave past, is necessarily imagined as the telos of ancestral suffering. Thus, feeling historical pain is a requisite component of the fantasy of pain’s alleviation. In a word, one finds a masochistic fantasy intrinsic to the contemporary narrative of slavery.
If prohibitive reading takes this premise of a psychic investment in pain as a self-evident rationale for discrediting the contemporary narrative of slavery, then therapeutic reading regards such pain as the vehicle for the genre’s unique promise, to rescue the contemporary reader from repression or self-alienation. In this spirit, to offer one example, Keith Byerman frames his analyses of “remembering the past in contemporary African American fiction” with the advisement, “it is necessary to go through the shame and disruption of remembering in order to begin to forge relationships that can become communities that can make a difference.”1 Stepping back from the now-familiar refrain that it is important to remember in spite of pain, I aim to displace the critical pre-occupation with black historical fiction’s assumed inculcation of the reader (for better or worse), to focus instead on how the literature may reveal the psychic economy of African American literature’s historical desire. Put another way, my project here is to interpret therapeutic reading, with its constitutively masochistic form, not as a liberatory or constraining hermeneutic but as a literary figure and attendant narrative form that operates powerfully within African Americanist fantasies of historical return.
In what follows, I couple literary analysis with cross-disciplinary theories of masochism to generate an interpretive frame for re-conceptualizing the desire to be punished that lives within the desire for reparative return. “Masochism” can help us to think through this conundrum on two levels. As a theory of desire—or more precisely, as an unwieldy body of theories of desire—it provides useful models for thinking about the contours and capacities of longing forged in the crucible of pain. As a theory about contradictory impulses (pleasure, pain) that is itself interpreted in myriad, often contradictory ways, the conceptual life of “masochism” gestures toward the possibility of a criticism detached from the presumptive imperatives of synthesis or closure. Finding precedent in the idea that masochism thrives precisely by deferring closure and dilating on contradiction held in tension, I chart a criticism of post–Civil Rights African American literature, particularly attentive to its treatments of historical desire, that lives in the thickness of complexity, turning a curious eye toward contradiction.
My analysis turns on two novels, Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), in which painful fantasies of immersive historical return are extravagantly explored. In Butler’s fantastical novel, a contemporary subject is seized from her Los Angeles home and mystically transported to an antebellum slave plantation. In Jones’s novel, a modern blues singer is haunted and ultimately possessed by the racial-sexual trauma of her enslaved foremothers. Bracketing trauma fiction’s obsessive (non-)revelation that the past is irretrievable, these novels set out to imagine what it would feel like, and what would happen next, if we proceeded with the fantasy of reparative return, anyway. Because both plots follow from the fictional “given” that pain is transformative and necessary, they allow us to ask: What narrative possibilities does masochism enable or foreclose? What pleasures, or systems of reward, are held out to inspire and sustain literary fantasies of historical return? How and where does power accrue in the (literary) masochistic scene, and what is the masochist’s relationship to power?
As with each of the psychopathological idioms that structure the chapters in this book, “masochism” is a capacious concept that originated in a clinical context but quickly came to circulate as part of a larger cultural vocabulary. My use of the term is avowedly promiscuous and idiosyncratic, including but also expanding upon, transposing, and metaphorizing conventional understandings of masochism as pleasure in pain. To this effect, I begin with Freud’s psychopathological model and a political allegorization of it, but over the course of the chapter, I also examine and apply counter-discourses emerging from feminist and queer theory that re-imagine masochism as a restorative practice. The present chapter proceeds from the belief that theories of masochism consolidate a rich interpretive tool for black literary studies, yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the obvious counterpoint that “masochism” is also an analytic term accompanied by a lot of baggage. As a way of preliminarily positioning my readings within a broader discursive field, I offer a cursory sketch of some proscriptive and reclamatory approaches to masochism in contemporary African American studies.
One powerful strain of discursive and behavioral censorship that has militated against the development of sustained, African Americanist attention to the topic of masochism has been the normative ideal of “respectability”—an ideal that carries an ambivalent relationship to racial progressivism. Many scholars have charted respectability’s emergence as a morally reproachful self-defense against vitriolic racial-sexual stereotypes.2 As such, it articulates a sympathetic defense of black women (in particular) that is nevertheless enshrouded in praxis of social and sexual conservatism. Insofar as the guise of race-liberalism authorizes the performance of an anti-sexual sociality, respectability’s rehabilitative efforts simultaneously work to restrain black sexual representation and practices. On these grounds, and noting in particular its recapitulation to sexist and homophobic ideals, a growing body of contemporary African Americanists working in feminist theory and black queer studies—including Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, Brittney Cooper, Sharon Patricia Holland, Arlene Keizer, Susana Morris, Amber Musser, Jennifer C. Nash, Darieck Scott, and Christina Sharpe—have persuasively argued against the hegemony of respectability in black social and academic forums.3
Sharpe has been especially attentive to the ways in which masochistic desire and sadomasochistic (s/m) practices have been deemed uniquely taboo within the cross-disciplinary field of African American studies; even deliberately sex-positive projects have been reluctant to acknowledge explicit eroticizations of power and powerlessness within black culture. Sharpe hypothesizes that anti-masochistic censorship in black academic and social discourses likely results from s/m’s unsettling rekindling of history: It unnerves us insofar as it “[makes] explicit the very master-slave configurations that haunt us, that make visible slavery within freedom and questions of consent.”4 Expanding upon her identification of the specters of racial slavery at the core of black censorial desire, I would venture that masochism disquiets because it disrupts important black political fictions of self-sovereignty; because it erodes the assumption of most progressive politics that the subjugated aspire, in uncomplicated ways, for freedom; and because it rejects cultural fantasies of progressive history in which the present or future finally and decisively triumphs over the injuries of the past.
Furthermore, enacting or even considering masochistic sexuality and desire may seem particularly unappealing at a moment when African Americans are increasingly cast as “unworthy” or insincere victims in political rhetoric, public policy, and civil society. For, to the degree that masochism requires one to claim desire of and as a victim, one might argue that it treads dangerously close to persistent conservative allegations of black subjects self-servingly “playing the victim.” In The Cult of True Victimhood, Alyson M. Cole observes that “anti-victimist literature” has been on the rise since the early nineties, producing a conservative rhetoric in which “real” victims are defined by increasingly narrow, at times even impossible, standards of virtue, blamelessness, and measurable suffering.5 It is hardly imaginative to hypothesize that this cultural milieu acts as a powerful deterrent to black intellectual and experiential engagements with masochistic desire.6
Indeed, African Americans’ widespread aversion to the concept of masochism gains still another dimension when viewed through the prism of black cultural nationalism’s enduring legacy. A radical cultural movement designed to upend Eurocentric discursive hegemonies that for centuries aligned blackness with ugliness, weakness, death, and malignancy, black cultural nationalism announced and articulated the counter-hegemonic ideals of black pride, black beauty, and black power. As countless post-nationalist critics and authors have demonstrated, black cultural nationalism was radical, creative, and liberatory but also rigidly prescriptive and intensely censorious. For better and for worse, the cultural nationalists’ invention of a powerful new black subject hinged on the disavowal of various forms of black negativity, including all “elements of their history that could not pass through the ideological filter of black pride.”7
But if, as the received wisdom holds, masochism signals unwieldy personal and political dangers, particularly for marginalized groups, then a growing body of literature and scholarship has alternatively identified masochism with a range of unique promises and pleasures. Consider, for example, Samuel Delany’s densely theoretical science fiction novella, The Game of Time and Pain. Delany’s protagonist, Gorgik, is a former slave turned liberator, now an elder statesman, whose sexual appetites attach to the slave collar he once, forcibly, wore. The slave collar is a prominent and versatile symbol in Gorgik’s self-accounting, signaling at once the political crime of bondage and the sexual excitement of reclaiming that sign of social annihilation. As Gorgik puts it, “I knew, at least for me, that the power to remove the collar was wholly involved with the freedom to place it there when I wished. And, wanting it, I knew, for the first time . . . in my life—the self that want defined.” In this figuration, the iron symbol and instrument of imprisonment is itself made vulnerable to radical reappropriation. In its second life, the collar becomes an accessory of choice, an unexpected sign of freedom and ecstatic unencumbrance. Reveling in this alchemical conversion of subjugation into agency, our hero tells us, history is “never inevitable, only more or less negotiable.”8
Many theorizations of rehabilitative masochism demur from Delany’s triumphalism but share his basic premise that masochism can work as an unexpected counter-force to historical powerlessness. For example, Keizer reads Delany’s depictions of s/m as an analogue to the psychoanalytic logic of “working through” trauma through repetitious re-enactment,9 while the controversial visual artist Kara Walker draws on this kind of logic to explain her infamous silhouettes of slavery when she says, “In order to have a real connection with my history, I had to be somebody’s slave. . . . But I was in control: that’s the difference.”10 In each of these views, the compulsion to return to the traumatic past acts as both symptom and cure: Masochistic performance is a gesture that expresses traumatic irresolution while opening up a phantasmatic space for working through past pains. Still other articulations of masochism’s value for critical and political discourse point to its embedded critique of the liberal ideal of self-sovereignty (Darieck Scott), or its attention to the sensory and affective pathways of power (Musser), or its capacity to illumine “the connection between contemporary labor, terrors, and desires, the labor and the excesses of chattel slavery, and power, sex, and identification” (Sharpe).11 In the course of this chapter, I rehearse some of these, and other, orientations toward politicized theories of masochistic fantasy and desire.
Speaking candidly, my own orientation toward masochism is ambivalent and inconclusive. I am convinced that desire forged in the crucible of victimization is often propelled by a recursive energy that the trope of masochism may substantively illuminate. Moreover, I find enticing and at times persuasive queer and feminist claims that masochism may re-open for trans-historical re-imagination an unresolved and enduringly hurtful past. Understood in this way, masochism promises to salve the stubborn wound of historical trauma. It is, to my knowledge, the only form of historical engagement that contains such a radically reparative promise.
I remain dubious, however, about masochism’s dramatic and demanding call for willful self-shattering, particularly when that call addresses subjects whose very socio-political existence is produced through an extreme and extended tradition of self-dispossession. My hopefulness about the revisionary potential of masochistic reenactment is, in substantive ways, dialed back by the inescapable truth that re-enactment necessarily and painfully reproduces scenes of injury, even as it makes conceivable alternative trajectories of event, desire, and identification. Masochism’s “cost” of relinquishing the reparative psycho-political ideal of sovereignty is, I believe, an exorbitant one, even if sovereignty itself is not a tenable psychic or political status but a potent structure of fantasy in its own right.
Registering both the danger and the allure of masochistic fantasy, my aim in this chapter is neither to endorse nor to discredit masochism but simply to explore the contradictory truths it produces, and often refuses, to resolve. Through a double-voiced, thick description of masochistic fantasy in contemporary narratives of slavery, I depict masochism as a site of moral, affective, and political ambivalence and as a narrative infrastructure that resists resolution, holding in tension the perils of a painful and impossible love, on the one hand, and the redemptive possibilities of re-enactment-with-a-difference, on the other.
The Austrian sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing is frequently credited for coining the diagnostic category “masochism,” although this term is named not for its “discoverer” but for its prototypical subject: the eccentric, nineteenth-century writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, masochism is tautologically defined as the family of “perversions” obsessively described in Sacher-Masoch’s fiction: “The individual affected is controlled in his sexual feeling and thought by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person as a master, humiliated and abused.”12 But Krafft-Ebing’s contributions to the theoretical development of the concept consist primarily in descriptive work. For him, Gertrud Lenzer notes, “the symptoms of the disease constituted the disease itself.”13
It was Freud who first sought to explain and sub-categorize the logic and economies of masochism—its developmental origins, its systems of reward, and its metapsychological import. In his influential essay “A Child Is Being Beaten,” he identifies “the essence of masochism” as the “convergence” of an illicit, impossible love (the daughter’s incestuous love for her father) and the guilt that is produced by that love.14 Freud’s clinical scenario begins with a daughter who covets exclusive access to her father’s power and protection; she wishes to be the sole object and recipient of his love. Upon discovering the prohibitive taboo that makes such love unacceptable, she develops a repressed fantasy of being beaten by her father. Within the daughter’s psychic economy, the fantasy serves two purposes: It functions simultaneously as substitute and punishment for her incestuous love. By disguising love as punishment, the daughter retains, in altered form, her original desire. At the same time, the fantasy of punishment works to expiate her guilt, which accrues around her sublimated yet enduring wish for a forbidden love. In brief, Freud proposes that masochistic desire arises as a maladaptive strategy for managing an illicit love.
Freud’s exploration of masochistic desire is characteristically confined to the individual psyche and the private sphere of family drama. He reads the desire to be punished as emanating from universal, ahistorical, and primarily familial dynamics of jealousy, constraint, identification, and love. But we may alternatively read Freud’s essay as a political allegory, in which the familial saga illuminates specifically historicized, social relations of power, prohibition, political fantasy, and politicized identity. This is a project the political philosopher Wendy Brown undertakes in Politics out of History, where she repurposes Freudian masochism to speculate about how histories of marginalization may produce unexpected, self-injurious forms of political desire. I propose that the theorization of political masochism provides one suggestive model for understanding the fantasy structure that powers contemporary narratives of slavery.
The re-worked plot of political masochism goes something like this: Subjects born into late modern democracy harbor an early, formative desire for the protection and positive recognition (in Freud’s term, the “love”) of the powerful (“paternal”) state. However, for certain marked and marginalized populations, such as racial minorities, women, and sexual minorities, the possibility of such positive regard is foreclosed by the “punitive social acts” of “racism, sexism, and heterosexism.” These punishments at once pre-exist the individual and constitute the individual’s abjected social identity through repeated acts of exclusion. Through them, the marginalized subject quickly comes to see her desire for full enfranchisement and positive recognition as impossible or unacceptable. She becomes “humiliated [by her] attachment”15 and turns back on herself, as if to say, “I should not have desired recognition,” or “I now know my desire to be illicit.”
As with the Freudian drama, however, the prohibition of desire does not quell its drive. The disenfranchised subject continues to long for recognition despite the apparent foreclosure of its possibility. Like Freud’s masochist, she develops an obsessive fixation, returning incessantly to a symbolic site of foreclosure (the parental beating/the scene of social exclusion) in hopes of forestalling or denying the loss of the idealized social order from which she once sought recognition (the patriarchal family, the racist state). Yet this repetition is futile, for the “pejoratively marked subject” has already fallen “from membership in a universal citizenry, from formal equality, from liberal personhood,” and what is more, this fall is precisely “the site of such an identity’s creation.” Thus, the most that can be salvaged is the repetition of the fall, as masochistic “repetition [comes to gratify] an injured love by reaffirming the existence of the order that carried both the love and the injury.”16
Reminiscent of this cycle of punishment and unrequited desire, Butler’s Kindred—the author’s best known novel and a massive commercial success—takes shape through a repeated and escalating pattern of abuse, staged between a powerful white father figure and a compulsively returning black daughter. Kindred’s trans-historical encounters between its black protagonist and her white ancestor are made possible through the fantasy device of time travel. In the novel, Dana’s spatio-temporal migration responds to the sporadic, unpredictable calls of Rufus Weylin, a white heir to a slave planter whom Dana quickly identifies as her “several times great grandfather.”17 In a literal, or genetic, way then, Rufus corresponds to the class of fathers that Freud identifies as the categorical love objects of masochistic fantasy. Still more suggestively, as a slaveholder in the antebellum South, Rufus figures within the text as the Historical Father, an avatar for white masculine traditions of power through which Dana’s racialized and sexualized occlusion from full citizenship was pre-emptively secured.
Whereas in the Freudian story beating fantasies follow the daughter’s apprehension of the incest taboo, in Kindred, Dana’s compulsive returns to a historical site of punishment follow a series of symbolic rejections that mark the impossibility of her desire for full citizenship. Several months before she is first abducted by the past, friends and family protest Dana’s interracial marriage, and the ceremony takes place without witnesses. Although Dana and Kevin attain in name the legal status and protections that accompany marriage, their union remains unrecognized, and more: It is aggressively disavowed by both of their families, in the workplace, and in various public spaces. Certainly, the degree to which one’s marriage is regarded as socially legitimate is not the sole or primary index of enfranchisement, but neither is this textual event arbitrary or accidental.18 Particularly in the context of African American history, the rite of marriage has long been regarded as a telos of enfranchisement. Thus, for example, Houston A. Baker has read Frederick Douglass’s marriage certificate as “the inscribed document that effectively marks Douglass’s liberation.”19
Moreover, Dana’s exclusion from civil society’s standards of marital legitimacy occurs in the year of the American bicentennial—a year oversaturated with commemorative events and patriotic rhetoric, and a year notorious for its selective amnesia regarding the different historical legacies of the Revolution for African Americans. As the historian Leon Litwack has argued, the widespread, uncomplicated, and laudatory representations of the American past that characterized 1976 were made possible only through a sustained refusal to recognize the African American presence as part of national history.20 The bicentennial’s celebratory ethos of patriotic nostalgia thus re-inscribed African American exclusion from the parameters of recognizable American citizenship. Kindred gestures toward this contemporary site of black exclusion—though it does not linger there—by sending Dana on her culminating trip to the punitive past on July 4, 1976. Indeed, the contemporary scenes within Butler’s novel assemble myriad, often mundane acts of exclusion as assertions of social taboo, renouncing and prohibiting Dana’s desire, as an African American woman, for state recognition.
Like political masochism’s compulsive re-stagings of exclusion from liberal personhood, Kindred’s plot subsequently unfolds through Dana’s repeated returns to the historical site at which the possibility for her full enfranchisement was originally, categorically foreclosed—the site of enslavement. Her desire for recognition persists but is now re-formulated as the impossible desire to return to and revise a bygone past. To be sure, Dana adamantly denies the force of her own desire in her recurrent abductions by the past, but this denial is diluted, if not contradicted, by her ready concession that she is invested in her white forefather’s survival, though his persistence in his being hinges on her own, enduring subjugation. As early as her second visit to the past, she postulates, “Was that why I was here? Not only to insure the survival of one accident-prone small boy, but to insure my family’s survival, my own birth. . . . If I was to live, if others were to live, he [Rufus] must live. I didn’t dare test the paradox” (29).
Dana’s logic meshes with a line of reasoning common to time travel fiction: She believes that in order to sustain her life in the present (i.e., to ensure her birth), she must uphold the meeting and mating patterns of the past. Having learned from an inherited family Bible that Rufus, together with a black woman named Alice Greenwood, will conceive Hagar, Dana’s mixed-race great-great-grandmother, Dana becomes convinced that she must help to sustain Rufus’s life, at least until Hagar is born, in order to provide for the terms of her own existence. Yet predictably, given the dominant racial ideologies of Rufus’s time and class, as well as his social position as heir to a slave plantation, Dana’s vested interest in sustaining his life comes into conflict with her politically and historically informed desires to resist or fight the slave economy and to protect and enrich the lives of the Weylin’s human property. Her desire for racial justice—an ethics that would enable a life of greater freedom for herself as a black woman and, more broadly, for black people as her “kindred”—is thus complicated by her discovery that her very existence depends upon a history of racial subjugation. In other words, and following the pattern of political masochism, the “I” for whom Dana desires freedom is itself produced in part through a history of slavery. Understood in this way, Dana’s project of self-preservation must also contain gestures of submission and self-compromise.
Here, we find the contradiction in desire that is the signature of therapeutic reading. On the one hand, Dana’s relationship to the past is marked by a paradoxical investment in oppressive, racialized power. On the other hand, a powerful current of reparative desire propels it. If, following Brown, we read Dana’s desire for rights and recognition in the present as an illicit political desire, already foreclosed by national traditions of slavery and racism, it follows that Dana’s returns to the past constitute the fantasy structure that enables her (impossible) appeals to the Historical Father. Embedded within these returns/appeals is a trajectory of desire that says, “If I can reach the Father before he rejected me, I can set things aright.” Or, as Dana justifies her efforts to endear herself to a young Rufus: “He’ll probably be old enough to have some authority when I come again. Old enough to help me. I want him to have as many good memories of me as I can give him now” (83). Much like psychoanalytic and political variants of masochism, Dana’s fantasy of returning to an abusive past is a fantasy of subjugation (of returning to slavery) that masks a stubborn desire for recognition or love (the desire to appease the Historical Father, to win over a foreclosed and abusive past).
Thus we may map the plot of Kindred onto a theory of political masochism through a series of direct and transparent correspondences. Both imagine a painful current of reparative desire that tethers a contemporary subject to a haunting site of historical exclusion, and in both instances, this circuit of desire and punishment is seductive, but also injurious and irresolvable. The longed for, retroactive recognition does not—cannot—materialize, and a repetitious wounding, more hurtful for its predictability, transpires instead. In this reading, Kindred adopts the form of political masochism, unfolding as a cautionary tale that warns against the destructive consequences of casting political desire backward. Adding force to the warning, the novel’s culminating scene tethers Dana’s salvation to her triumph over the cycle of punitive, historical return. When she finally apprehends the danger Rufus poses, as well as the limits of her love, Dana plunges a knife into the slaveholder’s side and shatters the antebellum fantasy-scape. Her murder of the treacherous yet seductive Father signals a psychoanalytic “recovery,” for this is the act that allows her to replace the illicit fantasy structure with socially sanctioned forms of love and desire. The trans-historical circuit of painful, bodily return that makes up most of the book is supplanted by a research trip to Maryland, where Dana looks for documentary traces of Rufus’s existence. On this trip, both she and Kevin articulate their committed disengagement from the masochistic fantasy. “It’s over,” Kevin assures her. “There’s nothing you can do to change any of it now.” Dana soberly replies, “I know” (264).
Yet even as Kindred may be shown to map neatly onto a prescriptive, anti-masochistic critique, it is also the case that the novel fails to achieve vindication or closure, ending with the explicit non-ending of Dana’s enduring search for Rufus. “You’d think I would have had enough of the past,” Dana muses, but still, Kindred’s final pages show her seeking out Rufus’s grave, scouring the records of the Maryland Historical Society, and questioning the locals about his life and death (264). In short, Dana’s murderous destruction of her masochistic fantasy does not produce psychic resolution or a more peaceable relationship to the past. On the contrary, it leaves her with persistent and irresolvable losses, both embodied and psychological: “I lost an arm on my last trip home,” she recounts. “And I lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort and security I had not valued until it was gone” (9). And again: “I don’t have a name for the thing that happened to me, but I don’t feel safe anymore” (17).
How shall we make sense of this final conundrum, in which Dana’s seemingly insatiable quest to earn Rufus’s recognition so robustly survives his death? In Brown’s accounting, the problem of political masochism is largely a problem of excess—of leftover feelings and wants with no viable place in the present. But in Kindred, the excision of masochistic fantasy does not solve the problem of excess. Dana’s potent historical feelings continue to press into her life, overriding her efforts to live in the present. Even after the time travel sequence ends, Dana feels powerfully compelled to seek out the past, to pore over it. She is still made vulnerable and insecure by it. What, then, does the prescriptive renunciation of masochism as such achieve? And more, why does Dana’s termination of the circuit of masochistic fantasy/time travel compound rather than eradicate or ameliorate her losses?
Perhaps political masochism offers a cogent analysis of the structure and mechanics of self-injurious desire, but it falls short as an aid to imagining the full scope of what masochism might mean for subjects who come into social being as constitutively disempowered. For political masochism—constrained, perhaps, by the original valences of the Freudian narrative—assumes in some measure that the “perversion” of masochistic fantasy is self-evident, that the masochist’s delusional system of identification and desire disqualifies her from credible self-representation, and that relinquishing masochistic fantasy will invariably yield improvement. Its tacit promise is this: We will interrupt a cycle of unnecessary pain, we will better understand the terms of political possibility, and we will become better citizens, if only we let go of our impossible desires.
In addition, the allegorical form of political masochism brings about a dubious censure of Freud’s original, erotic register. A system of symbolic representation, allegory operates through an economy of substitution; one thing stands in for another. In political masochism, the illicit sexual desire of the Freudian masochist represents the political desire of marginalized subjects. This comparison yields a rich and largely compelling description of the mechanics of political desire against ostensible self-interest. Yet the genre of allegory forces Brown to elide considerations of the erotic within the domain of politics.21 By replacing the eroticism of Freud’s story with a strictly circumscribed notion of political desire, political masochism effectively neuters the political, foreclosing explorations of how the erotic may not in fact run parallel to the political but may infuse and inform it. As I will show, Kindred reproduces this discursive censorship of the sexual but also critiques the notion that political desire may be assessed as something asexual, or wholly separable, from other human drives.
My point is not to discount political masochism but to identify and tend to some promising interpretations of pain and its psychic uses that this orientation toward masochism overlooks. How might we challenge and complicate this theoretical frame if we reject the premise that political and libidinal desires may be theoretically extricated from one another, and if we do away with the commonsense idea that pathology is inherent to pain’s pursuit? This approach characterizes the work of a number of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminist and queer theorists who conceptualize masochism as an explicitly sexual psychic drive bearing unique potential for psychic healing. On this view, masochistic fantasy operates, not as impotent delusion, but as an agency that allows us to imagine ourselves and the social world otherwise. Ann Cvetkovich, for example, proposes that enacting masochistic fantasy through “repeated, and especially ritualized violence” may bear a unique, if ambivalent, power “to heal and/or perpetuate an original trauma.”22 Similarly, Elizabeth Freeman describes lesbian s/m in particular as the erotic production of a “temporal Möbius strip” that allows the masochist “a consensual might-have- been triumphing over a personal history of being victimized.”23 (On another occasion, apropos of Kindred as the present chapter’s case study, Freeman calls s/m an “erotic time machine.”)24 What would it look like to read Kindred in this way, taking note of how masochistic fantasy operates not (only) as the guilty vehicle of a pathological love but as a privileged conveyance that uniquely enables access to potent and unresolved forms of historical desire?
In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman develops a new theoretical model for thinking through some of the therapeutic and epistemological potentialities of masochism. Against psychoanalytic and political models that regard masochism as a structure of inappropriate feelings that are intrinsically inimical to personal or social thriving, Freeman makes creative use of the concept of masochism to re-imagine the genre of history. Describing masochism as a way of feeling that exceeds “appropriate” forms of knowledge and “bourgeois-sentimental, emotional reactions to historical events,”25 she positions it as the repressed other of historiographical knowledge and a form of active resistance to such repression. At its best, she says, masochism enables a bodily epistemology that can desublimate disciplinarily and culturally censored forms of historical affect.
For Butler as for Freeman, the repression of “historical feeling” amounts to an incomplete and restrictive form of historical understanding. Moreover, she concurs that the corrective task of recuperating a more comprehensive, affectively engaged historical understanding requires a turn to masochistic fantasy. Butler endorses this logic most explicitly when, in several interviews, she traces Kindred’s origins to an ideological confrontation with a black nationalist college peer, regarding the status of the African American slave past. “Even though he knew a lot more than I did about Black history,” she recounts, “it was all cerebral. He wasn’t feeling any of it.”26 The author goes on to align her friend’s exclusively “cerebral” historical knowledge with a failure of empathy, a false sense of self-sovereignty, and a troubling commitment to historical detachment. She claims that, although her friend ostensibly “knew” the facts of historical oppression, he “apparently never made the connection” whereby ancestral sacrifices of dignity enabled his own existence. “He was still blaming [his parents] for their humility and their acceptance of disgusting behavior on the part of employers and other people,” Butler laments. “I wanted to take a character, when I did Kindred, back in time to some of the things that our ancestors had to go through, to see if that character survived so very well with the knowledge of the present in her head.”27
Anticipating Freeman’s argument, Butler regards “cerebral” historical knowledge as flawed by its constitutive excision of “feeling”—and more precisely, by its excision of identificatory feelings toward history’s victims. As Butler recalls, the thing that catalyzes her masochistic fantasy (though she never names it as such) is her friend’s ungenerous disavowal of ancestral suffering. She wishes, with Kindred, to rehabilitate the repudiated ancestral slave as a symbol of resilience, rather than defeat, and as the avatar of a more expansive, nuanced vision of heroic black identity. “I realized that he didn’t know what heroism was,” she says of her nationalist interlocutor. “That’s what I want to write about.”28 A literarily transcribed masochistic fantasy thus emerges as Butler’s template for the hermeneutical practice I am calling “therapeutic reading.” Her story of a contemporary subject who endures the suffering of her ancestors represents an affective pedagogy, a strategy through which she seeks to teach empathic (and indeed, loving) feeling to a resistant, “cerebral” other. “I was trying to get people to feel slavery,” she explains, when asked about her approach to history in Kindred. “I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.”29 If conventional historiographical study yielded, for Butler’s friend, antipathy toward the slave past, then it is through the fantasy of shared, identitarian suffering that the author imagines the possibility of mitigating his bad feelings toward his ancestors and, perhaps, of producing a historically situated ethics of African American self-compassion.
Through her repetition of this anecdote in various venues, Butler encourages a critical investment in the possibility of therapeutic reading. Much as Morrison describes her authorial desire to “kidnap” the reader, “[throwing her] ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population,” Butler revels in the fantasy of literature’s exaggerated agency in producing and shaping the reader’s experience.30 My interest, however, lies less in the credibility of Butler or Morrison’s statements of intent than in the narrative forms that refract their investment in the fantasy of therapeutic reading. Put another way, my guiding question is not, “Does Butler succeed in teaching the reader the ropes of therapeutic reading?” but “What narrative forms, psychic logics, and structures of desire are called upon to tell the story of transformative historical return?” Freeman’s theorization of s/m as the foundation for an epistemology of transformative historical encounter proves useful here, for unlike theories of political masochism, it holds out hope that reclaiming historical pain may be purposeful and effective.
Freeman coins the term “erotohistoriography” to describe a bodily epistemology whose specific iterations include masochism as well as other, conspicuously temporalized forms of queer desire. Erotohistoriography “[treats] the present as temporally hybrid” and “uses the body as a tool to effect, figure, or perform” trans-historical encounters. Whereas the conventional historian may measure his or her research by the standard of “objective and disinterested analysis,” the erotohistoriographer is a sensuous time traveler, for whom the past appears not as a sequence of discrete and knowable events but as a dynamic, porous, and permeable context for apprehending—variously, not conclusively—possible configurations of the self-in-history. (Freeman’s archetypal model for her theory of erotohistoriography is Frankenstein’s monster—a fictional figure whose body is literally pieced together from the remains of the dead, who “[wears] and [performs] anachronistic behaviors in the literal form of mismatched body parts” and who, in so doing, “learns virtue from precedent.”)31
According to Freeman, whose work builds on an oeuvre of lesbian/queer writing on masochism, erotohistoriography’s value consists not only in its presentation of an alternative way of “doing” history but also in the rehabilitative potential it offers up by enabling a dynamic re-visioning of the self in dialogue with traumatic, unresolved pasts. For example, an erotohistoriographical reading of Kindred might posit that by identifying with and against various ancestral figures—from her lookalike, an enslaved concubine named Alice; to Rufus, the white slave master; to Sarah, a seemingly complicitous black “mammy” figure—Dana is compelled to dismantle her original, anti-historical and monadic sense of self and to re-imagine herself in terms of multiple affective connections to a complicated past. Energized by the hope that “liberatory rather than random or reactionary difference might appear in the nonidentical repetitions that constitute identity,”32 erotohistoriography re-maps the possibilities of “history,” “identity,” and the relation between these categories.
So whereas political masochism illustrates the futility of repetitious, punitive cycles that produce “injured identity,” erotohistoriography posits that re-enactments of identitarian trauma may in fact constitute the very site at which reparative revision becomes imaginable. Masochism, in the latter frame, is not the symptom of a “bad” or malignant identity but an unwieldy modality of historical encounter through which contemporary identifications and desires might be productively negotiated and reconstituted.
As we might anticipate from Butler’s anecdote about Kindred’s genesis, much of the novel’s plot follows the erosion of Dana’s uncompromising will to self-determination. Inversely, Dana’s growing sense of her own vulnerability—apprehended through identification with historical victims—corroborates the novel’s critique of historiography as book knowledge and enables the protagonist’s evolving commitment to a kind of trans-historical intersubjectivity. Early in the novel’s chronology, Dana portrays the terms of racial history as “degrading nonsense” and expresses a willingness to die sooner than to accept certain compromising terms of existence. But as the plot advances, her anger and militancy are progressively worn down (127). By learning firsthand the radically circumscribed possibilities for black agency in the antebellum South, Dana develops a profound critique of her initial “moral superiority,” which she comes to associate with the “contemptuous” retrospect of “the militant nineteen sixties” (145).
Mirroring the critique of black cultural nationalism that she offers in interviews, Butler is explicit in her intention to distinguish Dana’s intensifying attachment to the past from a growing passion for any conventional conception of historical knowledge. Indeed, one of the most important “lessons” of Dana’s repeated historical abductions has to do with the limitations of book knowledge and sanctioned forms of historical narration. Dana finds little use for her reference books and historical documents when she is confronted with the visceral immediacy of historical oppression, and although she is a professional writer, she finds that she is unable to give shape to her own experiences of historical feeling in socially intelligible ways. “I had tried and tried [to write about Rufus],” she recalls, “and only managed to fill my wastebasket” (194). What Dana discovers in the history of slavery is an affective density that resists telling—or narrative apprehension—that is retrievable only through performative re-encounters with the past that etch their meaning on the body and mind through the sensory register of pain. And while the novel provides innumerable examples of what Dana cannot say or know, one is struck by her seemingly inexhaustible capacity to absorb the feeling of historical suffering.33 In the sting of the descending whip, the violent fists of a rapacious patroller, and the magically re-inhabited body of the wounded, aching slave, Butler figures a “stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of [Dana’s Los Angeles home], of now, could not touch” (191, Butler’s italics).
In this sense, Dana’s abduction by a brutalizing past transparently performs the critique that Butler offers in her description of the book’s political project, but Dana’s narrative also exceeds the terms that Butler avows. For in addition to Kindred’s corrective pedagogy of affective historiography, Butler emplots a queer, trans-historical desire routed through bodily identification with the suffering of one’s ancestors. In other words, Dana’s abductions are also seductions. To her own surprise, Dana develops a curious loyalty to Rufus, which unfolds in a far more intricate pattern than any simple, causal logic of power and obeisance. “I hadn’t expected to care about him except for my own and my family’s sake,” Dana remarks on one occasion (203). But “however little sense it made, I cared. I must have. I kept forgiving him for things” (180). Although she is made anxious and abused by her relationship to him, Rufus nevertheless holds out to Dana the promise of an important and elusive recognition. The more time she spends in the past, the more Dana experiences the present as a site of de-contextualization and anonymity (her family disowns her, no one at work knows her name). By contrast, she describes her compulsive returns to Rufus’s time as “so much like coming home that it scare[s] me” (192).
This complex, affective web of time, pain, and desire at once supplements Kindred’s critique of detached historiographical methods and reveals Butler’s specific investment in masochistic fantasy as a preferred mode of critique. Indeed, we may find within Kindred at least three plausible readings that locate reparative power in Dana’s acts of painful, historical return. The first reading foregrounds Dana’s relationship to Rufus (the Historical Father) as a site of negotiation, which allows Dana to constructively re-imagine her relationship to the slave past. In essence, it would say, in spite of her insistence that she “[has] no control at all over anything,” and in spite of her dramatically restricted power as a black woman on an antebellum plantation, that masochistic time travel ironically allows Dana a kind of historical agency that was previously unimaginable (113). A once inaccessible, deterministic past is reopened to receive her threats, appeals, and other attentions; she discovers firsthand, as she repeatedly saves Rufus’s life, the Hegelian truth of the interdependence of master and slave, and although the full and enfranchising socio-historical recognition that Dana longs for is foreclosed by a chronological order that remains irreversible, Rufus does offer, in lieu of historical recognition, something like historical hospitality. He actively welcomes Dana to the past, offering a sincerely meant (if false) reassurance of belonging: “You’ll be alright here,” he tells her. “You’re home” (143). In this reading, we might infer that Dana’s re-vivified enmeshment with a slaveholding patriarch allows her a kind of recuperative agency and that the re-vivified scene of the antebellum past unexpectedly provides “a space in which conflict and anger can emerge as a necessary component of psychic resolution.”34
An alternate erotohistoriographical reading of the novel would foreground the “non-identical [historical] repetitions” produced through Dana’s identificatory encounter with Alice Greenwood, Rufus’s concubine and Dana’s great-grandmother several times removed, who surfaces in the context of Dana’s time travel as both an ancestor and a historical alter ego. Dana’s identification with Alice is ambivalent and partial but also irrefutable. Nearly every character in the book, including Dana and Alice themselves, remarks upon the two women’s striking physical resemblance, as well as their mirrored status on the plantation as “Rufus’s women.” Still more explicitly, Rufus insists that the two are, in fact, the same. “You’re so much like her [Alice], I can hardly stand it,” he says to Dana. And then, “You were one woman. . . . You and her. One woman. Two halves of a whole” (257). To the degree that we credit Rufus’s claim, we might interpret Dana’s relationship to Alice not (only) as one of inter-generational, familial resemblance but (also) as one of revisionary repetition. When the white Historical Father attempts to subdue Dana through the same rhetorical and physical deployments of power that he used against Alice, Dana becomes an alternative version of her foremother, emboldened by a vindicating knowledge of the future (symbolized by a knife she’s brought from 1976) to imagine as otherwise a formative scenario of traumatic racial-sexual origins. Although Dana’s ancestor and historical double suffers non-recognition and obscure death, Dana returns to bear witness to Alice and to re-construe the historical scenario by confronting it with her belated, twentieth-century sense of entitlement and agency. Plunging the knife into Rufus’s side, Dana survives what Alice could not endure: the insatiable, brutalizing, corrupting, and intermittently seductive power of the Historical Father. The point here is not that Dana changes history or replaces the fact of Alice’s death with that of her own survival; neither of these claims are true to Butler’s narrative. Nevertheless, one might convincingly argue that Dana’s masochistic return to the past functions as a therapeutic phenomenon, insofar as it dilutes the singular grasp of an intransigent, oppressive historical narrative by casting that story alongside alternate scenarios of what might have been.
We can read Dana’s relationship with Alice in yet another way. In addition to enabling a multiplicative revision of historical possibility, Dana’s masochistic fantasy makes possible her reparative re-encounter with the abject figure of the ancestral slave. Traveling back in time, Dana is presented with an uncanny doppelgänger with whom she cannot help but identify. Like Dana, Alice is born free but subsequently made a slave through Rufus’s coercive force. Enslaved as punishment for asserting her freedom, Alice lives the disciplinary consequences of an antebellum, proto–black pride, enduring beatings, rape, and sustained and forceful opposition to her assertions and enactments of individual will. Over the course of her repeated returns to the past, Dana bears sympathetic witness to Alice’s progressive degradation. When Alice is ravaged by slave catchers and their dogs, Dana bandages and feeds her, nursing her to health. When Alice lashes out in impotent rage, Dana cajoles and reasons with her, urging her to act in the long-term interest of self-preservation. And when Alice finally succumbs to nihilistic despair and hangs herself from a barn roof, Dana dismounts the dead body, grieves her loss, and tends to Alice’s surviving children. Through this vicariously masochistic narrative trajectory, Butler engineers an opportunity for her contemporary protagonist to embrace—retroactively, yet still with tactile immediacy—a pained and once-forsaken historical victim. Read as erotohistoriography, masochistic fantasy here repeats history with the critical difference of sympathetic recognition by the morally adjudicating gaze of the future.
Yet there is a case to be made against an erotohistoriographic reading of Kindred—a case that turns on Dana’s firmly bounded resistance to thinking through the erotic dimensions of masochistic fantasy. When theorized as a de-repressive, transformative performance, masochism’s power hinges on the mystical economy of the erotic. Masochistic fantasy works by exploiting a specifically sexual power that can break apart both the subject and her present, allowing the masochist to feel at once the contingency of her known world and the “fragments of times that may not be [her] own.” Through these temporal and subjective disruptions intrinsic to sexuality, s/m “becomes a form of writing history with the body in which the linearity of history may be called into question, but, crucially, the past does not thereby cease to exist.”35
True, Butler is similarly invested in a kind of de-repressive unmaking of her protagonist by way of sensate contact with dominative “times . . . not [her] own.” However, for Dana, the erotic comes into view, not as the overt conduit for time travel, but as an aggressively repressed facet of her relationship to Rufus and her past. Kevin seems to know this better than Dana; he repeatedly, if unsympathetically, interrogates her about the sexual content of her trans-historical abductions. But for Dana, the erotic undercurrent of the force that pulls her to Rufus is unthinkable until it is irrefutable. In the moment that Rufus announces his power and desire as sexual, Dana aborts the fantasy structure entirely. Framing his sexual proposition as an encroachment on “what he knew I could not give” (257), she responds with murder, “[raising] the knife, [driving] it into the flesh I had saved so many times” (260). Thus in Kindred erotic apprehension signals not the opening but the closing of temporal “passageways.” Dana returns to the present, not to return to the past, and the past once again recedes to a distant and irretrievable site of historical irresolution.
Understandably, many critics have applauded Butler for the novel’s culmination in Dana’s courageous act of self-defense. After all, Rufus’s murder represents her most assertive and impactful act of agency against a dominative past. By killing Rufus, Dana reclaims ownership of her body and ends the brutalizing cycle of temporal abduction through which she was made to feel that she “had no control at all over anything” (113). In Angelyn Mitchell’s reading, it is this act of severance that makes Kindred a “liberatory narrative,” which matriculates to the “enslaved protagonist’s . . . conception and articulation of herself as a free and self-authored agent.”36 I would similarly contend that Dana’s retaliation against Rufus flickers as a moment of triumphant self-reclamation, yet at the same time, I wish to complicate this kind of utopian reading by noting that to the degree that we understand masochistic fantasy in Kindred as the revisionary and reparative modality through which Dana accesses, opens, and explores her past, we must also consider an interpretation of Rufus’s murder as a refusal of erotohistoriographic subjectivity, a return to repression, a rejection of a life that touches and is touched by the past. Moreover, if the transformative possibilities opened up by masochism consist in large measure in the lesson that we have survived, and that we can survive again (and again), then surely this potential is imperiled by Dana’s abrupt foreclosure of the fantasy structure, prior to survival, in lieu of survival.
By killing Rufus, Dana successfully fends off the imminent threat of sexual assault, but she does so at the cost of continued exploration of her vital connection to the past. Indeed, and in spite of the narrative satisfaction that Dana’s retributive triumph provides, this scene proves profoundly incommensurate with Butler’s self-proclaimed logic of empathic and identificatory historical consciousness. Butler purports to write Kindred as a chastisement of a peer’s limited capacity to put himself in the place of his forebears, yet she herself seems to establish black women’s sexual subjection as beyond the limit of what can or should be phantasmatically re-encountered. In Dana’s six returns to the slave past, she never experiences, and only superficially and dismissively imagines, herself as the object of enslaved black women’s categorical vulnerability to racialized sexual violence. By some mystical power of time travel, she escapes back to 1976 before a patroller is able to rape her; on a subsequent return to the past, Kevin poses as her master and shields her from the advances of antebellum white men; until the end, she represses the increasingly erotic charge of Rufus’s attachment to her; and, dressed in the casual garb of the late twentieth-century, she is not even wholly recognizable to her ancestors as a woman in the first place. (“[You wear] pants like a man,” various characters tell her, confusedly and ad nauseam; 22, 71, 165, 199.) In these various ways—through magic, chance, repression, and disguise—Dana evades identification with the enslaved women she encounters, holding on to a sense of sexual self-sovereignty that she contrasts against their status as “thing[s] passed around like the whiskey jug at a husking” (260). The figure of the female slave-as-sex-object thus emerges as the limit of Dana’s capacity for trans-historical identification and desire, and as the limit against which Butler recoils, no longer open to the transformative potential of masochistic fantasy.
Sex thus marks the boundary of Butler’s critique of detached historiographical methods. The masochistic repetition that constitutes the novel’s plot and that produces its intended lesson ultimately becomes untenable because Butler aggressively censors representations of the erotics of racial domination. Certainly, Butler’s antebellum women characters can and do suffer as women, but these forms of suffering remain beyond the reach of the contemporary imagination. Rather than envisioning herself in their place or re-experiencing the particular modalities of their pain, Dana defines herself against the sexual abjection that women like Alice and another slave, Tess, endure. As such, their gendered experiences of enslavement are not re-inhabited and negotiated through an identificatory fantasy of historical return; rather, they remain fixed, “past,” staved off, and enshrouded in shame.
Whereas Octavia Butler imagines eroticism as a terminus for thinking through the transformative potential of masochistic fantasy, her contemporary Gayl Jones conceives of the sexual as indispensable to a historically contextualized understanding of African American identification and desire. As we have seen, Butler’s Dana encounters the sexual as the limit to her open relationship to the past: sex is the thing that she “could not give” (257), the thing over which she chooses murder and psychic irresolution. By contrast, the protagonist of Jones’s 1975 novel Corregidora discovers that a masochistic reworking of the inherited traumas of racial slavery must begin with the erotic: To borrow her phrase, “it had to be sexual.”37 Corregidora performs the identificatory sexual re-enactment with slave ancestors that Kindred forecloses, casting it as the very structure of fantasy and desire at the heart of contemporary narratives of slavery.
In Kindred, black women’s sexuality is a family secret, the apprehension of which compels its discursive foreclosure. In Corregidora, black women’s sexuality is again cast as a family secret, but it is a secret that Jones’s protagonist comes to doggedly pursue.38 In the novel, Great Gram, the prized slave of “old man Corregidora, the Portuguese slave breeder and whoremonger,” commits a secret act on the master that compels and powers her fugitive escape (8–9). This unspoken event of circumscribed yet impactful agency is subsequently buried under Great Gram’s compulsive memories of the myriad forms of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse she endured as a slave. Never speaking of the terms of her escape, Great Gram spends the rest of her life narratively reconstructing scenes of her suffering and transmitting these stories to the matrilineal family she establishes in the United States. (“She told the same story over and over again”; 11.) The duty of her descendants, she decrees, is to “make generations” to mimetically repeat and preserve the story of her wrongful tribulation and to hold this testimony up against the power of a hegemonic cultural will to forget.
Ironically, this attempt at belated self-preservation works to radically confine the autonomy of Great Gram’s descendants—Gram, Mama, and Ursa—who become trapped in a version of the past they can neither fully access nor act upon. Great Gram’s story, its embedded mystery, and its rigid moral lens are asserted and re-iterated with such force that they occlude all other frames of interpretation, identification, and desire for three subsequent generations of “Corregidora women.” Thus Ursa, the protagonist and final daughter, expresses an inability to know her own desire beyond the strict parameters of “what all us Corregidora women want. Have been taught to want. To make generations” (22).
With its ritualistic repetition and its obsessive fixation on violence and retribution, the structure of identification with which Corregidora begins suggestively enacts the pattern of political masochism. For Great Gram’s demand of her unlucky heiresses is not simply that they retain the information she relays but, more comprehensively, that they re-experience—and in so doing, validate, and keep alive—the truth of her suffering. The injury that Great Gram endured/endures is twofold: It consists, most obviously, in her extended brutalization as a child and young woman but also in the devastatingly re-iterated non-recognition of her pain. This non-recognition takes various forms, both public and private, ranging from Old Man Corregidora’s blindness to her sexual non-consent, to the Brazilian government’s brazen destruction of slavery’s paper trail in the immediate aftermath of abolition, to the barbed questions of her granddaughter’s African American suitor in twentieth-century Kentucky. He asks, “How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love?” (131). Against this ever-expanding array of dismissals, Great Gram imagines a form of martyrdom—an inter-generational life of suffering—that will achieve the vindication she is denied. “The important thing is making generations,” she tells Ursa. “They can burn the papers but they can’t burn conscious, Ursa. And that what makes the evidence. And that’s what makes the verdict” (22).
Here, Great Gram’s moral logic of identitarian “evidence” recalls Wendy Brown’s formulation of political masochism, in which the desire for recognition compels the re-vivification of both historical injury and the redundant insult of that injury’s dismissal. Brown writes: “To make [the survival of a traumatic past] into an identity, to make the past into the subjective and objective present, one has to reiterate the injury discursively, emotionally, as bodily and psychic trauma in the present. One has to establish that injury lives, that the trauma is repeated not only through the subject’s psychic and bodily distresses but also through its denials and dismissals by others.”39 This Janus-faced desire, which simultaneously speaks in the idioms of self-preservation and self-destruction, would appear to form the core of Great Gram’s legacy. “We got to burn out what they put in our minds,” she tells Ursa, with resolve. Yet, she continues, “Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness. That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it as visible as our blood” (72).40
In the case of political masochism, injurious repetition is symptomatically inflexible—“a source of political paralysis” and “a constraint on a subject’s willingness to surrender [her maladaptive] investment.”41 Likewise, Great Gram’s prescriptive repetitions are experienced by her descendants as painfully restrictive and even self-obliterating. But even as Jones dramatizes the extraordinary destructive potential of masochistic repetition (“How many generations had to bow to his [Old Man Corregidora’s] genital fantasies?”), she also explores the possibility that masochistic repetition cannot maintain an absolute standard of rigid inflexibility because, like all citational performances, it invariably recurs with a difference (59). In this difference, she fantasizes the possibility of therapeutic, agential change. Indeed, according to Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Corregidora’s discourse of memorial inheritance, especially as embodied by Gram and Ursa, is at least as much about “the difficulty of recollection, the fluid quality of experience, [and] the changing nature of feelings” as it is about the intransigent, imploring impotence of the victim.42 If this is so, then how might erotohistoriography, with its emphasis on non-identical repetition and trans-historical feeling, illuminate our reading of the novel?
Corregidora starts with a fall: Ursa suffers a miscarriage and consequent hysterectomy after an argument with her abusive first husband, Mutt Thomas, culminates in her tumbling down the stairs. The fall is both literal and metaphoric, for by becoming infertile, Ursa is necessarily cast out of the eternal, traumatic time of “making generations” that her foremothers so assiduously cultivate and guard. And as in the Genesis story, Ursa’s fall corresponds with her apprehension of her own capacity for desire. “I am different now,” she reflects. “I have everything they had, except the generations. I can’t make generations. And even if I still had my womb, even if the first baby had come—what would I have done then? Would I have kept it up? Would I have been like her, or them?” (60, Jones’s italics). Severed from her destiny to sublimate identity through reproduction but still powerfully interpellated by Great Gram’s moral-historical demands on her future, Ursa struggles to imagine new terms for her sexual and social subjectivity that will accommodate both her profound sense of familial enmeshment and her emergent sense of individual difference and desire.
Whereas in Kindred, masochistic fantasy takes the magical form of time travel, Corregidora is a realist novel whose exploration of masochism is routed through Ursa’s chosen art and profession: the blues. The protagonist’s painful pursuit of individuation—what she calls “singing back”—takes the blues form of repetition with a difference (103). Ruminative, ambivalent, and profoundly sexual, Ursa’s blues suggestively recall the erotohistoriographical ideal, in which “liberatory rather than random or reactionary difference might appear in the nonidentical repetitions that constitute identity.”43
Crucially, despite her avowed difference, Ursa’s contestation of Great Gram’s psychic and identitarian regime does not hinge on the eschewal of her foremother’s traumatic testimony. Instead, it is energized by her immersive re-imagination of the victim’s history as a site of affective vitality and dynamism. She returns to the historical scenes that Great Gram and Gram obsessively described, but in doing so, she displaces their juridical preoccupation with “evidence” to foreground instead the obfuscated yet still potent domain of historical feelings. Entering her family history by attempting to rewrite it in and as the blues, Ursa wonders, “What did they [Great Gram and Gram] feel?” (102).
In the blues, Jones finds something like an indigenous idiom of reparative masochism—a painful yet pleasurable modality of sensate, affectively suffused, performative repetition. Recalling Freeman’s optimistic faith in erotohistoriography’s non-identical repetitions, the blues form characteristically and self-consciously proceeds through improvisational repetition, disallowing the certain and stagnant brand of historical knowledge that Great Gram requires. Instead, the blues approach history as an asynchronous “process of accumulation and variation,”44 allowing Ursa to encounter historical feelings as accessible, porous, and motile. In contradistinction to Great Gram’s prescription for narrative sameness (“I know I said it, and I’m going to keep saying it”; 41), Ursa adopts a mantra that more closely approximates the ethos of a nimble, reparative masochist: “Everything said in the beginning must be said better than in the beginning” (54).
Furthermore, Jones is adamant in her characterization of the blues as a narrative mode that constitutively entails a kind of sexual performativity. Ursa is a lyricist and songwriter, but she is also a performer who sings “out of [her] whole body” (46), who “[opens her] door and [sings] with [her] thighs” (67). That she talks forcefully about sexual trauma is to be expected, for she is indoctrinated by generations of women who sought, through speech, to make their past pains her own. But unlike the performative speech of her foremothers, which is issued to reproduce in the listener the exact and uninterrupted experience of the speaker, Ursa’s blues are dialogic, acknowledging and engaging the otherness of the audience. Accordingly, Jones’s descriptions of Ursa’s craft recurrently invoke images of receptivity: an opening door, beckoning thighs, the fantasy of an audience that “could see my feelings somewhere in the bottom of my eyes” (51). If Great Gram’s guiding desire is to make her trauma visible to the juridical eye of a divine future, then Ursa’s corresponding wish is to become an agential and recognizable constituent of the present—one who “[feels] satisfied, alone, and satisfied that I could have loved” (103).
To claim this subjectivity in the present, while also recognizing the formative force of her ancestral past, Ursa fantasizes “a song branded with the new world” that would at once affirm the anguish of “the girl who had to sleep with her master and mistress” and make room for the proscribed curiosity—the closeness and the distance—of the victim’s descendants. “I wanted a song that would touch me,” she says, “touch my life and theirs” (59, Jones’s italics). Imagining the blues as a conduit for tactile intimacy with the past, Ursa explores the censored, affective dimensions of her foremothers’ history (“What did they feel?”). At the same time, she seeks to discover and uphold her own, temporally proximate feelings that exceed her inheritance, extending beyond what has already happened and what has already been felt. Placing her own catalog of experience and emotion alongside the story of ancestral suffering that she is compelled to retell, Ursa’s “new world song” envisions the assimilation of her sympathetic grief for her foremothers, who were brutalized, “sacrificed,” and forced to bear the master’s children (59), with her own, isolating anguish of abuse and infertility, the “broken . . . string of my banjo belly.” This assimilation consists, not in comparison or equation, but in a profound, ambivalent, pre-cognitive intimacy: “My veins are centuries meeting,” Ursa explains. “Every time I ever want to cry, I sing the blues” (46). Conceived of as such, the “song that would touch my life and theirs” proceeds neither through logic nor compensation but by way of a sensate, trans-historical bridge that reactivates the dynamic possibilities of feeling—of touching and being touched in and by the past (59).
But if Jones uses the blues as an aesthetic device to hold together several, irresolvable sets of “private memories” (101), compulsions, and desires, then it should not be mistaken for a utopian figure of harmoniousness. To the contrary, Ursa’s singing is famously violent and abrasive. Her “spirit” is described as “knives dancing” (46); her voice is “like callused hands” that seduce in spite of their hardness, “the kind of voice that can hurt you . . . and make you still want to listen” (96). Operating throughout the novel as a metonym for a particularly gritty subset of the sexual, Ursa’s blues exploit and enjoy affective ambivalence. They rework complex sites of irrefutable pain to seize from them an unseemly, excessive, and avowedly erotic pleasure.
What can it mean to find erotic pleasure and desire in, and in spite of, a history of radical self-dispossession? This is the question that Kindred will not ask. Though Corregidora boldly approaches the subject, here, too, the question is inherently illicit, not only because it gestures toward the sexual but also because it rewrites the history of Old Man Corregidora’s crimes in a register that exceeds Great Gram’s totalizing frame of moral condemnation. It reimagines sex—curiously, inconclusively—as potentially more than the mechanism of the master’s dominative power or the sign of his slaves’ utter objectification. To be sure, the point of Ursa’s curiosity, and of her masochistic re-imaginings of the past, is not that trauma was absent or that consent was tacitly present in the prolonged psycho-sexual torture of her great-grandmother and grandmother. Nor is it that the blues or masochistic re-enactment can wholly redeem one’s haunting memories of brutal experience. Rather, Jones turns to idioms of “the pleasure mixed in the pain” to suggest that the survival of sexual trauma may require a semi-flexible re-circulation of sexual feelings, as well as a more fundamental re-framing of sexual affects as potentially inconstant, contradictory, and motile (50). Here again, one finds a suggestive parallel to erotohistoriography, for according to Freeman, s/m’s reparative power consists precisely in its capacity to “[take] up the materials of a traumatic past and [remix] them in the interests of new possibilities for being and knowing.”45
Consider: Sex is the site of the Corregidora women’s original and re-iterative injuries, but it is also the drive and desire that exceeds the master’s control and, later, a performative mode that holds out the promise of reparative change. On the one hand, Jones shows through Great Gram’s testimony how the expropriation of black women’s sexuality under slavery consolidated convictions about the master’s absolute power to name and adjudicate reality. As a slave owner and brothel proprietor acting with the backing of the law, Old Man Corregidora not only exploits the labor of his human property but also sets the terms of their most intimate engagements, determining what constitutes sex, what sex can look like, who can participate in it, and how. (“Any of them, even them he had out in the fields, if he wonted them, he just ship their own husbands out of bed and get in there with them”; 125) But, on the other hand, and in spite of the master’s certain and extreme sexualized power, the domain of the sexual harbors an unpredictable and unwieldy interiority that remains inaccessible to Old Man Corregidora. When Ursa wonders, “What did they feel?” she seeks to know and name the terms of her foremothers’ unspoken yet inextinguishable self-persistence. In the contours of “their desire,” she imagines the limits of Old Man Corregidora’s dominion (102, my italics). Thus, her “new world song” asks the women who came before her, “When did you begin to feel yourself in your nostrils? . . . When did you smell your body with your hands?” (59).
Rushdy rightly notes that it is Gram, the other blues-loving Corregidora woman, who anticipates and inspires her granddaughter’s “new world song.” Her oblique pretext to Ursa’s blues takes the form of a riddle that displaces Great Gram’s exclusive fixation on scenes of disempowerment to consider as well the unspoken conditions of her escape. According to Gram, “Up till today she [Great Gram] still won’t tell me what it was she did,” but some mysterious act of radical transgression emboldened her to escape the seemingly intractable grasp of slavery. “He would’ve killed her . . . if she hadn’t gone. . . . What is it a woman can do to a man to make him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her and can’t get her out of his mind the next?” (172–173).
Rather than affixing to the story of escape itself, Gram’s curiosity (which in turn guides Ursa’s) focuses on a story of insurrectionary violence that precedes and necessitates Great Gram’s subsequent death or departure. Her provocative wording—“what is it a woman can do to a man . . .”—recuperates for the enslaved not only the possibility of an interiority that resists total domination but, more, the possibility of the victim’s actionable will, circumscribed but present. Bearing the cryptic promise of a legacy of black women’s agency that emerges from and subverts conditions of extreme constraint, Gram’s riddle tenaciously invades Ursa’s dreamscapes, romantic life, and sexual fantasies. As it does so, it complicates the presumptively singular and over-determining claim of the Corregidora curse on Ursa’s libidinal imagination. For whereas Great Gram’s ritualistic repetition aggressively disallows the recognition of any agential actor but Old Man Corregidora, Gram’s riddle makes fathomable the disavowed power of the powerless. Thus contested and reframed, Great Gram’s story is no longer simply a hardened didacticism enacted upon her descendants but a seductive site of curiosity that activates Ursa’s exploration of her own dynamic relation to the past.
In the novel’s culminating scene, Jones mobilizes Gram’s riddle to approach in a new way both Ursa’s own experiences of sexual trauma and the ancestral stories of racial-sexual trauma that are her inheritance. Twenty-two years after her fall, she and Mutt meet again and warily consider reconciliation. In the cathected sexual encounter that follows, Ursa’s narrative present is spliced with the near and distant past, re-iterating history as both the same and different: “It wasn’t the same room, but the same place. The same feel of the place.” As she prepares to perform fellatio on Mutt, Ursa is reminded of Gram’s riddle and is consumed by a powerful identification with Great Gram. In the process, she spontaneously apprehends an answer to the riddle:
It had to be sexual, I was thinking, it had to be something sexual that Great Gram did to Corregidora. I knew it had to be sexual: “What is it a woman can do to a man that make him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her and can’t get her out of his mind the next?” In a split second I knew what it was, in a split second of hate and love I knew what it was, and I think he might have known too. A moment of pleasure and excruciating pain at the same time, a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops just before sexlessness, a moment that stops before it breaks the skin: “I could kill you.”
I held his ankles. It was like I didn’t know how much was me and Mutt and how much was Great Gram and Corregidora—like Mama when she had started talking like Great Gram . . . .
“I could kill you.”
He came and I swallowed. He leaned back, pulling me up by the shoulders. (184–185)
In this extended passage, Jones locates in the sexual a constitutive human vulnerability and a constitutive human capacity for violence. The thing that Great Gram did to Corregidora, that a woman can do to a man, that a slave can do to a master, “had to be sexual” because sex is the unique site at which power and powerlessness, self-aggrandizement and self-disaggregation, may be profoundly and (con)fusingly collapsed. In “a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness,” the swollen and erect phallus—that singular icon of masculine power—is humiliated in its desire, subordinated to the will of the feminine object/abject. “I could kill you.” This excess of masculine desire ephemerally appears as the flaw in the master’s aspiration to absolute power. “I could kill you,” Ursa/Great Gram says, and this is the phrase that propels self-liberation.
Alternatively, we can interpret the line “it had to be sexual” to mean that Ursa’s trans-historical apprehension can only happen through sex. That is, sex is the unique register that enables Ursa’s revelatory and potentially reparative time travel. It makes possible and ushers in different ways of being in time: the “split second,” the anticipatory pause, the momentary dissolution of time and self. According to Freeman, it is s/m’s unique capacity to manipulate the normatively bounded experiences of time and subjectivity that affords its epistemological value and its transformative potential. By “[using] physical sensation to break apart one’s present into fragments of times that may not be one’s own,” masochistic re-enactment can yield flickering moments of identificatory recognition across time—“not displacement but a certain condensation” of trans-historical subjectivities.46 Ursa says something similar in her description of the moment in which her sex act with Mutt spontaneously becomes a re-enactment of slave sexuality. In the phrase, “I didn’t know how much was me and Mutt and how much was Great Gram and Corregidora,” she identifies an erotic scene of historical density that crystallizes a previously inaccessible historical knowledge: “In a split second, I knew what it was.”
The precise mechanism through which sex distills trans-historical understanding or identification cannot be articulated, for the very thing that gives sex its mystical power is its elusive relation to language and logic. We might conjecture, nevertheless, that the possibility of deep, erotohistoriographic connection has something to do with the orgasmic shattering of the ego-in-time, the unmaking of bounded self-certainty, and the involuntary subordination of cognition and its attendant structures to a suffusive experience of affect and sensation.47 Furthermore, Corregidora’s climactic scene suggests that sex can uniquely make possible certain stagings of trans-historical rapprochement because of its capacity to hold contradictory truths: “a split second of hate and love,” “a moment of pleasure and excruciating pain at the same time.” Like the blues—and, indeed, often manifested as the blues—sex in Corregidora is a volatile yet pleasurable, formal container for ambivalent, inarticulate, and excessive feelings—what Ursa calls “my feeling ways” (50). Pre-empting the impossible compulsion to explain or repair past trauma, Ursa’s bluesy sex (and her sexy blues) instead holds out the promise of an ephemeral, extra-cognitive recognition. Through this visceral epistemology of self and other, past and present, Ursa achieves, not resolution, but a kind of sustenance, an inspiriting hope for alternative ways of living with history. In the final lines of the novel, she finally articulates, albeit in the negative, the terms of her own, previously unspeakable desire: “I don’t want a kind of man that’ll hurt me neither,” she says to Mutt. Although he cannot (yet?) comply, he absorbs her request; “he held me tight” (185).
The logical conclusion to my juxtaposition of Kindred and Corregidora is that Jones achieves a kind of hopefulness Butler cannot because she finds narrative figures (the blues, sex) that can tolerate ambivalence and even extract novel pleasures from it. As a result, one might argue that Corregidora’s trans-historical encounters take on a dynamic, propulsive energy, defying the warning political masochism issues, that returning to scenes of historical suffering will only further entrench past pains. By contrast, Butler’s foreclosure of the sexual results in the termination of Dana’s trans-historical circuit, leaving Dana stuck in the present while still burdened by an unchanging and unchangeable historical record. The varied consequences of Butler’s and Jones’s respective treatments of masochistic, historical re-encounter are perhaps nowhere more dramatic than in the respective endings of their plots: Kindred ends with murder and the ravaged body of the survivor (“I lost an arm on my last trip home”; 9), while Corregidora ends with an embrace among the living (“he held me tight”; 185). Indeed, even if we read Dana’s act of violence as a forceful triumph against her oppressive past, we must still grapple with the powerful specter of futility at the novel’s end: What can it mean to kill someone who is already long dead? There is no public record or recognition of Dana’s time-traveling insurgency. Its trace is registered only as her own injury, the permanent battle wound of her lost limb.
And yet I feel a measure of resistance to this reading of Corregidora as the fulfillment of Kindred’s botched task, for while Corregidora’s ending offers profound aesthetic satisfaction and beautiful formal rapprochement, the ending must also be read as inconclusive and, indeed, as harboring its own unwieldy danger. Although Ursa finally speaks her desire and Mutt “[holds] her tight,” this is ultimately something of a hollow gesture, which hardly encourages robust confidence in the couple’s future or even in the restorative potential of Ursa’s dynamic current of repetition-with-change. Seeing Mutt for the first time in over two decades, Ursa describes the powerful persistence of her hatred for him, “Like an odor still in a room when you come back to it, and it’s your own” (183). Moreover, if what Ursa does not want is “a kind of man that’ll hurt me,” then surely that “kind of man” is Mutt—a perpetrator of verbal and physical abuse whose final embrace may be at least as ominous as it is hopeful. To cast Corregidora as a narrative instance of reparative masochism requires the radical suppression of what we know about Mutt; it requires us to over-invest our faith in the transformative capacities of the blues form, to hope against the content of history that the protagonist’s citational variations on the past will soothe, rather than compound, her suffering.
This kind of wager is precisely what Brown warns against when she maintains that repetition-with-difference is no anodyne against the pernicious force of masochistic desire. According to her account, the inevitable variations among masochistic repetitions are absorbed as the multi-vocal corroboration of a grand narrative of wounding and moral vengeance. The “political-psychic economy” of masochism not only tolerates but also requires “a surplus of scenes of victimization.”48 Viewed through this lens, Ursa’s recitations and re-enactment of her foremothers’ pasts may be less notable for their flexible re-working of historical affect than for the ways in which they reconsolidate inherited experiences and convictions about victimhood, powerlessness, and a negative relationship to sexual agency. Even in the novel’s final scene, Ursa’s momentary apprehension of power (“I could kill you”) is quickly subsumed by Mutt’s orgasm (“He came and I swallowed”) and incorporated into a scene of masculine power (“He shook me til I fell against him crying”; 185). As Madhu Dubey bleakly notes, “On a thematic level, the novel’s end does not mark a progression from the beginning; Ursa’s and Mutt’s desires are as incompatible at the end as they were at the beginning.”49
By contrast, and in spite of its futility, there is something irrefutably satisfying in Dana’s flickering extraction of revenge. In a fleeting moment, she breaks free from Brown’s descriptive paradigm of political masochism, re-encountering the Father not to stage another, inevitable submission but to “[raise] the knife” and “[sink] it into his side” (260). Whatever its inassimilability with Butler’s masochistic pedagogy of historical empathy, perhaps there is something to be said for the author’s ultimate decision to preserve the fantasy of a heroically self-sovereign, black, female avenger. At least for this reader, Rufus’s “long” and final “shuddering sigh” before “his body went limp and leaden across me” (260) provides a narrative pleasure that Mutt’s detumescence (“he came and I swallowed”) cannot rival.50
Earlier, I noted that a fundamental gap in the idea of political masochism consists in its inability to think about sex and politics together. Rhetorically dividing these terms through the use of allegory, political masochism constitutes “politics” as a problem apart from the sexual. Now I wish to return to this criticism from the ostensibly opposite direction, to consider whether the limits of reparative masochism may consist in their implicit aversion to the register of politics. Can fantasies of reparative masochism speak in a register that is legible to politics, and if not, does this misalignment unavoidably suggest the uselessness of masochism?
In recent years, scholars including Judith Halberstam, Darieck Scott, and Kathryn Bond Stockton have suggested otherwise, proposing that masochism and a cluster of related terms may wield a subversive political power that counter-intuitively inheres in the repudiation of presently recognizable terms of political subjectivity and desire. In this vein, Halberstam describes masochism as a key modality within a “shadow archive of resistance, one that does not speak the language of action and momentum.”51 He pushes us to see masochism as “an antiliberal act, a revolutionary statement of pure opposition that does not rely upon the liberal gesture of defiance but accesses another lexicon of power and speaks another language of refusal.”52
Scott performs a similar analytic maneuver with the keyword “abjection,” through which he seeks to expose an as yet unrealized power in racial-sexual negativity—“some kind of power” within “that which is not-power according to the ego-dependent, ego-centric (and masculine and white) ‘I’ definitions we have of power” (Scott’s italics).53 Like Halberstam, Scott is concerned that the hegemonic political ideals of agency and self-sovereignty tacitly carry the legacy of white enfranchisement and black objectification. Rather than pursue the impossible emulation of white citizenship, he endorses a queerly revised, Fanonian turn: revolutionary, cleansing violence in the form of desirous, African American sexual abjection. In something akin to the masochistic climax of liberatory self-shattering, Scott identifies a model for radical divestment from the pursuit of self-aggrandizing power. He adopts the general pattern of reparative masochism insofar as he imagines the recursive possibilities opened up by sexual re-enactment as opportunities to negotiate the terms of coming into subjectivity. But he also moves beyond such claims, delineating “extravagant abjection” as a prescription for a new and liberatory politics of a subversively reimagined “black power.” 54
Allow me to underscore the stakes of this bold theoretical move: For Scott, divestment from the pursuit of self-sovereignty does not amount to a withdrawal from politics. Instead, he regards this divestment as a means of razing and radically re-inventing the existing political frame. Through the idiom and experience of abjection, he proposes, we can challenge and re-cast contemporary politics’ dependence on the fictions of the defensive, monadic ego, intractable linear time, and the conceptual tethering of mastery and pleasure. Anticipating the inevitable critique, Scott contends that his fantasy of reinventing the political is neither escapist nor unrealistic. Following Fanon, he counters that colonial history is itself the indisputable proof that a people can unmake the world-as-it-was while performatively interpellating a so-called New World. “The possibility of radical difference,” he insists, “is after all a proven possibility because colonialism was established and reorganized the world in precisely the manner of the introduction of a radical difference.”55 Scott thus maintains that contemporary formulations of citizenship and subjectivity are imperfect and eradicable. He turns to “extravagant abjection”—a capacious category that includes and exceeds masochism—as the first step toward reinventing political reality.56
There is much that I find exciting in Scott’s theorization—most of all, the skill with which he weaves together Fanonian political militancy with a Leo Bersani–inspired ideal of queer sexual liberation. His faith in the possibility of a sexual politics of reinvention is grounded in an unexpected theoretical synthesis that itself breaks the frame of received thought on the topics of race, sexuality, and “black power.” Yet even as I am lured by Scott’s promise to “meet the challenge of the defeat already imposed on us . . . by the problem of history,” I continue to find something stubbornly discomfiting in his politicized gesture of renouncing the desire for sovereignty. For Scott, the promise of untapped creative potential is bound up with the acceptance—indeed, the pursuit—of self-destruction. It is in the throes of profound, self-obliterating sexual abjection that he finds the germ of his politics, “an inchoate, churning, as-yet-unshaped resistance that is characterized by intense, even extravagant meaning-making.”57 Perhaps this is so, yet perhaps some perilous risk also inheres in African American repudiations of the will to a boundaried and self-possessed “self.”
In part, my hesitation is precisely what Scott anticipates and pre-emptively discounts: a politically cautious and perhaps sexually prudish concern that risk will outweigh reward, that the pursuit of abjection may too often approximate “a confirmation of the defeat with which abjection works rather than the complication of it.”58 But in addition, my resistance to Scott’s formulation stems from my sense that the desire for self-sovereignty cannot be fully and sincerely renounced, that it persists as an inextinguishable trace of what has been lost in the past—even within the ostensibly obliterating space of “extravagant abjection.” To illustrate my divergence from Scott’s theory and to articulate more succinctly my own, ambivalent take on masochism and the contemporary narrative of slavery, I conclude this chapter by engaging with Scott’s brief interpretation of Corregidora, in which he identifies Great Gram as an illustrative agent of his theory of black power in abjection.
In the conclusion to Extravagant Abjection, Scott references a well-known scene from Jones’s novel, in which Old Man Corregidora rapes Great Gram while slave catchers pursue her friend, a fellow slave from Corregidora’s plantation. Thinking of her friend while being raped by her master, she concocts a masochistic fantasy that fuses her vicarious desire for freedom with the forcibly imposed conditions of her sexual subjugation: “While he [Corregidora] was up there jumping up and down between my legs they was out there with them hounds after that boy. . . . And then somehow it got in my mind that each time he kept going down in me would be that boys’ feets running. And then when he come, it mean they caught him” (127–128). In Scott’s reading, this scene counter-intuitively crystallizes Great Gram’s potential for creative power, for in her resort to “magical thinking,” he locates a capacity to “sexualize and eroticize everything in her world,” to radically remake the meanings of the constraints that are forced upon her.59
Like Scott, I am inclined to see a certain adaptive resourcefulness in Great Gram’s production of masochistic fantasy. But whereas Scott locates the empowering promise of this scene in the dissolution of Great Gram’s coherent and defended “self,” I value Great Gram’s fantasy primarily for its capacity to enable her continuing desire for self-persistence. Unlike Scott, I carry deep reservations about imagining this “magical thinking” as a desirable model for power, let alone one that we might abstract into a politics. After all, this is not a scene that ends with Great Gram’s escape or with a challenge to the master’s authority that is in any sense perceptible to him. Instead, it is a scene that ends with unacknowledged rape and with the dead body of the fugitive, returned to the plantation he sought to escape.
More fundamentally, I want to trouble Scott’s claim that Great Gram’s power-in-abjection inheres in her relinquishment of a boundaried, self-aggrandizing ego. For it seems to me that Great Gram’s “power” in the scene of abjection materializes precisely through a fantasy of consolidated and agential power. Whereas Scott has shown how, in this scene, the foremother (de-)constitutes herself through gestures of self-sacrifice and even self-effacement, I wish to illumine how, in the same moment, Great Gram is producing the coherent and self-consolidating Gestalt of the martyr.
Great Gram’s masochistic fantasy operates by replacing the truth of her political impotence—her powerlessness to protect the young man from racist violence and murder—with an explanatory narrative in which her own suffering harbors the efforts of the fugitive running toward freedom. In her fantasy, the physiological and psychic injuries of rape are alchemically converted into a fugitive agency; they “would be that boy’s feets running” (128, my italics). But Great Gram’s fantasy is not only a prayer for the boy she cannot rescue. It is also a structure of identification that gives her access to a sense of social relevance within the annihilative matrix of slavery’s power relations. Corregidora would make of her a dehumanized object for sexual use, so severed from human capacities for will or consent that her abuse is legible only as his pleasure. But the fantasy erects a different economy of desire into which Great Gram can enter, even as she feels (indeed, precisely as she feels) the immediate physical pain of her own violation and the sympathetic, psychic pain attending her friend’s certain death. It provides her with identitarian coherence and moral standing; it steels her against the obliterating force of the slave master’s psychosexual tyranny. In short, Great Gram’s masochistic fantasy produces an inhabitable “self”—the self as heroic martyr, the self as incubator of a productive, emancipatory pain—in whose name survival becomes not only possible but a moral necessity. So whereas Scott reads this scene as a moment of political rebirth, in which Great Gram’s abjection makes possible the imagining of an identity without ego and an attendant form of black solidarity, I am compelled to read this scene as an illustration of how the longing for a coherent and legible subjectivity persists in the masochistic imagination, even as it is sublimated or subordinated to a narrative of self-sacrifice. In a similar vein, in Kindred, the will to self-sovereignty persists in the form of the concealed knife that Dana carries into her own masochistic fantasy, and elsewhere in Corregidora, Ursa experiences a like desire in her urge to reclaim the power to kill.
How shall we make sense of this curious fact, that both novels simultaneously emplot a masochistic narrative structure of identification and desire and a stubborn will for the power of self-possession? In lieu of synthesis, I would venture that these are novels in which the ending is not the most concentrated repository of meaning. “The end is in principle excluded—the text demands continuation.” Taken not as a hermeneutic but as a literary figure and form structured by masochism, therapeutic reading may materialize precisely as an instance of this kind of plot—a plot that “like life itself, resists being pigeonholed because it never comes to an end.”60 After all, isn’t a forestalled ending a crucial requirement of masochism’s most compelling promises? That we can live with inassimilable forms of desire, that we can hold together our longing for historical return and explorative futurity, and that doing so may even bring us profound and unexpected pleasures? Put another way, perhaps what masochism most usefully models for politics is not the possibility of post-sovereign subjectivity but, more modestly, the possibility of living with contradiction.