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 Posted: Fri 19 Oct 2007 23:19 Post subject: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature |
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| Quote: | MELUS Fall, 1999 > Article
Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature
Nancy Frazier
Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature by Werner Sollors: Oxford UP, 1997. $39.95 cloth.
Books about the Civil War offer explanations for its causes and reasons for the Confederate defeat. Although founded on more abstract ideas, books about Manifest Destiny, Industrialization and Ethnicity, all important topics in the discipline of American Studies, nevertheless are able to unfold upon namable, identifiable projects: Westward migration, the building of factories and cities, the tie--and untying--of cultural bonds. None of the above is true for the subject of Werner Sollors new book, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both. That is because it is about interraciality, and race--named America's oldest and most persistent problem, and supported by laws ad infinitum--cannot even be shown to exist. A mere "social construction," at best a metaphor, the truth about race itself has become as much of an academic cliche as the stereotypes that grew up around it.
Although race is an invention of the imagination, it has evolved a life and literature of its own which has, in turn, been studied extensively. Except, that is, in its all important permutation, the mixing of races, the topic Sollors has taken on. Often more complex than the face-off between black and white, the combination of the two is vexed by betwixt and between, by forced alliances and veiled secrets. The story of Anatole Broyard is an example.
For almost two decades Anatole Broyard, book reviewer for The New York Times, burnished the American literary scene. "An arbiter of American writing," as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes him, Broyard's sophisticated voice was laced with irony and his attitude and aura--surely supported by his name--with an aristocratic loftiness. He was in the upper echelon of white intellectual society, and was even anti-black in some of his opinions, according to his friends. Handsome, renowned, successful beyond the ambitions of most writers, he carried to his grave a secret even his own children were not told: he was a black man "passing" for white.
Broyard's story was published in an absorbing essay by Gates that first appeared in The New Yorker' on June 17, 1996. It was later included in a collection Gates describes as "narratives of ascent," entitled Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.(1) During that same year Sollors's new book, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both was published. One of Sollors's chapters is devoted to passing, and the resonance with Gates is strengthened in Sollors's concluding sentence of that chapter which reads" ... the time may be ripe for case studies of known individuals who passed as well as for a full-fledged cultural investigation of the period in which 'passing' was a significant feature." The period of which he speaks stretched broadly from the 1850s to the 1930s, and reached a peak, in literature, between the 1920s and 1940s--not coincidentally the formative years for Broyard, who was born in 1920 and died in 1990. Since both Sollors and Gates are in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, the synergy of their themes is perhaps understandable.
Sollors also notes in the chapter under discussion that contemporary writers are returning to representations of racial passing. The point is well taken, and it has re-emerged with a variation on the standard in which light-skinned blacks "pass" not for white but for black. That is, they claim, or reclaim alliance with and allegiance to black culture and society. Gregory Howard Williams, for example, Dean and Professor of Law at Ohio State University College of Law, and author of Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black.(2) His autobiographical story tells how, after his parents' separation, he and his brother were forced to leave Virginia and return to his father's family in Muncie, Indiana. There, after ten years of his life believing he was white, young Gregory discovered that his father was a black man who "passed" in white society. Gregory grew up on the black side of town among his father's relatives. Since publication of his book, Williams has achieved notoriety: he has appeared on several national television talk shows and his story was adapted for a made-for-TV movie. He is scorned by some critics for what they call "an endorsement of the myth of white racial "purity": "The disturbing thing about Williams's book is that he seems to accept the racist idea that a true 'white' person is totally 'free' of nonwhite ancestry, or at least black ancestry," writes an internet reviewer.(3) This assessment of Williams is questionable, but it is certainly true that the convention of being "white" has historically excluded having one drop of black blood.
The stories of Broyard and Williams, though not included in it, add topicality to Sollors's work that it hardly needs, for his scope is already vast. Interdisciplinary and encyclopedic research makes reading this book fascinating for its unpredictability as well as the surprising materials Sollors uncovers. An example of the latter is an eighteenth century painted door panel from a pharmacy in Stuttgart, Germany, part of a sequence which shows the relation of nature and medicines. The image is an exemplary "Peaceable Kingdom" scene: lion, lamb, bear and stag all models of congeniality, with parrots and monkeys in place of the wicked serpent, and Adam and Eve as black (she) and white (he).
Sollors uses pictures to great interpretative as well as illustrative advantage--forty-six images are reproduced in the text--however interracial literature rather than art is the subject of his study. He explains, "By 'interracial literature' I mean ... works in all genres that represent love and family relations involving black-white couples, biracial individuals, their descendants, and their larger kin--to all of whom the phrasing may be applied, be it as couples, as individuals, or as larger family units." That, then, is his scope; his methodology is thematic,(4) an approach that discusses what a work is "about." (The irony of a "thematic" approach to a subject--race--that is, in essence, non-existent, casts a paradoxical postmodern net over this project.) "Thematics" refers to a thematic study of a single work while "thematology," Sollors explains, explores a single theme in many texts. He uses both. The key to thematizing is that it refers us to ideas, such as that of "passing," that exist outside the texts at hand. As Melville wrote, "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme," and Sollors has done just that.
The theme-based chapters of Neither Black Nor White begin with an investigation of the imagined initiations of color differences, myths of origin, from, for example, ancient Greece and Rome: the legend of Aurora, between night and day, dark and light is one prototype. The Cherokee myth of creation, according to which God underbaked some and overbaked other humans--getting only the Cherokees properly al dente--is another. Sollors glides effortlessly back and forth in time. The second chapter concerns the unpredictability of color in offspring of mixed unions, and considers adultery and "atavism": Pliny the Elder declares the mother of the dark skinned boxer Nicaeus an innocent transmitter of the sins of ancestral adultery; Kate Chopin's 1893 short story, "Desiree's Baby," has both ironic and tragic atavistic surprises. Interpretative confusion of the biblical story of Noah led to supposition that the origin of a black race resulted from Ham seeing his drunken father, Noah, naked. Regardless of its absurdity, the idea of the "curse of Ham" gained persistent currency. The chapter describing this belief is followed by accounts of efforts to construct rationales and hierarchies about color differention--"scientific racialism"--especially during the nineteenth century. But the twentieth century yields its own limitable efforts, highlighted by Charles B. Davenport's Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-White Crosses (1913) which used a "color top" devised by the Milton Bradley toy company to identify skin tones. This is an unmatched example about which Sollors comments, "Among the many scientific texts on race that seem like inadvertent self parodies, Davenport's stands out." The problem of terminology is also discussed, and Mark Twain is quoted where he wrote, in Pudd'nhead Wilson, "To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro." Implications and fantasies about "The Bluish Tinge in the Half-moon; or, Fingernails as a Racial Sign," Chapter Five, are followed by literary examples in which the "Code Noir"--French Law that originated in 1675--comes into play. In the next chapter Sollors writes about the relation of a story to its sources. He asks:
For the purposes of thematic investigation, this relationship raises the
question of "versions" and "subversions" of precursor texts. Are retellings
a prerequisite for the emergence of something that can be called "theme?"
How do texts signal a relationship with other texts? What happens when the
precursor text is "corrected" and "revised" in the retelling?
To answer these questions, he examines a source of several stories, winding his way back to and then away again from the extraordinarily popular 1711 essay in the Spectator, "Inkle and Yarico," by Richard Steele. This story recounts the tragedy of a beautiful African woman, Inkle, who saves the life of a young man, Yariko, who ultimately sells her into slavery. A tale of betrayal and immorality, "Inkle and Yariko" evolved into a variety of permutations including, indirectly, Lydia Maria Child's Abolitionist "Joanna" (1834), and, in a very different vein, John William De Forest's "A Gentleman of an Old School" (1868). The unexpected anti-Abolitionist sentiments of De Forest's story derive not from a philosophical support of slavery, but rather from the perspective of a Southerner who had the moral fortitude to free his "octoroon" children despite the economic, legal and social pressures against doing so. In the end he loses his estate and lives in the North supported by those very children. Sadly, he and they are shunned by the supposedly unprejudiced northern Abolitionists, and he says of his daughter, "... to think that in Charleston that woman had not a civil right, and here she has not a social right!"
Chapter Eight of Neither Black Nor White is an extended exploration of the "Tragic Mulatto" stereotype and, at the same time, a consideration of the idea and function of stereotypes and counter stereotypes. These are complicated and sometimes contradictory impulses that, on one hand allow white readers to identify and sympathize with an individual who has some white characteristics, or, on the other hand, inspire whites to reject the same mulatto for representing the hated practice of miscegenation. The work of Sterling Brown, which called attention to and challenged these stereotypes in the 1930s, is discussed at length. Sollors himself questions the historic emergence of the type, noting that it gained prominence during the nineteenth century. Before that literary interest focused on the black and white parents, but during the 1800s it switched to their offspring. One explanation for this change Sollors offers is that the American and French revolutions may have directed thought to young people. He also speaks of revolutionaries in terms of their "rebellion against the principle of descent embodied in aristocracy." And he reminds us of "the Romantic fascination with youth and with descendants." Then, in drawing attention to the rationale and its effects, Sollors posits:
In other words, the term "Tragic Mulatto" may have come to such prominence
in criticism and in the public realm not because it permits a better
understanding of past ideologies, but because it supports, in the guise of
subversive-seeming ideological criticism, the ideology of racial dualism
and the resistance to interracial life that are still more prevalent in the
United States than are calls for hybridity. In short, by saying "Tragic
Mulatto" and thus devaluing much nineteenth-century interracial literature
we may also be supporting racial essentialism, or advocating as "normal" a
view of the world that divides people first of all into "black' and
"white"--and hence ridicules intermediary categories as "unreal."
His illumination of this and other hidden agendas makes Sollors's observations provocative, calling into question old presumptions and leading to new formulations. A consequence of his openness to new ideas is to expose his own to interrogation. I refer to his premises for Chapter Nine on the subject of "Passing." In the Introduction Sollors writes about "theming" Nella Larsen's Passing:
Larsen's text signals a "larger" theme, "passing," in its title and may
thus be themed as a representation of the relationship between Clare
Kendry, a woman who has crossed the color line, and Irene Westover
Redfield, a woman who does it only sporadically.
In the next paragraph Sollors hammers down his point in speaking of the "overarching theme that Larsen announces in her title...."
In fact, "Nig" was Nella Larsen's working title for the manuscript published as Passing in 1929. The change from "Nig" to Passing was made, albeit with Larsen's agreement, by someone at Knopf who considered "Nig" potentially offensive.(5) It is worth considering how heavy a weight the title of a book carries. For a writer with a book in progress it is a kind of organizing principle that helps give shape to the ideas she is developing, and up to the moment she had completed her story and submitted it for publication, in Larsen's own mind it seems she was writing a story about Clare Kendry, the women nicknamed "Nig" by her husband. Yet the effect of the change is significant: with its current title, critics read the novel, as Sollors suggests, primarily in the context of racial dissembling as seen in the relationship of two women. There is no question that passing is integral to the text, yet with a less commanding title the novel may be read with passing as a secondary, rather than the "larger" theme that unites it to others of a genre. I find Larsen's novel equally interesting, for example, as a parody of the pretensions of both white and "Negro" society during the Harlem Renaissance. I also find the complexities of self-identification interesting, and the psychological challenges of a life lived in fear of being unmasked equally intriguing--this novel "about" passing could really be as much about the mind and motivations of a pathological liar who is, perhaps, addicted to self-destructive behavior. A characteristic of Larsen's novel is it openness as a "writerly text," as Roland Barthes describes such a work to which the reader gives meaning.(6) The attraction of theming critiques is their presumption that a work is "about" something, and thus defined can be discussed in the context of what it is about. The danger of theming is its tendency to eliminate alternatives, which may be, on reflection, no more or less a risk than that of any other methodological predisposition.
Chapter Nine, which begins and ends with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, explores incest and miscegenation in interracial literature, and various ideological motives that may have inspired their fusion in many works. The final chapter, "Endings," is about denouements, both comic/happy endings and tragic conclusions. And, a combination of the two for the same tale was not uncommon, Sollors, points out. Stories like "Inkle and Yarico" and the novella Ourika (1824) by Madame Claire Lechat de Duras--also wildly popular, translated into many languages and dramatic and pictorial forms--could have their endings both reinterpreted and also changed to serve the purposes of their various retellings. Some interpreters, for example were predisposed to cite the mistake of educating the beautiful Senegalese slave girl Ourika as responsible for the tragedy of her life, while others blamed the problem of judgments that are based upon the color of a person's skin instead of the content of her character. Yet others could read Duras's story of unrequited love as a metaphorical projection of the author's own love for Chateaubriand.
While Sollors's narrative ends with the odd suggestion that the "age of interactive literature and electronic texts" may open aesthetic possibilities of plot resolutions that are "neither, nor, and yet both," his text continues beyond its narration. Appendix A "A Chronology of Interracial Literature" begins with a riddle believed to be from 5th century BCE Greece and ends thirty-three pages later with Scott Minerbrook's 1996 book Divided to the Vein: A Journey into Race and Family. Appendix B is a chronological and descriptive list of "Prohibitions of Interracial Marriage and Cohabitation"--fifteen pages dedicated to legal proscriptions related to crimes that are not crimes, based upon ideas that are false at their very roots!
Sollors acknowledges his scholarly debts, particularly in the field of thematic explorations, citing several of the essayists whose work was published in the book he edited, The Return of Thematic Criticism. And he follows closely and at length the categorical outlining of a stereotype, specifically the Tragic Mulatto, by Sterling Brown, mentioned above. In each instance, Sollors takes the material in his own challenging directions. His questions provoke others, and his examples call others to mind. As with Beyond Ethnicity, Consent and Descent in American Culture, Sollors restates a problem and changes the terms and the grounds for discussion of it.(7) The books are similar in their limitless range of historical interest, their investigations of the etymologies of specific words--not only because they are fascinating, but also because that too, is part of the construction of meaning. Both books profit from Sollors's habit of reaching into extra-literary texts and imagery, and his wonderful discoveries of little known works of literature to illuminate ideas which have lurked in dark corners. There is a sense of excitement and discovery--admittedly muted by his scholarly presentation--that is transmitted to the reader. We enjoy a sense of participating in Sollors's intellectual adventuring.
In Beyond Ethnicity Sollors did not specifically relate his methodology to thematic studies, though he might well have done so. But "ethnicity," unlike "race," has its roots in an identifiable cultural milieu. In Neither Black Nor White Sollors executes the paradoxical and tricky feat of theming a figment of the imagination--interraciality. In his new book he also makes us aware of the long history of interracial literature, and by so doing he brings to the foreground a new consciousness of a major theme that has never received such attention. As we remember that at its foundations race, like the Emperor, has no clothes, we cannot escape the truth that the Emperor nevertheless employs the most skilled, talented and expensive tailors. Regarding the remarkable feat of tackling such a topic at the close of the twentieth century when rumors of its existence are denied, Sollors has his own understated explanation: "Since there are no 'races' nor widely agreed upon definitions of 'race,' understanding the cultural operations which make them seem natural or self-evident categories may be desirable."
Notes
(1.) (Random House, 1997).
(2.) (Penguin, Plume, 1995)
(3.) powell@danenet.cicip.org, 11/17/96
(4.) Sollors is the editor of a survey entitled The Return of Thematic Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).
(5.) See Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1994), Chapter 10. The title, "Nig," was a reference to Carl Van Vechten's book Nigger Heaven (1926).
(6.) See Martha J. Cutter, "Sliding Significations: Passing as a Narrative and Textual Strategy in Nella Larsen's Fiction," in Elaine K. Ginsberg, Ed., Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham: Duke UP, 1996).
(7.) Beyond Ethnicity (New York: Oxford UP, 1986) was preceded by an extensive essay Sollors wrote for the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980). The essay is a preview for many of the themes that are fully developed in the book.
Nancy Frazier is a graduate student in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. A former reporter for Newsweek, and the editor of a weekly magazine, her publications include educational texts, such as Sexism in School and Society (1973), and guidebooks such as Jewish Museums of North America (1992). Her major work is an innovative reference book, The Penguin Concise Dictionary of Art History (1999). |
Frazier, an obvious ODR supporter, can't even give "Interracial Voice" and me a decent footnote. The incorrect email address she provides is not a proper footnote. This is what passes for a graduate student! |
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