"This Delta": Landscape, Race, and American Narrative

Antonio Ruíz, El sueño de Malinche ("The Dream of Malinche").

What follows is basically a place-holding post because I don't have time just now to explore all its various directions (one of which, you may have guessed, is indicated by the Ruíz painting at the beginning of this post). The road to Austin, and a Christmas-weekend visit with my mother, calls. But I'll be working out these ideas in various ways next week.

In the meantime, best wishes to all for a peace-filled and joyous Christmas season.

The holidays for me have come to mean, in addition to those things they are supposed to mean, both sacred and secular, the chance to do further reading/writing/thinking on my book project. So it's been in that spirit that I've been doing some reading I've long been needing to do--in particular, Edouard Glissant's seminal study, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. It's been in reading Glissant's dense but provocative writing that I've been reminded of some critical preoccupations of my own, which has made the past few days rewarding for me.

Some of you may remember Glissant's name from my discussions of his book Faulkner, Mississippi here and here. And indeed, Faulkner--in particular his novel Absalom, Absalom!--gets passing mention, along with other writers from this hemisphere. Despite its title, in Caribbean Discourse Glissant is in fact laying out an alternative literary and cultural history of the Americas, one that does not serve merely as an extension or branch of European history but is distinct from it: "[A] national literature emerges when a community whose collective existence is called into question tries to put together the reasons for its existence" ("Cross-Cultural Poetics," 104). The United States and most other nations in this hemisphere, by this definition, have national literatures, but Glissant's primary audience is his native Martinique and those other Caribbean nations that are cultural and economic wards of the European nations that had once possessed them as colonies.

Here's a passage I've spent some time musing on:

An immediate consequence of [New World writers' rejection of realism in favor of magical realism, as exemplified by Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude] can be found in the function of landscape [author's italics]. The relationship with the land, one that is even more threatened because the community is alienated from the land, becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character. Describing the landscape is not enough. The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process. Its deepest meanings need to be understood. ("Cross-Cultural Poetics," 105-106)

Some comments below the fold.

This intersects in intriguing, complicated ways with Ralph Ellison's central contention in "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," which you can find in his essay collection Shadow and Act, and which I've posted on before:

Thus on the moral level I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and scene upon which and within which the action unfolds. If we examine the beginning of the Colonies, the application of this view is not, in its economic connotations at least, too far-fetched or too difficult to see. For then the Negro's body was exploited as amorally as the soil and climate. It was later, when white men drew up a plan for a democratic way of life, that the Negro began slowly to exert an influence upon America's moral consciousness. (28)

There's not an exact equivalence here between Glissant and Ellison, but they are certainly headed in the same direction. One reason why they don't quite arrive in the same place, as it were, is in Ellison's own "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," another well-known essay in Shadow and Act. In it, one of his arguments is that American culture is in essence one big minstrel show, and makes this provocative statement in its midst: "When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical" (54). Given that Ellison wrote all these essays at the mid-point of the 20th century, one needs to remember that context and qualify accordingly. But the fact that Ellison does not talk about miscegenation in these essays, at least, except in their cultural manifestations, suggests to me that racial commingling can be talked about as a figurative equivalent to landscape: that is, it as fact/consequence creates a resistance to dominant (read: European) narratives in the same way that landscape did (and does?)--indeed, a quick re-read of Hortense Spillers' important essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (pdf file; it's long and dense reading, just so you know) both updates Ellison's "Twentieth-Century Fiction" and, in places, uses language strikingly similar to Glissant's.

Faulkner, for all these writers, is central in these matters, and "this Delta," a phrase Ike McCaslin uses near the close of "Delta Autumn," seems to embody for me that centrality: it's the delta's literal fecundity that makes slavery flourish . . . but it is also the fecundity of human bodies, black and white, who work the land that leads to what Faulkner (through Ike) understood as the dooming of the South.

As I said above, I don't have time to develop what I see as the implications of all this, so I'll do no more than list them here. The most significant thing for me is that, at long last, I have in this image of landscape-as-character a frame for the book-project which in various ways will allow me to unify some otherwise disparate materials and genres: Columbus mis-reading the Caribbean because his map is (a literal reading of) the Bible; casta paintings (and even the Virgin of Guadalupe herself) as depictions of a cultural landscape that the Church and Crown wanted to read in one way but Mexicans grew to read in another; a way to finally make sense of the very odd things regarding the treatment of race in Show Boat (some of which I addressed here long ago).

This listing feels very inadequate to me, but I hope it may pique some curiosity among my reader(s) for later posts.

And to those of you who read this far: Thank you and, again, a blessed holiday season to you and yours.

Read More...

Summary only...

"One imagines": A review of Passing Strange

The cover of Passing Strange, by Martha A. Sandweiss. Image found here.

Try to imagine, if you will, a nineteenth-century American man who was regarded by his peers--among them being the grandson of Presidents and another who would serve as a secretary of state--as being an exemplar of the best and brightest that America had to offer, whom his friends thought could have been a full-time man of letters had he chosen to be, whose geological survey work would be instrumental in the building of the Transcontinental Railroad and, more broadly, the settling of the West after the Civil War, who but for a few bad financial breaks could easily have been as wealthy as he was esteemed by his peers. Imagine that this man had business and scholarly interests that caused him to travel, it seemed, incessantly across the U.S. and into Mexico. Imagine, moreover, that this man never married, despite the efforts of his friends, though he was clearly interested in women and, when younger, was briefly engaged.

Now: Imagine learning upon this man's death that, for the last two decades of his life, he had not only been secretly married to a black woman and fathered children by her, he had also hidden all his (very) public life from her by passing as a black man whose jobs (which required frequent and extended absences from home) were a Pullman porter and a travelling steel-worker.

This all reads like a fanciful romance novel, but it is, in fact, all true. The man was publicly known and, it seems, universally admired as Clarence King; but he was known to his wife Ada and their children as "James Todd," and it's the story of their relationship that is the subject of Martha A. Sandweiss's book Passing Strange, which I recently finished reading.

The story of this marriage is so extraordinary that I am glad that Sandweiss felt compelled to tell it: as she notes, stories of whites passing as black during the post-Reconstruction era are less well known (and less common) than those of blacks passing as white; and it's through the contemplating of this story of a white man who risked an extraordinary amount to maintain two fictitious lives that we can perhaps see more clearly what even the allegedly-privileged had to go through in order to be with someone they loved who inconveniently happened not to be members of their own race. Another way to put this: King gained zero material or social advantage via his marriage to Ada--indeed, he put his already-considerable advantages at extraordinary risk because of that marriage; as his letters to her make clear, though, he gained "only" the deep, passionate love of this woman and their children.

All that said, this book reads a bit strangely: Sandweiss wrote this book to tell the story of "James Todd" and his wife, yet very little extant documentation of that relationship exists. There are the common-law marriage certificate, census records, birth records of the children (from which she can determine, more or less, when "James" had visited his wife and family), and some of his letters to her (none of hers to him exist), and that's about it. Moreover, Ada was born around 1860 somewhere near West Point, Georgia--in other words, she was born into slavery, and so next to nothing certain is known of her until her arrival in New York in the late 1870s. Sandweiss is honest about all this; she mentions in her prologue that she will have to read between the lines of the historical record and what was generally known about the lives of blacks of Ada's generation, both those who lived in the South and those who migrated North or to the Midwest and the Plains. A favorite phrase of Sandweiss's, as she describes Ada's and "James's" home life, is "One imagines." But none of this is Sandweiss's fault, and it's not a shortcoming. It's just that in those sections devoted to Ada's life and her relationship with her husband, the book reads a little more like recreated history than straight history.

But it's the very sketchiness of her subject that proves what I take to be her book's larger implicit point: people indeed defied anti-miscegenation laws, going, as in the case of Clarence King, to extraordinary lengths to do so. The fact that someone as prominent as King left such a meager paper trail regarding his own illegal marriage can't help but cause one to imagine all those others we may never know of who were also living such lives. This is one very odd and most unfamiliar story--but also very, very American.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I owe knowing about this book to Sandweiss's recent NPR interview.

Read More...

Summary only...

Casta paintings and the Virgin of Guadalupe: a link

Luis de Mena, casta painting, c. 1750. Museo de América, Madrid. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

(A couple of earlier posts on casta painting are here. A long post on the meaning of the Virgin of Guadalupe in connection with the New World as a miscegenated space is here.)

As part of my research for the book project, the other day I revisited this post's accompanying image, and some further reading--especially in reading the historical record supporting the authenticity of the story and, more directly, here--I was reminded, in a different way this time, of the contested nature of just about everything regarding the story of the Virgin's appearance to Juan Diego, from the very earliest days of that story (she appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in 1531). Some (much?) of that argument, we find between the lines, was driven by rivalries among bishops and their respective orders (which I first speculated on here). Thus, it makes sense that we also have overt written and visual assertions of Juan Diego's worthiness as a way of asserting the truth of the Virgin's appearance to him on the hill of Tepeyac; hence, in the frieze over the east entrance of the old basilica dedicated to the Virgin, Juan Diego's accompanying hat and staff, which mark him iconographically not only as a shepherd but also as someone making a pilgrimage to a shrine, and the beaver in the foreground (a symbol of chastity in medieval bestiaries).

Anyway, that and the fact of the Virgin's appearance as a mestiza to an indigenous person--that is, she appears, in effect, as always already of mixed ethnicity--made me wonder about linkages, whether direct or thematic, between depictions of the Virgin and the genre of casta painting that arose in Mexico and, to a lesser extent, in Peru during the colonial era. Those paintings are not merely secular in content, they are quite literally domestic: often their settings are the interiors of houses, or they show a family out for a promenade; some standardized depictions of castes show physical violence occurring between the spouses, their child attempting to intervene. So, off to Wichita State University's library I went yesterday, and in one of the books I looked at I ran across the Luis de Mena painting you see at the top of this post. As it turns out, this same image also appears in Ilona Katzew's excellent book on the subject; I own this book, but I didn't remember seeing it in there and so didn't bother to look again before last night. (Man: the things I tell you people.)

In a way, it's my forgetting this image that really prompts this post.

Casta paintings that also include images of the Virgin apparently are not very common: this is the only such example in Katzew's book, and I know I've not seen any others like this. At one level, that near-absence of juxtapositions is to be expected: The Virgin is, of course, the embodiment of chastity, while the most direct message of the casta paintings is, ahem, the consequences of the procreative act; moreover, though interracial marriages were officially permitted in Mexico, some, as I discussed in this post, were more approved-of than others were with regard to the social standing of the children of that marriage--more approved-of because of the matter of their racial purity. These were clearly not sacred but secular matters, as regarded the rules governing the painting guilds and their permitted subjects; to directly link the Virgin to such paintings would cross not only legal bounds but also those of propriety. I can be forgiven for not having remembered Mena's painting, then: it's something of an anomaly within this genre.

Katzew herself doesn't spend too much time on Mena's painting, either. She briefly discusses it within the context of a book by Juan Manuel de San Vicente, a book published in 1768 whose purpose was to extol New Spain's virtues and whose language Katzew describes as an example of "creole discourses of pride" (193)--even though San Vicente was a Spaniard. This book

ends majestically with a discussion of the Virgin of Guadalupe, of whom he quotes the famous verse from Psalm 147 (20): "Non fecit taliter omni nationi" (He has not done the like for any other nation), pointing to the honor that God bestowed on Mexico by having the Virgin appear in that country. The Virgin of Guadalupe also features prominently in Mena's casta painting along with the fruits of the land, the city's famous retreats [shown in the upper-right corner], and the Virgin's sanctuary [in the upper-left corner], allowing us to see how the work might have been interpreted by contemporary audiences. (194)

Katzew, as is typical of her book, doesn't go into those interpretations. But, especially when compared to other casta paintings, it becomes pretty clear that Mena wants to insist on a more benign interpretation of these different castas by placing their depiction within a context in which Mexico's other virtues are submitted for our admiration. The castas occupy the middle two registers of the painting; they are framed, below, by a depiction of native fruits and vegetables (it is no accident that the costumes of the figures in the casta paintings are in the same colors as the produce--as if to suggest that these many-hued people are likewise the fruit of the same Mexican soil) and, above, by the Virgin, her basilica and Ixtacalco, a popular place to visit on the southeast of the capital known for its canals. The painting's overall message is that of exuberant variety that is clearly and distinctly Mexican, a variety, moreover, presided over approvingly by the Virgin herself.

But as soon as I saw Mena's painting, I was immediately reminded of the painting below, which I saw for the first time when the Mrs. and I went on our Mexico City trip back in the fall of 2008:

Anon., Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de México, Patrona de la Nueva España. 18th cen. Museo de la Basilica de Guadalupe, Mexico City. Image found here.

(Apologies, by the way, for the poor quality of the image. For details I describe below, I'm working from a picture in a small booklet I bought at the museum.)

The Museum caters to a niche audience, obviously, but if you've read this far and ever find yourself in Mexico City with a few extra hours to spare at the basilica, it's well worth the 30 pesos admission fee to visit. Fortunately for the Mrs. and me, it wasn't too crowded the day we went because when I saw this painting, I couldn't help but stare and stare at it.

In remembering this painting, it suddenly occurred to me that it bears some compositional similarities to the standard casta painting: we have a male and female of different races (here, the female figure on the left symbolizes Europe; the male figure, dressed in indigenous garb, represents the Americas. (The male figure, by the way, is speaking the same verse from Psalm 140 that Katzew reports San Vicente as quoting regarding the Virgin's appearance.) But other images in the painting seem to argue for the Virgin's distinctive Mexican-ness. Directly below the angel who is directly under the Virgin's feet (the angel, by the way, is part of her traditional depiction--it's on the framed cloth with the miraculous image that hangs over the altar in the new basilica), we see two small scenes depicting, on the left, the Virgin's final appearance to Juan Diego and, on the right, Juan Diego showing the bishop his ayate with the Virgin's image on it. But those two scenes rest on the outspread wings of an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus, which itself is emerging from a body of water: the Aztecs' sign from the gods to build their city on that place and, now, the emblem in the center of the Mexican flag.

Clearly, this painting functions as more than an image honoring the Virgin or as one depicting particular scenes from the story of her appearances to Juan Diego. It contains, in the allegorical figures of Europe and the Americas, themselves explicitly female and male, "parents" for the Virgin--whose respective races would account for the Virgin's mestiza appearance, were this a typical casta painting. Moreover, her placement over the eagle on the cactus seems both to locate her in a very specific place and to explicitly associate her appearance with that earlier tradition (pagan though it was) of miraculous signs to the people in the Valle de Anahuac.

But no matter the truth of the Virgin's origins, no religious syncretism is at work here: The Conquest was by now two centuries past for both Mena and the anonymous painter of the painting I have been discussing. San Vicente, whom I quoted above, introduced his work on Mexico by celebrating the Aztec emperors who preceded Cortés' arrival, "because it is one of the circumstances that truly makes this city great, for having as its children (although heathen) eleven so great and illustrious emperors." Katzew goes on to comment, "In other words, Mexico's precolonial past is deployed to legitimize the uniqueness of the country and to set the stage for the remainder of his description [of the country]" (194). The latter half of 18th century was a time among Mexicans of growing pride of place and of culture, and the Virgin was most definitely included in that pride, so much so that in 1746 she would be declared the patroness of New Spain by the archbishop. What is at work in this painting is an allegorizing of the Virgin's cultural parentage, and that her parentage is a miscegenated one. To see a painting of the Virgin from this time borrowing the basic form of the casta paintings is certainly startling from the point of view of religion and of veneration, but from that of culture, specifically Mexican culture, it makes perfect sense. But even more importantly, the Church's official embracing of the Virgin as New Spain's patroness implicitly validated the mixed-race populations who venerated her.

In a later post, I want to address at greater length something I said in this post--in particular, this:

Whatever happened in December of 1531 and the weeks and months following–whether miracle or fraud or some now-irrecoverable combination of the two–the Church lost control over the meaning of the Virgin and the resulting manner of her veneration in the instant that she appeared to an Indian as a mestiza. Which, of course, is tantamount to saying that it thus never had control over her. Such is her power in Mexico and throughout Hispanic America: that everyone knows this; all the Church can do is acknowledge it and appear to grant it official sanction as it is able via such means as papal visits and the move to canonize Juan Diego.

Read More...

Summary only...

Strange Fruit: Some comments

Lillian Smith. Image found here; Wikipedia entry here.

I've just finished rereading Lillian Smith's 1944 novel, Strange Fruit, a novel that, though still in print, I suspect not many people read today. That's a shame, really. Given its title's origin (the Billie Holiday song), its setting (early Depression-era rural southern Georgia), its chief subject (an interracial relationship between a white man and a black woman) and the time of its publication--not to mention the fact that it was banned in some places when published--Strange Fruit is brave in ways that better-known Southern novels whose big subject is racism finally aren't (To Kill a Mockingbird, good as it is (and happy 50th anniversary, by the way), comes to mind here). Which, after all, is braver for a Southern novelist in the pre-Civil Rights Act South to do: to show us as we'd like to think of ourselves as being, or to show us as most of us in fact are--and why we are the way we are?

Some lengthy comments below the fold.

The novel's central story is an affair between Tracy Deen, the ne'er-do-well son of a respectable and well-off white family, and Nonnie Anderson, a college-educated black woman working as a maid for another white family. If you know the Billie Holiday song, you already know, more or less, where this story is headed: Nonnie becomes pregnant by Tracy; Tracy, who seems to love Nonnie yet already seems to know that a future with her will remain at best a clandestine one, and already under immense passive-aggressive pressure to marry the nice white girl across the street, breaks off his relationship with Nonnie and seeks to find a black man to marry her so the baby will have a father; that man, named Henry, a black boyhood friend of Tracy's who is now the Deens' house servant, brags on his upcoming marriage in earshot of Nonnie's older brother, Ed; Ed puts two and two together, lies in wait for Tracy along the path he (Tracy) takes that runs from the colored to the white side of town, and shoots Tracy, killing him; his family and a family friend help him leave town; a few hours later, Henry and his girlfriend will come across Tracy's body and attempt to hide it, but other people in Colored Town see this; once Tracy's body is found, word gets out about Henry's having been seen moving the body; despite the strong suspicion among the more-respectable white members of the community that Henry isn't guilty, and their attempts to stop it, Henry is lynched and then burned.

However, though the above is the novel's central narrative, it'd not be inaccurate to say that the novel's main character is Maxwell, Georgia, the town it's set in. We learn about its industries (agriculture and lumber) and their accompanying labor problems (farmers are having troubles finding (black) workers to work the fields because up North are better (and better-paying) opportunities; at the mills, there's rumbling about unionizing the workers); about how religion is regarded by various cross-sections of the town (a revival happens to be in town during the "now" of the novel); and about how blacks who served during the first world war and/or have gone to college are (in the minds of whites) quietly but firmly insisting--through the mere fact of their presence in town--on an opening-up of economic opportunity for blacks.

We also learn that Jim Crow is Maxwell's de facto mayor and, in the wake of Tracy's murder and Henry's lynching, varying degrees of complicity (ranging from participating in the lynching to disapproving but staying out of the way) work to keep that mayor in power. As Tom Harris, the owner of the town's lumber mill and thus one of its most prominent citizens, puts it, "Maxwell's a good town, a quiet town, good place to bring your children up in--and he had brought up nine. Except for Saturday nights, a few razor fights, a dead nigger now and then, nothing violent ever happened in Maxwell. Things still went on in the southwest of the county that had no business going on. Niggers disappeared out on Bill Talley's place too often--dropped plumb out of sight--but you didn't have proof, and there was seldom much talk about it" (300). The part about Bill Talley is especially telling: it's not that black people are disappearing--it's that they're disappearing too often that disturbs Harris. And yet the novel is at pains to show that Harris is among the most sympathetic to the plight of black people in the town: he attempts to hide Henry from the mob searching for him; and when the mob finds Henry, Harris tries to stop the lynching.

Given a novel like this, then, it isn't surprising that Strange Fruit lacks a figure analogous to To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch. Finch stands as our proxy in Harper Lee's novel; we can vicariously stand with him as he defends Tom Robinson, giving voice to what we know is right yet may be too afraid to say out loud.¹ Instead, what we get in Strange Fruit is, for the most part and at best, a resigned acceptance of the status quo. The two lovers at the novel's heart aren't especially sympathetic: much as Tracy Deen resists being defined by the town's definitions of Success and Respectability, he succumbs to them and in so doing rejects Nonnie; and as for Nonnie, her sister Bess characterizes her accurately as not being especially clear-eyed when it comes to seeing that there's no future worthy of her where Tracy is concerned--or Maxwell, either, for that matter. Sam, a black doctor who clearly has the respect of the African-American community there, commands our respect as well, but only up to a point--after all, after Ed shoots Tracy, it's Sam who drives him to Macon to hop a train back to New York and then to Washington, D.C., where Ed lives. Of the novel's white characters, Prentiss Reid, the newspaper editor, widely known to hold radical political and religious views, writes about the lynching but pulls his punches by writing that, yes, lynching is an unpleasant business but the North is not without its own race problems; Harris, as we see above, does not approve of lynching but, because his business employs some of the very men responsible for the lynching, feels he do no more than what he had done to try to stop this particular one. Harris's children, Charlie and Harriett, are much more vocal in their opposition to the town's endemic racism, but Charlie notes that in order to hang on to his ideas about how to fight against Maxwell's mindset, he would have to leave.

But leaving Maxwell, one gets the feeling, is difficult to do. A frequent motif in the novel is the evocations of roads and paths that connect otherwise discrete parts of the town to each other but which, it seems, never lead away from town. Those with the ability and/or inclination to leave are a definite minority; those who remain loathe or resent, with varying degrees of intensity, the members of those whose race they are not . . . in large measure because they recognize that without them, they could not survive--at least, not in the world as they had configured for themselves. It's a miscegenous relationship, but a mandated one: whites are just as trapped in it (though, to be sure, in different ways) as blacks are. So, even as we recognize and applaud Charlie's clear-headedness as he tells first his father and then his sister that he hates how blacks are treated in Maxwell, it's hard not to feel some despair for the town if Charlie either leaves town to preserve his current thinking or stays in town and gradually loses his convictions.

I've already gone on enough. Strange Fruit, I think, is well worth your time, especially when read against To Kill a Mockingbird--and just so no one misunderstands me, I do very much like and respect Mockingbird. But Smith's novel investigates racism's essential irrationality, something which, in the mid-century South, was an important task--especially since the prevailing argument in favor of Jim Crow at that time was that system's insistence on its rationality. More on that, by way of a discussion of Thomas Dixon's novel The Sins of the Father, in a future post.

(An aside on Strange Fruit's style: Smith is enamoured of letting her characters run on a bit in rather mechanical-feeling interior monologues in which her (educated) white and black characters end up sounding the same, despite the novel's otherwise pretty clear distinctions between them. It can grow tedious after a bit. On the other hand, there are a couple of moments when she will have characters interacting in the "now" of the novel and one of them will be simultaneously recollecting two separate past events. Also, there's a powerful scene where Nonnie, her lover now dead, goes through the motions of her duties as a maid and cook while through her mind passes a scrambled collage of bits and pieces of words that Tracy, Bess, Ed, and several other people have said to her over the past few days: Outer calm, inner emotional chaos. Pretty nifty, especially for a first novel.)

__________
¹During yesterday's Talk of the Nation segment devoted to Mockingbird's 50th anniversary, a caller from Georgia said as much.

Read More...

Summary only...

New World babies as articulations of cultural difference

Note: This is heading in the direction of a preface or introduction to the book project. The image below is its starting place, at any rate. Would reading this make you want to read more? Comments welcome and encouraged.

Detail from a panel of Diego Rivera's mural at the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City. Click to enlarge. Photo taken by the Mrs.

In a panel filled with figures, most appearing in full or partial profile, all going about the business of colonizing/being colonized, this infant, suspended in a plain rebozo from its mother's shoulder, its skin slightly lighter than its mother's, slightly darker than that of the soldier I assume is its father, gazes fixedly at something just above and beyond the viewer's left shoulder. It is difficult to say what accounted for my standing in front of this image for some minutes when my wife and I visited the palacio (Mexico's national capitol building) back in October: whether it's that the baby is the only figure in the panel's foreground looking in the viewer's direction yet not quite returning the viewer's gaze; or the color of its eyes--two tiny stones of aquamarine in a sea of reds and browns and yellows. Or both.

Though I did not have this image in mind when I worked on my dissertation, in a sense it is precisely because of what we see in it that I chose that dissertation's subject: an attempt to discuss historical and fictional narratives of consensual miscegenation as tropes of New World culture more generally. It is not merely that individual mestizos, métis, and mulattoes are, to borrow Joel Williamson's phrase, new people; it is that the culture that has emerged in this hemisphere is also, I argue, something demonstrably different from the European, African and indigenous cultures that contributed to its creation. Analogous to the baby's not quite gazing directly at the viewer, New World culture is simultaneously familiar and strange--and, moreover, not one fully explained by most mainstream critical theories of culture.

As an example of what I mean by that last statement, here is a passage from the introduction to Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture, coincidentally published in the year I defended my dissertation:

The move away from the singularities of 'class' or 'gender' as primary conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions--of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation--that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood--singular or communal--that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining society itself.

It is in the emergence of the intersticies--the overlap and displacement of domains of difference--that the intersubjective and collective experience of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How are subjects formed 'in-between', or in excess of, the sum of the 'parts' of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender. etc.)? How do strategies or representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable? (1-2, emphasis mine)

Readers of Bhabha will recognize in this passage an implicit articulating of the concerns at stake in his concept of hybridity, an idea that has great resonance--and potential pitfalls--for the citizens of the Western Hemisphere¹, and one I am largely sympathetic with. But, the bolded passage strikes me, a citizen of this hemisphere and someone who attempts to understand and write about its culture, as not quite speaking to our cultural condition. I would argue that it is precisely in "those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference"--phenomena that Bhabha calls on critics to examine so as to be "theoretically innovative and politically crucial"--that we find the New World's "narratives of original and initial subjectivities": the very sorts of texts Bhabha argues we "need to think beyond." To put this in terms of the baby in Rivera's mural, Bhabha's stance is that we already know where babies come from. I contend that, in this hemisphere, we're still trying to figure out how to articulate where this particular baby comes from--and what those origins tell us about ourselves as a culture.

(If you're still interested, the rest is here.)

Read More...

Summary only...

"For what it is": On the virtues of discussing the text in front of you

An illustration from Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom's Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1853), an adaptation of Stowe's novel for children, published the year after the novel itself. The illustration shows the Harris family reunited on free soil. Image found here.

From Carlos Hiraldo, Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin American Literary Traditions:

Despite Stowe's portrayal of such a complex act of passing on the past of George [Harris, a light-skinned mulatto who has dyed his skin dark to pass as a "Spanish gentleman"], she does not depict any of the mental and emotional processes through which a character in his circumstances could be expected to undergo. Her narrative never really stops to consider the destabilizing effect that George's passing must have had on his own identity. The narrative never fully envisions how it would feel for a character enslaved because he is considered black to have to darken his skin to pass for white. Furthermore, it never explores how helping a fellow black escape the bonds of slavery by passing him off as his own slave would plausibly bring George to seriously question his own racial identity. Illustrating [James] Kinney's pronouncement [in Amalgamation!, a survey of 19th-century American literature dealing with interracial relationships] on nineteenth-century representations of bi-racial characters, Stowe understandably demonstrates less interest in exploring the psychological ramifications of a polarized racial ideology in those bi-racial characters falling outside its parameters than with portraying the more immediate evils of slavery, such as the separation of families and the sexual and physical abuses experienced by the enslaved. (40)

I want to be respectful because Hiraldo has a book out and I don't, and getting a book published is an accomplishment worthy of respect. Still, this paragraph, coming at the end of his book's two-page discussion of Stowe's novel, split about down the middle between some general comments on slavery in the novel (including the characterization of George quoted above) and some remarks directed at an article on George, strikes me as puzzling, to say the least. His reference to Kinney in the last sentence, apart from undercutting what he identifies as a weakness in Stowe's characterization of George, also gives the game away, I think: Uncle Tom's Cabin is here not because Hiraldo wants to offer a reading of it, but because he wants to talk about what is not in it--at least, as he understands (what he has read of) the text.

More here

Read More...

Summary only...

Where do nations come from?: Some comments on Imagined Communities

Image found here.

Note: More sabbatical-project reading.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. Ed. London: Verso, 2006.

It's difficult to overstate the importance of this book to people interested in the question posed in the title of this post--not to mention the questions that arise from the answers to that question. Anderson's book is seminal because, while prior to it there had been any number of historical studies of the emergence of specific nations, no book had addressed what cultural work first had to occur before something like a nation, in our sense of that word, could appear. Anderson's book's position in this discussion, then, is analogous to that of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel for students of the English novel or, in my own field of American literature, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: agree or disagree with it, you have to be familiar with it.

Anderson's first important move is to discuss nationalism not as an ideology but "as if it belonged with 'kinship' and 'religion', rather than with 'liberalism' or 'fascism'" (5). (As one can see, such a move has the effect of rendering the term more neutral in its charge--in the post-war wake of National Socialism's defeat, "nationalism" had become an extraordinarily pejorative term. To be sure, the example of Nazism reveals the potential for horror within nationalism; but, as Anderson's analogous examples of kinship and religion indicate, there is much that is positive contained within a people's sense of itself as a nation.) He then offers this simple definition: "[I]t is an imagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (6). They are imagined because, within them, no one can possibly know all its other members--yet, despite that, one feels a political (in its broadest sense) link to those other members. They are limited because, no matter how expansive a nation is or wants to be, it always recognizes the existence of other nations beyond its boundaries. And finally, they are sovereign in that the people have some small say in their own governance (6-7).

Before I get into the wonkier stuff, I'd urge you who are the least bit curious about any of this but who don't want to pony up $20 or so for the book to go to the library and read the chapters "Cultural Roots" and "The Origins of National Consciousness." Here, Anderson identifies and discusses those cultural trends that to his mind had to be in place before nationalism could emerge as a political force. All these will be familiar to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with late-medieval to Renaissance history and culture; what's striking (for me, anyway) is how Anderson can make one see these trends in a new, compelling light as they--the trends--are revealed to also be performing a latent political work that wouldn't fully manifest itself for another 200 years. The crucial trend Anderson identifies is the gradually-waning power of the Church's ability to define the realities of this world on its own terms. Out of that trend emerged the others: the waning of Latin as educated/empowered/priestly Europe's privileged language and its gradual supplanting by vernaculars ("The determinative fact about Latin--aside from its sacrality--was that it was a language of bilinguals. Relatively few were born to speak it and even fewer, one imagines, dreamed in it" [38]); the fading of the notion of the dynasty as the sole legitimate form of governance; and, finally and most fascinating, a movement from what Anderson, referring to Walter Benjamin, calls "Messianic time--a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present" (in other words, the traditionally-Christian way of conceiving how God perceives time) to (in reference to Benjamin again) a sense of time as being "'homogeneous [and] empty,' in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar" (24). Anderson then notes that "homogeneous, empty time" is also precisely that of the novel-as-genre. I should also note here (though Anderson doesn't) that Mikhail Bakhtin (he of the idea of the chronotope that I mentioned in the previous post) notes precisely these two different senses of time as marking the chief difference between epic and novel.

The chapter "The Origins of National Consciousness," meanwhile, concentrates on the invention of movable type as simultaneously making possible the rapid production of texts and, more crucially, through its products' privileging of vernaculars, gradually turning educated Europeans from a collective who could understand each other via Latin no matter where they lived into linguistically-segregated groupings of monoglots who, now, began to feel connections with other speakers of their vernacular in ways that Latin had not done. From here, it's easy to see how a notion of nation-ness would gradually emerged: first (Anderson nowhere mentions this, but it seems inescapable to conclude otherwise) its prefigurement in the Protestant Reformation--many of the events of which were driven as much by (local) politics as by theology--and the Counterreformation; then in terms of politics.

Anderson's other important move--and the one that begins to explain why I'm reading and writing about this book--is that he locates the origins of nationalism not in Europe, as had been assumed by his predecessors, but in the Americas: specifically, not just in the American Revolution but also in the nearly-simultaneously-occurring wars for independence from Spain and France around the turn of the 18th-19th centuries that very self-consciously modelled themselves politically on the American example. Just as happened in American literature, in Latin America there appeared an explosion of literary works that in various ways attempted to articulate what it meant to be a [name of your new nation here]--and recall Anderson's noting the coincidence of the emergence of the novel-as-genre as accompanying the emergence of modern nationalisms. Using these observations their starting points, a whole slew of books, led by the example of Doris Sommer's Foundational Fictions: The National Romance of Latin America, examine the novels and other literature that emerged in the decades following these revolutions--many of which have as their protagonists men and women of different ethnicities who fall in love with each other--and posit that the work these novels perform is not (or not entirely) "artistic" in intent. Instead, their goal is, as Sommer's book's title states, to help these new states define themselves as inhabited by new peoples. It's no mistake, after all, that the authors of these works were more often than not also bureaucrats in these new governments. Put in Andersonian terms, they are purposefully intended to help these new communities imagine themselves, with the state dictating the terms of the imagining.

Well, yes. Sort of. I think.

Not just wonkiness but vaguely-formulated wonkiness follows.

I've read and thought a fair amount about how the Powers That Be in what are now what we call Latin America tried, on the one hand, to pretend that there was no essential difference between these colonies and themselves and yet, as I posted on here, produced an enormous variety of visual and textual rhetorics whose intents were to try to account precisely for the differences they found themselves immersed in. In these matters, the state's acountings always lagged far behind realities as racial comminglings became ever more complex in the Latin American colonies. To my mind, the byzantine casta-painting charts of the Mexicans and racial charts from the French colonies are, in the end, less testimonies to the desire to catalogue than Sisyphean exercises in futility. I didn't quite say in my post on Reading Columbus that one way of thinking about the mixture of rhetorics in the Columbian texts might be that they are an example of a recurring feature of the literature of the Americas: the seeking out of a language that will make sense of something for which a vocabulary barely exists, if at all. These various pictorial and textual catalogues of racial combinations are other examples of that same seeking out.

Sure: I can certainly see that the state has a vested interest in controlling how it gets defined; what I have more trouble buying, though, is that after 300 years of latent and, at times, not-so-latent anxiety about these new racial combinations and their implications on down the road, the state--even this new one--would suddenly be comfortable with presenting a vision of its people's future as a mixed-race one. The region's fascination, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th, with applying the principles of eugenics to shape such things political institutions and educational systems suggests a continuing ambivalence about all this. Never mind that it was precisely not that vision but the actuality of a mixed-race present that gave at least partial form to these particular imagined communities. And therein lies my point of disagreement with Sommer's basic argument. I think.

Read More...

Summary only...

Three casta paintings

Attrib. José de Alcíbar, 6. De Español y Negra, Mulato, ca. 1760-1770. Denver Art Museum. Image found here; specifics on the painting from Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico.

Two worlds God has placed in the hands of our Catholic Monarch, and the New does not resemble the Old, not in its climate, its customs, nor its inhabitants; it has another legislative body, another council for governing, yet always with the end of making them alike: In the Old Spain only a single caste of men is recognized, in the New many and different.
--Francisco Antonio Lorenzana, Spanish prelate and archbishop of Mexico from 1766 to 1772¹

In Antonio Lorenzana's statement we find a basic stating of something that the Spanish crown was simply blind to, at least on an official level: that its colonies were not merely just really far away from Madrid but could not have been more different from Spain. Certainly by Antonio Lorenzana's time those differences were inescapable; Mexico's revolt from Spain would begin only 40 years later.

All art is the human imagination's attempt to make sense of the world and the things and people in it, and casta paintings are a distinctly New World genre that attempts to depict and codify the bewildering variety of racial combinations arising from the commingling of indigenous, African and European populations in this hemisphere. At times these paintings, reflecting the Enlightenment era's fascination with describing racial and ethnic distinctions and, for that matter, taxonomies more generally, produced chart-like paintings such as this one (click on the image to enlarge it), as well as larger portraits like those I've posted here. Closely related to this fascination (even mania?) for categorizing is the Old World's fascination with New World exotica of all kinds--and not just the indigenous flora and fauna, either. These depictions of various mixed-blood couples and their offspring would have counted as exotica as well. Surely, one subconscious message of these paintings, given their subject matter of father, mother and child, is, well, sex with people who clearly were not Spaniards: a still-touchy subject in race-conscious Spain.

Alternately, one could be rather Freudian about all this and say that casta paintings are a manifestation of the uncanny: Spaniards, themselves more than a little preoccupied with racial purity yet confronted with the undeniable fact of 700 years of mixing of Moorish and Jewish and Spanish populations, perhaps saw in these depictions of commingling populations in New Spain an outlet for their own anxieties and yet, at the same time, an opportunity to assert the superiority (whether racial or socioeconomic) of the "Spanish race." That seems to be an implicit message in the both the painting at the beginning of this post and this one (image found here).

Their obvious compositional similarities surely serve to make that argument: in each, set in a kitchen, the Spaniard is dressed to go out to conduct business; the woman is dressed in housework garb and stands in the background--in the shadows, in more ways than one. The son, meanwhile, though dressed differently in each, nevertheless is in a position of servitude relative to the father--head respectfully bowed, offering up a dish to the father--but both males are interposed between the viewer and the mother. There is also present in the staging of the mother in this scene what Joshua Lund, in the midst of discussing a Brazilian text describing "the symbolic colonized woman," would describe as a visual depiction of a woman as "a subject within narratives of hybridity. She is a 'subject' in both senses: insofar as she is subjectified as an agent, and insofar as she is subjugated by a system of patriarchy" (The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing, 137, his italics).

The complicated relationship between miscegenation and class, some speculate, is also something to be considered when looking at casta paintings. That message could not be more explicit than it is in these little paintings by Pedro Alonso O'Crouley from 1774 (originally found here). The caption for the top painting reads, in English, "Spaniard and Indian, Mestizo"; that for the bottom reads, "Indian and Mulatto, 'Lobo.'" But what is more important to be read in the text that is this painting: In the top panel, the Spaniard is well-dressed, and the Indian woman, though plainly dressed, seems to be well-cared for--and perhaps, judging from the image, may be pregnant again. As she holds the baby toward the Spaniard, he points toward the baby, a calm, self-assured look on his face. The same can't be said for the couple in the lower panel: both are clearly impoverished; the man, his hands full, cannot gesture toward his child, who in any case is bundled, papoose-like, on his mother's back--a culturally-accurate depiction, but perhaps also suggestive of the figurative burden this child will be to her.

The homepage for the website Casta Paintings: The Construction and Depiction of Race in Colonial Mexico offers up a survey of prevailing opinions regarding the cultural/social forces that led to their making, some of which I've touched on above. If you're at all curious about this subject, the whole page is worth your time; here, though, is the summation:

[Casta painting] cannot be understood without recognizing its position in contemporary philosophical, scientific, and artistic traditions. Nor can it be separated from the interwoven history of Spain and New Spain during the colonial period. It reveals the fascinations and preoccupations of the era and offers insight into the construction of ethnorace in colonial times.

I'd just say that that last sentence, though accurate, is awfully polite. Though miscegenation was not policed in Latin America nearly to the extent that it was in the United States, during the colonial era it clearly caused more than a little anxiety on the part of the ruling class (European-born Spaniards--even people born in the New World of Spanish-born parents were seen as lower in rank by virtue of their having been born in this hemisphere). The Spaniard men in each of these paintings are well-dressed, serene, being served by their offspring: all visual messages meant to signify their control of their world, never mind the ethnic, cultural and political gumbo simmering all about them, all but unacknowledged.

(Cross-posted at Domestic Issue)

Read More...

Summary only...

Denial on the Mississippi?: Part II--the river as engine of nostalgia in Show Boat

Map from Mississippi River Cruises

Note: Part I of "Denial on the Mississippi?" is here.

While I was away from "here," I had occasion to do some more thinking about Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat and make a substantial start on an essay that, with luck, might appear in print somewhere. This is part of a version of that essay. I don't know whether the fact that, with the exception of passing references to it, I've not (yet) found a substantial piece published on it in the past ten years bodes well or ill for its chances in the academic journal marketplace, but at least no one can argue that the marketplace is overrun with Ferber criticism generally.

As I noted in that earlier post, that critical silence is itself curious to me, given Show Boat's subsequent history of innumerable revivals as a stage musical and its three film versions. There is something in its story that continues to appeal strongly to a mainstream American audience. I myself don't have any firm theories as to why this is the case--either the dearth of scholarship or the reasons for its appeal--though I'll mention the work of a scholar regarding the latter. However, the more I have thought about and tried to write on this novel, the more I think that scholars interested in American popular culture from the early decades of the 20th century would find it an intriguing novel.

They'll also find it a frustrating novel, if their experience turns out to be anything like mine. It doesn't appear to make any sort of argument, either about Life or American culture (except, perhaps, very obliquely toward its conclusion); it champions no causes, either noble or offensive; its characters don't change for the better or worse as events occur; it even seems to leave us free to like or not like its principal characters. It simply is. Therein might lie one reason for the lack of critical discourse on Show Boat: it's a hard novel to talk back to in an academic manner. Perhaps I'm just weird, but it's Show Boat's very blankness that has grown on me over the past couple of months. Surely, something, some mechanism, some force, some set of assumptions operates behind that blankness that a better reader than I can tease out and present as a way of beginning to explain why, for a very long time now, what Lauren Berlant terms the "superstructure" of Show Boat (consisting of the novel and its various stage and cinematic treatments) has appealed to American audiences for so long. But aside from Berlant--a very good and very smart reader indeed--no one has yet come along to do this sort of work. So, my poor reader(s) and (knock on wood) the greater academic world are stuck with my efforts for the moment.

Below the fold: some tracing out of Berlant's work and the direction I head in from that, along with a circling back to a passage I quoted in Part I. Apologies in advance for the length of this post and for the inclusion of some turgid prose--mine as well as others'.

Berlant's essay is called "Pax Americana: The Case of Show Boat," which is the last essay in a book called Cultural Institutions of the Novel. Her essay's larger subject is the relationship between sentimental fiction and historical realities, Show Boat serving as a model of that dynamic:

The disguise of "feeling" as a thing distant from and superior to public-sphere norms of instrumental rationality requires the modern sentimental text's central moments of instruction and identification to appear only as sublime ephemera, fragile temporal material of feeling and memory that constantly escape becoming knowledge that might inform, even revolutionize, the institutions and the common sense of official culture. These are the contradictions of modern American feminine sentimentality: a commitment to and revulsion caused by excesses of feeling in a world of politics, instrumental reason, and public-sphere mediation; the adoption of the commodity form to express the overwhelming predicament of subaltern identity in the face of the taxonomic and material violence of national capitalism. (399)

Berlant's first sentence is the one I am more interested in here for the moment, for it offers an explanation as to why the Civil War (and here I need to correct an earlier claim I made) merits only one mention in Ferber's novel, despite its chronology's having what I would argue is its beginning during the war, and then only to note, post-Reconstruction, that even as its audiences still struggled to recover from the war, the crew and actors of the Cotton Blossom "alone seemed to be leading an enchanted existence, suspended on another plane" (51). That first sentence of Berlant's also goes a long way toward explaining Show Boat's blankness that I mentioned above. Berlant goes on to argue, via a truly fine reading of "Ol' Man River," that what Show Boat's "superstructure" is interested in rendering ephemeral are "both . . . the suppressed and displaced history of American slaves and . . . the context of white misapprehension, the white will-to-not-know that supports the fantasy norms its romantic fictions express" (411). Thus, Berlant concludes, the history of Show Boat is "the history of the development of an apparatus of forgetting" (414).

Here is where my poor contribution parts ways a bit from Berlant's work. Though it incorporates some observations specifically about the novel, her essay is more concerned with that apparatus's history of development and, thus, moves away from certain of the novel's particulars that the stage and film versions don't dwell on. As I have thought about Ferber's novel, though, to my mind one "apparatus of forgetting" is already present throughout the text: the Mississippi River and its tributaries, the other plane on which the Cotton Blossom's crew and acting troupe lead their enchanted existence. The development of that apparatus of forgetting isn't something that emerges in the interim between the novel's publication and its stage and film adaptations. As has also happened with our popular memory of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (odd, isn't it, how Jim rarely if ever gets mentioned along with these two), the Mississippi, not because of but despite its location and hydrology, seems always already at an imaginative remove from our nation's painful historical and cultural realities.¹ Even within the world of Huckleberry Finn itself, it's not hard either to imagine Huck wanting to be on that other plane regarding the dilemma he finds himself in with Jim, or to imagine the atmosphere of the Cotton Blossom as being like something Huck could easily have fantasized.² It should surprise no one, once we gain the perspective of hindsight, that when Parthenia Hawks, Andy Hawks' wife, asks what time it is at one point on her first trip on the Cotton Blossom, it is Julie Dozier who responds, "What does it matter?" (54)

What Huck and Jim and, in Show Boat, Julie and her husband Steve Baker hope for but inevitably fail in achieving is escape from the ramifications of the legal and social politics of race. Huck and Jim's raft and the Cotton Blossom have to put in sooner or later. But even as this is their wish, for others in Show Boat the trope of racial ambiguity also provides, along with a good bit of not-so-latent anxiety, what appears to be an erotic element.

What follows are a couple of sentences from Show Boat that I quoted in Part I of "Denial on the Mississippi," this time including a couple of other sentences to frame the ones originally quoted:

Then, too, Nature, the old witch-wanton, had set the yeast to working in the flabby dough of Parthy Ann's organism. Andy told her that his real name was André and that he was descended, through his mother, from a long line of Basque fisher folk who had lived in the vicinity of St. Jean-de-Luz, Basses-Pyrénées. It probably was true, and certainly accounted for his swarthy skin, his bright brown eyes, his impulsiveness, his vivacious manner. The first time he kissed this tall, raw-boned New England woman, he was startled at the robustness with which she met and returned the caress. (21-22)

The phrase "It probably was true," as I mentioned before, affirms without confirming as fact Andy's explanation of his ethnic heritage, thus leaving in the narrative an uncertainty that the narrator ignores from that point on but which, I argue in my essay, manifests itself in Parthenia by way of her close surveillance of their daughter Magnolia when she is socializing with people that Parthenia knows or (in the case of Julie) suspects of being black. But it would also seem implicit in the passage I just quoted that Andy's story, whatever her doubts as to its veracity, also attracts her to him.

How to reconcile this apparent admission of the erotic attraction of racial ambiguity for the very people who would (and do) restrict or forbid or condemn such tendencies in public (as Parthenia herself does many, many times in the course of Ferber's novel)? There is also the matter, in the novel's famous scene of Julie's and Steve's exposure as a miscegenated couple, of how Andy behaves toward them (the short answer: ambivalently); of why it is that Magnolia, characterized throughout the text as a Daddy's Girl, is (according to the narrator) unaccountably drawn to Julie; and most perplexing of all, why, when Julie and Steve are forced to leave the Cotton Blossom, genuinely traumatizing Magnolia, literally no further mention of her trauma is given voice in the novel. And finally, there is the matter of Magnolia's later gaining of fame and fortune by singing African-American songs and spirituals "authentically"--that is, in the manner of the black people she had learned the songs from. Through it all, the river remains unchanged in the eyes of either Magnolia or the narrator--unvexed, even. Finally, there's the no-little-matter of a question Camille raised in a comment on Part I of this post that I've also been mulling over.

But all that will have to wait for another post (or so).
__________
¹Think, for example, of Abraham Lincoln's famous statement upon hearing that Vicksburg had fallen to Union forces in July of 1863: "The Father of Waters again flows unvexed to the sea." Lincoln's language, it seems, does more than merely announce the opening of a major waterway for Union forces that effectively cut the Confederacy in half. Implicit in the remark is, at the very least, an anthropomorphizing of the river; more, his use of an indigenous people's reverential name for the river perhaps is intended to confer the aura of sacredness upon it.

²American landscape's effect(s) on our nation's collective imagination, whether the Mississippi or Rip Van Winkle's Katterskill Mountains or what have you (think of Emerson's inimitable phrase from "Nature," "In the woods is perpetual youth"), surely is a crucial component of American Romanticism, which Toni Morrison, following Michael Rogin's discussion in his book on Melville, Subversive Genealogy, argues really came into its own at the very time that national debates regarding slavery were at their most heated. Berlant's essay doesn't address any of these matters, but it would not be difficult for someone so inclined to make the link between her arguments and Rogin's critique of Romanticism.
I personally am not so inclined; some of the very strongest criticisms of slavery--and, for that matter, our collective complicity in perpetuating it if we do nothing (I'm speaking in particular of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience")--emerged directly out of American Romanticism. To understand Transcendentalism only in terms of escape from the world that is too much with us is, I think, to understand it only partially.

Read More...

Summary only...

Denial on the Mississippi?: The strange career of the narrator in Show Boat

I find narrators of stories fascinating. Most of us pay them no mind, especially if they happen to be third-person narrators. But they are of the utmost importance: it doesn't matter who the characters of a narrative are or how compelling their stories are, if some entity doesn't feel compelled to relate that tale, it doesn't get told. And consider this rather crude analogy. The narrator provides a window through whom we see the world of the story . . . or at least that portion of that world available to the narrator. Just as usually happens when we look through windows, much of the time we forget the narrator's presence. As distinctive as Huck Finn's voice is, I sometimes forget that he is his own story's narrator. But every once in a while, we encounter, as it were, a speck of dirt or a stain or a flaw or crack in the glass itself, drawing our attention away from the story being told and toward the medium through which we're being told it.

Such for me is the case with the narrator of Edna Ferber's immensely popular 1926 novel, Show Boat. A third-person narrator usually limited to Magnolia Ravenal nèe Hawks' point of view, it often exhibits qualities more common among omniscient narrators, but at other times--at one crucial moment in particular--is not able to report on what Magnolia is thinking. Ordinarily, I wouldn't be too concerned about these inconsistencies. I would just chalk them up to inattentive writing and editing and then be on my way. But these inconsistencies most often occur when race is at issue in some form or fashion in the novel. This, I think, is of significance in a novel that isn't about race per se but whose most dramatic moment is unquestionably the moment in which it's revealed that Julie Dozier is of mixed race and her white husband Steve Baker draws blood from her finger and then sucks it so that he too "becomes" black according to the letter and spirit of "one-drop" laws. It's also of significance when Magnolia unaccountably finds herself drawn to Julie, when the narrator drops hints that other characters--most prominently Magnolia's father Andy, the captain of the Cotton Blossom (the show boat of the title)--might be passing for white, and when Magnolia's mother Parthenia seems not to question--or perhaps want to question--Andy's ethnicity yet constantly polices Magnolia's contact with the black crew members of the Cotton Blossom and tries to keep her away from Julie when she and Steve are forced to leave the boat after the revelation of their miscegenated status.

Add to all this such things as the narrator's descriptions of Julie, prior to the scene just described, that come straight out of any number of "tragic mulatto" narratives of the 19th century, Andy's revelation that he had once worked in blackface in a minstrel show¹ and his strange ambivalence toward Julie, the fact that, despite a fairly long flashback describing how Andy and Parthenia met and courted in the mid-1860s, no mention of the Civil War appears there or anywhere else in it, and a narrative voice that alternates between sympathetic and overtly racist descriptions of African-Americans, and you have (I think) a novel whose narrator is as complex and conflicted as you're likely to find in American literature. If there is a more oddly-narrated novel about race out there--apart from, interestingly, Thomas H. Dixon's blatantly-racist The Sins of the Father--I haven't run across it.

First disclaimer: If you think that, like most English majors with some letters after their names, I'm making way too big a deal about a novel that isn't even all that good (or, just making way too big a deal about a novel, period), I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that position. But, well, this is what I was trained to do, and I like doing it every once in a while.

Other disclaimers--and some actual text to look at, below the fold.

I'll be quite frank: Ferber is not a sophisticated novelist, and Show Boat is not a sophisticated novel. As I say above, this business about the narrator may be due to nothing more than sloppy editing. But I can't help being intrigued by it, for the reasons I stated in my first post on Show Boat: it's set for the most part on the Mississippi, as Huckleberry Finn is--and, for the most part, on the very sort of boat Huck and Jim had planned to catch a ride on for their trip up the Ohio. Acting figures prominently in both--more specifically, in each there's some exploration of the convergences between acting and race. But all that will have to wait for another post.

The other thing that intrigues me is that, despite her enormous popularity in the first half of the 20th century--and the popularity of Show Boat in particular--there's a surprising dearth of scholarship on Ferber. Her personal life and career, and the characters she tends to create (strong women, sometimes married, sometimes not, but not "needy" or helpless types), would seem tailor-made for feminist and pop-culture types. So, my other excuse for this is that I'm not trying to argue for her greatness but draw some attention to features of her work that are curious and (if I'm lucky) significant. My strong hunch is that they might prove to be.

Finally, I hope no one makes the mistake of thinking that what follows is anything more than sketched out. It's hard to write lengthy texts on a blog, especially texts that try to make an argument. But I hope that this makes some sense, and I hope that if you have questions, you'll ask them in the comments.

Okay: some text:

The first concerns Andy Hawks, who at a time that the narrative doesn't specify but which can be determined, through textual clues from elsewhere, to have been the mid-1860s, "drift[ed] up into Massachusetts one summer on a visit to fishermen kin" (21); this is when he meets Parthenia. Here is the narrator's report of Andy's ethnicity as he relates it to her:

[He] told her that his real name was André and that he was descended, through his mother, from a long line of Basque fisher folk who had lived in the vicinity of St. Jean-de-Luz, Basses-Pyrénées. It probably was true, and certainly accounted for his swarthy skin, his bright brown eyes, his impulsiveness, his vivacious manner. (21-22)

For someone like me, who got out of grad school by writing about miscegenation narratives, a passage like this is critic's catnip: Andy's exotic genealogy through the mother's side and his equally-exotic skin color and manner are the sort of thing that appear again and again in narratives dealing with miscegenation, as initial ways of accounting for a character who is subsequently revealed to be of mixed race. The fact that the narrator had earlier described Andy as having "a trick of talking very fast as he clawed the mutton-chop whiskers first this side, then that, with one brown hairy little hand" that made him appear "grotesque [and] simian" (13) only heightens my suspicions about this passage. But note that clause "It probably was true," simultaneously affirming and casting some doubt on Andy's accounting of himself. It's difficult to tell, moreover, whether this is something Andy in fact knows this to be true, has been told this and believes it or, rather, it is a deliberate invention on his or his parents' part.

So: certainly as far as the narrator is concerned, there is some ambiguity and ambivalence about Andy's origins. Even more intriguing for me, though, is what Parthenia makes of this story. The narrator will make one more passing reference (no pun) to his ethnicity; meanwhile, nowhere does the narrator record Parthenia's response to this information, much less whether she believes it.

Meanwhile, what to make of passages such as these?

Magnolia, as a child,

learned to strut and shuffle and buck-and-wing from the Negroes whose black faces dotted the boards of the Southern wharves as thickly as grace notes sprinkle a bar of lively music. (20)

but compare that to this description of the head cook and his assistants in the galley whom Parthenia confronts over what she regards as their waste of food:

A simple, ignorant soul, the black man, and a somewhat savage; as mighty in his small domain as Captain Andy in his large one. All about him now were his helpers, black men like himself, with rolling eyes and great lips all too ready to gash into grins if this hard-visaged female intruder were to worst him. (23)

And back and forth the narrator veers like this, from pleasant to not-so-pleasant stereotype, apparently approving simultaneously Magnolia's attraction to black people and, in particular, to Julie, and Parthenia's policing of Magnolia's interactions with them, and not quite knowing what to make of Andy.

What to call this narrator's perspective? I'm tempted to call it nostalgia, and even to assign the adjective "antebellum" to it. But its inconstancy of perspective makes it something other than the "moonlight and magnolias" sort of nostalgia. In the footnote below, I mention the possible links between the narrator and the tradition of minstrelsy, so that's something to explore and think about more. I have more rereading and thinking to do before I can draw a firm conclusion about this. But there are other things I want to consider, as well: the parallels regarding the function of the Mississippi in this novel and Huckleberry Finn; the link(s) between passing and acting (it is no coincidence that Julie is deemed the best actor aboard the Cotton Blossom) and, for that matter, Magnolia's attraction both to Julie and to acting.

But all of will have to wait till another post, you'll be pleased to know. If you've read this far, I sincerely thank you.

Part II is here.


__________
¹About all I have space and time (not to mention knowledge) to say about minstrelsy here is that its cultural history and legacy in this country are by no means decided. The most-common view, as put forth by Eric Lott in his 1993 book Love and Theft, is that minstrelsy was severely reductive in its depictions of black people and is responsible for many present-day stereotypes of African-Americans. While poking about in the library yesterday, though, I ran across William J. Mahar's 1999 study Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, which seeks to argue that minstrelsy--specifically, blackface itself--allowed performers to offer critiques of dominant culture without the performers' being attached by their audiences to those critiques. Right now--that is, as of the writing of this little footnote--I frankly see Show Boat's narrator as perhaps being in blackface as well, in a figurative sense--that image would certainly serve to get at some of the questions I have about him/her. I can't explore this further, though, till I reread the novel more closely . . . and, for that matter, decide what I think about minstrelsy.

Read More...

Summary only...