In the opening chapter of Andrea Lee’s 1984 novella, Sarah Phillips, the eponymous protagonist describes a hostile, semi-public exchange with her French lover, Henri Durier. While dining with Sarah and two of his childhood friends at a “small inn near the outskirts of Rouen,” Henri is suddenly possessed by a fit of meanness. Giggling as he grabs Sarah’s “frizzy ponytail,” he declares his African American girlfriend “a savage from the shores of the Mississippi” and proceeds to spin an absurdly racist story about Sarah’s alleged “pedigree.” In fact, Sarah is a product of suburban privilege: Her parents are esteemed members of the Philadelphia-area black bourgeoisie, and at the time of Henri’s attack, she occupies the elite position of a Harvard-educated American expatriate, traveling to Europe to pursue literary ambitions. Yet in Henri’s bizarre and aggressively anti-historical account, Sarah is recast as the accidental progeny of a “part Jew” “Irishwoman” and a rapacious black “monkey.” “It’s a very American tale,” he elaborates. “One day this Irlandaise was walking through the jungle near New Orleans, when she was raped by a jazz musician as big and black as King Kong, with sexual equipment to match. And from this agreeable encounter was born our little Sarah, notre Négresse pasteurisée.”1
Sarah is bewildered, first, by Henri’s undue cruelty and, subsequently, by the unexpected potency with which his defamatory story affects her; “The story of the mongrel Irishwoman and the gorilla jazzman” dispenses an affective force that cuts through the narrative’s conspicuous untruth, even as she remains unable to name the feelings that so powerfully claim her. Escaping to the bathroom, Sarah crouches inside a stall, “breathing soberly and carefully as [she tries] to control the blood pounding in [her] head.” “His silly tall tale had done something far more drastic than wound me,” she reflects. “[It] had summed me up with weird accuracy, as an absurd political joke can sum up a regime, and I felt furious and betrayed by the intensity of nameless emotion it had called forth in me” (12).
To the consternation of many of the novella’s critics, this “intense and nameless” bad feeling does not matriculate to confrontation, historical critique, or politicizing epiphany. Sarah rejoins the group reporting a vague sense of loss, but shortly thereafter, she resumes her relationship with Henri, tacitly accepting his tepid apology. Thus Lee’s depiction of anti-climactic irresolution that ensues from a scene of biting, everyday racism stands in stark contrast to many of the literary texts I have examined so far, in which the bad feelings that attend contemporary racism are meant to trigger dramatic, trans-historical revelations about race, racism, and identity formation. (One can picture Octavia Butler fantasizing Sarah’s abduction to a painful slave past!) In the latter tradition, time travel, possession, and other mystical technologies connect banal scenes of racism and racial alienation in the present to the revitalized moral claims of an unredeemed past. Fantasizing a present that opens backward into a traumatic past, these novels actively long for a historicized racial heroism, even when they cannot imagine its accomplishment. But Sarah Phillips refuses these common objects of racial desire, remaining insistently anchored in the present and near past, turning a cynical eye toward racial heroics, and refusing to broach the distant and sensational “there” of historical trauma that so many of Lee’s contemporaries foreground.
In the estimation of many readers, Sarah Phillips thus materializes as a text that skims the affective surface of black life, compulsively pulling away from the painful intricacies and inter-generational depths of bad feelings about race and racism.2 Sarah occasionally and temporarily feels bad—even acutely so—but she resolutely declines to give social or historical context to her bad feelings. As Valerie Smith notes, Sarah’s “responses to the muted manifestations of racism and sexism that she faces take the forms of studied nonchalance about her privilege, gratuitous rebelliousness, ambivalence about her familial and cultural roots, confusion about the direction her life should take, and uncertainty about where to place her loyalties.”3 Articulating her displeasure more explicitly, Mary Helen Washington demands to know, “Why isn’t Sarah angry at this [Henri’s] insult? Why does the narrator offer intellectual explanations and refuse to identify her feelings?”4
In fact, Sarah is angry at Henri’s insult. She is, by her own account, “furious,” and before she exits the dining room for the privacy of the bathroom, her immediate response is a reproach. “Leave me alone!” she says, withdrawing her head from Henri’s menacing grip. “I think that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard” (11). Washington’s critique thus bears a factual error—she claims that Sarah is not angry when in fact she is—but this error itself is telling. Eliding the scene of Sarah’s anger to focus instead on her subsequent impotence and affective impasse, Washington uncannily repeats Sarah’s own experience, in which focused counter-aggression unravels into something less actionable or identifiable, the terrible reign of some unharnessable, “nameless emotion” that overpowers other registers of feeling.
My intention here is not to emerge as Sarah’s champion but to propose a different interpretive pathway from those that have dominated discussions of Sarah Phillips to date.5 Read against African American literature’s historical turn, I am intrigued by Lee’s tacit yet insistent aversion to the dramatic register of trauma, as well as her implicit rejection of the notion that literature’s work is to effect prescriptive psychic change. I am fascinated, too, by her unexpected representations of African American history, which she casts alternatively as an absurd yet potent lie, something lost to the realist register of consciousness, or the irretrievable crucible of an amorphous, affective force. Might we approach Sarah Phillips, not as a novella about the emotional bereftness that attends racial alienation, but as a text that boldly insists upon an index other than intergenerational trauma for measuring contemporary black experiences of racial formation and discrimination? What if we begin with the assumption that Sarah’s inarticulate bad feelings represent a unique, essential, and overlooked substratum of post–Civil Rights African American psychic life? In this spirit, the present chapter shifts focus from direct literary engagements with unresolved atrocities of the slave past to texts that carry a much more ambiguous relationship to African American history.
Sarah Phillips, with its iconoclastic and, for many, unlikeable protagonist, is not a singular outlier within the corpus of late modern black fiction. Instead, I argue, it is an exemplary text within an extra-canonical counter-tradition—a missing archive—of contemporary African American literature. This under-studied body of work is marked, not by dramatic aspiration to an ideal of trans-historical rapprochement, but by stubbornly presentist, anti-cathartic, everyday experiences of race and racism. Here, when the history of slavery appears at all, it is ephemeral, hyper-mediated, or otherwise beyond reach. Contemporary characters are stymied or relieved by the racial past’s psycho-affective irretrievability, and they grow cynical about cultural investments in the (already failed) redemptive promise of inter-generational memory. As the narrator of James Alan McPherson’s short story, “Elbow Room,” puts it, “The old stories were still being told, but their tellers seemed to lack confidence in them. Words seemed to have become detached from emotion. . . . Everywhere there was this feeling of grotesque sadness, far, far past honest tears.”6
The purpose of this chapter is to chart the constitutive psychic structures and affective manifestations that animate anti-historical black fiction from the post–Civil Rights period. In addition to Sarah Phillips (1984), I take up two other acclaimed but critically under-examined texts—James Alan McPherson’s “Elbow Room” (1977) and Alice Randall’s Rebel Yell (2009)—to make a case for “depression” as a descriptive and explanatory rubric to enhance our understanding of contemporary black literary production.
Drawing on psychoanalysis and affect theory, I invoke “depression” as an umbrella term that prominently includes but also extends beyond Freudian melancholia. Melancholia provides a theory of how identity takes shape in relation to history, love, and loss; depression attends to this structural formation and also attempts to make sense of the texture and intensity of a range of extra-melancholic bad feelings, such as (externalized) rage, shame, boredom, and aimlessness. If the narrative structures of trauma and masochism in contemporary African American literature tend to reify the idea of a historically resonant psychic injury that compels a fantasy of return and repair across an inter-generational expanse, then depression suggests a different timing of loss and desire while bringing a contemporary scene of grief more clearly into view. Specifically, the texts I study here foreground a depressive response to the premature decline of the modern Civil Rights Movement and its attendant forms of faith and desire.
If the primary effort of this chapter is to provide a descriptive account of the body of presentist and near-historical writing that I am calling “the missing archive,” then a secondary aim is to think through the relationship between the relative neglect of that archive, on the one hand, and the critical prominence of the contemporary narrative of slavery, on the other hand. This line of inquiry affirms a core concern of prohibitive reading—that the form of the contemporary narrative of slavery may obscure or even foreclose other kinds of stories, particularly those that emphasize more proximate conditions of black political and psychic life. But where prohibitive reading identifies mistaken priorities that must be opposed, I want to forestall the gesture of judgment, to pose some agnostic questions about what it might mean for presentist, depressive narratives to materialize as the inassimilable remainder to historical narratives shaped by the structures of trauma or masochism.
In Freud’s famous formulation, “melancholia” describes the grief of the ambivalent lover who wishes simultaneously to retain and repudiate her lost love object.7 Fearing loss, the melancholic identifies with the love object as a means of preserving it. This unconscious identification “[substitutes] for the [earlier] erotic cathexis” and acts as a psychic defense against loss.8 Resenting loss, the melancholic rages against the abandoning other who now lives, encrypted, under the guise of the self.9 This self-beratement, which Freud identifies as the distinguishing symptom of melancholia, in turn reveals a psychic structure of split consciousness, “a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.”10 Herein lies the crucial distinction between mourning and melancholia: Unlike mourning, which is Freud’s term for the normative psychic response to loss, melancholia is a pathological process in which loss, or the perception of its imminence, provokes a complex, structural transformation of the ego. “Melancholia” thus describes a unique phenomenon in which grief powerfully restructures identity.11
For Freud, this hypothesis does not entail a cultural or historical context. He understands melancholia as alternatively arbitrary or an idiosyncrasy of personality—not as culturally conditioned or as a psychic response to systemic social or political forces. From his perspective, the “identity” melancholia restructures is identity in the psychoanalytic sense (i.e., the ego), not in the sense of the socio-politically interpellated self. It is Anne Anlin Cheng, eighty-five years after Freud, who returns to “Mourning and Melancholia” to produce a theory of the melancholic constitution of American racial identities. She contends that Freud’s formulation of “a chain of loss, denial, and incorporation through which the ego is born” unwittingly elucidates the intricate and often non-transparent processes of racialization through which contemporary American identities are forged.12
Cheng describes the cultural phenomenon of racialization as one that entails two simultaneously operating forms of “racial melancholia.” The first, “dominant racial melancholia,” refers to how (white) American national identity is consolidated and “sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others.” Much as the Freudian melancholic hates and loves, reviles and needs, its lost object, Cheng posits that the American national imaginary is fueled by its constitutive “need” for “the very thing [it hates] or [fears]”—that is, racial minorities. Racial minorities thus function as the melancholic objects of hegemonic fantasies of national identity. “It is this imbricated but denied relationship” to them “that forms the basis of white racial melancholia.”13
But even as racial minorities are made into the melancholic objects of American whiteness, they are simultaneously consolidating their own internal identifications as melancholic subjects. The second form of racial melancholia thus pertains to the internal negotiations of subjectivity performed by racialized others. This form of melancholia processes the experience of being interpellated through the contradictory hate and need of the dominant culture, and it consolidates legible identities through internalization of, and identification with, constitutive experiences of social loss. What are lost to the racialized other are social visibility and value, belonging, and the imaginative possibility of “self as legitimacy.” What ensues is “the internalization of discipline and rejection” and “the installation of a scripted context of perception.”14
In brief, racial melancholia is a two-pronged theory of identity formation that imagines subjectivity as at once socially and intra-psychically constructed. It posits that “racial grief” is an “invisible but tenacious” force at work in all modern American systems of identification, and it models the psychic “dynamic of retaining a denigrating but sustaining loss” through which de-/racialized identities are secured.15 Unlike trauma-based theories of racial identification, which pivot on a crisis event and its ensuing, undesired repetition, racial melancholia foregrounds a logic of seduction—its engine is the libidinal excess that survives lost love. In this regard, melancholia and masochism may be said to serve a shared purpose of explaining the libidinal complexities that fuel internal and inter-personal negotiations of exclusion and loss. But whereas masochism takes shape as a relationship to power and punishment, melancholia describes a relationship to oneself, albeit as mediated by intrusive forces of sociality. As a drama of the self (as distinct from a drama of crisis event or a drama of punishment), melancholia is better suited than trauma or masochism to speak in the unexceptional and presentist register of the everyday.
Cheng’s theory readily lends itself, for example, to a reading of Lee’s protagonist as a melancholically racialized figure whose formative psychic dramas are mundane, presentist, and enmeshed with the socio-cultural milieu of post-segregation America. The novella begins with a description of Sarah’s conflicted love and denigration of a wealthy white stranger named Kate. When Sarah and her housemates (including the aforementioned, contemptible Henri) hear that Kate is being held hostage “by her present lover and an ex-boyfriend, who were collecting her allowance,” Sarah takes pleasure in the “mock sorrow” of her companions but also, “sympathize[s] with [Kate].” “She seemed to be a kind of sister or alter ego, although she was white and I was black, and back in the States I’d undergone a rush of belated social fury at girls like Kate, whose complacent faces had surrounded me in prep school and college.” The “identification” that Sarah claims with Kate is complexly wrought, merging feelings of affinity, “fury,” and malice. For Sarah, “girls like Kate”—bearing the interchangeable faces of white feminine indifference—call to mind a history of social rejections that feel like loss and that sediment a re-configured and internally divided sense of self (3–4).
In a subsequent chapter, Lee elaborates upon this formulation when she tells us that, in high school, Sarah’s misfit friend Gretchen “despised the school and often condemned it,” but Sarah “had a secret”: “I wanted to fit in, really fit in, and if Lissa Randolph or Kemp Massie, rulers of the Olympian band of suntanned, gold-bangled popular girls, shimmering in their Fair Isle sweaters, had so much crooked a finger at me, I would have left Gretchen and followed the way the apostles followed Christ. . . . At night I gloated over a vision of myself transformed by some magical agency into a Shetland-clad blonde with a cute blip of a nickname” (56). Like the racial melancholic, an adolescent Sarah incorporates the “gold-bangled popular girl” whose imagined attentions she has lost but whom she cannot grieve. “No one knew my secret—not my parents, who bragged with relief about my levelheaded adjustment; not my brother Matthew, who might have understood” (56). Quietly identifying with the inaccessible “Shetland-clad blonde” whom she both loves and resents, Sarah internalizes “a set of almost imperceptible closures and polite rejections” that “shut me off socially” (54). In Cheng’s phrasing, “The social lesson of racial minoritization reinforces itself through the imaginative loss of a never-possible perfection, whose loss the little girl must come to identify as a rejection of herself.”16 Similarly, Sarah’s ego is re-iteratively re-configured and abjected—as well as re-iteratively re-configured as abjected—by way of a complex and ambivalent relationship to an idealized whiteness. It is this under-acknowledged transformation of the self that accounts for Sarah’s simultaneous “sympathy” and hostility toward Kate. Through her melancholic incorporation of Lissa and Kemp, she becomes both the agent of their racist discernment and the denigrated object they refuse to see.
As this cursory reading suggests, racial melancholia enhances our understanding of Lee’s novella by exposing the “world of relations” that inhabit “the reductive notion of ‘internalization.’”17 This lens allows us to see a nuanced and generative social injury at the psychic core of Lee’s often-unlikeable protagonist, and it pushes us to think through some of the invisibly pernicious effects of racism that may not garner our instinctive sympathies. But while Cheng’s formulations help us to see how blacks and whites incorporate and rage against their respective racial others, they provide less guidance for our understanding of how structures of African American identification are cultivated through intra-racial negotiations of love, loss, and identification. Surely, Sarah’s self-identification is forged not only in relation to Kemp and Lissa but also within the largely insular and racially homogenous domains of family and community. In this configuration, we may find a third form of racial melancholia—one that re-imagines the psychic genealogy of late modern African American subjectivity in relation to the intra-racially “lost” entity of the Civil Rights Movement’s iconic, teleological faith.
I use the term “Civil Rights idealism” as a shorthand to describe this object of melancholic loss—an abstract “object” inhering in the powerful coalescence of a collectivizing self-story, a political affect, a personal ideal, and an itinerary for political action, peaking in the years between the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968.18 King was not the singular or original author of Civil Rights idealism, but he is the iconic figure for this idea, par excellence. Conceptually, Civil Rights idealism made social and moral meaning of black suffering; to borrow language from Paul Gilroy, it upheld “the capacity of blacks to redeem and transform the modern world through the truth and clarity of perception that emerge from their pain.”19 More concretely, Civil Rights idealism attends a concentrated period of public protest, political action, and legal reform. It does not connote consensus or a singular voice of modern black progressivism; rather, it acknowledges a register of political resonance that reverberates through much of mid-century black discourse, consecrating widely shared ideals of progress, freedom, and moral truth.
Indeed, one striking measure of the reach of Civil Rights idealism may be found in the pained—if unrelentingly militant—eulogies that King’s anti-integrationist, black radical critics wrote on the occasion of his death. The poet Nikki Giovanni, for example, declared, “the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. is an act of war”;20 Amiri Baraka, at the height of his anti-assimilationist ardor, expressed a devastating mixture of rage and despair when he asked why King “can/be killed by criminals”;21 and the nationalist psychiatrists William Grier and Price M. Cobbs interpreted the collective grief attending King’s death as a portent of retaliatory violence. (“For a moment, be any black person, anywhere, and you will feel the waves of hopelessness that engulfed black men and women when Martin Luther King was murdered. All black people understood the tide of anarchy that followed his death.”)22 If such statements attest to the range of activist approaches that characterized mid-century black progressivism, then they also imply that even among dissidents, Civil Rights idealism figured as a “crucial collective [story]” by which African Americans lived.23 Put another way, what Civil Rights idealism represents, at its core, is the affective and ideological potency of a set of ideals in relation to which modern African American political identity has been forged.24
Anchoring its plot in the loss of Civil Rights idealism, Sarah Phillips begins and ends with a symbolic familial death. In life, Sarah’s father, James Phillips, was a prominent Civil Rights activist preacher whose ideology, legacy, and dexterous rhetorical style resemble (on a much smaller scale) those of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.25 “When he wasn’t preaching sermons, or visiting his parishioners from the New African Baptist Church, he seemed to spend his time in rooms full of men with dark suits—rooms in which the words ‘civil rights,’ constantly spoken, took on such gigantic significance that they seemed to be about to emerge from the clouds of cigarette smoke like the title of a Cecil B. DeMille movie” (48). James Phillips’s passing inaugurates the novella and contextualizes Sarah’s narrative project of recalling and reconstituting her identity alongside a scene of black congregational mourning in the early 1970s. It is in reaction to her sudden and devastating experience of father loss that Sarah flees to France, dreaming of “[casting] off kin and convention in a foreign tongue” (4). When, by the end of the first chapter, this escapist fantasy proves untenable, Sarah returns to her (personal, biographical) past by way of narrative memory, recounting a story of her life that culminates in the sorrowing event of her father’s death and burial. Thus the vignettes of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood that constitute the novella may be read as a circular eulogy, in which Sarah works through and finally apprehends the fact of loss.
Understood in this way, Lee’s novella appears to accord with Freud’s description of “profound mourning”—a condition whose presenting symptoms initially resemble those of melancholia but that slowly matriculates to a normative process of psychic detachment. Mourning, Freud tells us, entails a painstaking and “piecemeal” practice of “reality-testing”: “Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it.” Similarly, in Sarah Phillips, the novella’s chapters “bring up” Sarah’s memories of her deceased father and re-contextualize those memories as artifacts of the past. Through this process, Sarah narratively solidifies (i.e., “reality-tests” and confirms) the fact of the Reverend’s death. “The work of mourning” is thus “completed,” and “the ego becomes free and uninhibited again,”26 as we find Sarah, on the book’s final page, preparing to “[move] in a direction away from anything [she] had ever known” (117).
What I am describing here is in many ways a familiar story of a daughter who struggles, but ultimately succeeds, in assimilating the fact of her father’s death. This account of the novella is in some measure true, but it is also incomplete. For Sarah’s grief attaches not only to her father as a private, familial figure, with whom she shared a relatively uncomplicated bond, but also to the Reverend as a public figure and avatar for the Civil Rights Movement. (His “entire soul,” Lee tells us, was in the activist church [29].) Sarah’s relationship to her father’s public image and its attendant ideals is deeply ambivalent, and as Freud might predict, this ambivalence is re-activated, upon the occasion of loss, as the engine of melancholic processing. Much like the melancholic, who “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (Freud’s italics), Sarah mourns her father but proves profoundly unable to acknowledge, or “reality-test,” the political and ideological losses that attend his death.27 This abstraction, more precisely than the Reverend himself, becomes the once loved, now reviled entity whose loss resists apprehension and tacitly reshapes Sarah’s identity when, “with a certain amazement at the ruthless ingenuity that replaced [her] grief, [she] left to study French literature in Lausanne, intending never to come back” (4).
On the night of the Reverend’s funeral, Sarah is visited in her dreams by an apparition of the deceased, who appears to her as a “friendly” and familiar figure bearing an indecipherable message: “In the dream he had fallen overboard from a whaling ship—like the one in Two Years before the Mast—and had come up from the ocean still alive but encased in a piece of iceberg. Through the ice I could see his big hands gesturing in a friendly, instructive manner while he looked straight ahead at me and said something inaudible. It was the same word or syllable I had wanted to say to [his bereaved friend] Stuart Penn, and I couldn’t figure out what it was” (114–5). The imagery of this scene resonates suggestively with that of Freudian melancholia: A lost object (the father fallen overboard) is unacknowledged as lost (he is “still alive”), but the fantasy of preservation requires a psychic technology of entombment and encryption (he is encased in ice and made “inaudible”). Significantly, what is rendered indecipherable to Sarah is not the person who is lost but the content of his message. As with melancholia, it is “the ideal that the person represents” that “appears to be unknowable.”28
In this passage and the surrounding text, Lee indicates redundantly—though never in terms that suggest Sarah’s own apprehension—that the word Sarah fails to discern is concerned with her father’s progressive racial theo-politics. Sarah associates the dream with the Reverend’s political ally, Stuart Penn, who, at the funeral, appealed to Sarah to carry on her father’s legacy; she draws an unexamined stream-of-consciousness association between the dream and her memories of her father preparing sermons; and even the unexpected literary reference to Richard Henry Dana’s nineteenth-century adventure novel obliquely alludes to the project of racial uplift, for Dana was a renowned abolitionist and co-founder of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party. Yet Sarah, a Harvard-trained literary critic, declines this easy interpretation, insisting that her father’s message—which is “lost” to the ship along with his spontaneously entrapped body—is obscured, foreclosed from knowledge by a sedimented block of ice. Upon waking, Sarah registers some sense of failed connection, remembering that she wanted to say or hear something that she could not, but she fails to register that unarticulated “word” as something she has lost. Such is the opacity of melancholic loss. As Judith Butler explains, “Melancholia is precisely the effect of unavowable loss.” “[The] object is not only lost, but that loss itself is lost, withdrawn and preserved in the suspended time of psychic life.”29
I have suggested that upon the death of her father, Sarah loses not only the person but also his espoused ideals, even as she is unable to claim those ideals as loved or lost. But why should we imagine Civil Rights progressivism as the object of Sarah’s ambivalent love—an entity whose desirability makes the idea of its loss a threat—in the first place? To date, the novella’s critics have focused overwhelmingly on the protagonist’s conspicuous disinterest in cultural history and racial politics or on her forceful rejection of an inherited tradition of “genuine gallantry in the struggle for civil rights” (4). But alongside this characterization, Lee repeatedly describes Sarah’s mixed feelings toward her racial-cultural inheritance: “a mixture of pride and animosity” (18), “a mixture of hostility and grudging affection” (24). Furthermore, Lee casts Sarah’s original disavowal of her father’s theo-politics in a chronologically prior moment, which Sarah retrospectively apprehends as a scene of thwarted love. In the novella’s shortest chapter, “Marching,” a ten-year-old Sarah fantasizes an intense love for the “great” “symbol” of the 1963 March on Washington (51). This scene sets the stage for the future development of Sarah’s conflicted and disavowed grief.
In “Marching,” the protagonist nostalgically recalls a time when she was returning home to Philadelphia with her father, who had been attending meetings in Washington, D.C. Sarah overhears the Reverend and their cab driver discussing the upcoming march. Piecing together the words of her unwitting adult informants with her own, naïve fantasies of heroism, she envisions a glorious scene of human solidarity: “Something began to burn and flutter in my chest: it was as if I had swallowed a pair of fiery wings. . . . A tremendous picture appeared in my mind. . . . I saw a million men, their faces various shades of black, white, and brown, marching together between the blazing marble monuments. It was glory, the millennium, an approaching revelation of wonders that made blood relatives of people like my father and the cab driver” (49–50). In this scene, Civil Rights idealism appears (albeit in a naively reductive iteration) as the object of Sarah’s own desire and as a register of political resonance through which she imagines herself as part of a racial community. It is a fantasy that stirs her, like “a pair of fiery wings,” that summons her rapt attention and inspires an ardent love. Picturing herself among a magnificent community of “blood relatives,” Sarah voices her love, declaring to her father, “I’ll go to the march with you.” But her love is thwarted (or perceived to be so), for her father responds with tepid excuses and the thinly veiled prohibition, “We’ll ask your mother when she gets home” (50).
The march transpires as a historic and, by many measures, triumphant event, but Sarah’s “tremendous picture” of her own, participatory engagement in “an approaching revelation of wonders” (49) is “lost [to her] as an object of love.”30 Barred from attending the march and “only grudgingly” allowed by her elderly caretaker to watch it on television, Sarah is made uncomfortably aware of her estrangement from the realization of her once-loved ideal. Viewing the event with her cynical teenage brother, from the dissonant space of “the creaky green glider that stood on the sun porch at home,” Sarah’s viscerally inspiriting fantasy of “glory, the millennium” is recast as a cryptic, foreign image of “a quiet gray crowd” and “on the screen, the face of Martin Luther King[, which] looked very round, with a somber, slightly Eastern air, like a Central Asian moon” (51).
Sarah’s description of King by way of this conspicuously strained and irrelevant metaphor is perhaps most obviously a sign of her generational and class-based acculturation. According to Michael Awkward, the protagonist’s “inability to recognize constitutive features of the racial past and present” is one feature of a deeper, “intractable [challenge]” of alienation that is nowhere more evident than in Sarah’s inability to register “King’s energizing speech” as a “unifying and transcendent occasion.”31 Awkward and others have compellingly prioritized the theme of African American class mobility and the resultant fracturing of collective black identification in readings of Sarah Phillips, and while these readings ring true, I wish to add to them another dimension of analysis. Sarah’s baffling misreading of King is additionally significant because it signals her defensive encryption of a lost love object into an unknowable, foreign entity (a “Central Asian moon”). However naïve, Sarah’s initial fantasy of the march evinces some measure of cultural literacy and collectivist political faith: Her vision is infused with shared, resonant feelings of hope and communal love, and its teleology conflates the registers of religion and politics in accordance with the most recognizable forms of Civil Rights activist rhetoric. Put another way, the interpellative force of Civil Rights idealism shapes Sarah’s initial sense of identification, and it is only after her perceived slight that she acquires an exaggerated ineptitude for discerning the meaning of the march. Like the melancholic who must make both her love object and the fact of its loss opaque to herself, Sarah is suddenly convinced of the unknowable strangeness of the processional as it plays out before her. In a phrase that captures both her loss of an ideal and the obfuscation of that loss, Sarah recalls the embarrassment of discovering that, with regard to the march, “I wasn’t sure what I really thought” (51).
Thus Sarah’s early attachment to Civil Rights idealism progresses from love to disappointment to encryption and disavowal, producing a secret history of unresolved feelings that are later obscurely aggravated on the occasion of her father’s death. In the Freudian drama, the stage for melancholic loss is set by a series of preceding but sublimated losses (or threatened losses) that persist in the unconscious as unresolved “memory-traces.” These memory-traces harbor not only a relational history but also an unprocessed history of ambivalence that is re-activated when melancholia sets in. What the melancholic grieves, then, is more than the lost object itself. She also confronts anew a history of ambivalent attachment—of now ghostly, perceived “situations of being slighted, neglected or disappointed.”32 Similarly, Sarah’s dream of her father encased in ice addresses not only his death but also an expansive, serialized embattlement with loss that we can trace back at least as far as the novella’s prior textual scene of an illegible black, theo-political leader (King), captured and displayed in the impenetrable block of the family television. What Sarah loves, loses, interiorizes, and turns against, then, is not her father, as such, but her “lifelong” ambivalence toward the “outworn rituals of [her] parents” and their consecrated narrative of African American history as a progressive story of uplift—in Sarah’s phrase, “everything that made up my past” (4, my italics). As melancholic rage emerges to conceal the unavowable facts of love and loss, Sarah reports that her grief transmogrifies into “a ruthless ingenuity,” with which she constructs a new fantasy of her self, one predicated on the evasive desire to “cast off kin and convention in a foreign tongue” (4).
One might object that Sarah’s felt exclusion makes her a problematic representative of the race, whose grief response to her father’s death can hardly be read as a transparent allegory of post–Civil Rights black feeling. Indeed, her relationships to racial community and cultural tradition are most often described in terms of estrangement, alienation, and discomfort—feelings that point toward anything but a straightforward correspondence. And, in the days following her father’s death, she describes the grief of fellow mourners not only as mysterious and unknowable but also as so many individuals’ selfish attempts to “try to make my father’s death into something all their own” (109). Nevertheless, I move to count Sarah as “representative” precisely insofar as her pronounced estrangement from feelings of racial unity registers widespread experiences of the post–Civil Rights period as, in Rolland Murray’s phrase, “the time of breach.”33 Much as Sarah associates her father’s death with the abrupt rupture of “the web of assumptions, memories, and old associations that make conversations within families as automatic as breathing” (106), popular historiographical accounts of the end of the Civil Rights Movement recount the loss of communal coherence and the exacerbation of once-latent ambivalence and animosity.34 Foregrounding the loss of black theo-political leadership and a subsequent disorientation and melancholic grief response, Sarah Phillips points us toward an under-examined structure of identification and desire at work in the post–Civil Rights racial imaginary.
But perhaps we should push back against the psychoanalytic desire to confine identification to a consolidated, knowable structure—particularly, one that calcifies loss and injury in the psychic form of the racialized person. How else might we imagine the purview of racial grief’s effects? Dilating on a keyword that at once evokes and turns away from the theoretical genealogy of melancholia, Ann Cvetkovich’s recent monograph, Depression, draws on affect theory to reorient the discourse on racism and psychic life. Wary of psychoanalysis’s capacity to distract us from direct and transparent ways in which political injustice produces psychic malaise, she encourages a retreat from the logic of internalization and the development of alternative, anti-pathologizing conceptualizations of psychic distress. Through a vocabulary that foregrounds neither symptoms nor identity types but feelings, she aims to tie systemic socio-political analyses directly to “everyday . . . feelings of despair and anxiety, sometimes extreme, sometimes throbbing along at a low level . . . feelings that get internalized and named, for better or for worse, as depression.”35
Cvetkovich is one of several contemporary theorists who turn to affect theory to expand upon psychoanalytic understandings of depression by attending to feelings as important indices of social and psychic truth. The point is, not a disproof of psychoanalysis, but an inquiry into how feelings may amplify and texture a psychoanalytic portraiture of the self. As Eve Sedgwick asserts, where psychoanalysis meditates primarily on structures of desire and identification, affect theory gives us interpretive access to “an array of perceptual data . . . whose degree of organization hovers just below the level of shape or structure.”36 If this is so—if affect theory can illuminate our understanding of black psychic life by making the intensities of feeling that color loss available to discourse—then what does such a theoretical tool mean for our reading of post–Civil Rights racial melancholia?37
Let us return, briefly, to the scene with which I opened this chapter, a scene in which Sarah Phillips—a privileged constituent of the post–Civil Rights black bourgeoisie—appears to recognize herself in her boyfriend’s wildly inaccurate, racist caricature of the American South. The versions of racial melancholia I have sketched in the preceding pages lend themselves to various logics for understanding this scene. We might, for example, claim that Sarah sees herself in this story because she has ambivalently internalized a racist gaze or because melancholia works by redirecting social rage into self-beratement. From this perspective, the narrative “event” is a scene of mis-recognition that brings into view a mappable, melancholic psychic structure. But just as surely, this is a scene that is about something other than event and structure. It is a scene that is at pains to describe an effusion of inconstant feeling that never matriculates to a psychoanalytically legible form: fury, shame, isolation, confusion, betrayal, resignation, and an intense and “nameless emotion” (12).
What if we imagined form as something short of the final word on meaning, heeding Sedgwick’s warning that “to describe [affect] primarily in terms of structure is always a qualitative misrepresentation”? The alternative, she says, is to “enter a conceptual realm that is not shaped by lack nor by commonsensical dualities of subject versus object or of means versus ends.”38 Reading through this prism, we might argue that the protagonist’s bafflement, rage, and felt impotence upon hearing Henri’s story offer a self-sufficiently meaningful index of what racism feels like. We would shift critical attention from the question of whether or how Sarah incorporates or identifies with Henri’s insult to the emotional impact and ephemeral reverberations of racism. Attention to affect as a primary axis for analyzing this scene would also yield an intricate view of how unwieldy, motile feelings are enmeshed with everyday processes of perception and communication that mediate experiences of identity and sociality. Our reading would remind us that the psychic life of racism consists not only in structures of identification coerced by social power but also in the production and dissemination of involuntary and unfair bad feelings.
Even more so than Sarah Phillips, James Alan McPherson’s short story, “Elbow Room,” offers a valuable occasion to zero in on what is at stake in elaborating a vocabulary of feelings to describe racial grief. Like Sarah Phillips, “Elbow Room” narrates the post–Civil Rights era in the moment of its emergence, yet it does not enshrine a central story of a phantom, lost object. Instead, it enlists an affect-driven conceptualization of depression, disarticulating the feeling of loss from the obsessive incorporation of loss. For McPherson, the post–Civil Rights era is a resoundingly depressing time of historical flux, most compellingly modeled by the proliferation of reverberating feelings that occasionally reference momentous events but more often spread diffusely, like an invisible contagion.
First published in 1977, “Elbow Room” is the periodically interrupted, first-person story of an unnamed black fiction writer seeking “new eyes, regeneration [and] fresh forms” amid an emergent zeitgeist of post-sixties political and existential despair (262). Through its prominent emplotment of a lost and searching writer, the story doubles as a fictional meta-commentary on the problem of post–Civil Rights black literary production: What directions will African American literature take in the uncharted future? Where will it find narrative forms commensurate to the needs of the beleaguered present? The story includes the symbolic fall of a character who personifies Civil Rights idealism, but the narrator’s relationship to this character remains somewhat strained and superficial. His most earnest articulation of “the nature of the times” (277) consists in repetitious descriptions of the feelings that attend alienation. “There was a feeling of a great giving up” (278); “All around us, people looked abstracted, beaten, drained of feeling” (275); “Words seemed to have become detached from emotion and no longer flowed on the rhythm of passion” (260); “There were no new stories” (261). It is worth noting that, although “Elbow Room” does not announce the end of African American literature, its narrative project takes up Kenneth Warren’s most enduring critical preoccupation: the practical, rhetorical and analytical inadequacies of “the racial commonsense of the twentieth century” to express the contents and serve the needs of our post–Civil Rights present.39
As a story about a search for stories, “Elbow Room”’s narrative path is somewhat difficult to grasp. Its framing conceit is a prolonged disagreement between the narrator/author and his white, male editor, represented in a progression of discontinuous, escalating debates. Ostensibly, these debates take as their object a story that the narrator is trying to tell, but in fact, they reveal little about that literary object and much more about the difficulties of cross-racial recognition and communication. With intensifying exacerbation, the editor repeatedly breaks into the unfolding, internal story with questions and critique. He finds the narrator cryptic and disturbingly rebellious, so he sets out to “discipline” the story, “to impose at least the illusion of order” (256).40 In turn, the narrator feels frustrated and constrained by the editor’s unimaginative, formal conservatism and reacts with cynicism, longing, and defiance. The narrator’s feelings emerge in conversation with the editor, but they also frame, provoke, and seep into the story he is trying to tell.
In the internal story—the site of the battle for authorial control—the narrator follows an unlikely romance between two of his acquaintances: an African American woman named Virginia Valentine, and her white husband, Paul Frost. It is Virginia who first captivates the narrator and who figures as the story’s closest approximation to an avatar for Civil Rights idealism. Egalitarian, aggressively utopian, and open to the diversity of the world, she represents a precious, vulnerable, and near-obsolete brand of political optimism. If Virginia is the “wounded” dream of Civil Rights idealism in the era of post-sixties, liberal declension, then Paul is a romanticized stand-in for the (white) American Dream.41 An earnest, innocent, hardworking Midwesterner whom the narrator regards with unshakeable suspicion, he is the risky love object on whom Virginia settles. In a time of “grotesque sadness” (261), “vaguely haunted by lackluster ghosts” (282), this couple becomes a symbolic repository for the narrator’s fragile, redemptive desire. Yet, even as he longs to enter and claim their story, Paul and Virginia’s romance increasingly becomes an object of suspicion, derision, disinterest, and rage.
The narrator’s initial pursuit of Virginia’s stories represents his residual hope that Civil Rights idealism might be revived as the premise for the “new forms” he needs and craves, but he discovers that this is impossible because the stories he wants from her are lodged in the past and, as such, cannot speak to the anxious and amorphous time beyond loss. “More and more [her stories] fragmented into pieces of memory. There was no longer the sense of a personal epic” (278). Having begun the story as Virginia’s ardent admirer and defender, the narrator ultimately declares, “I did not care about [Virginia and Paul] and their problems any more. I did not think they had a story worth telling. . . . I did not feel I owed them anything anymore” (281–282). The narrator’s ultimate alienation from the couple becomes the story’s most poignant illustration of its repeated assertion, that “old” articulations of politicized desire (Civil Rights idealism, the American Dream, a cross-racially unified “human family”) have lost their currency.
As we did in Sarah Phillips, here again we find a sharp distinction between the depressive archive and the literature I have read under the rubrics of “trauma” and “masochism,” for in his refusal to look to past forms to inspirit African American literature’s future, McPherson’s narrator eschews the constitutive move of the historical turn, which was beginning to take shape just as McPherson was writing “Elbow Room.” It is not my assertion that McPherson’s story overtly or deliberately critiques the historical turn; such a claim would be untenable given the simultaneity of “Elbow Room”’s emergence and the earliest wave of contemporary narratives of slavery. I am suggesting instead that “Elbow Room” marks a divergent mode of narrative response to the post–Civil Rights milieu that would later become subordinated to the historical turn, perhaps in part because of its internal disavowal of the past as a site of viable literary desire.
In a conspicuous departure from the narrative conventions of trauma and masochism-based fictions that unfold in relation to a temporally dissonant and intrusive racial past, “Elbow Room”’s racialized antagonists—most notably, the editor—filter an oppressive, uneven, and stubbornly presentist affective force. McPherson’s meticulous sensory attention to how people feel de-centers the presumptive importance of origins (slavery) and telos (redemption) as the organizing parameters of African American self-story and brings a different set of narrative urgencies to the fore: Why does the narrator feel creatively stymied? Why is he unable to sustain interest in his narrative subjects? Why is his story unintelligible to his editor? These questions, which double as questions about how post–Civil Rights black literary practice will grapple with the mundane and isolating feelings that attend racial depression, lie at the heart of McPherson’s story.
Here, the frame of racial depression allows us to apprehend something beyond the purview of racial melancholia, for where melancholia describes the unknowing enshrinement of loss through the formal reconstitution of the self, the narrator’s sense that he has lost the sixties’ “epic of idealism” disallows the repressive retention of that loved and lost object and gives way to a crisis in self-coherence (258). In lieu of melancholic form, racial depression here is apprehended through the narrator’s meandering, itinerant loneliness, his poor instincts about his own interests, his intensifying skepticism and distrustfulness, and the anxious unraveling of stories that once gave shape to his identity and his being-in-community. “I began to feel cynical and beaten,” the narrator reports. “Inside myself, . . . I heard only sobs and sighs and moans” (278). The story’s own, unresolved suspension of narrative form produces an impression of dis-unification for the reader and, in so doing, redoubles the connection “Elbow Room” forges between the loss of Civil Rights idealism and the failure, the emptiness, or the inadequacy of extant narrative frames for understanding African American identification and desire.
All this is not to say that melancholia plays no role. If racial depression in “Elbow Room” involves feelings of self-fragmentation and cynicism that emerge from the loss of Civil Rights idealism and its attendant narrative and identitarian forms, then this cluster of feelings is compounded and framed by the persistence of (melancholic) societal racism, which mediates the narrator’s identity by delimiting the terms of his social intelligibility. Recall that, for Cheng, the melancholia of the racialized subject in relation to white American hegemony is often experienced as invisibility: “Teetering between the known and the unknown, the seen and the deliberately unseen, the racial other constitutes an oversight that is consciously made unconscious.”42 In a similar fashion, the narrator’s relationship to his editor and, later, his observations of Paul show how racial depression is amplified by the possibility—imminent and everywhere—of one’s illegibility to others. Anticipating this motif, the story begins with the editor’s aggressive and discrediting commentary that precedes the main text in an italicized and offset paragraph. Through this paragraph, the narrator is pre-empted by his own de-authorization, much as racialized individuals are preceded by an obfuscating and de-personalized racial discourse. Throughout the story, the editor interjects criticisms about what he does not understand in a succession of directive marginalia: “Analysis of this section is needed. It is too subtle and needs to be more clearly explained” (272); “Clarity is essential on this point. Please explain” (273); “Clarify the meaning of this comment. . . . Comment is unclear. Explain. Explain” (286). In short, as a concentric frame for the narrator’s account of post–Civil Rights racial depression, the editor symbolizes and performs a distorting mis-translation through which the black speaking subject enters into the rhetorical field of sociality.
Like Cheng, José Esteban Muñoz theorizes racial depression—what he calls “feeling brown, feeling down”—as a phenomenon of misrecognition, but he departs from Cheng by asking how we might re-imagine the invisibility of the racialized subject with greater attention to affect. What interests Muñoz most is how racism asserts its psycho-affective power by simultaneously producing bad feelings in marginalized populations and obscuring from its lexicon the contexts of differential power and racial injury through which such feelings circulate.43 This is precisely what happens when the editor goads, chastises, and criticizes the narrator in a relentless offensive, while his inability to fix or conquer the narrator’s “meaning” aggravates his own, defensive myopia. “You are saying you want to be white?” he asks when the narrator expresses frustration over the literary constraints that racism imposes upon him. With mounting irritation, the editor persists: “You are ashamed then of being black? . . . Are you not too much obsessed here with integration?” (262).
Unable to see his interlocutor as a “mobile human personality” (271), the editor imagines himself in a “moral” struggle against the “unyielding material” (256) of African American psycho-affective domains.44 Indeed, in a majority of the scenes that stage conversations between the narrator and the editor, the editor crowds out, obscures, or over-writes characterizations of the narrator’s affective expressions, conveying to the (dubious) reader that the narrator is “paranoid,” “shrill,” oppositional, and in need of “discipline.” Threatened by the editor’s aggressive and mis-perceiving eye, the narrator responds more and more obliquely. The imagined struggle generates and intensifies feelings of terror and righteousness for both parties, which in turn foreclose communicative pathways and ironically seem to corroborate the editor’s convictions about the narrator’s fearsome foreignness. In this way, the relationship between the editor and the narrator models the curious phenomenon by which black psycho-affective illegibility is at once the stated basis and the veiled effect of an excessive, unclaimed white anxiety. By shifting his emphasis from identification to feeling in scenes such as these, McPherson redirects our gaze to the emotional frustration that ensues from experiences of being mis-seen and to socio-political forces that act on racialized subjects independent of our own psychic investments.
Like the editor, Paul’s initial confrontation with blackness evades his existing frameworks for understanding social and psychic life, but unlike the editor, he is motivated by his love for Virginia to endure identitarian and epistemological crises to cultivate a revised racial consciousness. Paul’s education in blackness is in part a historically and ideologically grounded introduction to the forms of racialized structural violence, but it also entails a difficult psychological and affective re-orientation. It unfolds as a kind of conversion experience that involves a restructuring of identification as well as Paul’s subjection to feelings of anger, impotence, pensiveness, defensiveness, and sadness: the feelings of being made an object. Incrementally, we see:
Paul began confronting the hidden dimensions of his history. . . . He read books hungrily for other points of view . . . what stuck in that private place in his mind made him pensive and silent, and a little sad. (275–276)
In early February, while he was with Virginia in the parking lot of a supermarket, a carful of children called him nigger. . . . In late February, when he was walking with Virginia in the rain through the Sunset district, two younger children called him a nigger. “What’s a nigger?” he asked me on the telephone. “I mean, what does it really mean to you?” (276, McPherson’s italics)
Something was also happening to Paul. In his mind, I think, he was trying desperately to unstructure and flesh out his undefined “I.” But he seemed unable to locate the enemy and, a novice in thinking from the defensive point of view, had not yet learned the necessary tactics. Still, he seemed to sense that there were some secrets to survival that could be learned from books, conversations, experiences with people who lived very close to the realities of life. He cut himself off from the company of most white males. . . . He denounced his father as a moral coward. He was self-righteous, struggling, and abysmally alone. . . . His large brown eyes still put the same question, though now desperately asked, “Who am I?” (279)
By depicting how confrontations with racism catalyze the unraveling of a subject who begins the story with (the white privilege of) his “soul intact” (264), the narrator pedagogically draws attention to experiential and affective dimensions of black life, whose apprehension by whites requires not only knowledge (“books, conversations . . .”) but something like a loss as well—of whiteness, of naiveté, of “more than a million small assumptions” whose “totality guarded for him” an “ego that embraced the outlines, but only the outlines, of the entire world” (272–273).
For Paul, this loss compels a restructuring of identity—what Cheng might describe as a melancholic fall from “dominant racial melancholia.” Corroborating such a reading, both Virginia and the narrator identify in Paul the gradual development of a defensive psychic posture that they associate with blackness, and Paul’s father articulates a similar point from a different perspective when he “accused the son of beginning to think like a Negro” (268). But Paul’s transformation also exceeds the contained and predictable terms of a shift in psychic structure. As important, Paul’s loss of the self-oblivious fiction of white identity entails his experience of proliferating and at times unintelligible affects. He becomes “upset and determined” (268), “irritated” and confused (270), “pensive, and silent, and a little sad” (276). He grows “a long black beard” which “[merges] with his intense, unblinking eyes to give him the appearance of a suffering, pain-accepting Christ” (279). These descriptive details constitute an essential aspect of the story of Paul’s transformation, even though they are never fully knowable to the narrator (or the reader) and never matriculate to something so cognitively accessible as an identitarian form. Demonstrating how black interior life consists not only in psychic structures that result from racism but also in idiosyncratic expressions of affective vitality that “[break] all the rules” (269), the narrator suggests that Paul’s education in blackness hinges in large part on the intangible yet indispensable measure of his capacity to feel differently—to register at a visceral level the sting of the word “nigger” and to sense an answer to his own, unanswerable question, “What does it really mean to you?” (276, McPherson’s italics).
As a point of clarification, the narrator does not posit that Paul becomes black by virtue of experiencing discrimination or that the feelings associated with being in an interracial relationship approximate the feelings of being personally marked as black. On the contrary, Paul’s naïve question, “What’s a nigger?” (276) is repeated throughout the remainder of the story as an index of the persistent limits of his efforts to understand or to “earn his own definitions” (284). In fact, although Paul’s trajectory ostensibly offers an optimistic alternative to the editor and the surrounding social milieu, it does not ultimately bring him closer to the narrator or allow the two men to more fully see one another.
Refusing to emplot a direct and progressive development through which black feeling is finally and decisively transmitted to Paul, “Elbow Room” instead dilates on how Paul’s new consciousness activates and stokes an array of contagious yet non-mimetic feelings among the story’s diverse cast of characters. In this way, Paul’s transformation provides McPherson with another tool for illustrating how racialized affects move through interior geographies and social space. Virginia recognizes in Paul “extraordinary spiritual forces” (264) that compel her love and protection; at the same time, “she could not understand why Paul became so upset” (276). Virginia’s father is flummoxed by Paul and his daughter’s bond and made to feel a curious and free-floating shame that evolves into uncomprehending but devoted acceptance. The narrator’s capacity to “hear” and “feel” the “frequencies” of Paul’s experience waxes and wanes in relation to his own, reactive emotions, which range from tender fellow feeling to unrelenting suspicion.45 And the editor refuses or is unable to see the vast, affective complex that Paul’s transformation produces. Discomfited and confused, he moves quickly to shut down this vaguely generative branch of the story, through the noise of his own, redundant complaint: “Unclear. Explain. . . . Clarity is essential on this point” (286).
To be sure, the premise of emotionally distressing racial misrecognition in a contemporary setting is neither unique to “Elbow Room” nor foreign to the contemporary narrative of slavery. Within the genre, such scenes often appear as the catalyst for a present-day protagonist’s revelatory return to the slave past: Though painful in its own right, historicizing context becomes a corrective and a balm for contemporary social illegibility. But in the depressive archive, the scene of contemporary mis-recognition does not compel a pivot and displacement; instead, it demands uncomfortable dilation. Thus Henri’s derisive joke floods Sarah with shame and impotent rage that she cannot escape. Rather than encountering her “true” past, she can only hide in a bathroom stall, feeling the impact of his insult. Similarly, the editor’s persistent inability to understand the narrator does not compel him to explain their impasse through a story of historical origins. Instead, he redundantly describes the fatigue and frustration of missed connection.
Although “Elbow Room” is ostensibly a story about attempts to transcend alterity and know the other, with the possible exception of Paul and Virginia’s love, it depicts connection among characters as categorically fleeting, embarrassing, partial, insincere, and unconvincing. A similar feeling of failed connection confronts the reader in her encounter with the text and militates against therapeutic reading as a hermeneutic approach to McPherson’s story. For “Elbow Room” incapacitates readerly desires to access the text through immersive identification, romantic sympathy, or over-investment in a character’s redemption. For one thing, the internal story is uneventful, predictable, and aggressively disrupted by the editor’s critical interjections. By design, it is not a story in which one risks losing oneself. For another thing, its characters are stubbornly two-dimensional and even cliché, defensively concealing their “secret [selves]” from the narrator’s—and the reader’s—prying curiosity (263). Their secrets are not our own repressed truths, nor are they the narrator’s; instead, they are symptoms of the story’s depressive thematic. If the reader is drawn into the affective experience of the story, it is not through identification but through an opposite maneuver, in which the text’s effect of emotionally shutting out its reader produces feelings akin to those that frustrate and impede the story’s characters. Like the narrator and his acquaintances, the reader is brought into an affective world of confusion, irritation, stymied attempts to connect with others, distraction, and even boredom.
But if “Elbow Room” is saturated with missed connections and with descriptions of amorphous feeling that often substitute for plot, then McPherson nevertheless defines his narrator’s central and enduring aim as the pursuit of form. The narrator wants not only new dimensions of feeling but also “new stories” (261), “fresh forms” (262), and “the insight to narrate [the] complexities [of a new story]” (286). The story’s retreat from plot, in other words, does not represent a formal ideal unto itself but enacts a narrative tactic that allows the author to sit with perceived challenges and impasses for African American literature without the burden of teleological resolution hanging over him. Although the attainment of a suitably capacious and dexterous form remains beyond the frame of the story, the narrator holds out optimism that such forms will be the province of the future: He “wagers” that that it is neither he nor his discarded friends Paul and Virginia but the unforeseeable persona of their infant child who will evince a narrative “ambition” and “strength” that will eclipse his own, failed attempts to realize new expanses of narrative possibility (286).
As a story that narrates the emergence of its own, unfamiliar present, “Elbow Room” opens but defers the question of what forms post–Civil Rights African American literature will take. Born of loss and its host of attendant feelings, the story carries its unfulfilled optimism in the unformed, forward-looking figure of the child. In the remainder of this chapter, I turn to Alice Randall’s Rebel Yell (2009) to consider post–Civil Rights black fiction in hindsight. Set in the twenty-first century but punctuated with many protracted flashbacks, Randall’s novel offers a fictional retrospective of the post–Civil Rights era through its depiction of the life and death of an anointed child of the Movement. As a novel in the form of a eulogy that foregrounds the perspective of the first post–Civil Rights generation, Rebel Yell may also be read as an inter-text and a rejoinder to Sarah Phillips, reviving and re-imagining the theme of loved and lost Civil Rights idealism from a twenty-five-year remove.46 Whereas Lee brings Civil Rights idealism into view as a melancholic object for black literary consciousness and McPherson lends texture and dimensionality to a psychoanalytic portraiture of post–Civil Rights grief, Randall asks us to consider a more uncomfortable, antagonistic orientation toward the lost ideal.
Let us return to the problem of melancholic ambivalence by way of a question that remains unasked in my foregoing discussion of Sarah Phillips: If Civil Rights idealism is embodied in Sarah’s father—a figure who invokes King—then what should we make of the fact that it is her father who thwarts her desire to participate in the movement’s scenes and sentiments of racial collectivity? To re-articulate this question in terms of its metaphorical significance, what would it mean to locate an agency of aggression or dis-unification within a beloved trope of black political optimism? Recent scholarship on literary representations of the Civil Rights Movement has shown how fantasies of segregation-era racial unity often belie pervasive socio-cultural fractures, particularly along demographic lines of class, generation, gender, and sexuality difference.47 And indeed, each of this chapter’s primary texts may be said to engage in a deconstruction of the familiar bourgeois, patriarchal leader of Civil Rights iconography. Prompted by Randall, I want to consider an additional manifestation of ambivalence toward Civil Rights idealism, keying in on a “hatred” that consists less in an alternative opinion voiced by dissidents than in the underside of a love attachment itself. Put plainly, my point not simply that some people objected to Civil Rights idealism all along while others loved it but also that the very tenets of fraternity, pacifism, and hope in the face of unrelenting racist brutality were shadowed by feelings of resentment, terror, and hatred. This internal tension lurks within Sarah Phillips, surfacing, for example, when Sarah’s mother alleges that “[the Reverend’s] work killed him” (108). But it is Lee’s contemporary, Randall, who most emphatically brings this dimension of ambivalence to the fore.
Like Sarah Phillips, Rebel Yell stages the figural death of the promise of the Civil Rights Movement, but this time, the deceased is not a King-like figure but a member of the next generation. The only son of a prominent Civil Rights lawyer, Abel Jones III rose through the ranks of academic and professional success but “[betrayed] his special birthright in the black community,” growing up to become a neo-conservative CIA agent and government lawyer complicit in the defense of the second Bush White House’s war crimes.48 Posthumously recounted through the grief of his survivors, Abel’s life allegorizes a historical narrative in which political hope gives way to liberal declension.
Born on the precipice of social change, when “black was just about to bust out beautiful,” Abel is hailed by African American civic and political leaders as a “a new prince” (15) and “a citizen for whom [one] can prepare a future” (16). Randall cultivates his symbolic significance with good-natured heavy-handedness. “Related by blood or marriage to both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington” (14), Abel, who shares a name with his distinguished patrilineage and the biblical first martyr, grows up to marry a woman called Hope before “a predominantly black but integrated congregation” (147). To have danced at their wedding, it is said, was to be “convinced that Lyndon Johnson was the greatest president who had ever lived—that his dream of a Great Society had become a reality” (148). Their marriage is brief and gives way to divorce, but “for a moment they were side by side in the same place and the future outstretched before them was alluring and obtainable” (169).
With his energizing love of hope and his successful matriculation through Harvard and Duke to the highest levels of government office, Abel embodies the extraordinary optimism and unprecedented possibilities for racial advancement brought about by the Civil Rights Movement. But, if Abel’s attachment to his inheritance of Civil Rights idealism may be characterized in terms of love and optimism, then it is also an attachment formed in terror, rage, and resentment. As a toddler, Abel loses his babysitter to the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, whereupon Carole Robertson’s grieving mother implores him to remember, “These men, these black men . . . used you children to fight this war” (10).49 He absorbs her injury and promises, “I hate them too” (11). Abel’s childhood is described as “a time and place of terror, a place of bombings and shootings, a place of funerals and wakes, a place of police dogs and fire hoses turned toward children, a land red with the blood of the recently slaughtered” (52); he remembers the sixties as “his Civil War” (132).
Indeed, although the novel frequently indulges a nostalgic sensibility—toward the leisure culture of the black bourgeoisie in the mid-to-late twentieth-century, toward the folk history of Hope’s native West Virginia, and even toward certain unlikely inter-racial romances staged in the antebellum South—Randall staunchly disallows for a sanitized memory of the “trenches” of Civil Rights activism. Complicating popular memories of the Movement as a site of political unity and affective purity, she portrays a profoundly ambivalent cultural scene and a tragedy of lost innocence. Both the beginning and the end of the novel scandalize with rhetorical questions about whether God will forgive King, who knew “just how precious” the Movement’s child martyrs were (11).
Randall’s metaphoric references to “Abel’s Civil War” invoke both the extraordinary violence of the sixties (“the bombings, the murders, the funerals” [182]) and Abel’s corresponding interior drama of a bitterly divided self, ever negotiating a volatile conflict between hope and fear, love and hate. Much of the drama of Abel’s ambivalence toward the principles and material effects of Civil Rights idealism is told through the story of his consummated but dismantled marriage to Hope. To this end, one way of reading the book is as a grief-driven re-counting of the promise of the Civil Rights Movement with and after hope; another way is to read it as the story of hope’s resilience, since Hope is the character who twice survives her loss of the “prince” of Civil Rights idealism, first in divorce and later in death. But despite the novel’s foregrounded commitment to the genre of romance, its central conflict—which is also its melancholic core and the site of its teleological revelation—lies not in marital discord but in a primal scene of father-son conflict. Alluded to and repeated in variations over the course of the novel, this scene operates as a site of narrative origins (i.e., the sub-plot to which all other sub-plots can be traced) that inspires a range of competing interpretations.
Those closest to Abel are privy to the knowledge that his thirteenth birthday is the occasion for a personal trauma that profoundly alters him. On this day, his party is disrupted when celebrants become aware of a seven-foot cross burning in the front yard. Terrified, Abel wets himself. Then, with shame, he watches his father, who is unable to put out the fire or speak back to the “rednecks” who call to ask “how [he likes his] boy’s birthday present” (298). When a couple of white policemen arrive, Abel “[mistakes] their disinterest for courage” and runs “to stand in the sheltering space he [imagines] between their two bodies” (297). After the fire is put out, his father summons him to “get a strap and wait [in his] room” (299). In early accounts of these events, Abel implies that his father proceeds to physically and sexually abuse him, although he persistently withholds a specific accounting from his loved ones and even from himself.
In the novel’s penultimate scene, as he lies in an ambulance foreseeing his imminent death, Abel remembers what happened between him and his father with new and painful clarity. This time, it is a story that begins with paternal mercy. When he enters the room, Abel’s father “[reaches] to reassure” his crying son. But, for Abel, this mercy is maddening and oppressive. “The father takes you in his arms and tries to stop your shakes. . . . His hands are nowhere near your neck, near any part of you he shouldn’t touch, but it feels like he is strangling you and violating you and you shake harder to shake him off.” Abel announces that he is ashamed of his father, and this abject interpellation ensnares them both. “This new connection, a shared and profound cocreated humiliation, is immediate and volatile” (361).
Let me first sketch some ways in which different formulations of racial melancholia can help us to interpret the scene of the hate crime and the subsequent father-son confrontation. In Cheng’s sense of the term, we may note that what Abel recounts is a scene of identitarian reconstitution mediated by loss: Abel’s “internalization . . . of rejection” ensues from his loss of safety and from his “imaginative loss of a never possible perfection.”50 Coveting the fantasy of absolute power the white policemen represent, he disavows his blackness, though he can never fully relinquish it. For in spite of his disavowal, the burning cross represents a rite of humiliation that casts him out of whiteness. Waiting for his father to beat him, reflecting on his powerlessness and his unanswered desire for recognition, Abel says to himself, “I am wrong. He repeated the same sentence over and over again” (302, Randall’s italics). Much as Cheng describes the melancholia of the racialized other, Abel realizes himself as “both a melancholic object and a melancholic subject, both the one lost and the one losing.”51
We may also read the scene as one in which Abel’s “mature” identity is reconstituted through the melancholic incorporation of his father as a powerful Civil Rights leader. Such an interpretation returns us to the burning cross, which now appears as a site of thwarted love. The adolescent Abel is focused not on the fire but on the prolonged and shocking enactment of his father’s impotence. His father hits a white child in frustration; he “[struggles] with the spigot on the [slashed] outdoor waterhose” but achieves only “a half trickle out the nozzle”; he cries out in desperation, “Get me some fucking tape . . . no, get the hose from next door . . . no, don’t fucking call the police” (296, Randall’s italics). This spectacle discredits the idealized object of Abel’s father love by exposing the father as one who “wasn’t powerful” (298). True to Freud’s maxim that no one ever willingly abandons an attachment,52 Abel resists relinquishing his beloved image of the powerful father, saying to himself, “Can I not know tomorrow what I know now? . . . Big Abel can’t protect me. Can I not know tomorrow what I know now?” (ibid., Randall’s italics).
In melancholia, impossible love cannot be registered by the conscious mind, so it takes cover in identification. Likewise, Abel disguises his lost ideal of the powerful father through a fantasy of paternal brutality with which he comes to identify. (His consequent incorporation of masculinist, brute power materializes most perversely in his future as a white-collar perpetrator of extraordinary military violence.) Though factually untrue, the beating fantasy keeps faith with the affective history of Abel’s ambivalent, fearsome attachment to the powers his father symbolically consolidated, both as a familial disciplinarian and as a civic warrior through whom Abel came to apprehend the violent dangers facing the black South. Throughout his childhood, Abel’s personal relationship to his father and his relationship to the patriarchal leadership of the Civil Rights Movement more generally are marked by admiration and fear, emulation and resentment, love and hate. Thus, his loss of the idealized patriarch is inassimilable because it is an unwilling loss that nevertheless enacts a wish fulfillment; the beating fantasy appeals because it sublimates a mutually implicated trifecta of aggression, love, and loss. Read allegorically, this plot progression may imply a broader cultural ambivalence about the stature and authority that accrued to male leaders of the black bourgeoisie as self-designated representatives for an illusory black unity.
But if Abel’s fantasy of his father’s brutality suggests one history of post–Civil Rights racial melancholia, then his memory of his father’s mercy uncovers another. Here we arrive at an interpretation of the melancholic, father-son confrontation that turns on the love and loss of the forgiving father, who imbues suffering with dignity and love, but whose “shivering hug . . . can not matter enough” (362). In Abel’s near-death memory, his father repeatedly moves to embrace him, while Abel repeats, in variations, the word “shame.” The scene is saturated with the language of reflection, porousness, and contagion, so that the enactment of father love becomes inextricable from the experience of humiliation. Shifting to second-person narration, Randall writes, “Your eyes are mirrors.” “Your shakes are contagious.” There is a “new connection, a shared and profound cocreated humiliation” (361). What humiliates is love itself—both the individual love of the father and love as the father’s political and identitarian ideal. It is 1972, the year of the last major legislative gain of the Civil Rights Movement and the year of Nixon’s re-election. The ethos of Civil Rights idealism appears at once superior and inadequate to the counter-presences of vigilante violence and the impassive state (the burning cross, the indifferent policemen).
From a psychoanalytic perspective, humiliation exposes the values we hold closest to the ideal self, and the ideal self is the one thing we can never mourn. “Tell me what makes you . . . feel truly diminished,” Adam Phillips writes, “and I will tell you what you believe or what you want to believe about yourself. What, that is, you imagine you need to protect to sustain your love of life.”53 By this logic, humiliation reveals Abel’s love of love, for it is love’s inadequacy that he cannot abide, that he feels as a violation. “The father takes you in his arms and tries to get you not to shake but it feels like he is strangling you and you shake harder.” Love is the precious, self-exposing thing he rages against when he later “translate[s] an utter and tender, complete and mutual defeat into the oldest and most powerful male story [he knows].” When, in the novel’s final pages, Abel returns his memory to what we might call its original language, he arrives at an unexpected conclusion: “Ultimately it is not strange and dramatic occurrences that shatter: it is a shivering hug that can not matter enough” (362).
Because the drama of Abel’s thirteenth birthday prompts the identitarian re-constitution that governs all subsequent stories about him, we may infer, at least in the context of this novel, that the loss of Civil Rights idealism re-forms the very conditions of narrative possibility. But how shall we understand the concept of “translation,” through which Randall links the range of interpretations rehearsed above, and, more concretely, two ostensibly dissimilar quantities—“strange and dramatic occurrences that shatter,” and “a shivering hug that can not matter enough”? Melancholia lends itself to one compelling logic of “translation,” since, as a symptomatic mode of expression, melancholic speech encodes a clue about the thing it cannot say; it wears a “disguise” to “[make] desire accessible by making it tolerable.”54 Put another way, melancholic speech, like translation, describes a substitutive economy, in which one entity stands in for another. It is susceptible (psychoanalysts hope) to an interpretive key that will enable a drama of revelation, a return to the event in its “original language.” If the rape story is a lie, then it is also a melancholic translation: a disavowal that substitutes for the impossibility of mourning the ideal self, and an encryption of love and loss through which the self is remade.
Affect theory lends itself to another interpretive approach, whereby the narrative telos of “corrected” memory need not be read as the event’s full and final meaning. By bracketing melancholia’s mechanical description and its fundamental commitment to the logic of repression, attention to affect may illuminate another understanding of “translation” that operates through the density and distribution of feeling. If melancholic translation consists in something like a practice of decoding, then affective translation might entail something more like an art of approximation, whose success is measured through resonance with, or felt closeness to, an original expression.
To explain how affective force travels and transforms through speech, Sedgwick presents an analogy to the act of wandering through adjoining neighborhoods. In this analogy, performative utterances—such as Abel’s interpellation of his father through shame—constitute the “prestigious centers” of real estate zones; they are sites of power from which influence reverberates, albeit “unevenly, [and] even unpredictably.”55 Using the term “periperformatives” to describe utterances that cluster around performative speech acts, she notes, “If the periperformative is the neighborhood of a performative, there might well be another performative neighborhood not so very far off to the north or northwest of this one; as I amble farther from the mother lode of my own neighborhood, my compass needle may also tremble with the added magnetism of another numinous center to which I am thereby nearer.”56
As described here, affect’s movement is at once mysterious and mappable. The model for associative connection is not “truth” and “disguise” but geographical sprawl, through which feeling “rarefies or concentrates in unpredictable clusters [and] outcrops,” becoming vulnerable to “powerful energies that often warp, transform, and displace, if they do not overthrow, the supposed authorizing centrality of [the original, or central] performative.”57 Similarly, we might imagine that a propulsive force in the form of a compelling, if idiosyncratic, resonance clears the pathway that begins with Abel’s declaration of shame and leads toward his allegation of sexual abuse. It is worth noting that, when Abel finally recalls his “untranslated” memory, the scene is not a single, stable revelation but three consecutively repeated memories of the same moment, “ambling” in the direction of his original declaration of shame.
In Abel’s recollection, shame feels like confinement, violence, and the loss of bodily self-control. “Your thought is narrow, compressed, flattening.” “[The father’s] touch constricts.” “Your nose continues to bleed. . . . You taste your own blood and cry harder” (361). Shame reverberates through the room, attaching to everything—Abel, his father, Abel’s soiled clothes, his father’s belt. It feels like contagion and isolation.58 “Your eyes are mirrors. . . . You see him and he sees how you see him.” “You come undone and he comes with you” (361). “You push him away.” “The breach is a reciprocal bond” (362).
But shame is not only the scene’s affective milieu; it is also the transformative speech act at the heart of the novel. More than a confession, it is the core of a repetitious, performative declaration that coheres and transmits the feeling it identifies. “‘You. Ashamed of You, Daddy,’ you say.” “‘Shame,’ you say like it’s his name” (361). Randall’s pervasive use of the second person throughout her description of Abel’s deathbed memory further amplifies this effect, since the appellation “you” contains volatile capacities for intimacy and accusation. “You are ashamed of him,” she writes. “The breach is a reciprocal bond” (362). In the stifling confines of Abel’s bedroom, unbearable love is felt like the most intimate injury. Love and injury are made congruent through a standard of affective fidelity. Like a translation, the apprehension of love as injury bespeaks both consistency and conversion.
I want to emphasize that this affect theory–based concept of “translation” insists upon a measure of credibility for the “cover story” of abuse, not in keeping with any juridical standard, of course, but still pertinent to a rich understanding of the psychic dynamics that accrue to the novel’s central scene. We know that the rape story is invoked to obscure or disguise Abel’s feelings toward vulnerability and love. But we can say this even as we hold on to an ostensibly opposite claim, that the “strange and dramatic” story of Abel’s sexual trauma is meant to capture something authentic about how mercy felt like violence and likely also about Abel’s adolescent feelings toward patriarchal power and disciplinary violence.59 If melancholia helps us to understand how and why Abel obscures from consciousness the meaning and trajectory of grief, then affect theory supplements this logic with a description of how “translation” keeps faith with an original feeling (here, shame) by way of a traceable path of resonant feeling.
Since Abel goes on to become a neo-conservative war criminal (in the fashion of his good friend, Secretary of State Aria Reese!), it is easy to read his biography as a cautionary tale, warning that the refusal to mourn the most tender and personal losses of the Civil Rights era will corrupt black political subjectivity’s authentic trajectories of feeling, desire, and identification. But might we also read the story of “translation” as a parable about Randall’s milieu of contemporary black literature and its criticism—a discursive domain in which “strange and dramatic” historical plots may be seen as covering or displacing or “translating” more proximate and familiar narratives of loss? Put plainly, might we interpret the novel’s epiphany as a reflection on the contemporary narrative of slavery, whose spectacular scenes of violence and trauma themselves emerge as symptoms of racial melancholia? (Ursa, the protagonist of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, seems to surmise something like this when she laments that her mother could bear witness to her enslaved foremothers’ traumas but could not disclose “what she had lived.” Ursa concludes, “[The ancestral slaver and rapist] Corregidora was easier than what she wouldn’t tell me.”)60 Much as melancholia operates as a mode of censorship, in which the thing that cannot be declared comes to govern speech through its pre-emptive power, the loss of Civil Rights idealism haunts the contemporary narrative of slavery, which compulsively disavows or downplays the near past as a primary site of love or loss.
Commonly heralded as the first contemporary narrative of slavery, Margaret Walker’s Jubilee was published a year after Malcolm X’s assassination and two years before King’s. In the decades that followed, running parallel to an escalating panic about a post-King vacuum of black leadership, the contemporary narrative of slavery became the most celebrated and widely circulating form of mid- to high-brow African American literature. Yet, even as these novels publicly articulate racial grief in the immediate and extended aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement’s premature end, the great majority of them do not represent substantive scenes of contemporary political loss at all. Instead, and in keeping with melancholic grief, they refuse to mourn the lost faith of the near past, forestalling the apprehension of loss through self-punitive returns to the past. To be sure, my point is not that slavery has been sufficiently grieved or that trauma offers an inappropriate lens for the study of contemporary black literature. Nor is it that we can have no credible feelings about the distant past. Rather, I am suggesting that historical plots of slavery and the rhetorical device of traumatic time may simultaneously offer an earnest, resonant representation of grief that attaches to the past and work to forestall or encrypt other forms of unspeakable love and loss.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the melancholic psychic trajectory I articulate carries a certain indebtedness to formulations that emerge from prohibitive reading—most notably, from Warren, who begins What Was African American Literature? with the hypothesis that the field’s historical turn bespeaks a wounded attachment to the apprehension of the Civil Rights Movement as loss. He writes, “Recent claims that either distinctly African traditions or the experiences of slavery and the Middle Passage constitute the center of African American imaginative and expressive practice should be seen as symptoms of the breakdown of a former coherence.”61 Rephrased to highlight our shared conviction, Warren suggests that the backward gaze of black literary discourse bears a coded expression—a “symptom”—of something unspeakable in the present.
Here is where we part ways. Prohibitive reading surmises that the contemporary narrative of slavery is at best self-delusional and at worst a liar’s discourse. It treats African American literature’s historical turn as a diversion, whose content has no bearing for the comparatively under-theorized social and political demands of the post–Civil Rights era. By contrast, I want to sever the idea that the historical turn is not fully self-transparent from the conclusion that it has no useful or “true” content. Which is to say, I move to re-think the relevance of the lie as a category for literature and to turn a curious eye toward the figure of translation. What might we discover by “translating” the contemporary narrative of slavery’s “strange and dramatic” account of loss and longing if, indeed, it carries within it, and in its narrative traces, the very stories it eschews?