"Blankness": On unselfconsciousness in narrative

"Acting naturally" is an odd phrase, no?

"Unselfconsciousness" in any sort of art, even that which purports to allow for chance, is an impossibility: at some point in the making, someone makes a choice that results in the eventual preservation of the whatever-it-is. It's that choice-making, I would argue, that is at the core of the making of Art. (Note: "choice-making" doesn't make something "good" art; it's simply the least common denominator for those objects which someone asks an audience to consider as Art.) That said, an artist can certainly seek to create the illusion of unselfconsciousness, via spontaneity, candidness, shaky camera shots, etc.

Or, in the case of Show Boat (the Edna Ferber novel, not the musicals or its film versions), what, in this post, I referred to as "blankness."

Randall and dd both mentioned this word in their comments on that post, for which I thank them:it caused me to think some more about that word and what it might mean within the larger context of ideas about the work of narratives. What follows is in part a response to them and in part a talking-things-out to myself.

Though most of Show Boat is set in the southern basin of the Mississippi River and is thus steeped not even in Southern culture so much as the more-ephemeral Southern atmosphere, I would argue that Show Boat is not directly concerned with "saying something" about the South. "The South" is scenery, a backdrop for the novel's real preoccupation, the telling of the story of Magnolia Ravenal née Hawks. Or, rather, it's intended (I think) that "The South" remain in the background, as background. Part of what I hope is at least implicit in my last post on the novel is that the Mississippi and, by extension, certain historical and cultural realities (not all of which are "Southern," by the way), intrude upon and are awkwardly ignored by the narrator. His/her ignoring those realities and, in the case of all the material about Magnolia's relationship with Julie, not reflecting on an event that gets an entire chapter to itself in the novel--that ignoring and absence of reflection seem especially odd to me in this novel--which does, after all pose as a biography.

It's that absence of reflection on the part of the main characters and the narrator that I meant when I used the word "blankness." Southern--and, by extension, U.S.--culture and history is, of course, not at all a blank, but you almost wouldn't know that from reading Show Boat--and that, of course, is Lauren Berlant's argument with regard to the stage and film versions that I referred to in that post.

It's that "almost" that I'm picking at here. The fantasy-world combination of the river and the show boat cannot forever keep out the Real World, as evidenced by the expulsion of Julie and Steve from the Cotton Blossom. Here, surely, the South is something much more than a setting--you'd think. But once that chapter ends, the narrative says nothing more about the incident; the narrator reports no one, not even Magnolia, musing on it. There is, of course, such a thing as characters being able to keep things from narrators--that's certainly true in this novel, in any event. But here, aside from the fleeting glimpse of Julie that Magnolia will have years later in Chicago, the novel is done with that. It's as though, in the world of this novel, even human suffering and injustice are also performances that, once they're done, can be packed away, with no further need to ponder them.

What I want to do, then, is tease out what it is that the narrative and its characters seek to ignore--to make it seem a bit less blank, in other words. You lucky people, on down the road, will be treated to another post in which I'll claim that this blankness is in large measure intentional but that, like lots of psychologically-repressed stuff, we can find more than a little projection of certain anxieties in Show Boat.

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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).
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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.

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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.


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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.

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