Race, Immigration, and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Edited by William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A Routledge ...

Author: Randy Boyagoda

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Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory William E. Cain, General Editor Machine and Metaphor The Ethics of Language in American Realism Jennifer Carol Cook “Keeping Up Her Geography” Women’s Writing and Geocultural Space in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture Tanya Ann Kennedy Contested Masculinities Crises in Colonial Male Identity from Joseph Conrad to Satyajit Ray Nalin Jayasena Unsettled Narratives The Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London David Farrier The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction Sharon DeGraw Parsing the City Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and City Comedy’s London as Language Heather C. Easterling The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the s Winnie Chan Negotiating the Modern Orientalism and Indianness in the Anglophone World Amit Ray Novels, Maps, Modernity The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000 Eric Bulson

Novel Notions Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction Katherine E. Kickel Masculinity and the English Working Class Studies in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction Ying S. Lee Aesthetic Hysteria The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction Ankhi Mukherjee The Rise of Corporate Publishing and Its Effects on Authorship in Early Twentieth-Century America Kim Becnel Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel Adrian S. Wisnicki City/Stage/Globe Performance and Space in Shakespeare’s London D.J. Hopkins Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century Pamela Albert Race, Immigration, and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner Randy Boyagoda

Race, Immigration, and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner

Randy Boyagoda

Routledge New York & London

First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Randy Boyagoda From INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison, copyright 1947, 1948, 1952 by Ralph Ellison. Copyright renewed 1975, 1976, 1980 by Ralph Ellison. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. For the British Commonwealth: From THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET by Salman Rushdie, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. Quotations from THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET by Salman Rushdie. c 1999 by Salman Rushdie. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. From MODERNITY AT LARGE: CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF GLOBALIZATION by Arjun Appadurai, copyright 1996. Used by permission of the University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Boyagoda, Randy. Race, immigration, and American identity in the fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner / by Randy Boyagoda. p. cm. —(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-415-97984-6 1. Rushdie, Salman—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Ellison, Ralph—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Faulkner, William, 1897-1962—Criticism and interpretation. 4. National characteristics, American, in literature. 5. Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature 6. Race relations in literature. 7. Minorities in literature. I. Title. PR6068.U757Z754 2007 823’.914--dc22 ISBN 0-203-93499-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-97984-6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-93499-7 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-97984-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-93499-9 (ebk)

2007018415

To my parents, Ivor Boyagoda and June Boyagoda

Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Chapter One Imagining Nation and Imaginary Americans

1

Chapter Two Salman Rushdie’s American Idyll

23

Chapter Three Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Immigrants

51

Chapter Four William Faulkner’s “Durn Furriners”

79

Chapter Five Americans You’ll Never (Have To) Be

107

Notes

119

Bibliography

129

Index

137

vii

Preface

We cannot study American literature and culture in the early twenty-first century without considering its global dimensions. These gained in consequence over the course of the prior century and resulted from unprecedented forms of migration and immigration, and from the muscular reach and pull of American culture and commerce. This situation has stimulated many writers to imagine the effects of new cultural and demographic mobility on conventional notions of national identity. This book attends to the efforts of three novelists along these lines. It argues that fiction by Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner register the destabilizing effect of immigrants on concepts of American identity in their imagined versions of the United States. The first chapter situates the book’s interests in the wider contexts of contemporary American literary studies, globalization theory, and U.S. southern studies. This chapter proposes that Rushdie, Ellison, and Faulkner organize their representations of American-ness according to competing visions of national identity. Faulkner and Ellison each wrestle with an internal hybridity arising from ratios of native black and white. By contrast, Rushdie emphasizes an external hybridity premised upon unceasing global immigration. The book then analyzes the implications for imagined American identity as defined by an uprooted cosmopolitan’s account of U.S. experience. Its second chapter argues that Salman Rushdie shifts the interests of his early fiction—postcolonial migrants to the Old World—to neocolonial immigrants to the New World whose possibilities for self-realization are preemptively defined by America’s military, economics, and cultural presence in the Third World. This chapter establishes Rushdie’s imagined America, a 1990s global metropolis, as the questionable and humorous fulfillment of Ellison’s and Faulkner’s worries about the nation’s interests and composition if these were exclusively circumscribed by immigrant presences. The third chapter argues that Ralph Ellison juxtaposes the Great Migration with the ix

x

Preface

New Immigration to suggest troubling consequences of the nation’s failure to recognize the a-priori American-ness of its black population. Seeking cultural integration between native blacks and whites, Ellison depicts the historical injustices, linguistic confusions, and political dangers posed by Eastern European immigrants who gain recognition as Americans before southern blacks in pre-WWII New York. The fourth chapter argues that William Faulkner regards the presence of Italian immigrants in the U.S. as undermining his efforts to imagine an America free to resolve persistent tensions between North and South, black and white, rural and urban. Alert to the 1920s nativist movement and to southern debates over the New Immigration, Faulkner imagines racially indeterminate, mobile Italian newcomers upsetting internal balances that were necessary for rectifying America’s and the South’s historical failings. The fifth chapter contends that American identity, whether imagined as black and white or as a series of migratory mixings, obscures a primordial hybridity represented by Native Americans. The study concludes by addressing the responsibilities of twenty-first-century scholars of American literature and culture to make sense of the field’s global contours, and by considering the historical and intellectual advantages and disadvantages that foreign writers meet in trying to imagine their way into the American literary tradition.

Acknowledgments

For their support of my scholarship: John T. Matthews and Laurence Breiner, Boston University; T.H. Adamowski, University of Toronto (emeritus); Robert Sullivan, University of Notre Dame. For research funding: The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame. For assistance in manuscript preparation: The Faculty of Arts, Ryerson University. For reading these pages with patience and love and more patience: Anna Boyagoda.

xi

Chapter One

Imagining Nation and Imaginary Americans

The first thing you have to understand is that this is a strange country. There is no logic to it or to its ways. In fact, it’s been half-crazy from the beginning and it’s got so many crazy crooks and turns and blind alleys in it, that half the time a man can’t tell where he is or who he is. —Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

For all his transcendent rhetoric, Emerson’s ambitions for America were rather narrowly focused: “though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to [an American] but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till” (29). Both figuratively and literally, Emerson’s judgment relies on a rich, organic image in this early moment from “Self-Reliance” (1841). The source of an American’s abilities, and the source of his responsibilities, is the plot he tills in the ground beneath his feet. Such a foundation, which William Faulkner later characterized as his “postage stamp of native soil,” is the local space from which the American artist springs and from which he receives the fullest inspiration. For Emerson, and for later writers such as Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, by connecting deeply to his local origins, the American artist accesses the universal good and connects that little parcel of land to the wider nation and to the wider world. Fourteen years after “Self-Reliance,” Walt Whitman sought to take up this Emersonian challenge with Leaves of Grass (1855). His efforts disclose the variegated and cacophonous terrain of the idealized ground that Emerson evoked: the poet’s vision takes in “Not only the free Utahan, Kansian, or Arkansian . . . not only the free Cuban . . . not merely the slave . . . not Mexican, native, or Flatfoot, or negro from Africa . . . Chinese with his transverse eyes. . . . Bedowee—or wandering nomad—. . . [but peoples] of this country and every country” (ll. 32, 35). In trying to 1

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Race, Immigration, and American Identity

encompass the entirety of America, Whitman reveals its heterogeneity; he dedicates his poetry, as does Salman Rushdie his fiction some one hundred and fifty years later, to embodying it in its particularities. This is only one of countless lists from Leaves of Grass, in which we see a series of carefully balanced distinctions that together constitute the wholeness of the nation: between individuals internal to the United States and external; between newcomers to the country from across oceans and across the continent; between indigenous peoples rooted in the land for centuries and wanderers moving across it. The American artist trying to represent a nation so composed must, indeed, “contain multitudes” (l. 1316). Between Whitman and Emerson, major influences upon America’s cultural self-comprehension, we can discern a submerged tension between one’s commitments to the ideal purity of a local setting and to the epic multiplicity of the nation’s pluralist composition, between America defined by place and America defined by people. Both paths are intended to assist in determining what “America” means as a nation, a culture, and an identity. For Emerson, there is that single kernel of corn; brought to maturity in a well-tilled field, it provides nourishment enough for the proto-Gramscian artist and his community. For Whitman, it is a field of manifold growths; his artist and nation find vitality only through that variety. Writers seeking to till and sing of America in the twentieth century have had to negotiate between Emerson’s proudly native recommendations and Whitman’s explosively pluralist renderings. Such a challenge in turn provokes a series of questions: Do Americans define themselves according to geographic, historical, and blood continuities within a particular space—the farming community nation that Thomas Jefferson envisioned—or according to the disruption of such continuities through mobility across particular spaces—the so-called nation of immigrants that started with the Puritan arrivals? Given the heterogeneous composition of American space since the first encounter between Indian and European, how do we determine the nature of a U.S. national identity? Moreover, since Americans have been a migratory people from the nation’s inception, how do we ascertain when the mobile outsider has become a rooted native? In a related vein, what constitutes assimilation, and how does it occur, given racial, historical, and geographic differences and parallels amongst past, present, and future Americans? Just how desirable or necessary is such an ambition, as a means of indicating that one is truly American? Finally, how have writers variously represented and understood the complex triangulation of national identity, geography, and movement, as these terms together have defined, questioned, and redefined “America” and “American”?


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Reading a contemporary postcolonial writer alongside two modern, native-born figures, this study seeks to extend back to the turn of the twentieth century a radical awareness that the terms for defining “America” and “American” are under continuous revision as local American spaces and peoples become increasingly connected to the world at large. A primary contention is that the presence of unprecedented new immigrants—Italians in the U.S. South in, 1900s; Eastern Europeans and Caribbean islanders in New York in the 1930s and 1940s; and Third World migrants throughout America from the 1950s through the 1990s—forces and enables writers to complicate their representations of racial, historical, and economic components of American life. The three major writers under consideration, Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner, commit their work to imagining how under-recognized Americans come to be considered fully national citizens— or don’t—and also the means by which this process plays out. Attempted assertions of American-ness, however, often involve either the stigmatization or studied ignorance of another group competing for similar recognition. This dynamic often plays out along a line dividing minority natives from non-traditional immigrants, as these groups find themselves in unexpectedly close contact and competition with each other. Trying to solve the difficulties of national belonging and identity that arise in such encounters, these writers have sought to establish normative relationships between language and national identity while interrogating the term “American” as a historical and geographical signifier and, in fact, as a practice. Alongside these efforts, each writer seeks variously to defend, introduce, or reject forms of national identity that were either initially threatened by new waves of immigration or previously rejected due to racial and geographic prejudices. Understood in its historical context, each writer’s work reveals a crisis of national identity to which he responds by seeking to determine—in form, language, and style—who is an American and who is not. Each effort involves a back, formation of traditional American identity that emphasizes the primacy of one group’s claim of American-ness against others, whether U.S. southerners against Italian immigrants; native black migrants against European and Caribbean immigrants; or Third World immigrants against native citizens. Faulkner and Ellison are each invested in a binary of black/ white power relations that in turn structure their respective senses of place, past, language, and citizenship; their imagined versions of America depend upon internal oppositions that inevitably resist new immigrant presences. Rushdie reveals an alternative form of investment, if one that seeks nonetheless to be firmly situated within American experience. His sense of American place, past, language, and citizenship is structured around the assumption

4


that the U.S., in a historical context, defines itself according to perpetual immigration and attendant racial and cultural mixtures. Opposition in Rushdie’s America arises when immigrants’ successes have damaging effects upon their Third World places of origin. Attending to representations of American national identity complicated by the presence of immigrants, we perceive why and how such efforts create surprising continuities between America and the wider world, particularly within a globally southern context, and why these efforts also provoke sectarian divisions that are often established through linguistic distinctions and strategic assertions of ethnic identity. Samira Kawash defines ethnicity as “a group’s holding something in common, whether language, religion, geographic origin, common history, some physical characteristic, genetic similarity, or some other attribute” (175). Yet ethnicity as a concept at play in the modern nation, while suggestive of certain fixed absolutes, “is constantly being contested and reinvented. It is not the sign of the timeless origin of a people; rather, it is the always already newly created expression of an experience of the present” (176). Kawash persuasively argues for the instrumental status of ethnicity in situations where a local community must respond to an outside presence. Often, she further observes, there occurs “an imaginary splitting between good ethnic community and bad ethnic alien,” which in turn occasions “violence and repression . . . against the threat of the alien other who appears outside the community” and seeks entry (179). This insider/outsider dynamic, which characterizes local responses to immigrants in Faulkner’s South and Ellison’s New York, relates in part to these writers’ ambivalent responses to their nation’s increasing involvement in a global network of migration and cultural exchange. Each writer reveals his awareness of this development by imagining, often with negative connotations, immigrant entries into particularized American settings. Faulkner and Ellison then delineate, with differing commitments and strategies, the subsequent “splitting” that Kawash identifies as a feature of older forms of community encountering new peoples. These encounters can in turn be understood as features of globalization. Indeed, elements of globalization theory offer a promising set of terms and approaches to begin understanding literary responses to the historical phenomenon of local American communities gaining internal coherence at moments when the world at large exerts its alien presence upon them. As Tony Judt has observed in a crisp distillation of the active agents of this phenomenon, “[g]lobalization is about the disappearance of boundaries—cultural and economic boundaries, physical boundaries, linguistic boundaries—and the challenge of organizing our world in their absence” (41). As we shall see, it is precisely in the loss of cultural, economic,


5

physical, and linguistic boundaries that Rushdie, Ellison, and Faulkner find imperatives for their imaginative efforts to understand and represent an America thus irremediably situated in the uncertainties and fluctuations of global experience. I: GLOBALIZATION, MIGRATION, AND THE NATIONAL IMAGINARY Peter Berger provides a bracing explanation for the initial problem of involving the phenomenon of globalization in, as is the present case, a scholarly treatise on immigrants, literature, and American national identity: The term “globalization” has become somewhat of a cliché. It serves to explain everything from the woes of the German coal industry to the sexual habits of Japanese teenagers. Most clichés have a degree of factual validity; so does this one. There can be no doubt about the fact of an ever more interconnected global economy, with vast social and political implications. . . . It has also been noted that there is a cultural dimension, the obvious result of an immense increase in worldwide communication. If there is economic globalization, there is also cultural globalization. To say this, however, is only to raise the question of what such a phenomenon amounts to. (419)

Berger indicates the dangerous ease with which scholars today can ascribe any form of cultural and economic complication or unanticipated mixture to the fashionable phenomenon of globalization and he laments the consequent weakening of the term. He also identifies the two primary forms of globalization (economic and cultural), however, and encourages us to make sense of how these relate to each other and in turn inform the very term itself, which too often is merely invoked as a catch-all in contemporary cultural discourse.1 Given the vast array of current writing on globalization, any one attempt to understand it inevitably seems limited, if not potted, in comparison to other approaches.2 The goal, therefore, is to limit and articulate precisely what features of globalization are at play in a given study. For the interests of this particular work, globalization’s importance relates to the challenges that the increased mobility of peoples and cultures have posed to writers seeking to describe the composition of locally imagined communities increasingly affected by outside presences. Though globalization has been considered an especially contemporary phenomenon, Arjun Appadurai has argued that it

6


“is itself a deeply historical, uneven, and even localizing process” (17). In Appadurai’s sense, “localizing” describes the degree to which globalization’s impact upon the local actually structures forms of knowledge and selfdefinition, as opposed to solely igniting resistance to new cultures and peoples. While it is comparatively easy (if in places problematic) to locate Rushdie in the context of globalization, my present intention is to place both Faulkner’s and Ellison’s representations of national identity and immigrants within the context of globalization as well. This proposal is based precisely upon their respective structurings of the local. Barbara Ladd makes a persuasive case for such an approach, specifically within the context of literary studies of the American South, by arguing that “The local has become the crossroads— contemporary work wants to bridge the local and the global, laying claim to relevance in and beyond the nation-state” (1636). The following chapters attend to globalization’s effects on Faulkner, and Ellison’s writing, as they imagined unexpectedly globalized zones, such as 1930s Harlem and 1920s Mississippi. The following chapters argue that the presence of immigrants constitutes a prime factor in the globalizing of Ellison’s and Faulkner’s local spaces. As a preamble to understanding the nature of their responses, what follows is a consideration of imagined national communities alert to the way global developments pose challenges to their continued, self-determined identities. Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?” remains a tendentious text in contemporary discourse about global cross-cultural understanding, particularly in regard to the relationship between the Islamic world and the West after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In the more provocative Foreign Affairs article that preceded the eponymous book-length study, Huntington describes the potential conflicts that would arise in an age of increased mobility and potentially multiple affiliations, where traditional conceptions of cultural identity were under threat. He explains that one response to this phenomenon is for groups to re-emphasize firm divisions based upon “language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and . . . the subjective self-identification of people” (4). Through these primordial divisions, communities (which Huntington groups according to the broader rubric of civilizations) seek to maintain intact, self-regulating identities, set firmly against the challenge of outsiders who differ according to any combination of the above elements. One unfortunate result of such sectarian commitments is that “interactions among peoples of different civilizations enhance the civilization-consciousness of people which, in turn, invigorates differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back deep into history” (6). But just as these


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divisions set in, or perhaps due to the technologies that enable and intensify interactions across the boundaries of civilizations, a complication arises: “People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and boundaries of civilization change” (5). This rather neutral statement ostensibly reflects an inevitable development of peoples moving across geographical borders; yet a great deal of anxiety often attaches to such moments of redefinition, as emphasized in the contexts the following chapters provide for readings of Faulkner, Ellison, and Rushdie. American nativism of the 1920s; political and ethnic conflicts in 1930s New York; postmodern intellectual cosmopolitanism; and native–immigrant divisions in historical and contemporary southern communities: each of these provokes writers to represent the complexities of individual, communal, and national redefinition that have resulted from America’s traditional openness to immigration. The movement of peoples across geographic borders is of course one of the primary means by which these globally influenced, local changes occur; it is also, according to Arjun Appadurai, one of the constitutive elements of globalization. In Modernity at Large (1996), Appadurai proposes that the double and interrelated effects of mass migration and world-spanning media define globalization.3 These two elements particularly account for the ruptures between past and present that he identifies as the preeminent sign of modernity and which in turn have posed unprecedented problems for the modern nationstate. One consequence of far-reaching media and far-traveling peoples is the production of locality “in new, globalized ways” that call into question traditional presumptions about the locally circumscribed composition of national community and the nature of national belonging (9). The traditional belief that national identity requires individuals living continuously in a rooted way alongside identifiably similar counterparts in particular(ized) places is primarily under interrogation in a globalized moment. Responding to this premise, Appadurai encourages understandings of “locality itself [as] a historical product” and calls for the accompanying recognition “that the histories through which localities emerge are eventually subject to the dynamics of the global” (18). Appadurai focuses especially on the imaginative dimension of how local spaces respond to their unprecedented encounters with global presences, both in terms of culture and migration. While admitting that the politics of representation in such a context is a longstanding feature of immigration dynamics, he identifies new concerns that are produced specifically by globalization: What is new is that this is a world in which both points of departure and points of arrival are in cultural flux, and thus the search for steady points

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Race, Immigration, and American Identity of reference . . . can be very difficult. It is in this atmosphere that the invention of tradition (and of ethnicity, kinship, and other identity markers) can become slippery, as the search for certainties is frustrated by the fluidities of transnational communication . . . [Traditional collective cultures therefore] become . . . an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences. (44, emphasis mine)

Appadurai gestures towards the aesthetic work’s role in articulating resistance to new threats to a local community’s self-conception. The array of cultural components available to the writer’s imagination becomes an “arena for conscious choice” in which selected emphases highlight alien differences and thus re-emphasize the community’s internal unity against outsiders. This phenomenon arises in response not to simple migration, but to the rapidity with which it occurs in a globalized world, from the vantage of previously isolated, internally homogenous locales. The vexed response of native southerners to Italian immigrant arrivals in their region, which Faulkner depicts, is equally a response to the increased mobility to, from, and within a once-static space now faced with new racial and economic threats to its precarious stability. When dealing with immigrants, Faulkner’s fiction both attends to and describes the difficulty of maintaining continuous self-conceptions of group identity in light of such destabilizing arrivals and departures. One response, according to Appadurai, is the studied (re)invention of a coherent, static communal identity, a reaching back to past-based versions that gain new currency as bulwarks against present-day and future change, a formulation that recalls Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “time-lag” (141).4 The consequence, which Appadurai discerns in the workings of the local imaginary, and which I in turn locate in its literary representations, is an understanding of “culture as the process of naturalizing a subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate group identity” (15). Culture’s significance as an instrument of local identity emerges precisely when its producers realize that “groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogenous” (48). Distressed by the rupturing of traditional connections between soil and blood and by forms of identity not originating in these conjoined components, Faulkner and Ellison after him dedicated their writing to the re-entrenchment of American identity within the parameters of U.S. southern, regionalist community. This study contends that they depict immigrants as responsible for, in Walter D. Mignolo’s observation regarding globalization and national


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identity, the “uncoupling of the ‘natural’ link between languages and nations, languages and national memories, languages and national literature” (42). Faulkner and Ellison, while tacitly recognizing the artificiality of claims that traditional national identity is pure and natural, commit their writing to imaginative interrogations of that identity in hopes of re-inscribing its indigenous value. These efforts were undertaken in support of their respective wider ambitions. For Faulkner, these involved achieving reconciliation between the American South’s racially divided populations; between the South and the wider nation; and between the South’s historically agrarian way of life and encroaching industrialization. Ellison’s wider ambitions were concerned with forging reconciliation between native black Americans and their white, historically dominant counterparts; between black claims to American identity and the nation’s historical denial of them; and between indigenous black cultural expression and the nation’s overall cultural selfunderstanding. Meanwhile, Rushdie seeks to reconcile his career-long interests in post-national, migrant identity with archetypal American immigrant identity; his presumption of the basic fragmentation of the Third World immigrant’s life in a First World metropolis with the absurd superfluity of peoples and cultures to be found in contemporary New York; and his presentation of stereotypical American immigrant ambitions with his critique of modern American economic and cultural power. In committing his writing to such goals, Rushdie would seem to represent the other side of globalization, the outside forces transforming the local spaces of the United States, a phenomenon he depicts in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). But because Ground seeks so aggressively to establish a post-national alternative to the rooted forms of American identity that Faulkner’s and Ellison’s writings seek to affirm, the many American and southern particularities of Ground ’s wildly hybrid terrain are potholed with problematic instances of studied racial blindness and ignorance-as-irony in relation to American history. Compared with Faulkner’s and Ellison’s historically defined, indigenous concerns, Rushdie’s interest in American experience seems purposefully committed to a superficial rendering, with the intention of revealing such superficiality to be in fact a constituent element of American-ness that results from the nation’s longstanding openness to immigration. Yet Rushdie seeks to avoid the consequent, problematic implications of what Jürgen Habermas calls “place polygamy”—the multiple and partial belongings that post-national, migrant types exhibit and often celebrate as the nature of their geographic commitments in a globalized age—by establishing Ground as an updated version of a traditional American immigrant narrative (quoted by Barlow 70). In fact, the narrative energy of Rushdie’s

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novel begins with a desire to leave behind the (by comparison) monolith of Old World colonial and postcolonial experience for the pluralist abundance of American life. In doing so, Rushdie’s Americans maintain a series of over-lapping, even contradictory commitments (inside and outside the U.S.) whose own natural and historical connections have been both enabled and compromised by continual acts of globe-spanning migration and by mass media’s global reach. Chapter Two contends that Rushdie’s novel proposes an America populated by immigrants drawn to the nation by “the seductiveness of a plural belonging, of becoming American while staying somehow diasporic,” in Appadurai’s description of what the contemporary United States offers newcomers (170). These immigrant efforts are directed by and into the tempting power of a globally present American free market, and they produce a trans-national pop culture phenomenon: a world-famous rock group. The contradictory success of this musical venture leads the novel to question the possibility of preserving genuine locality for its own sake in an age wary of locally rooted forms of national, particularly American national identity. In turning first to Rushdie, I seek to establish and interrogate the imagined terrain of an immigrant-dominated America. Provided through a postmodern, global imaginary attuned to the contradictions of late era capitalism, Rushdie’s America reveals the historical, racial, cultural, and linguistic outcomes of perpetual movement into and around the nation over the course of the twentieth century. In the subsequent chapters, which consider Ellison, and Faulkner’s anxieties about national identity, immigrants, and their effect upon local spaces, Rushdie’s multitudinous America reverberates, as do questions about the consequences of American identity as imagined by an aesthetic so insistently unhinged from geographically immediate and historically framed experiences. These concerns emerge in light of Rushdie’s dependence upon what Appadurai, like Mignolo, recognizes as a principal feature of globalization: “the unyoking of imagination from place” (58). This feature leads Appadurai to pose a question that describes a central issue for studies of Rushdie’s American fiction, and of Faulkner’s and Ellison’s respective efforts: “what is the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized, deterritorialized world?” (58, 56). Indeed, Paul Jay has observed that “it has become increasingly difficult to study . . . American literature without situating it, and the culture(s) from which it emerged, in transnational histories linked to globalization” (33). Building from this premise, Jay thereafter proposes, “we can more effectively reorganize our approach to the study of what we have heretofore treated as national literatures . . . by emphasizing [their] relation to the historical processes of globalization” (33).


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Immigration has been a prime factor in creating the relation that Jay describes; it has also increased awareness among modern American writers of the globalized situating of their imagined local spaces. To assist in elaborating this contention, the following chapters incorporate globalization theory as a means of establishing and clarifying the ways in which the local has been transformed and indeed structured by the global, via the entry of immigrants into rural southern and metropolitan northern settings. Just as significant, however, is the way literary works attest to the local’s transformation and re-structuring of global presences, which in a modern American context has involved the often re-imposition of binary black-and-white understandings upon hybrid other-ness. A key factor in these exchanges, as Andrew Barlow observes, is [t]he fundamental relationship of race, [which] is a social conflict: white versus nonwhite [because] whiteness denotes the status of racial privilege . . . [and] is thus a relative concept, one that can only be defined by the state of oppression reserved for those designated as nonwhite. (Barlow 14, 12)

The ensuing chapters devote especial attention to moments in texts where the white/nonwhite distinction is complicated by the presence of immigrants whose geographic, racial, linguistic, and cultural compositions often subvert the very American need to divide people into two strict, singularly homogeneous racial categories. By attending to representations of whiteness (and blackness) as another factor related to locality and national identity, this study further seeks to contribute to an understanding of what Barlow calls “the way in which the specific national histories of race and current racial structures intersect with the new dynamics of globalization” (14). As we shall see, such an ambition also responds to the direction that U.S. literary studies have taken in the early twenty-first century. II: AMERICAN LITERATURE’S LOCAL AND WORLD CONTEXTS Studies of the immigrant’s representation in American literature and, as it were, his invitation into the nation’s literary tradition naturally relate to considerations of America’s links to the wider world, a premise that has of late come to the foreground in U.S. literary studies. The New American Studies movement is now involved in critical work that confirms, according to Peter Schmidt and Amritjit Singh, that “U.S. literature past and present is increasingly being studied within the context of the global literatures in Eng-

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lish” (viii).5 According to these two scholars, “We may now be said to be in a ‘transnational moment,’ increasingly aware of the ways in which local and national narratives . . . cannot be conceived apart from a radically new sense of our shared human histories and our growing global interdependence” (viii). I share Schmidt and Singh’s interest in the interconnection and intersection of internal (local and national) narratives with global forces and locations; more specifically, my readings emphasize the subsequent reframing of the immigrant’s status in American writing, and the immigrant’s influence upon native and foreign representations of American identity. Schmidt and Singh gesture towards a new type of interest in the immigrant’s presence in American literature by proposing that “[t]o think transnationally about literature, history, and culture requires a study of the evolution of hybrid identities within nation-states and diasporic identities across national identities” (viii, authors’ emphasis).6 The distinction they make between two forms of hybrid identity correlates to the distinction made in the following pages between internal hybridity and external hybridity. Read together, Faulkner, Ellison, and Rushdie register a struggle between internal hybridity—composite American identity based on racial and geographic categories that originate in the nation’s historical past—and external hybridity—the composite produced by present-day immigrants introducing foreign components and modifications to established categories of American self-conception. Of particular interest, as the following chapters disclose, are the various juxtapositions of hybrid identities within and across nations to which Faulkner, Ellison, and Rushdie were each responding.7 Rushdie’s late twentieth-century writing imagines the ways in which modern American imperial power and perpetual immigration have combined to fracture “American” as a stable national definition into “American” as a post-national signifier of practices, dispersed amongst a culturally, racially, and geographically hybrid citizenry. In Rushdie’s handling, ever-new immigrants ensure that America remains perpetually forward-focused and heterogeneous in its composition, even if this leads to an increasingly damaging effect upon the world at large. Ellison, writing at mid-century, was also attuned to “American” as a set of practices; contrary to Rushdie, Ellison intends these to be internally focused and ordered to the renovation of “American” as a hybrid national identity that reaches beyond native whiteness only to native blackness, which in turn led Ellison to represent negatively globally diverse immigrants whose presence and interests disrupted such national reintegration. Faulkner, writing in an earlier part of the century, was starting to see how America’s global presence led to unprecedented changes in American local spaces, with the immigrant characterized as responsible (as


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in Ellison) for disruptions of past-based continuities and equally responsible (as in Rushdie) for altering the future composition of the nation. III: DISLOCATIONS OF THE MODERN NATION, AND THE WRITER’S RESPONSE Current critical interest in the concept of hybridity has been largely influenced by the work of Homi K. Bhabha, who has encouraged literary scholars 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” (1). We can witness such moments in the dramatization of competing immigrant and native voices, which together produce a hybrid national register. For example, in the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury (1929) a young white southerner realizes he cannot feel at home in either Mississippi (his place of origin) or Massachusetts (the site of articulated difference). Mississippi and Massachusetts assume these positions when the protagonist encounters Italian immigrants and transplanted black southerners mixing in racial and linguistic ways that break his connection to both places. In light of Faulkner’s sympathetic treatment of Quentin’s difficulties, Bhabha’s theory of articulated difference assists us in understanding why native-born writers committed to a historically based, composite definition of American identity (black or white or some combination therein) have stigmatized immigrants in their writing. A primary reason is that “the political unity of the nation consists in a continual displacement of the anxiety of its irredeemably plural modern space” (148, emphasis mine). To achieve reconciliation between the South’s internal populations and between the region and wider nation, Faulkner and Ellison depended upon past-based conceptions of American identity. Plurality—historically understood—was a burdensome complexity they were willing to engage. But plurality in a modern form—the result of new forms of immigration—proved recalcitrant to their bi-racial, regionally focused ambitions for America’s rehabilitation. This led them to represent immigrants as charlatan-Americans rejected by patriotic natives (in Ellison, as evident in a climactic moment in Invisible Man, analyzed in Chapter Three) or violently assigned to more traditional categories of American identity (in Faulkner, as we shall see in the murder of Light in August’s Joe Christmas, discussed in a later section of the present chapter). Both Faulkner and Ellison represent immigrants as especially responsible for the distancing of America from its organic self-conception and continuous development. Bhabha identifies such rupturing as the preeminent

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sign of change in the modern nation’s understanding of its identity and composition: The problem is not simply the “selfhood” of the nation as opposed to the otherness of other nations. We are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population. The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourse of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference. (148)

The “tense locations” that Bhabha describes are typically local zones, such as we find, for example, in the U.S. South. The process of immigration as a disrupter of internal homogeneity is today regarded as newly present in a region stereotypically presumed to be somewhat static, if (internally) mixed in its population. As Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith propose, “the ‘regionalist concept’ is transmogrified by the changing dictates of transnational postmodernism, not least of which is the recent influx of immigrants to the South” (16). While Salman Rushdie’s American fiction, situating an Indo-Greek immigrant girl in 1940s rural Virginia, proves particularly if problematically demonstrative of Jones and Monteith’s point, we can extend backward our critical awareness of the changes and challenges to southern regionalist understanding that immigrants have brought about by attending to their presences in Faulkner’s and Ellison’s works. By examining writing on this phenomenon that spans the twentieth century, this study reveals the continuities and discontinuities that exist between surprisingly different writers and contexts, linked together by shared southern spaces and responses to immigrant presences within them. We can find these connections between, for example, Booker T. Washington in 1895 Atlanta, railing against new immigrants supplanting local black labor, and Robert Olen Butler evoking 1990s small-town Louisiana, where Vietnamese immigrants living “on the Westbank do not like [those Vietnamese] in Versailles”(15). From Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) to Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992), the contestation of local space has developed from a traditional struggle between insiders and outsiders to a conflict among fellow outsiders whose past national distinctions (North and South Vietnamese) repeat themselves in a regional setting of their new country, where, as it happens, minor geographic distinctions have historically been valued. Butler’s writing suggests


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that contemporary Vietnamese immigrants further complicate the South’s self-splitting and contribute to the ever-expanding plurality of American national identity. One result of this fracturing, especially for earlier native-born American writers witnessing these changes, is the onset of the “unhomely,” which Bhabha defines as “a paradigmatic colonial and post-colonial condition [that] has a resonance that can be heard distinctly, if erratically, in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of transhistorical sites” (9). Faulkner, with his seemingly odd pairing of Quentin Compson, native MississippiAmerican, and an Italian immigrant girl, doubly registers the unhomely, in that neither character can be fully at home in Boston because of both their incommensurate backgrounds abutting each other and the animosity of a local, xenophobic population. We need not press for a postcolonial reading of Faulkner’s fiction to establish the applicability of Bhabha’s theoretical frameworks to his writing; a sense of the unhomely, related specifically to the onset of modernity in his region, courses through Faulkner’s work. And his response, which Chapter Four argues was an attempt to maintain an intact vision of the historically continuous, organic U.S. South, fails in its very act of articulation. As Bhabha explains, “scraps, patches and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a coherent national culture, while the very act of the narrative performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects” (145, emphasis mine). By writing immigrant dialect and representing responses to the presence of immigrants in the South, Faulkner enlarges the “circle of national subjects” that he knew composed modern America, while simultaneously seeking to reject immigrants because they were directly responsible for rendering southern life linguistically, historically, and racially incoherent. The onset of industrial modernity in the U.S. South and the related arrival of immigrant labor provokes Faulkner to represent immigrants if only to exclude them eventually from his imagined local communities. Yet as a result of these alien presences, Faulkner cannot ultimately delineate a firmly traditional image of his native land. The unintended result of his representations of immigrants is an understanding of Faulkner’s South as an unexpected “new international space of discontinuous historical realities” where “the disintegrative moment, even movement, of enunciation [of an immigrant presence]—that sudden disjunction of the present—makes possible the rendering of culture’s global reach” (Bhabha 217). Bhabha’s concept of the time-lag directs us to literary moments where we can find “that sudden disjunction of the present,” particularly in Ralph Ellison’s writing. Bhabha explains that in response to unprecedented elements of modernity entering into traditional, national settings, writers endow “[the past’s] dead symbols [with] the circulatory life of the ‘sign’ of the present, of passage” (254).

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In Invisible Man (1952), Ellison represents the tensions that resulted from the coincidence of two modern American historical phenomena: the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to northern cities, and the New Immigration of Eastern European (and Caribbean) immigrants to these same places.8 Chapter Three contends that Ellison’s protagonist feels a “strange, out of joint quality” upon reaching New York in part because his attempt to establish new roots there relates partially and therefore problematically to similar efforts by fellow recent arrivals from outside America (IM 160). As we shall see, brittle a-symmetries between native and immigrant minority groups provoke Invisible Man (and in part the author himself for the rest of his career) to try to keep alive an appreciation for the southern, rural, black past in a northern, urban, mixed present. Bhabha’s concept of the time-lag proves to be a helpful instrument for explaining how such historical and geographical commitments, challenged by rapid changes in population, motivate generally antagonistic portrayals of immigrants in Ellison. Though racial, cultural, and linguistic factors are involved, a fear of historical amnesia regarding America’s traditionally under-privileged peoples and regions primarily moved Ellison and before him Faulkner to press for the inclusion of the historical past—embodied in rural southerners, black and white—in the national present. This was to occur alongside, instead of, and (especially for Ellison) against similar attempts at inclusion attempted by immigrants. For Bhabha, the metropolis—rather than the rural settings mined by Faulkner and, in more complicated ways, by Ellison—attests to the heterogeneity of the nation, the resulting conflicts, and the survival strategies available to racial minorities and newly arrived immigrants. Declaring that the “Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history . . . as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity,” Bhabha is particularly interested in fictions attending to the movement of the formerly colonized to the imperial center (the India/Caribbean-to-London corridor, for example) (170, emphasis mine). With The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie offers a postmodern version of just such a narrative but, for the first time in his career, tests its relevance in an American context.9 Obliquely rewriting Elvis Presley’s rise to fame, he in part reimagines the rural U.S. South, via Bombay, as productive of global rock stars whose trajectories are mediated through post-national, city-based identities. These wildly successful characters are in turn entangled by the contradictions inherent to America’s Third World influence and Third World immigrant contributions to America. The explosive forms of hybridity that Rushdie emphasizes throughout Ground as emphatically American tend to underplay economic disparities and dissimilar historical experiences amongst minority groups within America.


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While not imaginatively rejecting newer Americans, as do Faulkner and Ellison, Rushdie effectively bypasses historically grounded types of Americans in his writing. Perhaps more galling to Faulkner and Ellison, in seeking to advance the terms for defining American space and identity, Rushdie provides a willfully heterodox reformulation of the native presence in the nation whenever he does touch upon it. His novel describes a universal America/n effectively unhinged from indigenous complexities of race and history, and always-already postmodern in its linguistic and cultural development. While aggressive in its reimagination of America, Rushdie’s novel, like Ellison’s and Faulkner’s fiction, still depends upon a series of traditional distinctions— urban/rural, immigrant/native, national/foreign, and homogenous/heterogeneous—to describe how immigration enables local spaces to transform others and create unprecedented global linkages of historically isolated places. In considering these phenomena, Bhabha asks: “How do we think this relation of locality whose every ebb and flow requires the re-inscription of global relations?” (40) Answering this question in an American literary context leads to a re-positioning of Faulkner, Ellison, and Rushdie into a shared constellation, and connects each writer more fully to global concerns. In support of this grouping, my argument devotes especial attention to aesthetic renderings of the jarring sounds of native/immigrant dis-locations, and to considerations of the relationship between language, national identity, and imagined community. IV: ACCENTS, EXCLUSIONS, INCLUSIONS: WRITING THE IMAGINED COMMUNITY Raymond Williams’s account of the fractious if fertile nature of language’s historical development provides a promising theoretical avenue for a scholarly exploration of national identity and representations of immigrants in twentieth-century American fiction: This [type of study] recognizes, as any study of language must, that there is indeed community between past and present, but also that community—that difficult word—is not the only possible description of these relations between past and present; that there are also radical change, discontinuity, and conflict, and that all these are still at issue and are indeed still occurring. (23)

Williams posits two forms of linguistic development that, of necessity, seem to be antagonistic. Either language grows from past to present amongst a

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group that gains unity through this organic development, or language emerges at fissure points that open up between disparate individuals who in turn disrupt communal self-definition. I propose that these two forms of linguistic creation are evident in the ways that writers represent national identity in evolution (or devolution) in America, along the internal and external axes of hybridity. As we shall see, Faulkner, Ellison, and Rushdie variously reveal and then straddle the line between organic and grafted languages and, by invoked association, between organic and grafted types of Americans. Williams is not alone, of course, in attending to the relationship between community and language. As Benedict Anderson observed in Imagined Communities (1983), “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6, emphases mine). For Faulkner and Ellison, imagined community, on local, regional, and national levels, requires a commitment to calibrations of falsity and genuineness, which is intended to maintain continuities of composition and self-understanding in the face of radical disruptions. Meanwhile, for Rushdie, the stylized falsity of imagined community in America constitutes the nation’s only genuine trait, and the discontinuous intervention of immigrants is precisely what ensures its (a)historical unity. In the case of all three writers, defining the nature of American hybridity—in language, racial composition, and geographic settings—constitutes their prime motivation for determining the nature (false, genuine, or some combination) of imagined communities in America. Analyzed together, Faulkner, Ellison, and Rushdie register the struggle between internal hybridity and external hybridity, terms whose currency becomes clearest when we realize that literature often represents the in gestation struggles of communities intent upon defining themselves. In an American setting, this often works according to an insider/ outsider distinction; for Faulkner, Ellison, and Rushdie, such a boundary is perpetually under revision and open to transgression. Each writer, however, discloses a different position regarding who is, and who is not, allowed to reform and/or defend the boundary. Additionally, each writer differs on how to regulate that limit, and the stakes involved in its circumscription. At the end of Light in August (1932), for instance, Faulkner delineates the repressive mechanisms of the imaginary that a local southern community depends upon—in the literal face of a suspected outsider—to maintain internal self-cohesion. In many ways, Faulkner’s writing can be understood according to the stylistic mode that Anderson proposes, and the structural pattern that Rosemary George has delineated.10 Taken together, these premises reveal, in Faulkner’s fiction, how the continual positing of internal/external and native/immigrant distinctions eventually collapses forms of difference


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that have historically proven vexatious within America, such as black/white and North/South. After witnessing the lynching of Joe Christmas—whose manifold identities, particularly as a new immigrant to the U.S. South, make him a threat to the locally defined sense of community in the novel—the men gathered around him are tellingly transformed: [U]pon that black blast [of blood from his pale body] the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there . . . not fading and not particularly threatful. (LA 465)

Despite being taken for an Italian immigrant at intervals throughout the novel, the style of Joe’s death defines him by and within the traditional black-and-white binary of U.S. southern life. With his identity thus fixed according to locally circumscribed standards, he becomes a uniting thread for these men, who, in Faulkner’s description, themselves collectively and imaginatively (re)assert an unbroken line of continuity into the “mirroring faces” of their children. Faulkner here alerts us to a southern community’s compulsive dependence upon a carefully calibrated line of perceived internal unity that gains force especially when the local is challenged by potential outsideness. In Faulkner’s description, the people of Jefferson, whether focused upon past defeats or future possibilities, remain homogeneously composed, reliant upon an image of Joe Christmas as a southern black man lynched in accord with local forms of justice. The final image of Joe is not “particularly threatful” because it has become, as it were, particularly local. Here, then, we witness the style of a U.S. southern community’s achievement and maintenance of its identity, to borrow from Anderson: it arises in the communal working of the imagination dedicated to (re)establishing stable homogeneity, based upon the exclusion of an unwanted, threatening outsider. We can also see in the blackening of Joe Christmas the coercive means by which immigrants whose identities—historical, geographic, and racial— are not defined according to America’s historically internal categories are forced to fit into them. As Werner Sollors argued in Beyond Ethnicity (1986), concepts of ethnicity in America—of what it means to be black, white, and/ or a natural American—are invented according to the power relations of a specific moment and particular context. Sollors’s premise invites critical studies of the processes by which such forms of identity come into creation and gain traction in America. In focusing on the interrelation of particular group

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identities (localized and racially -based) with national identity, the ensuing chapters argue that the complexities of imagined community in twentiethcentury American literature result from writers confronting unprecedented other groups simultaneously seeking recognition as national subjects. The efforts of these new groups arise often in tandem with the similar claims of local, historically marginalized communities, within U.S. southern, globally southern, and metropolitan settings. Writers responding to these tensions, including Faulkner, Mark Twain, Ellison, the contributors to The New Negro, and, more recently, Rushdie, current U.S. southern, and Vietnamese-immigrant writers, imagine the processes by which notions of American national identity come into being amidst competing claims. This seemingly disparate grouping comes into common focus when we recognize that the various efforts of these writers occur within a recurrently southern context, ranging from the locally southern efforts of Twain and Washington to the globally southern efforts of Butler and Rushdie. V: WRITING THE NEW “POLYSOUTH” In their introduction to a collection of essays on new approaches to U.S. southern studies, Jones and Monteith encourage scholars “to chart connections with ‘other’ Souths in ways that open up spaces and places from which we might read the region as a site of exchange” (10). They further propose that literary scholars in particular should attend to under-studied, other Souths that native writers have revealed as surprisingly interconnected to the American South. Such links are clear in new Vietnamese immigrant writing like Butler’s, or in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997).11 We also find them in Faulkner’s and Ellison’s representations of Italian and Caribbean immigrants as obliquely and potentially fellow southerners to native-born American southerners. Indeed, the literary readings that result from this book’s premise and collection of writers will both respond to Jones and Monteith and also seek to complicate Barbara Ladd’s argument about southern studies, that “once a site [whether inside or outside the United States] is called southern, it is clearly racialized in black and white, and other racial and ethnic identities are constructed with reference to that categorical divide” (1630). Beyond the writers mentioned above, Rushdie’s recent fiction, in drawing a series of parallels between Indian, Vietnamese, Mexican, and traditional black-andwhite U.S. experience within a globally southern context, even more explicitly opens the region up to non-binary understandings of its identity, while also inviting new considerations of a classic premise of American literary scholarship: the relationship of southern space to southern identity.


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Scott Romine’s observations on location and southern literature provide a promising theoretical context for reading Salman Rushdie in an American literary setting. Romine suggests that “the question ‘What is southern literature?’ necessarily turns on the question ‘Where is southern literature?’” (24) Contemporary attempts to define southern literature can no longer be provided by recourse to authorial identity or even setting; indirectly gesturing towards the problematic phenomenon of de-territorialization that characterizes globalization, Romine proposes that “‘southern’ is, finally, irreducible to geographical criteria. But at the same time, geographical criteria can never be removed from the equation” (27). Romine further recommends that current analyses of writers’ attempts to represent the South as “qualitative geography” must take into account longstanding and new ways in which the region has been defined. In support of this effort, Romine offers a conventional series of factors that continue to figure into southern identity—economic, geographic, ideological, cultural, historical (28). His final component, however, is particularly innovative, and encourages the development of a global context for U.S. southern studies: “orientation,” which he defines as “an identification [on a writer’s part] with or positive orientation toward one or more of the preceding ‘Souths’” (28). Chapter Two’s analysis of Rushdie’s engagement of historical and imagined U.S. southern experiences in The Ground Beneath Her Feet introduces to U.S. southern studies a type of southern-ness that is different from internally focused discoveries of previously unacknowledged southern experience.12 In reading Rushdie’s representation of an intersecting American and global south, the following chapter relates to current work by George Handley and critical compilations by Jon Smith and Debra Cohn, which have sought to extend and re-imagine the geographic and historical boundaries of southern studies.13 But Rushdie’s writing, with its willfully skewed connections to conventionally drawn and circumscribed settings, offers a further challenge to literary scholars’ present critical commitments to extend the parameters of southern studies (and, by extension, U.S. literary studies). Romine explains that “regionalism, traditionally conceived, presupposes ‘place’ not as mere geography but as . . . a distinctive limitation of the possibilities of plot, character, and narrative subjectivity” (41). Imagining American geography, race, and history with the license of Magic Realism, Rushdie radically transgresses traditional understandings of regionalism. Yet the studied specificity of his representation of the U.S. South in Ground (alongside Indian, Vietnamese, and Mexican Souths) suggests the problematic persistence of local geography as a primary determinant of American national identity in its literary representations. Rushdie attempts to diminish the significance of

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this rooting by imagining a (New York) metropolitan present as permanently and ideally, if perhaps idealistically, containing all fragments of global southern experience and thereby resolving the problem of competing immigrant and minority/native claims to national identity and local spaces in America. His attempt, through a postmodern, poly-southern, American fiction, as we shall see, represents but the most recent in a century-long tradition of writers attempting to resolve the relationship between movement, nation, race, and place in an (ever) globalized United States.

Chapter Two

Salman Rushdie’s American Idyll

In the present chapter, I argue that Salman Rushdie’s engagement of contemporary American experience transgresses national borders and concepts of identity, the likes of which Faulkner and Ellison were deeply invested in maintaining. Writing in the post–World War II era, in which the United States exerts a commanding influence abroad, particularly in Third World countries, Rushdie offers a critical rendering of the transnational inequalities of contemporary economic and cultural production. Rushdie’s aim, however, surpasses a simple critique of American global might; in fact, he seeks to imagine America as embodying a set of practices. This is an extraterritorial gesture that playfully dismisses organic connections between identity, place, and history. Provocatively, Rushdie suggests that the consequent uprooting is both the product of contemporary globalization—media and migration together dismantling intact, homogeneous local places—and a longstanding feature of American life itself. As we shall see, with Ground Rushdie ultimately seeks to reveal how modern globalization and traditional forms of American mobility combine to render American identity a phantasmagoric masquerade that makes the careful measurements of authenticity which so occupied Faulkner and Ellison exercises in futility. The following sections of this chapter attend to the subtle and fabulist means by which Rushdie attempts to set up his extraterritorial vision of America in the context of his longstanding interests in the imaginary, immigration, and national identity. As a whole, the chapter analyzes the ambitions and presumptions of Ground’s three main characters regarding their respective claims to be considered American and their reception as such. It also considers the novel’s comic presentations of American identity as studied impersonation; Ground’s circular logic regarding American identity formation; and its dark implications for the fate of a globally dominant United

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States. Finally, the chapter indicates Rushdie’s own inadvertent compromise with the cultural and economic globalization that Ground critiques. Throughout his writing, Salman Rushdie has tested alternatives to conventional categories of identity, reserving an especial suspicion and critique of traditional, rooted nationalism and privileging instead the migrant figure free(d) from the confines of national commitment. In a well-known essay on Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Rushdie identifies the film as the product of that odd thing, the migrant sensibility, whose development I believe to be one of the central themes of this century of displaced persons. To be a migrant is, perhaps, to be the only species of human being free of the shackles of nationalism (to say nothing of its ugly sister, patriotism). It is a burdensome freedom. (IH 124)

Shortly after this recognition of the post-national migrant’s difficult freedom, Rushdie explicates the figure’s concomitant strength: “[He] suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier” (IH 125). The nation is an illusion meant to coerce, confine, or reject individuals; the migrant alone arrives at this recognition thanks to his fluid identity and mobility, which together enable him to occupy multiple positions vis-à-vis the nation—within, without, throughout. Such proposals have provoked disputes in Rushdie criticism. In a 2003 review of new books on Rushdie’s writing, Andrew Teverson delineates “two distinct camps”: In the one camp are those writers and critics who believe that Rushdie’s tendency to incorporate and rework previous systems of thinking and writing is enabling because it allows him to take down the master’s house using the master’s own tools. In the other camp are those who argue that Rushdie, in establishing his oppositional politics in relation to colonial modes of writing, identifies postcolonialism as a political form that can only ever reply to, and revalidate, a colonialist center. (332)

The critical debate over Rushdie concerns the allegedly co-dependent relationship that exists between postcolonial writing and colonial inheritance, and the purported advantages of the postcolonial writer’s politico-aesthetic agenda. Scholars such as A.D. Needham and Jaina Sanga are among recent contributors to the first camp, which generally esteems Rushdie as the heroic voice of the displaced, converting minority experiences of rejection into the difficult but


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exemplary liberty of the post-national global citizen. Aijaz Ahmad and literary critic Gillian Gane, among others, have established the latter.1 These competing critical positions are determined by differing responses to Rushdie’s formulations of the relationship between national identity, displacement, and movement, and the interrelation of the imagination, immigration, and local spaces. Standing between these critical camps, Timothy Brennan has offered a more measured response to Rushdie. He is critical of the class and race insensitivities implicit in Rushdie’s cosmopolitan sensibility, while remaining alert to the author’s complex reformulation of questions of literary form, nation, and individual identity. By emphasizing the relationship between postcolonial experience and postmodernism as central to Rushdie, Brennan provides a more nuanced premise for reading his work than do partisan defenders and critics.2 According to Brennan, “Rushdie is best seen as a critic for whom ‘fiction’ in the monumental sense of high modernism is no longer preferable. . . . His novels, in short, are metafictions, and their range of interests neocolonial. That is, they are novels about Third-World novels” (85). Reformulating Brennan’s thesis, we can understand Rushdie’s first major novel on American experiences, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), as an ambivalent treatment of a contemporary form of neocolonization, as manifested in the relationship that has developed between Third World nations and the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. With the onset of modern cultural and economic globalization, the novel suggests, “Americana international” subsumes the Third World through the sway and reach of pop culture and consumable commodities, and re-creates each absorbed country into a “consumer-serf (and supplier of cheap labour)” (GB 441). In addition to provoking migration—the would-be immigrant’s desire is to experience firsthand the American Dream promised by its marketable appurtenances—this global America also produces amongst its neocolonial subjects new types of alienation and requires new types of imaginary homelands, a key concept in Rushdie’s work. In his earlier writing, Rushdie proposed the imagination as the means by which newcomers are able to find a measure of freedom from xenophobic immigrant experience and from colonial obsessions, predominantly within the U.K. imperial center. Through the workings of the imagination, immigrants are able both to survive culturally within their new surroundings and to maintain some type of necessary, rehabilitating relationship to their past. In his essay “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie observed that exiles, emigrants [and] expatriates are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back . . . [but] our physical alienation from

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Race, Immigration, and American Identity India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; . . . we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (IH 10)

Although Rushdie here waxes poetic about the imaginary substitutions that dislocated individuals must rely upon for sustenance, he endorses uprooting and post-national identity as noble actions throughout his writing. Repeatedly, and without achieving resolution of these terms prior to Ground, Rushdie has attempted to describe the relationship of imagination to movement, and in turn their relation to local space. His wider ambition has been to resolve the problem of home in philosophical (postmodern) and historical (postcolonial) periods where such a term has lost its conventional meaning and function. In The Jaguar Smile (1987), his travelogue of Nicaragua during its 1980s civil war, Rushdie reflected that “the revolution had really been an act of migration [for rural farmers] . . . They were inventing their country, and, more than that, themselves” in movement, resettlement, and attachment to a new local space ( JS 86). Such meditations, which Rushdie further explains were provoked by “the idea of home [which has] never stopped being a problem for me,” are indicative of his obsession with questions of belonging that arise within, yet are not contained or explained by, national contexts ( JS 86). A revolution, however, is not “really” an “act of migration,” except in the most obliquely metaphoric sense, and those Nicaraguan farmers were not inventing a country so much as claiming it from Contra forces. Rushdie tends to apply his immigrant-imagination thesis to most any setting or problem that involves geography, movement, and questions of national identity. This tactic opens him up to charges of over-intellectualizing and aestheticizing political and historical complexities. Indeed, the narrator in Shame (1983), whom Rushdie has acknowledged as a stand-in for himself, attempts to anticipate such criticism when he informs us that The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exists, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this off-centring to be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate (S 22–23).3

The self-consciously stylized qualifications that here define a “not quite” Pakistan are not needed, suggests Rushdie’s latest major novel, for America.


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In an often comic register, The Ground Beneath Her Feet affirms America variously as a land of immigrant dreams come true, a green-card issuing and denying First World state, a global marketer of movie- and music-backed perfect lives, and a capitalist-consumer world power. Ground ’s America exists in a confusing matrix of fiction and reality, unlike Shame’s Pakistan, which was defined by more nuanced distinctions between the historical place and its oblique but explicitly fictional counterpart. America as represented in The Ground Beneath Her Feet in fact operates according to a basic premise of globalization, as Appadurai describes it: The lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes [viewed and experienced by Third World audiences] are blurred, so that the farther these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct imagined worlds that are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects. (35)

This description captures the motivations of the novel’s narrator, Rai, and his friend Ormus to immigrate to their imagined versions of America, but in Rushdie’s handling, the idealized images produced by global “mediascapes” are not revealed as coercive confections (35). Rather, the problem and potential of the modern American nation-state, as he imagines it, is that no one in it can distinguish between fiction and history, the authentic and the impersonated, the citizen and the foreigner, the native and the immigrant. Moreover, and particularly troubling to the other authors under consideration in this study, no one in this America really cares whether something is real or imagined, or whether someone is a true American or a false American. In a nation so heterogeneous in its composition and protean in its cultural development, such questions, the novel proposes, are in fact impossible to answer. Any anxieties that do arise are easily ignored, provided that material comforts and aesthetic enjoyments ever increase. And the anxiety is eventually alleviated by the fact that no one in Rushdie’s America remembers long enough to tell the differences anyway. Throughout Ground, Rushdie suggests that the multiplicity of histories brought to the United States by its immigrants has resulted in such excess that it produces a condition of effective pastlessness for American society. In Rushdie’s formulation, immigrant designs on the United States have less to do with the conventional trope of escaping Old World complications for New World freedom, and more to do with the reach of American markets and the attraction of American culture abroad. Rushdie establishes this premise by depicting various Third World postcolonial sites, such as India,

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Mexico, and Vietnam, as essentially enthralled to U.S. imperialism in its military, cultural, and economic manifestations. This relationship in turn renders immigration from these places the culmination of one’s protoAmerican life, regardless of where one actually originated, and thereby suggests the elasticity, if not the absurdity, of defining oneself according to a conventional national designation based upon rooted, continuous experience within the nation—American identity as imagined in Faulkner and Ellison, which, as we shall see, they attempt to establish in their fictions against the very types of immigrant incursions that Rushdie privileges. I: SOUTHERN LOCATIONS FOR AMERICAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION Sacvan Bercovitch’s explication of the complex relationship between America’s symbolic construction and its collective self-understanding provides an apt theoretical framework for understanding Ground ’s representations of how outsiders relate to the United States and vice versa. Bercovitch observes that “in the United States the discovery of America is converted into a process of self-discovery, whereby America is simultaneously internalized, universalized (as a set of self-evident absolutes), and naturalized (as a diversity of representative social, credal, racial, and ethnic selves)” (1). Rushdie’s novel is populated by immigrants endowed with the pragmatic ability to draw upon and embody fragmented selves akin to Bercovitch’s parenthetical series, a skill that leads characters to a concomitant realization. Proposing just such a “self-evident absolute” about what it means to be American, Vina, the novel’s female protagonist, tells Ormus, her lover, prior to his migration: “You’re an American . . . You always were” (GB 330, emphasis mine). Vina’s presumption of an always-already American identity is not merely a romantic celebration of Ormus’s heterodox position in a staid Indian society. In fact, it keys into Rushdie’s often harsh depiction of modern relations between America and the wider world. By revealing, among other (globally) southern experiences, the interconnectedness of colonial and postcolonial Indian life with an increasingly global, post-WWII American military, economic and cultural presence, Rushdie exposes the irremediable involvement of Third World local cultures and settings in an America-saturated world circulation system. One result is the emergence of proto-Americans like Ormus and his friends. Ground details how this has occurred through the phenomena of global migration, world-pervading commodity culture, and overwhelming media influence. As Mariam Pirbhai explains, in Ground “the United States is . . . problematized as a neoimperial center . . . [that] capitalizes on,


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and dominates, information industries that channel goods, images, and ideologies globally” (59). This otherwise acute interpretation fails only to recognize the immigrant dimension of the novel. Because of the channeling that Pirbhai identifies as a primary feature of Ground, people are continually on the move as well, alongside, because of, and eventually producing the other elements that she identifies. This factor supports Rushdie’s most provocative proposal: post-national, citizens from throughout the global south are the foremost practitioners of American cultural forms. According to the novel’s version of American cultural history, Ormus, a 1950s Indian teenager, invents rock and roll prior to Elvis Presley. This striking falsity cannot be dismissed as merely a Magic Realist feint, as Roger Clark has done.4 In fact, the subtly realistic underpinnings of Rushdie’s fabulist proposal indicate a primary consequence of modern globalization. Though living in a Third World country, Ormus is exposed to and influenced by American culture, since he is able to buy records at a music shop in Bombay supplied by “sailors on shore leave from an American naval vessel in the harbour” (GB 90). Moreover, the other world that Ormus visits to find his musical inspiration—a kaleidoscopic, starlet-populated Las Vegas of the mind—is not simply a modern-day version of the Orphean underworld (GB 97).5 It is the specific outgrowth of a Third World child’s fertile imagination, fed by readily available Hollywood fanzines and American movies watched in the tellingly named “New Empire” theater (GB 91). With these pregnant details offered early in the novel, Rushdie suggests that American popular culture invades the world by traveling aboard its roving warships and it creates a form of icon imperialism out of celluloid. His accompanying, revisionist history of the birth of rock and roll playfully ignores the historical Elvis Presley’s own southern origins, and thus evades the racial and cultural complexities of American music that encircled Elvis’s rise.6 Brief references to “Tupelo, Miss.” inadvertently draw the reader’s attention to the U.S. South as an indigenous American location whose poor population yields cultural objects for ready consumption in metropolitan markets as far away as Bombay (GB 89). Yet Rushdie, overly focused on emphasizing the de-territorialized nature of culture and the primacy of Third World immigrants as its producers, disregards the particularities of Elvis’s location and cultural production. Instead, Rushdie represents him as merely part of monolithic American culture leaving its imperial imprint around the world. This strategy culminates in Rai’s sassy proposal, “[Perhaps] we Bombayites can claim that it was in truth our music, born in Bombay . . . not ‘goods from foreign’ but made in India, and maybe it was the foreigners who stole it from us” (GB 96). Through his narrator, Rushdie here emphasizes

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the metropolis—regardless of its national setting—as the true location for the creation of most every new and important art form, a premise he has long maintained.7 This rock-and-roll retelling replaces indigenous black complaints about the white theft of their cultural forms with a cosmopolitan Indian’s joke, which the novel’s narrative affirms. II: OLD WORLD VS. NEW WORLD IMMIGRATION To convince Ormus that he should leave Britain for the United States, Vina offers him a choice: “You can either stay and I don’t know immigrunt the rest of your life away . . . or you can cross the mighty ocean and leap into that old hot pot” (GB 331). Vina’s neologism registers an attitude towards immigrant life in Britain that Rushdie has elsewhere established as indicative of Old World, colonial-immigrant experience: servile and suffocating. America, by comparison, is defined for would-be immigrants by assumptions about the nation’s longstanding openness to immigration. The following chapters prove this to be a dangerously naïve presumption, as is Vina’s sense of immigrants undergoing easy and continual assimilation (GB 331). Rai happens to share Vina’s very optimistic attitudes and justifies them through his consideration of Ormus’s father, Sir Darius. With this character, Rushdie re-inscribes a standard type from his prior fiction: the Anglophile colonial subject transformed into an unwanted immigrant in his attempt to join the ranks of British citizenry. This was, of course, a central component of The Satanic Verses (1989), which culminates in the transformation of Saladin Chamcha (Sir Darius’s forerunner) into a bleating goat. Xenophobic, racist immigration police disregard his love for the country, and even his state-sanctioned right to be there, in their rough and, Rushdie implies, representative treatment of him as a non-white immigrant.8 We see a less aggressive but related episode in Ground, pitched from a new perspective. According to Rai, Sir Darius receives a harsh welcome upon arriving in England, the nation that he has slavishly admired from afar: “Sir Darius looked haggard and dishevelled . . . [by the] gruelling interrogation by immigrant officials. . . . After several hours of questioning, Sir Darius was finally released into England, a confused and somewhat punctured man” (GB 152). “Released into England” with his puffed-up self-definition as a would-be British citizen “punctured,” Darius is treated as little more than an animal, a lesser version of Verses’ goat-man. The revelation from Lord Methwold, the novel’s arch-British presence, that Darius invented his British credentials, confirms that rejection. His identity is doubly deflated, leaving him a total wreck upon his miserable return to India. The intensity and duration


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of the character’s bureaucratic difficulties, combined with Lord Methwold’s cold rebuff, suggest to Rai that Great Britain is extremely wary of its immigrant arrivals, unlike (his and Vina’s and Ormus’s versions of ) America. Rai recounts Darius’s British immigrant experience as a justification for his choosing America, rather than Britain, as his boyhood, hoped-for destination. The comparison in part defines the novel’s narrative frame: an immigrant reflecting back upon the events that have brought him to a “well-off, green-carded life” in the United States, where he enjoys “more of a sense of belonging than [he]’d ever felt back home” (GB 419). Rushdie’s alteration of the compound noun “green card” into adjectival form, “green-carded” as a modifier for “life,” subtly suggests the effect that bureaucratic recognition has on an immigrant’s life. As we shall see, Faulkner makes ugly a similar presumption about paper-defined citizenship during the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury. For both Faulkner and Rushdie, the immigrant gains a footing in his new landscape through a combination of economic and state-sanctioned benefits. But Rushdie, unlike Faulkner, ignores altogether the negative effects that such immigrant success can have on natives. Rather, Rai’s material success, seemingly ratified without INS difficulties (compared with U.K. equivalents), allows him to feel fully and proudly part of a very specific community of Americans: well-to-do immigrant intelligentsia dwelling in bohemian Lower Manhattan. Rai’s successful ensconcing in fact provokes sarcasm from one Rushdie scholar, Rachel Falconer: “So much for those who survive to take their part in the American middle-class dream of home” (500). Unlike Indian immigrants to U.K. destinations, Rai goes to America and enters the country at a comfortable socio-economic plateau and without any monstrous transformations or bureaucratic difficulties. He is fully accepted and, moreover, equally accepting of all that America can offer him. Differing from his Anglophile counterpart’s, his boyhood dream is fulfilled: “I remember the thrill of the whispered word on my young lips—America. America, the open sesame. My dream-ocean led to America, my private, my unfound land” (GB 59). In this remembrance and in other, numerous effusions over life in America, Rai’s tone, language, and logic are overblown, almost theatrically romantic. One senses, particularly in light of Rushdie’s more recent critiques of U.S. immigration policy in his non-fiction, that he recognizes America does not immediately open its doors upon the saying of magic words (“the open sesame”).9 The simplistic indulgences about immigrant life that Rai and other characters trade on would predictably invite undercutting, especially from a satirist of Rushdie’s order. This would seem especially the case in light of Rushdie’s prior fiction, which has been keenly

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attuned to the degraded lives of Third World immigrants who have moved to First World metropoles. Yet with Rai in the United States, the immigrant ideal is not only expressed but achieved, and a cosmopolitan version of the American Dream remains intact from beginning to end. What is it, then, about the nature of America that leads Rushdie to leave intact his narrator’s view of the country as completely open to a series of immigrant successes, regardless of racial, geographic, or historical complications?10 III: AMERICA: A PRACTICE OR A PLACE? In Ground, Rushdie deploys a circular logic to establish the nature of American national identity; he establishes the currency of this model through the delayed decoding of his characters’ patently misguided actions. These include incidents such as Ormus’s greeting passengers on an Indian flight to London with “Welcome aboard the Mayflower,” as if they are all would-be settlers traveling to the New World United States (GB 250). Ormus decides to leave India for the United States in the mid-1960s, having been alienated from his Indian origins by three developments: familial tragedy, cultural isolation (his interests, of course, are in American music), and hopes of finding his love, Vina, who earlier left India for the United States. But for reasons both metaphoric and historical, his journey takes him through London first, though England has become “ersatz America, America’s delayed echo,” and Ormus’s interests are strictly, if blindly, focused on seeming American (GB 251). Thus he is “dressed carefully for the journey, arraying his body in the casual wear of America: the Yankees baseball cap, the white Beat Generation T-shirt with the ragged cutaway sleeves, the Mickey Mouse watch” (251). His is literally a “bespoke identity,” as Rai elsewhere describes Ormus and Vina’s self-presentation; he has carefully constructed for himself an image of a pop-culture savvy, 1960’s American man (GB 95). His look matches his presumption about why he will do well to immigrate to the United States: I want to be in America, America where everyone’s like me, because everyone comes from somewhere else. All those histories, persecutions, massacres, piracies, slaveries; all those secret ceremonies, hanged witches, weeping wooded virgins and horned unyielding gods; all that yearning, hope, greed, excess, the whole lot adding up to a fabulous noisy historyless self-inventing citizenry of jumbles and confusions; all those variform manglings of English adding up to the livingest English in the world; and above all else, all that smuggled-in music. (GB 252, emphasis mine)


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This passage proposes national sameness based upon inexorable difference: the homogeneity of America’s peoples is defined by their heterogeneous origins. Moreover, it reveals the linguistic-national identity relationship that Rushdie seeks to establish as defining what it means to be American: “those variform manglings of English adding up to the livingest English in the world.” In Rushdie’s handling, the immigrant’s inability to conform to standard English renders the American language perpetually fluid and innovative.11 While not as provocative as Vina in her formulations of American life or as precious as Rai, Ormus is similarly excessive and self-interested in promulgating a certain image of the nation as justification for his belonging there. In his view, because “everyone comes from somewhere else,” the multiplicity of historical experiences that enter the United States via its immigrants mixes with whatever it may have for an internal history (hence the undifferentiated references to slaveries, witch hunts, etc.). No finer distinctions need be made, Ormus believes, because the sheer number of pasts that surge into and throughout the country (paralleled by his overflowing thoughts) create an excess that unhinges the nation from history itself. America’s insatiable appetite for new peoples, new languages, and, most importantly to Ormus, new music only attests to perpetual re-invention as its primary means of development. And the very fact that Ormus starts to feel, viscerally, that he is American while an Indian citizen on his way to a British airport only underscores the sundering of place from identity that defines American-ness in this novel. To strengthen his presumption, Ormus constructs a musical version of American history that seeks to attest to its plurality. In another of the novel’s excessive lists, a product of Rushdie’s postmodern style but also and newly indicative of what he sees as the overabundance of American life, the country moves to the “drums of Africa,” “Polish dances,” “Italian weddings,” “zorba-zithering Greeks,” and the “drunken rhythm of the salsa saints” (GB 252). Once again disregarding any cultural distinctions or historical contexts for these various forms of musical production, Ormus considers them, wondrously, as adding up to “the hot democratic music” of America itself (GB 252). Such a history, in many ways foreshadowing Vina’s heterogeneous identity and trajectory, erases the line between internal and external forms of hybridity, since such distinctions are less important than the unceasing phenomenon of newcomers arriving to contribute to the nation’s noisy, jumbled identity. Thus American history-as-music inspires in Ormus the confidence that a “boy from Bombay . . . [will] complete the American story; [he] will take the music and throw it up in the air and the way it falls will inspire

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a generation, two generations, three generations. Yay America” (GB 252). The character gleefully forecasts American history as continuous, provided immigrants constantly interrupt and change its course. The closing exclamation only underscores the puzzling ease of Ormus’s presumption that merely by acting out his own ambitious plan to augment and advance the fantastic, foreigner-driven, “democratic music” of America, he too will be fully American and accepted as such by others. Through Ormus’s musical reverie, Rushdie re-imagines the American myths of idealistic plurality and immigrant success from a postmodern remove. This locates the process of exuberant nationalization in the minds and experiences of would-be Americans and casts citizenship as performance. Rushdie thus constructs something of a virtual America; according to Paul Giles, “To virtualize America is not only to denaturalize it, but also to suggest how its own indigenous representations of the ‘natural’ tend to revolve tautologously, reinforcing themselves without reference to anything outside their own charmed circle” (2). Ormus’s version of America requires the continual arrival of new immigrants to reinforce the tautological definition of the nation. Excited to (be an) import himself, he decides that the country’s greatness lies in its importing the world’s peoples and their music. This interpretation results in a decidedly skewed version of American history, one that erases cultural, racial, and historical distinctions under the guise of unceasing, happy assimilation. Ormus falls prey to related forms of blindness during his journey out of India. The plane Ormus calls the Mayflower, in celebrating his departure for the New World, is, in reality, the Wainganga, named after an Indian river (258). Rushdie includes this name as a brief indicator of India’s post-Independence cultural mission of claiming and redefining a piece of Western technology as proudly native. Ormus ignores the name, which, I suggest, is Rushdie’s way of implying that the character has no interest in post-1947 Indian cultural nationalism. Instead, he is solely intent upon reaching the New World of America. Because of this focus, Ormus excitedly interprets the various Indians aboard his plane as “the people who are going with me to the New World” in a modern-day version of the Mayflower’s voyage to America. Yet, as Rai notes, Ormus’s subsequent greeting (“Welcome aboard the Mayflower”) falls on confused ears, for 1960s migratory experience does not resonate with the original migrant journey to America: he greets them, seizing their hands as they pass his seat, the terrified uncomprehending peasants from remote villages on their way to desert kingdoms, the perspiration-sprinkled executives in cheap suits,


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the frowning chaperones of a veiled young bride . . . the unwary young student on his way to a miserable four years in an English boarding school . . . children dressed in spectacularly lumpy jumpers . . . their very garments proclaiming their alienation from the new homes they have never seen, trumpeting the difficulty they will have in adjusting to life in those lightless northern climes. (GB 250–51)

Through Rai’s qualification of Ormus’s blanket greeting, Rushdie delineates the varied migration experiences of the postcolonial Third World. These migrants are not going to the New World United States that Ormus is preparing for, and yet, their sad trajectories notwithstanding, they inspire Ormus to imagine happily, “We are the Pilgrim Children” (GB 251). Frederic Jameson contends that one consequence of globalization is that “local American cultural characteristics [such as the pilgrim journey motif ] . . . have been exported as practices valid for all people of the world” (64). The novel here suggests that few people are able to follow through and benefit from these advertised promises, though all are exposed to them through the spread of American culture. Ormus is, however, quickly exempted from an explicit critique for already possessing stereotypically American blindness to cultural differences. Aboard this same flight, he meets Mull Standish XII, who “rises to welcome him: tall, Bostonian, not yet fifty but already silvery and patrician, reeking of old money, dressed in Savile Row silk and Lobb leather” (GB 259). Standish seems to embody the successful, lineal American. A twelfth-generation descendant of an original Mayflower passenger, he is moneyed, regal, and brimming with confidence. And yet, as Standish himself quickly explains to a bedazzled Ormus, “Don’t be fooled by appearances . . . It’s mostly phoney. You’ll find I’m pretty much a rogue” (GB 259). Learning Mull Standish’s background, we quickly put aside his Boston Brahmin self-presentation, recognizing that he is an archetypal American in another way, hearkening back to the characters who populate Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857). Standish, we quickly learn, is someone with whom Ormus readily and successfully identifies. Over the course of his life, Mull Standish has been a Chinese scholar, a college professor, a trucker, a Teamster, a Las Vegas gambler, a male prostitute, a Manhattan real estate baron, and now a fugitive from the IRS who has reinvented himself as a pirate radio deejay moored off the coast of England. Rushdie opts explicitly for Twain over Melville in delineating his character’s literary lineage; Standish openly and proudly relates his fantastic story to Ormus as “his American way,” a nationally defined experience because,

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like Huck Finn, “he lit out, without illusions or regrets” (GB 260).12 His accomplishments have enabled him to create a self-image of deep history and American aristocratic reserve. Beneath it all, however, and by his own account, he is “shameless and inexorable in [his] own interest,” a description suggesting that the myth of the American success story conceals the rapacity of all American experience (GB 263). As if to prove his point, Standish recruits Ormus to sing for his pirate radio network and immediately [h]is manner . . . changed completely, from patrician Bostonian to eager-beaver muso peacenik, and Ormus, watching the transformation, begins to see who he really is. Never mind all his explanations [Ormus decides], the truth is he’s just another one of us chameleons. . . . we’re of the same tribe . . . we can recognize each other in any crowd. (GB 265–66)

Standish is a professional and, we realize, very American shape-shifter, able to inhabit any persona that advances his financial interests. Immediately a telling juxtaposition comes to mind: in England, Sir Darius is rejected for being a pretender; in America, this ability is the very guarantor of success. Ormus is not particularly bothered by Standish’s methods, especially since they are his own: “we’re of the same tribe, the same sub-species of the human race” (GB 266). This moment in the novel discloses one of the central results of reinterpreting Salman Rushdie in an American context. Ormus’s description echoes the author’s previous defenses of migrant shape-shifters. For Rushdie, their exemption from national identity accords them alternative types of community, and their transformational capabilities in new geographic spaces make them heroic agents against monolithic, purist worlds.13 Yet Ormus’s interest in Mull has little to do with post-national migrant community. In fact, it relates to his sense that this man will help him get to America and, moreover, that he will help advance his budding music career. Thus the ability of one protean pragmatist to recognize another is not a revelation of subaltern agency, but the ability of one American to recognize another. This recognition, I emphasize, is not based upon shared racial features, historical experiences, or geographic points in common—the main components in Faulkner’s and Ellison’s formulations of American identity, which, in their respective renderings, new immigrants disrupt. Instead, it has to do with one’s practices: within a mishmash of self-fiction and fragments of authentic history, Ormus is dressed to look like one type of American, Standish like another. Neither possesses an authentic connection to their image of the


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moment, but their identity is not based on as much; rather it is invested in their very ability to inhabit identities, to impersonate types. This, Rushdie seems to be suggesting, is a positive national trait, provided that its stress is upon the perpetual process of being American, rather than on defining points of departure from or arrival at a stable, homogenous national identity. This American-ness is a-historical, de-territorialized, and process-based, thus subverting an alternative based upon organic affiliations to time and place. In short, American identity in Ground is a shape-shifting skill set shared by chameleon-like immigrants. Rushdie elaborates this premise through the experiences, images, and statements of the novel’s female protagonist. As the novel’s archetypal American by its own definitions, Vina constantly attempts to align herself with various non-American elements as these suit her interests. She becomes, eventually, the battleground on which the novel struggles to resolve two versions of identity-charlatanism: the outsider who plays at being American; and the American who impersonates whomever she pleases from the rest of the world. Faulkner and Ellison were particularly focused on the former, while Rushdie seeks to demonstrate that the two are inextricable from each other. Through Vina, Rushdie draws attention to the negative consequences of the conversion of Third World southern experience into First World metropolitan capital. But Rushdie moves beyond a conventional leftist critique, because Vina’s involvement in this process occurs under the two-headed guise of Americanization and American immigrant success. The novel’s forms of authentic mimicry, whether Ormus’s Third World rock, Mull Standish’s shape-shifting, or, ultimately, Vina’s global charlatanism, seem appropriate representations of cultural practices in a world where media and migration have intervened between the local and the imagination. Such features lead Jaina Sanga to observe that “the novel effectively attempts to ‘map’ the cultural sites and experiences of globalization” (140). This otherwise sound contention ignores Rushdie’s emphasis upon the American-ness of the novel’s migratory and morphological components. A more nuanced understanding of Ground would reveal the novel as simultaneously about the Americanization of the world and the American-ness of mobile cultural production liberated from the confines of a static national past, which Rushdie personifies in spectacularly successful and spectacularly contrived individuals. IV: VINA: AMERICAN CONSUMPTION PERSONAFIED While Ormus’s musical career advances through his partnership with Standish, Vina reappears in Bombay looking for him. She had disappeared

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from the city years earlier, as swiftly as she first appeared there as a Gatsby-like “nobody from nowhere” (GB 143). Rai describes her as “a rag bag of selves, torn fragments of people she might have become,” a pitying explanation of her tragic, fragmented upbringing. Yet into this description, Rushdie inserts, via a metaphoric echo, a potential conversion of her personal tragedies. As earlier mentioned, Rai uses another clothing analogy (this time positive) to explain Vina’s ways. She is, above all else, a creator of patchwork identities who tailors a self-image out of the various bits and pieces that she encounters in her travels throughout America and the wider world (GB 95). We see one result of this ability in Rai’s description of her look in the heady sixties: Vina was always good at putting out mixed signals. As well as the single black glove of the black American radicals, she had painted the Om symbol in scarlet on her right cheek and wore an English dress . . . of Indianized occult-chic couture. . . . Her dark skin had a burnished quality to it . . . it was the gleam created by the brilliant gaze of the public eye, the first rough licks of the tigerish tongue of fame. (GB 223–24)

Vina is always Rai’s main index of American life; after first seeing her by the ocean in Bombay, in a stars-and-stripes bathing suit, he now gains from her his first view of black American traits (66). But she offers more; in fact, Vina is a garish pastiche of sixties radical American pop culture: earth mama, Eastern mystic, and Black Panther all at once, while fame has “burnished” her dark skin into a rich, non-specific glow. Celebrity seems to render Vina postracial, in parallel to her post-national position, though the novel emphasizes that both of these designations are based upon her immigrant-American practices. Rai is as overwhelmed in the moment by this spectacularly contrived persona as Ormus was upon first encountering Mull Standish. The parallel between two would-be immigrants enchanted by image-purveying Americans, however, quickly ends. Since he offers his impressions in retrospect with the privilege of reconsideration, Rai is also somewhat tart, as particularly evident in the restrained sarcasm of “Vina was always good at putting out mixed signals” (GB 223, emphasis mine). Rai’s further deliberations, however, become more confessional as he frames Vina’s abilities in a national context. He explains that “Knowing she had come from nowhere, had nothing but what she made of herself, she had learned to treat the whole world as her possession, and I, like the rest of the planet, meekly acquiesced, and acknowledged her dominion over me and mine” (224). Over the course of this single sentence, Vina develops from


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being, in Rushdie’s sense, a variously self-made American to becoming an embodiment of the nation itself. Vina is derided in India for being “a nobody from nowhere,” the phrase Tom Buchanan first applied to Jay Gatsby, the summa of fraudulent American success stories (Fitzgerald 137). Rushdie’s repetition of this phrase of course implies a link between Gatsby and Vina, though what Fitzgerald revealed as a tragedy-inducing falsehood, Rushdie seeks to establish as perhaps the one true feature of American identity. In becoming a success, Vina is redefined as a global Gatsby: she goes from being from nowhere and possessing nothing, to now, as indicated by her look and possessions, being from everywhere and having everything. This very American ability to become a living storehouse of global culture is confined, at this point in the novel, to Vina’s East/West components. Elsewhere, however, Vina also incorporates Native American, South American, Mexican, and other non–First World traits into her identity, which she in turn performs to an adoring world audience. Doing so, Vina represents the novel’s primary demonstration of American-ness as focused on turning global southern experiences into lucrative cultural fodder. V: VINA’S SOUTHERN LIVES Rushdie continues to re-imagine American history through music and celebrity as Rai explains how Vina becomes “the woman most cited by the world’s young women as their role model” (GB 394).14 She enjoys this position because of her ability to perform as an ever-fluid signifier of global ethnic experience. As we shall see, however, Vina’s self-presentation is more properly “the simulacrum of cultural identity, where theories of representation . . . [constitute] only a play of choice, not a test of praxis” (Kapur 200). The distinction that Kapur makes in abstract finds rather clear evidence in the fact that Vina holds the occasional Chautauqua on college campuses while ignoring her lack of any organic connection to the Native American origins of the narrative performance. Rai further explains that she prowls music stages throughout the world “in wildly eclectic ethnic symbols, mojos, caftans, quetzal feathers, classical breastplates, [and] tika marks,” another overflowing list of items meant to demonstrate the sheer excess of cultural signifiers available for incorporation into a globalized American’s self-image (GB 339). Vina blithely unyokes these various local cultural expressions from their indigenous histories in support of her own agenda, and the purely performative nature of Vina’s southern experiences renders her an embodiment of Rushdie’s “unique brand of extraterritorial prose” (Israel 158). But to overcome what Nico Israel elsewhere denotes as the “profound anxiety over place” that unavoidably

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results from such an extraterritorial stance, the novel defines Vina’s ways as a national practice, just as earlier Ormus and Standish’s shape-shifting was similarly emphasized as an American ability (130). Vina assuages Ormus’s concerns about not fitting in as an immigrant to America by telling him that in America “you can play remember-when” with the nation’s history because “half the country’s faking it just like you” (GB 331). As part of a nation so described, it therefore makes little difference to Vina whether she fakes being Mexican, Indian, African-American, or any other national and racial types. To be American, for Vina, is to take what one pleases from a weaker people, shine it up, and sell it back to them. Questions of Vina’s ambiguous relation to the races, histories, and cultural symbols that she works into her act are essentially dismissed by the homogenizing glare of contemporary fame: “celebrity has a way of washing whiter,” as Rai notes elsewhere (GB 412). This initially seems an odd revision of his earlier noting that fame “burnished” Vina’s skin, but if celebrity whiteness is effectively non-coloration, then in fact the comment stands as an incisive critique of the dynamic between pop culture and race in America. The spotlight seemingly exempts Vina from categorization according to race, even further distancing the character from traditional black-and-white conceptions of American identity. Yet despite her deracinated status as a celebrity, and her wildly pluralist tendencies, Vina has surprisingly local nightmares, nightmares of “lynch mobs, of burning crosses. If such horror was happening to anyone, anywhere, it might someday happen to her” (GB 413). The logic behind Vina’s fear inadvertently registers the absurdity of her variegated self-imaging: the ethnic Everywoman is also the ethnic Every-victim. But the grounding of her universal concern for the suffering of others within the intense particularities of U.S. southern racism brings the limitations of Rushdie’s envisioning of American identity into focus. The historical specificity of Vina’s nightmare—Deep South lynching— draws our attention to the mixed circumstances of her origins. She is born to Greek and Indian immigrants in the early 1950s, in Virginia, where the South’s intact racial binaries descend upon her. Yet Rushdie does not invest this experience with any great significance, at least not by comparison to the various global souths that he depicts. He mines it only for some rather cheap humor. Vina’s time in the American South as a child serves only to confirm the ignorance of a xenophobic local community and the equal ignorance of Vina’s well-meaning stepfather. Trying to spare Vina and her sisters from the racial prejudice they initially encounter in Virginia, John Poe explains to local school authorities that “the girls’ darkness was not Negro darkness, they were Indians from India and didn’t need to be discriminated against, they could


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ride on the bus along with the regular kids” (GB 105, emphases mine). John simplistically presumes that because his stepchildren have dark complexions that originate outside America, they will not require the racial animosity that, by tacit implication, indigenous whites are obliged to display to indigenous blacks in the American South. In addition, the pure fact that the girls are not native black, he reasons, assures their fitness to sit alongside “regular,” meaning white, children on the way to school. More surprising than John Poe’s logic is the fact that the school accepts his rationale (105). As shall be argued in a later chapter, Faulkner’s writing reveals the American South’s intense resistance to foreign arrivals, precisely because they fail to fit into and in fact destabilize the region’s black-and-white binary composition. There is little sense of a comparably deeper concern with American racial problems in Rushdie.15 This particular episode functions as a means of demonstrating Vina’s perpetual alienation as a child in America and of poking fun at the ignorance of even “liberal” white southerners such as John Poe (GB 105). Rushdie’s interest in the U.S. South is fleeting, despite the rich geographic, racial, and economic parallels to be drawn between it and the novel’s global southern locations. The fact that Rushdie draws repeated parallels between the American South and global souths throughout the novel— between Elvis’s Tupelo, Mississippi, and Ormus’s Bombay; between Vina’s rejections in Virginia and in India; and later, between pop culture Texas and corporate culture Mexico—invites a deeper consideration of race relations, cultural production, and historical experience along a southern axis. Yet in its fullest treatment, the region where Vina spends her early childhood and which inspires her adult nightmares is momentarily evoked by loaded references to lynching and segregation and functions as little more than a signifier of obvious stereotypes about non-metropolitan America. These particularities, which arise and then are so quickly dropped, inadvertently suggest the inadequacy of Rushdie’s extraterritorial prose (as Israel describes it) to engage even a modicum of the deep history of this particular American region. This in turn calls into question the deeper meanings at work in writing about America that is so aggressively fractured from organic relations to time and place. When Vina is sent to upstate New York following the death of her family, she encounters yet more knee-jerk xenophobia.16 In the North, as in the South, Vina is rejected, most dramatically by her guardian. Marion Egiptus is “repulsed by the future Vina’s dark skin” (GB 110, emphasis mine). We can understand this adjective as performing a double function. Ostensibly, the text is referring to the fact that the character changes her name from Nissy Poe to Vina Apsara later in life, hence she is known here in the future

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tense. But from the perspective of this study’s main argument, the adjective “future” also suggests Vina is rejected because her ethnic mixture, her form of racial darkness, does not conform to America’s pre-existing identities. IndoGreek rather than native black, white, or Indian, Vina is externally rather than internally hybrid. Native populations scorn Vina, whether in Virginia or New York State, because the newness that she represents threatens their local compositions. Rather than attempt to interrogate the reasons behind Vina’s rejection, or differentiate between the two locales where it arises, however, Rushdie focuses on the questionable solution that Vina finds to American racial dynamics. In another subtle echo of The Satanic Verses, where Chamcha’s scapegoat status is converted from being a sign of xenophobic native power to a symbol of subaltern agency, Vina uses the mixture that leads to her rejection to become a pan-ethnic Everywoman. While in a U.K. context this leads to chaotic, principle-driven clashes between immigrant groups and a British police-state, in the United States the terms are strictly private and economic.17 Vina’s adult return to Chickaboom provides the singularly sustained American context in Ground for what seems, initially, to be anti-immigrant sentiment, in offering more than the easy entertainment of the Virginia episode. Rushdie sets Chickaboom, N.Y., as a representative American rural region: the abstract embodiment of the darkest tendencies of that space, regardless of its geographic location or historical setting. Unable to enjoy her celebrity resort vacation in upstate New York, Vina finds herself sobbing at random reminders of her childhood in nearby Chickaboom. She eventually tracks down foul-mouthed and money-driven Marion, who spouts xenophobic rhetoric from her home in a trailer park. Confronted by a limousine-traveling Vina, Egiptus snorts, “So you’re rich now. . . . I’m done for and you made good. This is America, money gives you rights” (GB 363). This is an equation that Vina thereafter confirms with an act of charity, but in accepting a generous parcel of cash, as Rai narrates the exchange, Marion shrugs it off as self-interested: “Don’t think you’re doing nothing for me. You’re buying your personal freedom is all. Well, okay, Vina concedes, maybe so. Nobody wants to be a slave” (GB 365). In Rushdie’s version of America, though articulated through the most antipathetic character in the novel, money can exempt anyone from any unwanted experience, even a racially traumatic past.18 Yet there is something problematic in his depiction. As was the case with the earlier lynching reference, Rushdie again utilizes a signifier of America’s racial past, this time with Vina affirming that “Nobody wants to be a slave.” Here, Rushdie effectively reconfigures a historical American motif: the black slave buying his freedom


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from the white master. Yet in this case, the event is altogether unhinged from real history and geography (like Bombay Indians claiming a Mississippi white man stole their music). This master–slave exchange is exclusively metaphoric, and transpires in the North, suggesting a free-floating region of American race problems that follows Vina around like a bad cloud. Yet Vina has never fit into traditional American race categories (or, by extension, master–slave categories). This was the very point that first offended Marion Egiptus, who loathed Vina as a child more because of her future status as a new immigrant than because she coded black, yet Rushdie abandons this possibility of anti-immigrant sentiment and substitutes instead a confused rendering of American racial dynamics. Rushdie’s interests in the racial complexities of American life seem limited to evoking provocative particularities that provide ironic touches to Ground’s narrative. His shorthand evocations of the American South’s particular race trauma through Vina’s childhood, and of anti-immigrant sentiments through Marion Egiptus, can be understood, it should be said, as in keeping with the generally comic tone of this novel.19 Moreover, we learn about Vina’s American experiences through her histrionic retellings to Rai, and through his own questionable commentary—which sounds at once smitten and bitter towards his sometime lover, in parallel to his feelings about his new country. Taken together, the implications of genre and unreliable narration impede a stronger critique of Rushdie’s facile engagement of U.S. southern experiences. But to exempt the novel’s limitations in this regard does not exempt it in another. Throughout Ground, Rushdie simultaneously critiques and engages in a form of free-floating cultural production that borrows from a global series of southern settings, including America’s. In this way, he mimics both Vina and Rai, with the overarching practice leading to one character’s demise and the other’s success. VI: VINA’S SOUTHERN DEATHS Just as she depended upon her variegated, particularist music to buy freedom from her rural past, Vina pursues a similarly diverse set of businesses to become the embodiment of modern American excess. In addition to marketing exercise videos and health food, Vina owns and oversees “the stocks and bonds, the real estate, the growing art collection, the bakeries [and] the Santa Barbara winery” that her various profits have brought her, while also becoming “the biggest dairy [farmer] in the northeastern United States” (GB 433). We learn as much a few chapters after Vina “buys her freedom” from Marion, suggesting that since she is no longer a slave (of

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sorts), she is free to become something of a master. In response to her rise, however, Rushdie sends this comically successful American to a harsh end, one that suggests the danger of doubly drawing upon the world’s poorer regions for private gain. Vina spends her final days in Mexico, where she is the guest of a wealthy tequila baron; she has, we recall, reached the point in life where she can enjoy such luxury by incorporating, among others, native and ethnic Mexican motifs into her self-image and music. It becomes clear, though, that Vina identifies more easily with the wealthy corporate barons of Mexico and their clichéd American tastes than with the rural poor whose culture she borrows from. Between performances, Vina lounges at a bar in downtown Mexico; its design “is a Latin American echo of the establishment in Dallas, the soap not the city”: a mighty stone-clad pyramid set on the upper floors of a shining highrise . . . and it looks like all the extinguished peoples of the region have been exhumed to construct it: Olmecs, Zapotecs, Mayas, Toltecs, Mixtecs, Purépechas, Aztecs. It is a temple, in its monied way: a place of power with added settees and liveried waiters. (GB 452–53)

In one of the novel’s most critical images of globalization, Mexican corporate executives create a posh space for themselves inspired by American television representations of excessive wealth while ransacking Mexico’s indigenous history for accent pieces. The historically particular past returns to adorn a modern-day temple to material success, which in turn hosts an American rock-and-roll star who embodies this same phenomenon. She, like the temple, is a pastiche of other people’s experiences, mashed together by pop culture and an overabundance of ready capital. While this twofold corporate raiding has been going on, Rai informs us, “the 1980s [have] been a bad time for the whole faulty earth,” which means, more properly, for the world’s southern regions (GB 450). Ravaged by U.S. Navy boats and pop culture and subsumed into the “wildly eclectic” act of an American music diva, southern locales such as India, Turkey, Tajikstan, Algeria, and others are now destroyed by a series of massive earthquakes (GB 451). Rushdie here deploys a fabulist re-imagining of 1980s First World wealth intersecting with Third World tragedies, to evoke the global dangers of the unrestrained success of the Western free market. America’s Third World presence, which becomes embodied in Vina’s touring, music, and marketing, proves to be specifically responsible, by juxtaposition and implication, for these massive rifts in the world’s southern locales.


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While enjoying herself in the “privileged isolation” of a tequila plantation, Vina is punished finally for her many borrowings from pan-southern life (GB 17). An earthquake unleashes vats of tequila, and Vina is awash in the flood, which also runs through and destroys local villages. Vina is mortally repaid for her complicity in de-territorialized cultural creation and unrestrained economic gain. She is destroyed by an unceasing, overwhelming flow of Third World production, which also stands in for the all-destroying flood of First World capital. Drowning in tequila, she eventually falls to her death between the rifts in the earth that, by implication, her own globe-straddling performance of various ethnic identities has brought about (GB 466). As Pirbhai observes, drawing on Jameson’s theory of globalization, “the ‘self-contradictory’ earth, like the self-contradictory individual, is a metaphorical echo of the contending, shifting processes of globalization. These processes often occur as a split between globalization as a cultural phenomenon and globalization as an economic phenomenon” (57). The “split” to which Pirbhai refers is only ostensibly so, however, as Rushdie’s novel and Jameson’s abstractions each suggest. Rushdie positions Vina at the nexus of cultural and economic globalization, where rather than being actively opposed, these forms actually hold each other in suspended contradiction. As Jameson notes, “culture and the market,” particularly in southern locales such as Latin America and India, further each other’s interests and depend upon each other for their viability (71). According to Ground, this intertwining actually has the most dangerous implications for the United States, which, contrary to populist grumbling by some contemporary American politicians, seems to have benefited most from globalization’s hydra-like evolution. If we reconsider Vina’s status as representative of the nation, her death forecasts the imminent demise of the United States as a capitalist superpower. Vina has a double relationship to the Third World, encapsulated in her identification with wealthy Mexico while performing to poor Mexicans as an indigenous Aztec goddess. We can understand this relationship as implying that the seeds of the United States’ destruction lie in its practice of using poorer regions to advance its economic interests and to develop/consume its cultural products. Rushdie breaks any further nation–individual parallels, however, at the point of Vina’s death. That event unleashes private mourning that seems to unite the world: “people pour into the streets, whatever their local hour,” in a metaphoric echo of the various flows of tequila and capital effacing local experiences in prior moments (GB 480, emphasis mine). Moreover, Vina is suddenly and cravenly claimed by “rural Virginia, upstate New York . . . [and] India” (GB 483). The novel thus suggests an ironic consequence of the multiple, partial belonging to particular places that the oft-rejected Vina possesses.

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As Rai further explains, global mourning in turn encourages the global marketing of Vina’s image: “all the cascading emotion of the Vina phenomenon will end in the slave market of capital. One minute she’s a goddess, and the next she’s property” (GB 486). Her death converts her into a commodity, and, as the language again suggests, she is once again a slave of sorts. In this instance, Rushdie attempts more explicitly and persuasively to update the historical phenomenon of slavery so as to align it with the “market of capital” that today dominates the world. The multiplicity of selves that Vina has represented—Virginian, Indian, New Yorker, etc.—each gain in economic value despite being, or perhaps because they are, fragments: they allow each locale to profit from its connection to Vina. This represents a particularly bitter reversal of her earlier attempt to purchase her freedom from enslavement to a particular place with money gained from her own marketing of various cultural particularities. In one of the novel’s most potent symbolic moments, Vina, the consummate extra-territorial, does not return to any one soil even in death: she falls between cracks in the earth. In some ways, however, Vina’s fate also aligns her more authentically with those citizens of the Third World whose experiences she co-opted and grew rich on as a very successful, practicing American. She too has become a victim of the very strategies that once brought her fame and riches. VII: WHY RAI SURVIVES With Vina’s experiences and dual relationships to southern and American experience, Rushdie seems to be suggesting that the U.S. capitalist system encloses global cultural production and producers in a circular prison. As we realize, in tracing the lives of the two men closest to Vina, this imprisonment is universal and perpetual. While bemoaning Vina’s treatment, Ormus and Rai, as good Americans themselves, engage in similar activities. Rai notes that “Ormus’s love for Vina is not in doubt, but he too, is sending her ghost out to do some business for the family firm” (GB 486). Meanwhile Rai, while complaining of everyone else’s efforts to capitalize on Vina’s demise, gains attention and profit from a photo exhibition that he mounts in a Manhattan gallery. Despite, or more correctly because of, his intimate connection to Vina, as her sometime lover and confidant, Rai actually benefits most from her death, since he takes the most famous, final photograph of her. And Rai’s presence in Mexico, simultaneously covering another Third World disaster and the tour of a pop culture diva, brings us to the novel’s most troubling intertwining: of cosmopolitan, immigrant, and autobiographical elements.


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While Ormus and Vina are punished for their complicit, profitable support of the nation’s twofold contemporary world presence as both dominator and utopia, Rai is spared. This is a departure from prior Rushdie novels, where endings are typically marked by images of annihilation and, at best, feeble hope in a future that is already foreshadowed to be destroyed by monolithic national interests.20 Given the negative portrayal of the United States that persists throughout Ground, we might understandably expect likewise, but Rushdie ends on a decidedly positive, even traditionalist note. With Ormus and Vina dead, Rai has taken up with Mira Celano, a Vina look-alike with a similarly mixed, immigrant background. From his time with Vina and from his own work as a photojournalist, he recognizes that the world is under perpetual threat of self-annihilation. At some point, he senses, humanity’s “greed and cruelty and bigotry and incompetence and hate” will lead to an apocalypse, in part foreshadowed by Vina’s death (GB 573). This roster of negative provocations of course aptly describes, in one key, Rushdie’s vision of America’s destructive relationship to the world’s impoverished, southern locales. And such positions lead Pirbhai to accept uncritically Rai’s self-presentation as a “shrewd, well-traveled observer . . . [who alone] can see through the myth of the American Dream” (61). More correctly, while he may be afforded this insight, it does not prevent him from seeking out the Dream, and actually, happily, proudly gaining it. Despite his firsthand knowledge of the possibility of annihilation and of the greed of the American Dream life that, combined, have left Ormus and Vina dead, Rai “feel[s] like arguing with the earth’s decision to wipe us out,” because he finds real if absurdly banal value in “drinking o.j. and munching muffins” with his new girlfriend and her daughter (GB 575). In heroic and proud immigrant language, Rai declares at novel’s end (GB 575): “I’ll stand my ground right here. This I’ve discovered and worked for and earned. This is mine.” With these sentences, Rushdie recasts the novel’s heterodox, immigrant trajectory, and eradicates whatever “heartache” Rai earlier expressed about his “discontinuous” life as a new American in a state of perpetual selfinvention (GB 441). The reference of the ambiguous lead pronoun in the sentence “This is mine” becomes clear as it is linked to classic immigrant verbs that Rai deploys: discover, work, earn. But upon further reflection, we realize that what he is claiming as his is not merely the right to be considered American, or even the right to domestic bliss in America, but the right to define himself as a very specific type. He is a wealthy member of New York’s intelligentsia, properly critical of U.S. foreign incursions and disgusted by capitalist excess, while also responsibly worried that these elements might lead to global destruction.21 And yet, he is a beneficiary of these fruits, selling

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his photographs of “the hand of Mighty America [falling] hard on the back yards of the world” (GB 419). In short, he is blind (like any good American) to his complicity in the nation’s predations on the wider world, and proud (like any good immigrant) of making it in his new country (GB 419). Why, unlike Vina and Ormus, does Rai’s double vision of American life survive intact through the novel without ironic pullback or satirical undercutting? The answer, I argue in closing, is his proximate relationship to Rushdie himself. Rushdie’s willingness to involve autobiographical elements in his fiction is well known; the narrators of both Midnight’s Children and Shame bear clear biographical parallels, while he actually includes himself as a character in Verses. He continues this practice with Ground, which begins on February 14, 1989, the day he went into hiding because of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa sentence upon his life. The novel is thus partially a meditation on the paradoxical experience of global celebrity and seclusion, on America’s influence upon India, and on the Third World native-turnedFirst World artist’s responsibilities and contradictions in a globalized present. Through his depiction of Vina, Rushdie attempts to distance himself from unseemly charges of converting southern experiences into mere aesthetic fodder. Yet Rai, as we can see, is open to a related, if more complex, critique, as is Rushdie himself, whose fictions, Ground included, lend themselves to being read as promoting “a hybridity [that claims] to offer certain advantages in negotiating the collisions of language, race and art in a world of disparate peoples comprising a single, if not exactly unified, world” (Brennan 35). While Brennan, writing in 1989, balanced critique and esteem in his evaluation of Rushdie, the author’s more recent fiction demands a more exacting judgment. This is especially the case since Rushdie seems to admit the negative implications of the hybridity Brennan described (at least with Vina) yet never rebukes his narrator for being open to related charges, or for Rai’s joking shrugs over less successful experiences of immigration to the United States. And while the novel repeatedly inveighs against ignorant Americans for holding a glib, amorphous view of the southern locations outside their country’s borders, its author displays a questionable understanding of the southern locales within America. In part, The Ground Beneath Her Feet reads finally as a compositely autobiographical narrative of Third World natives with penchants for American music and culture.22 The surviving member of the novel’s original trio settles in New York and enjoys a comfortable, celebrated perch while critiquing the exploits of the United States and drawing royalties for his efforts. In proposing such a life as the American idyll come true, Rushdie would seem to have resolved the idea of home that has always been a problem for him. He has done so by synthesizing the migrant intellectual


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figure of his past writings and autobiographical experiences with the happy specter of the American immigrant unencumbered by any affiliation to the nation’s past, who simply arrives in New York harbor and works hard to fit into his new country. This representation of American identity directly abuts those that we will find in Faulkner’s and Ellison’s fiction. The gargantuan America that emerges from Rushdie’s pages, however, does seem an indirect confirmation of Faulkner’s and Ellison’s concerns about what would happen if their terms for determining national identity—blood, soil, and history— were forgotten for the immigrant-led merriments of money-making, mobility, and newness.

Chapter Three

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Immigrants

Like Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison regards hybridization as a positive consequence of disparate cultures blending within the pluralist setting of the United States. Its emergence as an instrument of determining Americanness in Invisible Man (1952), however, represents a sharp rejoinder to the efforts of immigrant intellectuals and activists in the novel, whose brands of uprooted, hybrid cosmopolitanism indirectly anticipate those that Ground privileges. In this chapter, I argue that Invisible Man registers the encounter of opposing versions of national identity formation: one based upon external contributions to American composition; the other based upon their internal equivalent. This convergence occurs in the tense coincidence of the Great Migration and the New Immigration to 1930s New York, which Ellison details through edgy interactions between representative figures of these two events.1 The novel’s protagonist feels a “strange, out of joint quality” when he first migrates from the South, in part because his attempt to establish himself in New York clashes with similar efforts by recent immigrant arrivals (IM 160). Brittle a-symmetries between minority groups in Invisible Man eventually encourage the protagonist to transform indigenous black historical experience into contemporary cultural agency, as a means of establishing his authentic claim to American identity amid the new ethnic pluralities of the urban North. This chapter proposes that the novel’s historical and geographical commitments motivate generally negative portrayals of its immigrant characters, at least when these commitments are challenged by immigrationrelated changes to America’s composition that still ratified pre-existing black– white binaries. While intellectual companion to ethnic European–descended writers such as Saul Bellow, and always emphatic about the European influences upon his writing, Ellison displays a troubled attitude towards less literary examples of a foreign presence in the America that emerges from Invisible 51

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Man.2 He was principally concerned by what he saw as the onset of collective national amnesia regarding America’s historically underprivileged groups, an amnesia partly enabled by the superseding claims of new immigrant minorities. His fiction and non-fiction reveal a longstanding frustration over the comparative ease with which white European immigrants were assimilated into American life ahead of native-born blacks. Yet he was also resistant to strictly race-based responses to the difficulties of black American life, which came with the rise of African nationalism amongst black American writers and intellectuals in the 1960s. As biographer Arnold Rampersad explains, on this latter point, Ellison was “almost proud” of his studied lack of interest in U.S. black/African connections (376). In Ellison’s own words, “he had ‘no special emotional attachment to [Africa] . . . It is just part of the bigger world picture to me,’” and he considered it a romantic self-delusion for a black American to think otherwise: “‘The African content of American Negro life is more fanciful than actual’” (376). Against what he saw as a monolithic, racialist sensibility, Ellison pressed for the recognition of native blacks as preeminently American. Through the aesthetic and intellectual involvement of the historical past—embodied in the post-migration cultural expressions of southern black experience—in the national present, the linguistic and cultural elements of traditional black life would be recognized as uniquely and undeniably American. This chapter argues that in Invisible Man, Ellison attempts to enact this recognition at the novel’s most dissonant moments, alongside, instead of, and against immigrants’ competing efforts. The presence of immigrants in 1930s and 1940s New York City complicated Ralph Ellison’s ambitions for black Americans and provoked in him a persistent hostility towards their competing claims for recognition as fellow citizens. During a 1977 writers’ discussion, for example, Ellison’s response to a leading question from Ishmael Reed about immigrant attitudes towards the United States reveals an unmistakably sour position. It is tacitly but firmly based upon his view of a fundamental disjunction between responsibility for past wrongs and reception of present promise: Some simply feel nostalgic for the certainties of the societies they left behind. I don’t think that most of them bring their disdain with them. They develop it after discovering the difference between the American dream and our day-to-day American reality; a complex reality which is consistently questioned by our condition and our protests. On the other hand, that kind of disdain is a put-down which an immigrant might well find irresistible. They didn’t create the negative aspect of our society; they weren’t here, and most would deny that they even benefited


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from the injustices we’ve had to live with—although they damn well have, and do. (Conversations 352–53)

Ellison complains that the problem with immigrant passages into American society is that not only do they exempt themselves from responsibility for past injustices (such as slavery), they also benefit from America’s race-divided social system by easily passing into the white population. Elsewhere, he explicitly cites the presence of immigrants as impeding modern America’s acceptance of its native blacks as nationally equal to their white counterparts. In the ominously entitled essay “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (1970), Ellison explains one reason for perpetual black exclusion and archly notes those responsible for it: Many whites could look at the social position of blacks and feel that color formed an easy and reliable gauge for determining to what extent one was or was not American. Perhaps that is why one of the first epithets that many European immigrants learned when they got off the boat was “nigger”; it made them feel instantly American. (CE 583)

While blacks have suffered through two centuries of degradation, and yet maintain their allegiance to a nation that refuses to grant them full status as fellow citizens, white immigrants feel “instantly” American based upon their easy entry into America’s pre-existing racial hierarchies. This frustration leads Ellison to argue in turn that a full understanding of U.S. national identity depends upon one indisputable fact: “the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black” (583, emphasis mine). In Invisible Man, Ellison establishes this version of an indigenous American identity by positioning it against nationally defined outsiders. He was provoked into this strategy by the challenges that newly arrived immigrants posed to his locally circumscribed conceptions of national community and American identity. The strategies that Invisible Man deploys in combating foreigners in New York reveal why, how, and when local communities depend upon what Appadurai explains as a primordialist concept of collective identity (140). Primordialists reject common connections uprooted from specific, continuously homogenous locales; instead, they endorse “attachments that bind small, intimate collectivities. . . . based upon shared claims to blood, soil, [and] language” (140). In response to what he saw as the persistent non-recognition of black contributions to America’s composition and culture, Ellison uses Invisible Man to enact the “self-expression” and support the “cultural survival” that constitute

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the positive form of a “culturalist” mobilization of group identity (146, 147). This gambit, however, involves a strong, if thus far understudied, xenophobic element. Immigrants are stigmatized in Invisible Man by their intertwined associations with languages and political interests deemed unAmerican when measured against the commitments and culture of southern blacks. What I call invisible immigrants act as catalytic elements in the novel; their foreignness comes into high visibility so that the protagonist can assert his primordial American identity—as an ambivalent but selfaffirmed black southerner—as justification for being recognized as American by comparison with suspicious, dangerous immigrants. Glenn Loury has noted that blacks migrating to the North in the first half of the twentieth century met with “fierce resistance from the relatively new Americans of that day” (79). This was a further burden for “these sons and daughters of slaves,” which, according to Loury, could only be corrected through a universal recognition of “the equal humanity” of all Americans (89). Ellison would readily agree with this humanist approach to race relations and determining national identity, and he would likely agree with the immigrant challenge that members of the Great Migration had to confront. In his writing, he sought to resist the fragmentation of modern life brought about by (the Great) migration and communal dissolution; through Invisible Man, he tests organic national identity, defined by a cultural reformulation of black America’s historical and racial scars, as an answer to the disintegrations of native black community in modern America. He sends the novel’s protagonist off in search of continuity between his southern past and northern present, his rural roots and urban consciousness. In so committing his only major fiction to such a task, Ellison joined a history of writing on black aspirations for national recognition complicated by immigrant competition, including work by Alain Locke and the contributors to The New Negro, and by Booker T. Washington. Ellison’s formula for American identity most directly resembles W.E.B. DuBois’s, as put forth in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Early in that work, after famously lamenting the native black’s “two-ness—an American, a Negro,” DuBois calls for a merging of these “warring ideals” through a middle way between the monolithic options then available: [The American Negro] would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that the Negro has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit


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upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (364–65)

In Invisible Man, Ellison evokes the opposed extremities of expatriation and self-erasure that DuBois describes, and rejects both paths. Instead, the novel endorses the internally hybrid identity that Souls also holds up—to be both “Negro and American” and thus “a co-worker in the [national] culture” (365). In committing to such a goal, Ellison—long considered strongly conservative—was in fact more heterodox than he initially seemed, contends Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: “[For Ellison,] the revolutionary political act was not separation; it was the staking of a claim for the Negro in the construction of an honestly public American culture” (Conversations 398). Rather than rejecting a nation that had historically rejected his race, Ellison sought to establish, through historically defined experiences and cultural expressions, the very American-ness of native blacks. Yet in staking this claim while trying to avoid the “door of Opportunity closed roughly in his face,” Ellison’s protagonist has to contend with elements that exist outside of the binaries that he, like DuBois’s famous seventh son, so valued. Before both DuBois and Ellison, Booker T. Washington registered a similar commitment to black national identity, though he sensed it was challenged by changes to America’s population. I: CAST DOWN YOUR BUCKETS WHERE “WE” ARE Up from Slavery (1901), like Souls, provides a classic example of internally focused thinking on American identity; throughout his autobiography, Washington stresses the shared experiences of “both races,” black and white, that together define the nation (cf. 73, 200, 206). Race theorists such as Reginald Daniel locate “the dichotomization of blackness and whiteness” in American life as something “that originates in Eurocentric thinking” (3). But black intellectual figures such as Washington, Ellison, and, at least during the early part of his career, DuBois were themselves invested in this binary. For Washington, it provides a stable context for understanding the relationship between historical burdens and present rights: he regards slavery as the painful past out of which blacks have emerged, ready to succeed in America. In order for blacks to do so, however, Washington must convince whites in America, particularly in the South, that they can ensure a healthy future for their beloved land only through and with the darker race. Ellison undercuts Washington’s idealism in the opening chapter of Invisible Man by having his protagonist go through a condensed version of the Tuskegee founder’s vision

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of black life. As M.K. Singleton observes, “Ellison’s major fictional strategy is . . . to chronicle his hero’s picaresque misadventures at the hands of assorted exponents of some distorted variant of Washington’s credo” (10). After a repugnant, degrading boxing contest, the idealistic if confused narrator is invited to give a speech to an assembly of town fathers. Ellison explicitly models this speech on sections of Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Exposition address. Washington’s goal for that speech, he recalls in his autobiography, “was the desire to say something that would cement the friendship of the races and bring about hearty coöperation between them” (142). His method of achieving such solidification persists throughout Up from Slavery: he stresses the shared, genuine heritage of white and black Americans, particularly within the South. With Invisible Man’s speech, Ellison provides a symbolic encapsulation of what it means for a black southerner to follow Washington’s advice. Battered, bruised, and bloodied after his time in the ring, the protagonist soldiers on with his speech. He identifies himself as a member of “the younger generation [that] extol[s] the wisdom of that great leader and educator” who first announced: To those of my race who depend upon bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your buckets where you are.” (IM 29–30)

Ellison echoes the first of Washington’s two uses of the bucket metaphor in the Atlanta speech, as his protagonist assures his audience that southern blacks seek close relations with southern whites rather than to escape to a foreign land. This rosy optimism, of course, sounds decidedly hollow; it follows the boxing contest that culminated in the boys pathetically groping for fake gold coins upon an electrified rug to the delight of their “nextdoor neighbors.” Clearly, Ellison intends his protagonist’s promise that the younger generation of southern blacks is committed to a socially responsible (if not equal) life in America to reveal the blood-clotted ironies of what this commitment entailed. Yet Ellison passes over Washington’s second use of the bucket metaphor—one with which Ellison’s own later writings and Invisible Man’s experiences in New York seem in close agreement. After enjoining members of his race to “cast down their buckets in America,” Washington establishes the validity of this proposition by setting it expressly against the competition new immigrants posed to native blacks. Washington redirects


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his plea to whites in the Atlanta audience, arguing against any temptation to look beyond the South for its future well-being: To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your buckets where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested . . . people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields. . . . While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding and un-resentful people that the world has seen. (144)

Keying into commonly held attitudes about new immigrants during this period, Washington’s roster of the positive attributes that southern blacks possess implicitly defines immigrants by their opposites.3 Washington strives to assure his southern listeners that their best course of action lies with a people whom they can understand; whose loyalty has been proven; and whose interests are stability and harmony—unlike “strange tongue[d],” unproven, troublesome immigrants. This segment of Washington’s address affirms Arnold Shankman’s observation that “[t]he comments Afro-Americans made [between 1880 and 1935] about immigrants often told as much about their own status and aspirations as about the activities of foreigners in the United States” (151). Indeed, Washington’s attempt to synthesize black and white southern life consistently depends upon xenophobic-laced promises. Elsewhere he promises his audience, “we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be . . . interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one” (144–45).4 Washington was a failed figure from Ellison’s vantage, as is evident in the sarcasm and ironies that characterize Booker T.’s recasting in that early chapter of Invisible Man. Nevertheless, the two endorsed surprisingly similar premises. Near the end of Up from Slavery, Washington declares, “This country demands that every race shall measure itself by the American standard” (194). In Invisible Man, a similar black-and-white, blood-and-soil nationalist paradigm emerges. In thinking about Ellison’s formulations of American identity, however, one cannot divide questions of national identity from linguistic issues. To demonstrate American-ness, in Ellison’s formulation, one must speak a vernacular form of English, a premise that encourages

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the recognition of the inherent black dimensions of the nation’s identity. Elsewhere in his essay “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” Ellison explains that overcoming racism in America required “the inclusion, not assimilation, of the black man” into national recognition (CE 582). This inclusion, for Ellison, would best be achieved in a linguistic context, because “the American nation is in a sense the product of the American language,” and “the black man [is] co-creator of that language” (581). This formulation in turn depends upon a regional foundation; in a 1965 interview, Ellison contended that “American English would not have the same music in it were it not for the existence of great numbers of Negroes and great numbers of white Southerners, who have learned their English partially from Negroes” (Conversations 92–93). According to Ellison, the heterogeneous and mellifluous characteristics of American English come out of native black-and-white interactions within the U.S. South. Rushdie, we recall, has a similar regard for the musicality and mixture of American English, “the livingest English in the world” as Ground announced, but he conceived its greatness to be the consequence of continuous immigration. Rushdie’s version of linguistic development in America is extraterritorial and fragmentary: through perpetual immigration, bits and pieces are added from all over the world, at a variety of unlinked time periods. Invisible Man seeks to demonstrate, like Faulkner’s fiction before it, that an American linguistic register created according to Rushdie’s premises results in national dissonance, not vitality. As a counter to such thinking, Ellison’s affirmation of the American language as internally developed forms the foundation for his recurrent positing of the local against the foreign in his only major fiction. Invisible Man is spattered with foreign accents, languages, and peoples; these elements emerge as barriers against which the novel’s protagonist struggles to assert his American identity. Jerry Watts charges that “Ellison at times seemed to ignore all nonwhite cultural influences on black Americans,” while his desire “to situate black life in the very core of American life” depended upon his rejecting components not circumscribed by local geography and the Western cultural tradition (61). Watts ranks among the few Ellison commentators who have drawn attention to this tendency of Ellison’s; most simply accept his obsessive binary constructions (black/white, North/South) as sufficient indicators of America’s heterogeneity.5 Ellison, however, does not exactly ignore other minority influences, as Watts claims; rather, he includes them in his writing precisely to reject them. Ellison regards new minorities, specifically European and, to a lesser degree, Caribbean immigrants, as challenges to, and provocations for, his central theme: “The bursting forth of Negro personality from the fixed boundaries of Southern life” (Bone 27).


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This is not, however, an idealized celebration of northern, urban freedom from southern, rural enslavement. Early in Invisible Man, an older black southerner warns the protagonist prior to his departure from the South for seemingly better prospects: “‘New York! . . . That’s not a place, it’s a dream . . . Now all the little black boys run away to New York. Out of the fire into the melting pot” (IM 152, emphasis mine). The reference to a classic immigration-assimilation motif registers tension between organic American identity defined within the parameters of southern race relations and grafted American identity brought about by the ever-evolving composition of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. To compare these competing versions of American identity formation, Ellison magnifies the linguistic and cultural differences posed by immigrants, before seeking rhetorically and politically to close off their access to the promise of American life. In Invisible Man, this strategy comes into play when the protagonist first reaches the North: This really was Harlem, and now all the stories which I had heard of the city-within-a-city leaped alive. . . . For this was not a city of realities, but of dreams . . . a new voice of possibility suggested itself to me faintly, like a small voice that was barely audible. . . . Then I stopped still. (IM 159)

His reverie is broken by “a short squat man [who] shouted angrily from a ladder to which were attached a collection of small American flags. ‘We gine chase ’em out,’ [he] cried. ‘Out!’” (IM 159) The “new voice of possibility” that Invisible Man hears as the promise of New York is drowned out by a foreign voice “yelling something in a staccato West Indian accent” with a divisive ring to it (IM 159). He “stops still” because he is greeted, first and foremost in New York, by evidence of the melting pot in overheated action. From Invisible Man’s perspective, this man’s presence is incongruous with his expectations about his new city, as symbolized by the jarring juxtaposition of American flag and West Indian accent. Like Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury, as the next chapter argues, Invisible Man’s confusions in a northern urban location do not result exclusively from inter-regional, and therefore internally American, differences. They also involve the unexpectedly strong, intervening immigrant presence in the North. Presumably, the first man whom Ellison’s protagonist encounters in New York is demanding that whites should be chased out of Harlem, but at the novel’s climax Invisible Man determines that this provocateur rejects others not for their racial identities but for their national identities, a decision that in turn provokes

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his counterbalancing defense. With this minor moment, Ellison frames subsequent native–immigrant encounters in the novel: a foreigner deflates the native black migrant’s hopes as he seeks better prospects and authentic local affiliations in his new city. This was a situation that also challenged contributors to Alain Locke’s The New Negro. II: NEW NEGROES AND NEW IMMIGRANTS: WHICH ARE THE NEW AMERICANS? Ellison’s intellectual interests in black American experiences were first focused when he heard Alain Locke speak at Tuskegee, ten years after publication of The New Negro (1925). According to Gregory Stephens, Locke’s “theory of the ‘New Negro’ . . . pointed Ellison towards the recognition that ‘black culture’ was . . . central to the American experience” (118). And integral to black American experience for Ellison (and Locke et al. before him) was the Great Migration and the possibilities it held for black southerners. In his introductory comments to The New Negro, Locke emphasizes the three themes that characterize the collection’s response. Foremost is the Great Migration itself, the movement of the black population in America from South to North that culminated in the early decades of the twentieth century. Second is the challenge inherent in a change from rural to urban living. The third, in close resemblance to Rushdie’s later pronouncements, delineates the great artistic and social potential that arises with displacement, movement, and the freshness of the migrant’s new local space. For Locke, and for Ellison after him, these themes possess a national significance because “the conditions that are molding a New Negro are [simultaneously] molding a New America” (NN 10). The black man’s ascent to full national recognition is premised upon his movement from the southern farm to the northern city, which Locke views as a rise both from slavery to liberty and from a primitive to a modern state (NN 6). But as black writing from the 1920s onward reveals, hopes for prosperity brought about by a radical break and physical dislocation from one’s origins went often unfulfilled, at least for native black migrants to the North. In his contribution to The New Negro, Charles S. Johnson initially evokes Locke’s hopefulness, explaining the Great Migration’s impetus as “the barrenness and monotony of rural life; the dawn of hope for something better; distant flashes of a new country, beckoning—these were the soil in which the idea took root—and flowered” (NN 280). He quickly complains, however, that newly arrived blacks in New York discovered that “incoming hordes of Europeans had edged them out of their inheritance of personal


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service businesses, clashed with them in competition for the rough muscle jobs and driven them back into the obscurity of individual personal service” (NN 283–84). The most revealing term in Johnson’s sour complaint is “inheritance”; clearly, he believes blacks have a lineal right to the economic promise of New York, which ought to supersede any rights of the “incoming hordes” who have ridden over their claims. In fact, Johnson implicitly accuses immigrants of returning blacks to slavery with the euphemistic reference to “individual personal service.” Johnson’s complaint was indicative of a general frustration during this period. A 1928 Harlem newspaper editorial declared that “blacks had ‘learned through bitter experiences that foreign labour, though it may be crude, illiterate and hopelessly unsympathetic with American institutions and ideals, is used to press us further down the ladder . . . in spite of our proved loyalty to America’” (quoted in Shankman 150). New European immigrants represent more than an intervening presence in terms of economic rights and possibilities for members of the Great Migration. According to prevailing sentiments in 1920s and 1930s black American thought, these immigrants also provide white northern interests with a new means of perpetuating the historical degradation of blacks. The countervailing desire to prove the black right to American identity takes on a metaphoric significance elsewhere in The New Negro. In one of the most creatively nationalist of the collection’s essays, Paul U. Kellog characterizes the Great Migration as evidence of southern blacks representing the most recent of America’s frontier settlers. In the prior chapter, we saw Rushdie inadvertently update this notion by connecting the postcolonial Indian Diaspora with the New World migratory impulse of early America (recall Ormus’s “Mayflower” greeting). In celebrating the Third World immigrant’s pre-American ability to succeed in the country, Rushdie, like Kellog, draws parallels between the ideal American type and the dark-skinned southerner: historically, both were underdogs, both were rebellious, and both had the desire and daring to move to a new land. But here Rushdie’s version diverges into a fragmented field of poly-southern arrivals and post-national American types, while Kellog celebrates a form of migration that is entirely nativeborn and internal. Indeed, he strictly opposes it to “the waves of immigration which have swept in from overseas” and argues that this new generation [of black migrants] are fellow adventurers as never before in the inveterate quest of our people. . . . In the pioneering of this new epoch, they are getting into stride with the old. By way of the typical American experience, they become for the first time part of its living tradition. (NN 273, emphasis mine)

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Again, we see a black writer stressing the inherent American-ness of his communal group and its equality to white native-born citizens by de-emphasizing the similar claims, or in this case pioneering efforts, made by immigrants.6 In joining themselves to the “living tradition” of the American frontier, southern blacks relocate it from the Western Plains to the urban North. The image’s metaphoric value, unlike in Rushdie, remains firmly grounded upon internal geography.7 Like Kellog, James Weldon Johnson hinges the potential for positive black life in America on an integrated future for Harlemites. Detailing the various characteristics of Harlem, Johnson observes that these in part reveal it to be “similar to the Italian colony” (NN 309). But he makes an important distinction: Unlike segregated immigrant quarters, “Harlem grows more metropolitan and more a part of New York” (NN 309). Johnson then emphasizes language as the grounds upon which black claims to America, as opposed to immigrant claims, are established: “[The] language of Harlem is not alien; it is not Italian or Yiddish; it is English. Harlem talks American, reads American, thinks American” (309). Johnson establishes the total American-ness of Harlem’s blacks by negative comparison with immigrants. He invalidates immigrant rights to recognition as “part of New York” in the dual noun–antecedent relationship of “Yiddish” and “Italian” with “alien.” In an interview with Jon McPherson published in 1970, Ellison spoke along similar lines: “[o]ther people from other European countries, the first generation at least, didn’t speak English. But we happen to be a people who can’t remember when we didn’t speak English” (CE 369). This is a moment of positive, strategic amnesia regarding national identity: Black Americans cannot remember when they did not speak English, which means, given Ellison’s connecting of linguistic ability to national identity, that they are exempt from pre-American, foreign-based connections. In other words, to take the logic to its furthest implication, native blacks actually possess a deeper historical right to American national identity than do European-originated, native whites. Of course, Ellison knew that black attempts to transform their aboriginal status into modern opportunities would meet resistance; when Invisible Man finds work in New York, however, it proves to involve more than simple white-on-black racism.8 III: LIBERTY PAINTS: KEEPING AMERICA PURELY AMERICAN Invisible Man’s blindly optimistic ambitions manage to persist beyond his early, unsettling encounter with Ras, and beyond homesickness, repeated employment rejections, and revelations about Bledsoe’s letters of


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recommendation. In finally finding work at Liberty Paints, however, the character loses whatever hopefulness still lingers, finding himself in a position that remains his for the rest of the novel: caught between new immigrants and southern blacks, pulled towards and pushed away by both while confronted by a strategically color-blind nation. He is greeted with a loaded slogan on his first day of work: “KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS” (IM 196). His first duty suggests the seeming impossibility of achieving this famous purity: he is told to add drops of black liquid to white paint and mix them together. Kerry McSweeney suggests that Ellison “hints at a whitewash designed to absorb black Americans into a sanitized history of American life—to cover the black truth with a glossy white mythology” (75–76). This reading pays inadequate attention to the metaphorical underpinnings of the whitening process. The whiteness of this paint requires a component of blackness to achieve its purity; the color represents not so much the disappearance of black Americans into a purely white national myth as the dependence of that myth on the inclusion of blackness. The painting allegory is indeed a critique of black complicity in the ongoing whitewash of national history, but is also the revelation of blackness as a constituent element of American identity. Ellison expands this allegory by sending his protagonist underground to Liberty Paint’s boiler room, where, to Invisible Man’s confused presumption that “‘the paint was made upstairs,’” the crotchety Brockway replies: “Naw, they just mixes in the color, make it look pretty. Right down here is where the real paint is made. Without what I do they couldn’t do nothing, they be making bricks without straw. . . . caint a single doggone drop of paint move out of the factory lessen it comes through Lucius Brockway’s hands.” (IM 214–15)

If Liberty Paints allegorically “represents America,” then the national image is prettied above but forged below, white on the surface but black beneath (McSweeney 73). Brockway is slavishly devoted to Old Man Sparland and, given the calamities that befall Liberty’s white paints when Lucas is temporarily absent, proves himself indispensable to the operation. Two important geographical elements here emerge. While we are never told explicitly that he is a southerner, it seems reasonable to assume—based upon his age, his attitude towards white authority, and his southern-inflected language—that Brockway is an early member of the Great Migration. In terms of spatial symbolism, the distinctions he makes about the factory, between below and above, suggests a North/South division. The white

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national image of America is borne by the black South in its migration to northern factories and in its historically servile relation to the nation at large. Ellison represents both of these black contributions to the wider nation as tactically effaced, with blacks complicit in the denial. A throwaway comment confirms this wider possibility for Ellison’s paint-factory-as-national-allegory.9 After proudly informing his would-be apprentice that he came up with the slogan for the company’s most popular paint, Brockway again boasts of his indispensability: “‘Ain’t a continental thing that happens down here ain’t as iffen I done put my black hands into it!’” (IM 218, emphases mine) Ellison’s choice of adjective holds geographic implications; most every action—continent-wide—that ensures white success has a black component. Unmoved by Brockway’s self-aggrandizement, Stephens regards the character as symbolizing the “complicity of blacks in this act [of whitewashing America], and [in the] conditions of underpaid and underrecognized servitude under which blacks perform their role” (138). Indeed, the character seems willing to fulfill one of the negative options that DuBois lays out in Souls: the black man willing to “bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism” (365). As we shall see, however, the regional dimension of Brockway’s black pride in white paint renders it, at the very least, indicative of an inherently national, historically based problem that Invisible Man will struggle to modify and correct. When he innocuously goes off in search of his lunch, Invisible Man encounters an unexpected, newer difficulty facing Great Migration blacks in New York. In seeking success in the North, an ambition symbolized by his moving upstairs from the southern setting of Brockway’s boiler room, Invisible Man stumbles into a meeting of factory workers. Informing an interlocutor that Lucius Brockway is his foreman, he receives an unexpectedly harsh response. “‘Get him the hell out of here,’ they shouted. I turned. A group on the far side of the room kicked over a bench, yelling, ‘Throw him out! Throw him out!’” (IM 219) The angry words echo the “‘We gine chase ’em out!’” refrain that welcomed Invisible Man to Harlem, though the deeper parallel between the respective speakers is not initially clear. The workers at Liberty Paints are organizing into a union; their rationale for rejecting Invisible Man involves a racial prejudice that becomes evident as their deliberations intensify. One union man’s seeming sympathy is based upon the presumption of certain differences between those who work above and those who work below. His offending benevolence anticipates Ellison’s sarcastic depictions of the wellmeaning white activists of the Brotherhood: “‘we don’t want to forget that workers like him aren’t so highly developed as some of us who’ve been in the labor movement for a long time’” (IM 222). The put-down ostensibly occurs


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along an experiential divide, though the protagonist senses a racial tone to the euphemistic “workers like him” and “some of us” distinctions. When he returns downstairs, however, this rather simple black–white split is reformulated along more complex national lines, through fanatical appeals to racial and regional solidarity. Invisible Man receives yet another loud and unexpected rejection, this time from Brockway, when he mentions the union meeting: “Union !’ I heard his white cup shatter against the floor as he uncrossed his legs, rising. ‘I knowed you belonged to that bunch of troublemaking foreigners! I knowed it! Git out!’ he screamed. ‘Git out of my basement!’” (IM 224) Another exclamatory dismissal leaves Invisible Man feeling roundly rejected. Earlier, he was confronted with foreign-accented, divisive sentiments that framed his arrival in Harlem; now, he is rejected by the union for his apparent association with Brockway, and rejected by Brockway for his apparent association with the union. Brockway despises the union for its foreignness, which, in a historical context, relates to its predominantly immigrant composition. David Reimers explains that Eastern European immigrants to New York “became active in the city’s growing trade unions” between 1880 and WWII, while Seth Scheiner observes that “those southern Negroes who migrated northward brought with them the southern antipathy for unions” (Reimers 41; Scheiner 72). In response to the interconnection of unions and immigrants, Brockway projects a fantastic vision of rosy plantation life onto a northern factory and regards union membership as a betrayal of one’s race, one’s nation, and of idealized, benevolent black–white relations in America: “‘That damn union,’ he cried, almost in tears. ‘That damn union! They after my job! I knew they after my job! For one of us to join one of them damned unions is like we was to bite the hand of the man who teached us how to bathe in a bathtub!’” (IM 228) Brockway’s response registers the anxiety of the native-born forced to contend for his well-being with an outside challenge. Against this newness, anything rooted and historically based—even an idealized vision of updated plantation relations—is acceptable because it is knowable within the parameters of a continuous, stable, and indigenous narrative. Richard Kostelanetz regards this chapter of Invisible Man “as a symbolic portrait of the underlying reality of black–white relations in America,” through which Ellison reveals “the heretical truth that American life, underneath the white surface, is like the color grey, indeed a mixture of black and white” (118–19). This observation, while attentive to the chapter’s blurring of neat racial distinctions, does not account for how (native) black and white in fact harmonize, at least for Brockway. He regards the presence of union men as a destabilizing

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third element outside indigenous black/white relations; these troublemaking immigrants are intent upon taking black jobs and will break apart traditional American race relations, in turn demanding unity on the native side that denies all internal problems in the face of outsiders. Invisible Man inimically views the old man as beholden to an understanding of black–white relations that holds in contemporary New York only through zealous denials of foreign otherness and fantasy images of blackwhite, master–slave relations. But while Invisible Man finds problems with Brockway’s regionalist limitations, he is similarly dissatisfied with the union’s offerings. Moreover, he becomes the unwitting catalyst for competing expressions of identity—union solidarity based upon tacitly racial and immigrant unity vs. national solidarity supported by racial regional connections. His consequent position, a version of the “tight spot” motif that Houston Baker discerns in the novel, recurs throughout Invisible Man: he is stuck between sectarian foreigners and lame black southerners—uneasy, alienated, and intent upon a new option (130). IV: THE BROTHERHOOD, OR THAT OLD AGRARIAN SELF? Despite the Brotherhood’s ostensibly representing just such an opportunity, tensions define Invisible Man’s dealings with the organization from the onset; these span regional, race-based, linguistic, and, climatically, national contexts. The organization’s leader, Brother Jack, a politically responsible, metropolitan activist, offers Invisible Man the opportunity to follow his lead. He has, however, a questionable connection to the historical experiences of the indigenous minorities whose plight he seeks to fold into his organization’s class warfare. This results in a starkly negative depiction, though the full reasons behind the characterization, which involve more than political differences, are not revealed until an exchange late in the novel between the testy protagonist and his would-be superior. When Invisible Man first tries to establish a regional basis for his nascent New York political activities (defending an old black couple from eviction), Brother Jack coldly insists that “they [the old couple] don’t count” (IM 291). Invisible Man counters, “‘I like them, they reminded me of folks I know down South. It’s taken a long time to feel it, but they’re folks just like me’” (IM 291). This affirmation of his local origins and identification with rural black community is unprecedented for a young man often embarrassed to be associated with fellow black southerners and ashamed of their behavior. But these positive sentiments are discounted by a lecture against organic affiliations:


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“Oh, no, brother; you’re mistaken, and you’re sentimental. You’re not like them. . . . Perhaps you were, but that’s all past, dead. You might not recognize it just now, but that part of you is dead. You have not completely shed that self, that old agrarian self, but it’s dead and you will throw it off completely and emerge something new.” (IM 291)

Brother Jack encourages Invisible Man to reject his past for re-invention, though within a prescribed political frame. His proposal substitutes tacitly Marxist affiliations for the regionalist equivalents that Invisible Man momentarily values. Instead of “that old agrarian self,” Brother Jack offers him a new urban consciousness, and the chance to be a political operator. This, of course, appeals to the ambitious protagonist, yet it soon becomes clear that the Brotherhood offers him opportunities that depend upon paradox. It provides Invisible Man with a platform from which to speak in support of improving his race, so long as he mouths the words of an organization that seeks to downplay the significance of race and that pulls him away from the very people he seeks to help through its offices. To be a new Booker T., Invisible Man is told to live “‘further downtown so that [he’ll] be within easy call’”; and again, he is instructed to “‘put aside [his] past’” (IM 309). He thus leaves the transplanted southern comfort of Mary Rambo’s Harlem home for “an undistinguished building in a mixed Spanish-Irish neighbourhood” (IM 331). To be closer to the Brotherhood is both to be further from Harlem and to live anonymously amongst a mixture of immigrants. Invisible Man’s new apartment is the antithesis of Mary’s: clean, neat, and altogether empty of community.10 Like Faulkner’s Quentin Compson living in Boston, Invisible Man finds himself in a markedly different world from that which he knows: not just in the North, or even in a black neighborhood of the North, but in an immigrant district. He struggles to value this new mode of living, embodied in the promise of the Brotherhood: I belonged to them. I sat up, grasping my knees in the dark as the thought struck home. . . . Did I mean that I had become less of what I was, less a Negro . . . less an exile from down home, the South? . . . But all this is negative. To become less—in order to become more? (IM 353–54)

Invisible Man’s “I belonged to them” echoes Brockway’s accusation, “I knowed you belonged to that bunch of troublemaking foreigners!” in what proves to be an instance of foreshadowed xenophobia. Ellison suggests the protagonist’s loss of his regional identity by having him accept that he

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belongs “to”—rather than “in”—the Brotherhood. This is a thought that “struck home”; the violent connotations confirm that his membership in the Brotherhood breaks his connection to his origins. Invisible Man senses that the gains of the Brotherhood are also an inevitable loss, even though he now “glimpse[s] the possibility of being more than a member of a race” (IM 355). Marjorie Pryse explains that despite repeated rejections, “Invisible Man continues to associate the pursuit of identity with membership and distinction in an organization,” in this case by rejecting a past-based identity—he’s no longer primarily the “exile” from “down home, the South” (157). Through Invisible Man’s subsequent experiences with the Brotherhood, Ellison tests the opportunities a political organization held out for blacks seeking to achieve a greater sense of belonging in America than was allowed for by their historically degraded positions. The author’s own experiences, however, suggested to him the unlikelihood of this possibility. According to Lawrence Jackson, Ellison “was deeply influenced by . . . communist theory, which he gravitated towards as a means to explain racism” between 1936 and 1938, a decade prior to Invisible Man (186). More than explaining racism, Ellison then thought, Communist practice held the potential to eradicate it. But in privileging class struggle over racial strife in the battle for social improvement, the CP-USA failed to acknowledge how intertwined these issues were in American society. In fact, Ellison considered such privileging to be an inherently non-American approach. In a 1965 interview, Ellison’s comments on the U.S. Communist movement reveal a race-based, nationalist rationale for his break with the Party twenty years earlier: You could be in a muck and a mire of dead and futile activity, much of which had little to do with their ultimate goals or with American reality. They fostered the myth that Communism was twentieth-century Americanism, but to be a twentieth-century American meant, in their thinking, that you had to be more Russian than American and less Negro than either. That’s how they lost the Negroes. (CE 744)

The CP-USA’s definition of an American, in Ellison’s caustic formulation, represents the antipodal extreme of his hopes for blacks in America: the foreign assumption of the citizen’s body, “more Russian than American and less Negro than either.” The interests of the CP-USA meant, for Ellison, the further distancing of the black individual from his native-born right to national recognition as fully American. Ellison’s bitterness specifically grew out of the Party’s “public abandonment of black rights,” which he explained in a 1945


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letter to Richard Wright, and which he reworks in Invisible Man (Jackson 336, 254).11 Discovering little interest in the Brotherhood’s mission among native Harlemites, and battling an increasingly popular Ras the Exhorter, Invisible Man in turn starts to notice problems with the organization’s commitment to American blacks. A poster that he initially proposed to develop the Brotherhood’s visibility in Harlem seems, upon its final design, to disclose the organization’s strategic interests, troubling him in a way similar to how the CP-USA frustrated Ellison: It was a symbolic poster of a group of heroic figures. An American Indian couple, representing the dispossessed past; a blond brother (in overalls) and a leading Irish sister, representing the dispossessed present; and Brother Tod Clifton and a young white couple (it had been felt unwise simply to show Clifton and the girl) surrounded by a group of children of mixed races, representing the future. (IM 385)

The poster’s arrangements and intended meaning suggest, initially, that native Indians have been the only victims of dispossession. It further represents contemporary victims only as politically engaged and labor-class white immigrants (Irish activists and Nordic farmers). Finally, the poster posits ideal mixture as the future America that will be brought about through solidarity among these victimized groups. The only black presence in this poster is isolated; Clifton is not part of a couple and his alienated position implies a lack of black contributions to the hybrid ideal of someday America (the symbolic de-sexualization of the black male comes across in the passage’s parenthetical comment). The poster thus enacts black erasure: the past belongs to the Indians; the present to Nordic and Irish whites; the future to an assembly of mixedrace children. The American composition on the poster combines internal (Indians and white farmers) and external (Irish sister) origins, both of which exclude the native black. The poster alerts the protagonist to the Brotherhood’s questionable modes of representation and understandings of American reality. The organization’s perfected American future tacitly and tactically excludes blacks, as even the poster’s slogan suggests. Earlier, at Liberty Paints, Invisible Man was invited to “KEEP AMERICA WHITE”; in the Brotherhood, he now agitates for “The Rainbow of America’s Future” (IM 385). Literally and metaphorically, in either setting, there’s no place for blackness. The poster’s message comes into play in the novel’s political drama when Invisible Man discovers there has been “a switch in emphasis [in the Broth-

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erhood] from local issues to those more national and international in scope . . . [F]or the moment the interests of Harlem were not of first importance,” as Ellison complained to Wright of the CP-USA’s shift in focus (IM 428).12 To suggest the consequences of the Brotherhood’s abandonment, Ellison has Invisible Man then encounter Brother Tod Clifton, whose present-day situation confirms his alienated position in the Brotherhood’s poster. Isolated from the organization, Clifton engages in willfully absurd street performance that eventually gets him killed by the police. Ellison envelops his protagonist’s response to Clifton’s death amid the alien(ating) nationalities of ethnic New York: I raised my head [from Clifton’s body]. . . . I turned. A roundheaded, apple-cheeked boy with thickly freckled nose and Slavic eyes leaned over the fence of the park above . . . he shrilled something to someone behind him, his face lighting up with ecstasy. . . . What does it mean, I wondered, turning back to that to which I did not wish to turn. (IM 437)

Stephen Bennett and William Nichols call this young boy the “epitome of whiteness,” and too quickly pass over important details (173). While the boy later speaks standard English and celebrates Clifton’s fighting skills while ignoring their mortal outcome, for the moment Invisible Man’s morbidly fascinated spectator stands out for his immigrant effects. He looks with Slavic eyes, and he shrills, rather than speaks, to a fellow foreigner in a language unintelligible to the protagonist, who in turn wonders, “What does it mean.” The question is at once literal and abstract; Invisible Man cannot understand the boy’s language, or why he seems to be enjoying Clifton’s death. Faced with no other option but to look again on his slain black friend, the protagonist finds himself once more in a nationally defined “tight spot.” A black southerner has been murdered, and a new immigrant takes in the aftermath with “ecstasy.” When this black southerner is buried soon afterwards, the task is done by “gravediggers [who] knew their business and [whose] brogue was Irish” (IM 459). Lucas Morel cites this moment from Invisible Man as “emblematic of the immigrants that would seek assimilation or ‘inclusion’ . . . into the New World that was America” (64). This observation is indicative of persistent scholarly neutrality—if not innocence—regarding Ellison’s representations of immigrants. In this case, Ellison again places alien-sounding immigrants alongside native blacks in a tense, situation. But this brief description of Irish immigrants burying native blacks is not merely a further


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sign of the contemporary difficulties that Invisible Man has with new immigrants. I suggest that the moment subtly echoes the 1863 draft riots of New York, the first significant immigrant/black clash in American history, in having Irishmen stand over a dead black man.13 Coming immediately after the Slavic boy scene and structured along the same lines, the placement, actions, and sounds of the Irish immigrants thus cast an ominously foreign pall over a native community’s burial ceremony. Invisible Man’s attendant frustrations and confusions contribute to his general dissatisfaction with the Brotherhood, which has already proven itself attuned to brogue accents (the Irish sister in the poster) and later proves attuned to the shrill speech of Eastern European immigrants. V: IMMIGRANTS, CHARLATANS, AMERICANS In mourning Clifton, Invisible Man casts doubt on the Great Migration’s promise: “I thought . . . about those of us who shoot up from the South into the busy city like wild jacks-in-the-box broken loose from our springs” (IM 439). His reflection registers the alienation of twentieth-century life as more than an individual phenomenon; it is the result of large-scale, historical uprooting and movement. The concomitant fracture of organic experience results in the loss of affiliations to and within a stable local setting. As a solution, Ellison has his protagonist link his experiences of migration and disappointment to those of other ex-southerners. In this way, Invisible Man begins to envision a source of consolation for contemporary, urban despair: a communal reconnection to origins. The deepest provocations of this strategy come from the dual threat of migration and compositional changes to a group’s surroundings. In response, Appadurai contends, primordial group identity draws on those attachments that bind small, intimate collectivities, usually those based upon kinship or its extensions. Ideas of collective identity based upon shared claims to blood, soil, or language draw their affective force from the sentiments that bind small groups. . . . [Such] social collectivities are seen to possess a collective conscience whose historical roots are in some distant past and are not easily changeable but are potentially available to ignition by new historical and political contingencies. (140–41)

Fixed historical roots and a series of intertwined claims to shared community increasingly define the novel’s ignited response to the new immigrant

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presence in New York and to the political and cultural challenges faced by its native black migrants. Invisible Man and the Harlem community’s mourning over Clifton follows this primordial strategy. Together, they sing “There’s Many a Thousand Gone,” a song from their regional and racial past. In returning to “the same old slave-borne words,” their sorrowful sentiments are transfigured into a salve for the difficulties of the urban present (IM 453). Invisible Man marvels at how “the old longing, resigned, transcendent emotion still sounded above, [and was] now deepened by that something for which the theory of the Brotherhood had given me no name” (IM 453). The Brotherhood’s ideas and language cannot provide the proper terms to capture the experiences of ex-southern, black New Yorkers, who instead find their voice through traditional forms of cultural expression that grow out of and reconnect them to their historical origins. Just before confronting the Brotherhood over Clifton’s death, Invisible Man considers how Harlem blacks will respond and questions their prospects with the organization: “What would they say? For the boys speak a jived-up transitional language full of country glamour . . . though perhaps they dream the same old ancient dreams. They were men out of time—unless they found the Brotherhood” (IM 441, emphasis mine). Only with increasing skepticism, then, does the protagonist posit the Brotherhood as a means of preserving this historical experience—keeping the men in time—since the novel’s evidence increasingly suggests the bleakness of this possibility. An organization that rejects “that old agrarian self ” in its ideas and symbolically isolates black men in its posters would likely not be open to a “transitional language full of country glamour.” Invisible Man increasingly recognizes the misfit of his people in an organization whose interests seem exclusively contemporary and now internationally focused, and whose members seem incapable of understanding black America on its own terms. Invisible Man’s subsequent approach to arguing with the Brotherhood over Clifton’s funeral confirms this reorientation. Within the context of his earlier rejections, the protagonist reveals a comparatively positive relationship to southern, racial experience. As one result, the novel begins to provide an understanding of native black American “culture as the process of naturalizing a subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate [its] group identity” (Appadurai 15). Culture’s significance as an instrument of local identity emerges precisely when its producers realize that “groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogenous” (48). Distressed by the rupturing of traditional connections between soil and blood, and by forms of American identity not originating in these conjoined components, Ellison directs Invisible


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Man towards the entrenchment of an American identity defined within the parameters of southern, racial community. The reasons behind this turn, in spite of the many, persisting flaws of southern black life, come to the fore in the protagonist’s tense exchanges with the Brotherhood’s leader. With Brother Tarp’s leg chain wrapped around his knuckles—a symbolic and eventually literal use of the regional and racial past to fight (in) the mixed urban present—Invisible Man challenges Brother Jack’s right to speak on behalf of blacks: “‘Who are you, anyway, the great white father?’” (IM 473) To this basic racial division, Brother Jack merely bristles and maintains the Party line. But when Invisible Man intensifies his attack, which draws in regional, historical, and race-based dialect elements, the consequence is dramatically revealing: “‘Wouldn’t it be better if they called you Marse Jack?’” (IM 473) Overcome by anger, Brother Jack breaks down and lunges after Invisible Man: “he came between me and the light, gripping the edge of the table, spluttering and lapsing into a foreign language” (IM 473). This moment offers the central disclosure of rereading Ralph Ellison through his representations of immigrants in his fiction. The effects of Brockway’s earlier hysterics over troublemaking, unionizing foreigners, and the Slavic boy’s “shrill” response to Clifton’s death, coalesce in a negative portrayal of Brother Jack’s progressive politics and alien speech. Ellison makes visible an invisible immigrant at the most regionally and racially charged moment in the novel. “Marse Jack” is at once the most southern, black, and American utterance in Invisible Man: A lead address of that peculiar institution can have no foreign source in its encapsulation of the historical experience of native blacks in America. In Ellison’s rendering, Brother Jack cannot speak to that experience; his past is emphatically not an American past, a fact established by his descent into a foreign language. Literally, the native past and foreign present cannot understand one another. “Marse Jack” occupies a deeply local, intertwined linguistic and historical register. In using the term, Invisible Man intended to point out that for all the Brotherhood’s anti-racist rhetoric, black–white dialogue in America continues to be defined by southern-structured race relations. But instead of refuting the charge, as might be expected, Brother Jack loses his very ability to communicate in an American setting. Language reveals the immigrant’s lack of affiliations to the native contexts out of which the native black emerges, and Brother Jack thus reverts to his original identity: that of a European émigré to America. This in turn provokes a nationally determined response from the protagonist. In the novel’s calculus, one originary identity provokes another: Invisible Man begins to view himself— with ample qualifications—as American when he establishes his antagonist,

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Brother Jack, as disconnected from American experience and dissonant as an American himself. Invisible Man’s initially sarcastic assertion inadvertently leads to the exposure of a foreign challenge to the organic integrity of the nation. After this revelation, the novel more explicitly suggests that whatever problems may exist in America require solutions grounded in the complex reality of their initial sources, sources defined as past/present, black/white, North/South—a series of internally defined binaries that only cohere upon the emergence of a new, overarching distinction: native/foreign. This final encounter between Invisible Man and Brother Jack places the division between them finally along national lines as the novel expresses frustration over European immigrants passing easily into mainstream American society simply because they share the whiteness of recognized Americans. This was especially the case in the political atmosphere of the 1930s New York that Invisible Man evokes. In Communists in Harlem during the Depression, Mark Naison notes: “Since most white Communists were immigrants themselves, Party leaders desperately wanted to avoid any strategy which might inflame ethnic tensions and make it more difficult to unite blacks with left-wing workers” (102). Part of that strategy, which Brother Jack tacitly practiced before Invisible Man calls him out, was the concealment of foreign origins. The novel asserts the character’s revealed foreign origins and linguistic abilities as inadequate prerequisites for American-ness, while also critiquing the ease with which his color grants him presumptive status as American. As we shall see, this frustration influences representations of immigrants in Faulkner as well, though the particular focus in that instance moves from the immigrant’s superseding the native’s claim to America to the immigrant’s destabilizing the South by introducing a racial indeterminacy that is located between black and white America and yet is distinct from both. Ellison’s novel is more concerned with the destabilization of individuals than of regional spaces; a character like Brother Jack is especially galling because of his seeming interest in helping blacks through their involvement in his organization and in his tacit self-presentation as a native-born white American, the identity that, according to Naison, white immigrant Communist leaders adopted to maintain authority in their organization.14 Appadurai provides a further illumination of Invisible Man’s consequent anger at Brother Jack’s concealed immigrant identity: When the neighborhood teacher is revealed to be, in his heart, a Croat, when the schoolteacher turns out to be sympathetic to the Hutu, when your best friend turns out to be a Muslim rather than a Serb . . . what seems to follow is a sense of deep categorical treachery, that is, treachery


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about group identity as defined by states, censuses, the media, and other large-scale forces. (154, emphasis mine)

Invisible Man feels precisely this sense of “categorical treachery”; the Brotherhood, the “large-scale” force in this instance, has presented itself as a New York–based political movement that seeks to improve the lot of the underserved in the city and in the nation at large. Brother Jack, its leader, has taken on a similar role, only to disclose inadvertently his potential allegiances elsewhere, or at least so Invisible Man imagines in growing increasingly nationalist in his perspective. Soon after this polyglot dustup, Invisible Man acidly guesses at where his former leader obtained his glass eye: “Maybe he got it where he learned that language he lapsed into,” that “unknown tongue, the language of the future” (IM 476). According to Maldwyn Allen Jones, “both the Communist and the Communist Labor parties derived much of their support . . . from the foreign-born and especially from those born in Russia” during the 1920s and 1930s (196). This demographic fact, coupled with the novel’s publication era and Ellison’s later statements about the CPUSA’s Russian ways, potentially frame the protagonist’s musing about immigrants in America as an anticipation of Cold War xenophobia. As the novel draws to a close, the horrific possibility of Americans from unknown or even enemy origins speaking unknown tongues in the future—a prospect directly opposed to patriotic natives rehabilitating the “Marse Jack” utterances of their past—motivates Invisible Man to defend locally defined American experience against strange-sounding foreigners, whether Russian Brothers or Caribbean Exhorters. VI: “I SPEAK FOR YOU” Jesse Wolfe describes Invisible Man as searching for “a morally responsible reaction to the complex horrors of life in Harlem at a time when Black Nationalists and Communists are busy recruiting foot soldiers” (622). For Ellison’s protagonist, moral responsibility starts to equal national responsibility. By revealing Brother Jack to be an immigrant and, by extension, the Brotherhood’s lack of a native-borne relationship to America’s native-born blacks, the novel rejects one possible option for improving the lot of Harlem’s citizens as essentially un-American. Another remains: though finished with the Brotherhood, Invisible Man still has to confront an ascendant and popular Ras the Exhorter, who has restyled himself as Ras the Destroyer. In a discussion of foreign black intellectuals in America, Michelle Stephens notes that “Caribbean Americans have always been seen as

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maintaining an ambivalent relationship to their American citizenship, and as having a keen loyalty to their islands of origin” (592–93). This skeptical view of would-be Americans from the Caribbean frames Ellison’s portrayal of Ras, which started with the character’s calling for the expulsion of outsiders from Harlem while atop a platform affixed with tiny American flags. The effect upon Invisible Man, that “strange, out-of-joint” quality, was provoked by what struck him as unnatural connections between national symbol (the flag) and race-based division (anti-white sentiment) articulated in foreign tones (IM 160). Ras represents the absurd extremes of racial affiliation. He tries with little success to convince Invisible Man that their personal conflict results from a white overlord’s meddling, an argument he expands to a global frame. He invokes a form of poly-southern brotherhood that elides national and historical differences for fixed binaries of white and non-white: “‘They know about me in Japan, India—all the colored countries!’” (IM 372) In more obvious terms than with Brother Jack’s depiction, Ellison again draws a critiquing connection between impersonation, foreignness, and the lack of any authentic local affiliation in New York. Ras would be perhaps more comfortable in Rushdie’s New York than Ellison’s. Heedless of national, historical, or cultural distinctions, he boasts of his trans-national popularity amongst the world’s consolidated dark races, and incorporates American flags or primitive African warrior garb into his self-presentation whenever such components suit his purposes. Though Ellison himself originally envisioned Invisible Man to involve a theme of global anti-colonial solidarity in sympathy with DuBois’s late-period African nationalism and trans-national labor interests, in its final version anti-national/trans-racial positions in the novel come across as buffoonish and inadequate to improving the situation for American blacks.15 While Brother Jack substituted a political form of identification for the regional in recruiting Invisible Man, Ras attempts a strictly racial version. Ras functions in part as Brother Jack’s black counter-balance, if more satirically rendered. Both characters lack organic connections to historical American experiences, yet, to the protagonist’s ire, still presume to offer solutions to resultant modern-day problems. In fact, Jack and Ras enjoy measures of local agency that presumptively represent and redirect local black experience into their own movements. Their efforts represent the conversion of historical black regional experience into contemporary urban political fodder, which the protagonist resists through a blood-and-soil appeal to classic American principles. In rejecting the options of engagement and selfrepresentation embodied by Ras and Brother Jack, Invisible Man arrives at the first of his two famous insights, which is specifically provoked by his seeing Ras


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march through New York costumed as an African king: “I knew it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others, whether for Ras’s or Jack’s” (IM 559). Invisible Man proposes that to choose one’s own path, however strangely or painfully it has been buffeted about by American life, instead of those offered by madmen with foreign costumes and foreign tongues, is to accept a race-based form of organic national identity, fractured by migration but reformed through cultural affiliations to its historically sanctioned source of American-ness. Ellison seeks to imply the validity of this choice in drawing attention to the foreigner’s inadequacies in an American setting based on linguistic dissonance, as Invisible Man did with Brother Jack. Invisible Man listens as Ras attempts to forge an alliance with Clifton by telling him, “You my brother, mahn. Brothers are the same color. . . . You Africa. AFRICAN!” (IM 371) Ras’s explanation for why Clifton should align with him—“You Africa”—fails to persuade, and the immigrant’s stumbling grammar underscores the reason for the failure. Because a native standard ultimately trumps all else in Invisible Man, Ras’s attempts to create racial brotherhood fail in their articulation: “‘So why don’t you recognize your black duty, mahn, and come jine us?’” (IM 374) Just as Invisible Man leaves the Brotherhood after hearing Brother Jack’s foreign sputtering, the very sound of Ras’s offer, its attempt at unity in a foreign accent, explains why Invisible Man does not accept it.16 The answer to Ras’s question is that Invisible Man’s recognizing his “black duty” means recognizing his intertwined regional, racial, and national obligations. These inspire him to join, rather than “jine,” something else. As he prepares to re-enter society, Invisible Man admits that now and then he has “been overcome with a passion to return into that ‘heart of darkness’ across the Mason–Dixon line . . . [and he feels] the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unlovable in it, for all of it is part of me” (IM 579). In spite of the persistent racial degradations attached to his southern origin, Invisible Man reaffirms his compact with it, and the novel ratifies this decision by rejecting the other options that Great Migration blacks met in 1930s New York. The American South is part of Invisible Man in a way that neither Jack’s nor Ras’s origins ever could be; solutions to its and the nation’s problems are to be found within internally defined American experience, rather than through either Jack’s or Ras’s respective foreign offices. It is on this admittedly difficult, but reliably local terrain that Invisible Man establishes the “beautiful absurdity” of his own American identity, and it is from there that he issues his ultimate realization: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (IM 559, 581, emphasis mine)

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This famous question, I propose in closing this chapter, is intended to have a native-inflected, national timbre: With it, Ellison seeks to demonstrate the inclusion proposed by the novel, which was demanded by its author for decades afterwards. Given the alternatives the white American reader has seen and heard in the novel—the spluttering foreign white Communist and the patois-raving, costumed black nationalist—he cannot help but choose this native-born, black southerner-cum-cynical New Yorker as his fellow speaker. Compared with Jack’s and Ras’s un-American languages, the lower frequencies that Invisible Man speaks are organically, even exclusively, American. With Invisible Man, Ellison attempts to establish the black southern components of America’s national language and culture. These elements emerge as instruments of national identification and cultural re-affiliation, in 1930s polyglot New York, in the responses of southern black migrants to their encounters with new immigrants. Through Invisible Man, Ellison sought to make native black southerners audibly and, he hoped, visibly American. In the decades before Ellison arrived on the American literary scene, William Faulkner wrote fiction similarly attentive to questions of national identity, language, and racial visibility. For Faulkner, even more so than Ellison, new immigrants posed a threat to the core commitment of his writing: the rehabilitation of the American South as an internally coherent region and as a self-reliant component of the greater United States. As the following chapter proposes, these goals required careful calibrations of American-ness and southern-ness. Faulkner dramatizes these amongst indigenous Americans in Boston and Mississippi so as to suggest that such measurements could quickly provoke ugly sentiments and actions from natives, directed at newly arrived, shady-skinned strangers.

Chapter Four

William Faulkner’s “Durn Furriners”

The interplay between William Faulkner’s conceptualization of American identity and the presence of immigrants in his imaginings of the nation results in fictions not nearly as stark as Ellison’s in condemning immigrant incursions on American soil. Neither, however, are they as insouciant as Rushdie’s regarding the breakup of organic relations between geography, history, and race. Yet like these writers, Faulkner is attuned to the changes wrought by and upon local communities encountering new challenges to their static compositions. Faulkner’s work, particularly The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, registers the onset of American identity’s modern fragmentation and the related disruption of local spaces, both of which were brought about by increased migration and unprecedented forms of inter-national contact. Ellison responded to what he saw as more invidious versions of these phenomena years later with an integrated cultural defense. Rushdie, many decades later, emphasized similar elements as givens in a U.S.-dominated, globalized world, as he sought to add his voice to the American canon and new Americans to the (imagined) nation. Faulkner, conversely, was writing during a period when the U.S. South was struggling to respond to economic modernization, and the United States was trying to accommodate exceptional forms of immigration. In response, he sought to define and maintain the boundaries of his native region. His attempt, however, required him to reveal the impossibility of maintaining an internally homogenous vision of his U.S. South. Suzanne Jones and Sharon Monteith may overstate the achievement of contemporary southern writing when they contend that “New immigrant writers turn a mirror on the South, and the images refracted tell the South in new ways. They complicate the South’s predominantly biracial literary history and reveal the South’s demographics as complex and changing” (8). Faulkner was alert to immigrants challenging the South’s 79

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static black-and-white composition decades before recent southern writers such as Robert Butler and Lan Cao. In fact, Faulkner’s depictions of immigrants, and of the local response to them, provide confirmation of the most rooted, if ugly, means of establishing locally circumscribed, American identity. The “thousand streets [that] ran as one street” for Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932) extend “into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi” (LA 223–24). In locating his South within such a permeable geography, Faulkner registered a variety of uneasy penetrations of local U.S. southern life by newcomers whose effect upon his region, in light of America’s changing composition, was as inevitable as it proved vexing to him. Edouard Glissant envisions Faulkner’s America “as an apparently bifurcated country: North and South, Blacks and Whites, the native and the immigrant . . . [a country] so multiple, and so contradictory in nature” (249). We can condense this description of Faulkner’s country into Joe Christmas’s trajectory through Light in August. Faulkner scholars have long analyzed the first two of the three sets of binaries that Glissant discerns; this chapter attends to the importance of the third in Faulkner’s overall imagining of America. North and South, black and white, native and immigrant: Joe Christmas, a synecdoche for Faulkner’s world, contains these multitudes. In a discussion of Faulkner’s use of African-American dialect, John T. Matthews observes: “Minority voices and subjects are not incidental to Faulkner’s fiction; they are its foundation” (73). The validity of this statement, as we shall see, depends upon more than Faulkner’s ability to inhabit and speak from black or Native American southern experience, the longstanding focus of critical interest in Faulkner and dialect. Analyses of Faulkner’s New Orleans Sketches, early fiction, selected short stories, unpublished remarks, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August reveal Faulkner’s interest in minority voices extending beyond the South’s indigenous accents. The voices and experiences of black, white, and Indian groups constitute the internal mixture that Faulkner sought to affirm as organically, if problematically, American. Against these local sounds of the American South, however, Faulkner measured the articulations of new immigrants to his region, a group whose alien tongues and complexions threatened his vision of a homogeneously mixed homeland.1 William Faulkner’s representations of specifically Italian immigrants invite reassessments of his conceptions of national identity and of the United States as a nation during the 1920s and 1930s, when a new tide


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of immigrants seemed a threat to many native-born white Americans. Thomas Argio argues that Italians in Faulkner’s fiction contribute to “a signifying arrangement involving both displacement and substitution” of their presence for blacks (10). Argio argues for a chiasmus in which black and Italian figures are interchangeable, with Faulkner, in Argio’s reading, displacing his interest in a problematic native group onto newcomers. Argio’s proposal does not adequately account for the independent status of immigrants in Faulkner’s fiction, as a new, third group in America whose partial interrelations to blacks in contemporary discourse were problematic for him. Moreover, a straightforward inscription of Italian immigrant over black native fails to account for Faulkner’s perception that new immigrants and their new migration patterns rendered difficult his efforts to maintain the indigenous integrity of locally defined southern identity and experience. While both Rushdie and Ellison were interested in individual prospects for national acceptance, Faulkner’s concerns are predominantly spatial. His anxieties about immigrants relate to the way they complicate regional race relations by occupying a middle space between blacks and whites on racial, economic, and cultural levels. When Italian immigrants in particular appear in Faulkner’s writing, they are treated sympathetically only when they remain in prescribed, stereotypical frames. When they appear in his fiction in ways that directly challenge the composition of the South’s traditional population, however, Faulkner is effectively antipathetic; the presence of immigrants frustrates his ambitions for internal southern reconciliation between its native-born races, and between the South and the rest of the nation. Ultimately, Faulkner discloses a negative attitude towards the new immigrants because they destabilize the precarious balances of racial (black/white) and national (native/foreigner) identity that, like Ellison, he depended upon to indict the region and nation’s ugly legacies.2 Unlike Ellison, however, Faulkner was not interested in converting regional experience into cultural agency in an urban environment, nor in setting the rights to that agency against parallel claims made by immigrants. Instead, he was firmly committed to the defense of authentic locality for its own sake, even if he recognized and critiqued the means by which such a defense was undertaken. To establish a full context for understanding the importance of immigrants to Faulkner’s fictional foundations, this chapter draws on historical data, sociological studies, and contemporary source material related to immigration, particularly Italian immigration, and to the anti-immigrant components of the American nativist movement of the early twentieth century.

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By placing Faulkner’s works in conversation with this material, I seek in part to correct Karl Zender’s contention that “Faulkner’s confrontation with the modern world receives its fullest treatment in his postwar fiction” (19). Faulkner’s confrontation with the modern was career-long, already fully in play in his writing from the 1920s through the mid-1930s. I share Zender’s interest in “the effect on Faulkner’s art of the disappearance of a traditional South and of the emergence of a modern, deregionalized America,” and in this chapter I propose the immigrant’s entry into both region and nation as a primary reason for this disappearance (x). To reveal the manifold injustices done by and to Americans in America as he understood these designations, Faulkner needed to extend his past-based sense of national identity into the present and the future, thereby creating a narrative of continuity, a technique central to Ellison’s representation of the United States as well. As was the case for Ellison, newly arrived immigrants could play no part in Faulkner’s dramatizations of national healing. They were harbingers of a future, hybrid America that perplexed and worried Faulkner. He could limit but not ignore immigrants’ complicating, even contaminating, effects by reflecting in his fiction America’s changing composition via their entry into his region. He also depicted forms of resistance to the immigrant presence in America, a presence he first encountered as a young man in New Orleans. I: SIGHTS, SITES, AND SOUNDS OF THE IMMIGRANT’S PLIGHT Faulkner’s time in New Orleans provided him with material enough for his second novel, Mosquitoes (1927). This numbing treatise on aesthetics, writing, and sex suggests the types of conversations Faulkner likely heard while in the company of Sherwood Anderson, “a central figure in the city’s newly thriving artistic and literary renascence” (Wittenberg-Bryant 39). A satirical distance clearly opens up, however, between the young author and many of the characters spouting forth in this early novel. In fact, Faulkner seems most taken with Pete, the one passenger who clearly does not fit in amongst the high-minded on the cruise, being an immigrant of lower economic status. Faulkner’s interest in Pete speaks to the author’s New Orleans pursuits when not lounging about the offices of The Double Dealer : he was a willing initiate into the city’s seamy underbelly, populated by rough men of questionable morals and, often enough, unquestionable immigrant status.3 Faulkner’s interest in Italian immigrants in Mosquitoes, however, is not exactly gritty. At novel’s end, we follow Pete off the ship


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and learn that he is from an Italian family that runs a restaurant in the city. To establish Pete’s background, Faulkner provides a history of the family’s time in America. His rendering is sympathetic and regretful of their restaurant’s rise to American prosperity, which parallels its proprietors’ increasing awareness of the limitations placed on their financial aspirations by their ethnicity. An electric sign emblazoned with Pete’s family name heralds “the phoenix-like rise of the family fortunes[;] from the dun ashes of respectability [through] a small restaurant catering to Italian working people,” to the eventual Americanization of the family (MQ 296). Faulkner describes the past life of the restaurant in terms that immediately alert us to his ambivalent attitude towards this family’s improved prospects. One “entered a dingy room fecund with the rich heavy odor of Italian cooking”; sat before “oilcloth of a cheerful red-and-white check and cunningly stained”; and saw Pete as a child “in his ragged corduroy knickers and faded clean shirt, with . . . his queer golden eyes . . . beautiful as only an Italian lad can be” (296). A series of contradictory pulls produces the driving cadence of these lines: the food is rich but the setting is dirty, the tablecloth is bright but stained; the boy is queer but beautiful. Faulkner declines to idealize a hard-working immigrant family—he has to include the signs of its lowliness. Moreover, his final compliment marks only a sterile success: Pete’s beauty has long since passed. Pete’s brother Joe, “five-and-twenty and more American than any of them,” implements a wholesale renovation of the restaurant, replacing the dingy wooden floor with a tiled space for dancing and family servers with dinner-coated waiters (296–97). He trades the raucous sound of Italians dining together for the anonymous cacophony of city life. The renovations are extraordinarily effective, but the resulting success destroys the Ginotta clan. Mr. Ginotta cannot stand prosperity, dying “with more money to his name in the bank than most Italian princes have,” and the widowed Mrs. Ginotta finds herself completely alone, because “her sons were such Americans now, busy and rich and taciturn” (297). Faulkner’s history of the Ginotta family thus represents familial destruction and alienation as by-products of the money-hungry Americanization of a once-happy, if dirty, Italian immigrant family. Faulkner’s sympathy for the Ginotta family is premised upon the strict division of past life in Italy as familial fullness and present life in America as a wealthy void. This distinction also characterizes a major theme of his New Orleans Sketches (1925). James G. Watson notes that [in] the twilit city of Faulkner’s “New Orleans,” all but two of the speakers are broken by internal divisions . . . [which suggests] it

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Race, Immigration, and American Identity is not so much a place that the city of voices describes as a condition. The collision of past dreams with present realities . . . divides speakers in themselves as they are divided from one another in the text. (222)

The condition and collision of which Watson speaks are nowhere more apparent than in “The Cobbler,” which opens: “You wan’ getta these shoes today? Si, si. Yes, I coma froma—tella in my tongue? Buono signor” (66). The cobbler’s own tongue occupies an altogether different register. His choppy Italian-English suddenly shifts into flowing Italianate English: “Yes, I come from Tuscany, from the mountains, where the plain is gold and brown in the barren sun, and the ancient hills brood bluely above the green and dreaming valleys” (66). Grandiloquent and effusive, Faulkner’s cobbler discloses a classic immigrant premise, which the author parallels through the deployment of contrasting linguistic styles: that inevitable longing for a richer past provoked by an impoverished present, a premise that Watson suggests is a general characteristic of the collection. The cobbler shares with his customer a story of Old World romance, of how he and his beloved “walked hand in hand while the stars came out so big—it is not like that in your America, signor” (67). Through the cobbler’s direct address to the customer, Faulkner ensures that we remember the frame of the story. Unlike immigrants’ pronouncements in Faulkner’s later fiction, this Italian rejects any claim to America; he remains contemptuous of its offerings, which are paltry when compared with the wonders of his native land. Unfortunately, the cobbler loses his love to a rich signor and in turn finds himself aged and alone in America, at which point the story ends with a sudden, jolting return to immigrant-English and to immediate business concerns: “I have known joy and sorrow, but now I do not remember. I am very old: I have forgotten much. You getta thees shoe today. Si. Si.” (69) This harsh ending abruptly cuts off any sympathy or melancholy lingering from the cobbler’s eloquent tale of failed romance in Tuscany. Hans Skei’s observation that the “story is limited to the cobbler’s point of view and is consistently told in his words” is not nearly attentive enough to the chasm between the two styles Faulkner selects to construct the monologue (63). Faulkner imagines, sympathetically, the comparative ugliness of life in a new land by using elegant prose to evoke the immigrant’s past. But by adopting an immigrant’s English to locate him in his new nation, he also articulates, less sympathetically, the ugly sound of assimilation. This minor story provides early evidence of how external origins produce a form of linguistic hybridity that offends


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Faulkner as it did Ellison. The cobbler’s tongue is, in a sense, forked by his immigration; what should be mutually exclusive linguistic registers mix in his new country. II: SOUTHERNERS FROM NEAR AND FAR IN MARK TWAIN Faulkner is not alone in evincing a double attitude towards Italians who remain in Europe versus those who have come to America. Henry James’s American Scene (1907) recounts the author’s feelings about the difference between Old and New World Italians, which he noticed upon returning to New York from the Continent. Quoting James, David Fine explains that the writer “found the Italians strangely silent in the New World. They were not at all like the Italians of the Old World but produced a ‘neutral and colourless image’” (9). David Richards in turn notes that James identifies the loss of native color as “the loss of Italian history, culture, and personality under the exigent pressure of a relentlessly dehumanizing routinization” (183). This reading could be applied equally to the consequences of immigrant striving that Faulkner details with ambivalence in his New Orleans fiction. James’s disappointment, however, lacks the uncertain feelings that encircle Faulkner’s early evocations of immigrant life in America; rather, it results from his romanticized Old World vision being degraded, without any genuine sympathy for the immigrant’s plight. Yet James’s was, relatively speaking, a mild response to the influx of new immigrants into the United States from Southeast Europe starting in the late nineteenth century. Maldwyn Allen Jones explains that a particularly virulent brand of anti-immigrant sentiment first arose in the 1880s, when a demographic shift occurred in the traditional source countries for American immigration. No longer were immigrants from the traditional home countries of northern Europe dominating the ships docking in New York and Boston, as had been the case for much of the nineteenth century. Instead, America’s native-born were faced with “immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, whose bizarre appearance offered a tempting target” ( Jones 220). This negative attitude was intensified by the native-born discerning “a special danger in an influx of Slavs, Italians, and Jews, who were associated in the prevailing ethnic stereotypes with disorder, violent crime, and avarice” and came to be known as “the murder-breeds of southern Europe” (221). Local responses to the New Immigration provide early twentiethcentury versions of the North/South, First World/Third World divide that characterizes Rushdie’s globalized American fiction. Immigrants from southern Europe, dirty, different-looking, and violent according to the

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native community’s representation of them, constituted a threat to the (by comparison) clean, uniform, and peaceable people of civilized America, or so Booker T. Washington argued in his Atlanta Exposition address. In Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), a novel responding to the first wave of the New Immigration, Mark Twain registers related views of new immigrants but complicates the geographic and racial dividing lines of xenophobic nationalism during the late nineteenth century. As Barbara Ladd observes, “[f ]or all its concern with national reunification . . . [this novel] is set in a small town and focuses on national issues through the lens of the municipality” (108). One national issue in particular, which Ladd also notes, is the prospect of assimilating newly arrived immigrants, a difficult task for locals faced with non-traditional immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. An 1890 New Orleans Times-Democrat editorial draws sharp distinctions between old and new immigrants and notes the problems posed by the latter: The Germans, the Irish and others . . . migrate to this country, adopt its customs, acquire its language, master its institutions, and identify themselves with its destiny. The Italians, never. They remain isolated from the rest of any community. . . . They seldom learn to speak our tongue, they have no respect for our laws or our form of government, they are always foreigners. (quoted in La Gumina 74–75)

The initial attitude towards the Italian in Twain’s novel, however, has more to do with a romanticized vision of the foreigner-as-exotic than the negative stereotypes associated with new immigrants. Talking to her innkeeper mother, Rowena assumes the two Italian twins soon to take up lodging with them in the sleepy southern town of Dawson’s Landing have seen kings and other wonders; she is also impressed by their names, “Luigi” and “Angelo,” which are “so grand and foreign—not like Jones and Robinson and such” (50). Twain thus sets the distinction between the banalities of the local and the exciting exoticism of the foreign as the foundation for the twins’ first reception in the town and as the shaping force of their first arc of experience in it. Their success in winning over Dawson’s Landing is nearly universal, though it shifts rapidly following an ostensibly harmless event. When Wilson reads Luigi’s palm and divines a murderous act in his past, Luigi admits unabashedly to killing a man, and his position as the noble, admired foreigner vanishes, a shift punctuated by the town noticing that


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his “dark face flushed” in subsequent anger (80). The novel’s first reference to his complexion is a telling one. Italian immigrants were prime targets for displaced animosities towards blacks in the South during this period. Thomas Muller explains that “Italians from southern provinces had the twin liabilities of being Catholic and having swarthy complexions, the latter being taken as evidence of ‘black blood’” (32). Twain pairs Luigi’s dark face with a geographically determined, blood-based motivation for violence soon after this initial description. Because Tom ridicules him before four hundred townsmen at a Sons of Liberty meeting, “Luigi’s southern blood leap[s] to the boiling point,” and he sends Tom into the seated audience with a tremendous kick (89–90, emphasis mine). The basis for Luigi’s violent action, his “southern blood,” keeps with a stereotype held widely in America from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. An 1882 New York Times article explains that Italian immigrants were “continually brought before the courts for fighting, violence, and attempts at murder” (quoted in La Gumina 56). And, in a 1923 defense of the Italian immigrant that relied upon late nineteenth-century evidence, the apologist concedes: “The passionate nature of the Southern Italian, to whom love and pride acquire intensities unknown to northern races, often leads to bloodshed” (Stella 80). Luigi’s passion inspires a similar response in his fellow southerner (of sorts), Judge Driscoll, who becomes outraged when he learns of his nephew’s cowardly response to the kick. He declares that only a duel can redeem “the blood of [his] race” (Twain 96). Through the playing out of two southern-based justifications for action, the distinction between the twins and the town takes on a new form. The Italians become unwanted, feared foreigners; descriptions shift from simply the “new twins” to “murderous devil[s],” then “detested twins,” and finally “derned Italian savage[s]” (94–99).4 Following the duel “[b]etween chief citizen and titled stranger,” a distinction that explicitly delineates the boundary between the local community and the threatening outsider, Driscoll stirs up the town against the foreigners in a speech that keys into its tacit fears and stereotypes (114). Driscoll’s declarations are also well–timed, occurring shortly after the twins’ request for permanent citizenship in Dawson’s Landing, which the town initially endorsed but now fears would be an invitation to the deformation of its local composition. The narrator explains that the judge’s speech, which closes the campaign against granting the twins citizenry, was disastrously effective. He poured out rivers of ridicule . . . scoffed at them as adventurers, mountebanks, sideshow riffraff, dime museum

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Race, Immigration, and American Identity freaks . . . he said they were back-alley barbers disguised as nobilities; peanut peddlers masquerading as gentlemen, organ-grinders bereft of their brother monkey. (127)

In Judge Driscoll’s fashioning, the exotic noblemen from afar become the lowly and dirty immigrants populating northern cities and making their way into the South. With their identities thus revealed, the twins are no longer welcome in this southern community, which closes ranks against them when exotic differences threaten to become the traits of fellow citizens. The Italians are denied citizenship and then become the targets for a town lynching, in a development with a clear historical precedent.5 The dramatic change in feeling towards the Italians suggests the community’s nascent fear of the foreign/immigrant, which the judge manipulates in order to protect his (presumptively) white descendant from further humiliation and his town from immigrant contamination. Meanwhile, the Italians are revealed to be innocent of all crimes ascribed to them in Dawson’s Landing, proven when Wilson triumphantly indicts Tom and his bi-racial background as the true perpetrators. The Italians are thus vindicated but decide to return to Italy, an ideal compromise for both sides: “The twins were heroes of romance now, and with rehabilitated reputations. But they were weary of Western adventure, and straightway retired to Europe” (165). The twins are returned to their first position in the town’s collective consciousness, as exotics from afar, and their future involvement with town life is limited to communal, idealized memory. Dawson’s Landing ultimately evades the threat of foreigners, enjoying its brush with them only as a romantic afterthought. The town’s final image of them is acceptable because any future influence of the foreign has been precluded by the twins’ departure; their foreignness becomes merely another element of the local past. Life in this small southern town returns to its normal course: Tom Driscoll, the uneasy mixture of black and white, is spared from execution for his crimes because of his white parentage, and then sold down the river for the same crimes because of his black parentage. Anticipating in part the town’s solution to Joe Christmas in Light in August, Tom’s fate is satisfactory to the people of Dawson’s Landing because its elements—black and white—are of locally southern origin. III: THE NEW IMMIGRATION: BOSTON STARTS SPEAKING ITALIAN Walter Benn Michaels’s study of the race-based underpinnings of modernist American writing, Our America (1995), begins by citing The Sound and


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the Fury as a book belonging “to the discourse of . . . nativist modernism” which “in the period just after World War I involved not only a reassertion of the distinction between American and un-American but a crucial redefinition of the terms in which it might be made” (2). I follow Michaels in citing John Higham’s definition of nativism: Nativism, therefore, should be defined as intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e., “un-American”) connections. . . . While drawing on much broader cultural antipathies and ethnocentric judgments, nativism translates them into a zeal to destroy the enemies of a distinctively American way of life. (4)

Two works that articulate an “intense opposition to an internal minority” provide an initial context for understanding Faulkner’s and Quentin Compson’s attitudes towards the little Italian girl the latter meets in Boston, in The Sound and the Fury. Waldo Frank’s Our America (1919) proposes the “crucial redefinition” that Michaels mentions; Frank synthesizes race and language into an ideal—meaning internal—homogeneity set expressly against new immigrants who neither spoke nor looked American. Frank celebrates the rough-hewn New Englander, representative of an American homogeneity, as the very foundation of the nation, at a time when a predominantly Anglo-Saxon nation’s composition and political authority were being explicitly challenged.6 There has now risen a new mass of foreigners, he notes with dismay; “Latins [and] Jews swarm the industrial centers and the farms of this ancient country” and threaten the native’s dominance: “The Puritan is driven farther upon his rocky soil, deeper into his austere self. And still, he rules. He has not flung his dominion over the continent to lose it in the corner where it was born. Let Boston speak Italian, the quiet accent of Harvard will still tell it what to say” (148).7 Frank is clearly frustrated by immigrants overrunning Massachusetts but displays ostensible confidence that the clarity, civility, and purity of elite English will rule the day. He also champions the fortitude of the native New Englander but laments his current diminishment in a racial context, a concern of Quentin Compson’s as well, according to Michaels (3). Frank’s book directly registers the effect of southern and eastern European immigration on native dwellers of East Coast cities; his caustic reference to Boston speaking Italian suggests it was less America’s ability to assimilate newcomers and more the inability of new immigrants to be assimilated. Madison Grant made a similar argument three years prior to Frank’s Our America, in The Passing of the Great Race (1916), an unabashedly racist

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apology for the inherent superiority of native-born Americans of Nordic descent. Grant’s championing of the Nordic types in America, like Frank’s stress on the New England tongue amid the Babel of Boston, is pitched expressly against the polluting effect of new immigrants. Grant stresses the purity of the white American, listing the superior physical qualities of this noble race before contrasting it with the “increasing number of the weak, the broken, and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin” (80). Once more, if in bluntly resistant terms, we see early global southerners, deemed unappealing when compared with their northern equivalents, migrating to a consequently transformed America (80). According to his race-based critique of these “newer Americans,” Grant regards them as dissolving ideal national character. An extended quotation provides a sense of how vitriolic nativist sentiment was during this era and frames the very contemporary, very American perplexities Quentin Compson faces in his final day in Boston: The native American is . . . abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many county districts by these foreigners, just as he is today being literally driven off the streets of New York City . . . These immigrants adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes; they steal his name; and they are beginning to take his women; but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals, and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race . . . it is evident that in large sections of the country the native American will entirely disappear. (80–81)

The immigrant, in Grant’s rendering, is an impersonator at work displacing indigenous nationals from their local space. Grant deploys the terms “foreigner” and “immigrant” interchangeably to imply the permanent inability of the newly arrived to find a place in America, no matter the effort. He finds particularly galling America’s continued willingness to accept new immigrants whose racial characteristics were, by his self-styled scientific analyses, deficient, compared to old-stock Americans from the northern races of Europe. Like Frank, Grant is clearly distressed that the so-called passing of the great race means simultaneously the passing of the great nation into the lesser, mixed hands of its newest citizens. Together, these works represent an attempt to posit historical continuities within a people, in the


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midst of transformational moments in their nation’s history. With Quentin Compson’s section of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner enters into a national debate on immigration, which he gestured at only briefly in Mosquitoes when he had Fairchild remark to Gordon: “‘Prohibition for the Latin, politics for the Irish. . . . Italians and Irish. Where do we homegrown Nordics come in?’” (MQ 328) Though sarcastic, Fairchild’s worry that “homegrown” Americans [are] being displaced by new immigrants certainly keeps with contemporary nativist sentiments. Yet it is only a passing comment; this fear of displacement does not receive Faulkner’s full attention until Quentin Compson’s monologue, in which he assesses the value and applicability of contemporary terms for defining American identity from the vantage of a white U.S. southerner far from home. IV: FAULKNER’S BOSTON SPIKA ITALIAN When Quentin Compson attempts to deliver a little girl to her home, a local Bostonian assumes she is from one of the “New Italian families” that were populating the north and east ends of the city (SF 82). By 1915, there was a sizable Italian community in Boston, between 31,000 and 43,000 mostly poor, uneducated newcomers who took various lower-stratum jobs in the local economy (Foerster 329). In Faulkner’s Boston, there exists a debased version of the bifurcated response to the Italian that Twain portrayed. These contradictory attitudes regarding the Italian’s place in America initially reposition Deacon as the black man offering an “obverse reflection” of the various types of whites he lives among (SF 55). In his search for Deacon on the morning of June 2, 1910, Quentin recalls last seeing him marching “on Columbus’ or Garibaldi’s or somebody’s birthday. He was in the Street Sweepers’ section, in a stovepipe hat, carrying a two inch Italian flag, smoking a cigar among the brooms and scoops” (SF 52). Quentin’s contempt for an American celebration of Italians becomes clearer when he finds Deacon and explains that he saw him parading “on that Wop holiday. . . . obliging the W.C.T.U. then, I reckon” (SF 63). The OED traces “Wop” back to “Guappo,” an Italian term for “countryman” that transmuted into a slur against shady-seeming immigrant Italians in its American usage from the early twentieth century onward. Quentin’s desire to maintain a stable binary of black and white relations, central to his attempt to maintain an intact view of his South, manifests itself in his use of “Wop.” By ascribing Deacon’s dressing up as an Italian to the wishes of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, he peremptorily excuses Deacon from complicity in the celebration of a

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“Wop holiday” and instead blames the troublemaking North.8 Deacon’s response to Quentin’s comment suggests his own concealed motives (to get his son-in-law a job with the city) and seemingly reassures Quentin that their geographic connection remains preeminent: “‘Listen. This aint for outside talking. I dont mind telling you because you and me’s the same folks, come long and short’” (63, emphasis mine). The wily Deacon is taunting Quentin; pretending that black-and-white divisions matter less than shared, past-based, regional affiliations, he sarcastically reveals one of Quentin’s own tacit presumptions. Yet Deacon’s assurance of geographically defined sameness is not enough. Deacon’s ability to play an Italian may help his son-in-law to employment, but it clearly distresses Quentin because it is an instance of the categorical treachery we saw in Ellison. Quentin needs Deacon to conform to his traditional black identity and to assert their southern connection as superseding Deacon’s masquerade and his current relationship with northern whites. Deacon’s assurances, however, cannot overcome the intersecting social and racial contradictions produced by his parading. Thadious Davis argues that “Deacon is as incomprehensible to Quentin as the rest of the North and South, at least partly because Quentin’s mental training in a divided world has been in terms of blacks being like other blacks and whites being like other whites” (96–97). This only half describes Quentin’s anxiety; to a large extent it is Deacon’s appearing in the guise of an Italian that worries him. The Italian’s earlier appearances in Faulkner’s fiction have been in strictly limited frames, none of which were connected to blacks. From Deacon through Joe Christmas, however, the interconnection of black and Italian will be a recurrent feature of Faulkner’s representations of immigrants, a connection that will in turn limit his sympathy for them. His apprehension has to do with how he depicts Italians and the North as together destabilizing the roles that a young white southerner like Quentin depends on Deacon to maintain. Quentin’s failure “to see his own reflection” in Deacon results from Deacon reflecting an altogether different presence in America (96).9 Argio contends that “Faulkner paints both [blacks and Italians] in the same corner of cultural otherness, twinning them within a presumption of shared consciousness and social practice, and [thus] juxtaposing African Americans and Italian Americans against an Anglo way of thinking” (5). Such a reading ignores Faulkner’s emphasis on geographic connections between native blacks and whites, connections we see Quentin desperately attempt to maintain with Deacon. Rather than regard Italians and blacks as sharing a subaltern position


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in Faulkner’s fiction, as Argio proposes, we should attend to the more complex, partially shared positions of blacks and immigrants. Recurrent, unstable feelings towards Italians in The Sound and the Fury arise from native black, northern white, and from Quentin’s inbetween positions of enunciation. Greater Boston itself evinces a split attitude towards the foreign: while the city allows a celebration of the historical, romantic Italian, it betrays a sour attitude towards Italy’s more recent contribution to America. In fact, Quentin’s only connection with the northern community arises from a shared negativity towards the “new Italian families” that he encounters and towards the new, frightening America they announce (SF 82). Mistrust and contempt dominate the local community’s feelings towards immigrant Italians; Quentin first senses this when the quiet little Italian girl who follows him into a bakery provokes unease from the storekeeper: “‘Them foreigners. . . . Take my advice and stay clear of them, young man’” (81). Though Quentin agrees, he cannot heed the storekeeper’s warning; his relationship to the young immigrant places him in an intermediary position and further complicates his already tortured relationship to family, region, and nation. The primary parallel that Faulkner seeks to draw for Quentin with the little Italian girl is evident, of course, in his repeated address to and naming of her as sister. As Zender perceptively notes: “Interspersing comments about the little girl’s status as immigrant . . . with memories [of Caddy, Quentin] frames a disquieting but enticing association between sibling incest, racial and class transgression, physical filth and cultural heterogeneity” (748). Faulkner’s shift in his position on immigrants becomes most evident in Quentin’s initial description of his new companion’s features. Immediately after articulating a possible sibling connection to her, Quentin notices her foreignness, her unmistakably heterogeneous complexion: “Her face was like a cup of milk dashed with coffee” (79, emphasis mine). The girl is not merely and “inevitably coded as black,” but rather as violently mixed (Argio 5). And it is the little girl’s representing an exterior source of heterogeneity in America that prevents Quentin from achieving a full connection with her: Faulkner deploys the immigrant as the means of intervention between Quentin as would-be brother and the Italian girl as would-be sister.10 Shortly thereafter, Quentin has difficulty feeling part of the nation himself, having met a new fellow American, as he caustically redefines America as the “Land of the kike home of the wop” (79). Quentin’s sarcastic interior comment offers perhaps the best evidence in the section of his despairing, horrified view of the present-day and future nation. Matthews emphasizes the racial element of

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Quentin’s dark view of the future, arguing that “all elements that threaten his world order are in effect black. Seeing that future will continue to desecrate his ideal of the South” (103). If we recognize instead the anti-immigrant strain of Quentin’s attitude, and not limit its significance to indigenous American racial tensions, it becomes apparent that it is the foreign element in this blackness that most troubles Quentin.11 Quentin’s attempt to project southern family relations onto an immigrant girl produces a contradictory relation of past to present; his relationship with her soon becomes mediated by the community’s attitude towards the immigrant. From the bakery lady through Sheriff Anse, local Bostonians repeatedly voice their unease about “Them foreigners” (SF 80). The two men to whom Quentin turns for assistance, who automatically assume that his charge “‘Must be [from] one of them new Italian families,’” complain: “‘Them furriners. I cant tell one from another” (80–83). Quentin’s contradictory feelings for his Italian sister and his interaction with two mutuallyexclusive Boston communities together prevent him from identifying fully with either group. Quentin certainly shares the northern community’s attitude towards the immigrant but he cannot endorse it, for to do so would be to condone a community that dresses up Deacon to celebrate “Wop holidays,” a confusion of southern black identity with northern immigrant identity that constitutes a mixture inimical to his comprehension of America (SF 63). Initially, though, Quentin is more focused on the familial implications of his connection with an Italian immigrant; his time with Julio’s sister provides him with a form of the isolation that he longs for with his actual sister, though his response is ambivalent. Although he is tender towards her at moments, Quentin betrays an intense longing to be free of the siblingforeigner when the Italian woman who “spika” no English refuses to take the girl away from him: “Madam, your daughter, if you please. No. Madam, for God’s sake, your daughter” (83–84). In a manner recalling Ellison’s geographic pairings and subsequent division (as with Ras and Invisible Man) Faulkner uses immigrant-English to emphasize a strict boundary between the U.S. southerner and the Italian southerner, though both have been transplanted into the U.S. North. Because of the prescribed frames in which they arose, moments of Italian-English in Faulkner’s earlier fiction did not produce the same desperate, alienating effect upon the white audience. The desperation Quentin here feels stems directly from the fact that he is a young U.S. southerner who finds himself in a Boston that speaks Italian-English and is being made over into immigrant enclaves: “There were vines and creepers where at home would be honeysuckle” (84).


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Richard Godden notes that part of Quentin’s day involves his encountering “ethnic realities beyond his regional experience” (36). Godden understands this according to a labor-based scheme: the “Boston Italian community is industrial rather than rural” (36). Quentin’s experience of this industrial-immigrant community does account for his despairing view of contemporary and future America, but this has as much to do with national distinctions as it concerns economic differences between the rural South and urban North. Amidst the rundown houses of these new ItalianAmericans, Quentin is as far from Jefferson as he can be while still in the world. Unlike Godden, Kevin Railey relies on an image of Boston as “a city symbolizing, in literature, perhaps the best of bourgeois democracy” as a basis for arguing that “Quentin’s displacement . . . is demonstrated by his appearing as a misfit in the North” (56). Quentin’s encounter with Boston’s immigrants, rather than its bourgeois ideology, however, is the more significant, more textually explicit means by which Faulkner suggests the character’s displacement. Like Invisible Man, Quentin is confused and alienated when he finds himself not just in the North—which allows him at least an understandable measure of difference—but in an immigrant district of the North, confronted by the new, dirty, and proliferating face of the nation. The emphasis that Faulkner places on the immigrant as a threat to Quentin is perhaps clearest in his description of Julio’s successful (though misdirected) defense of his sister: “‘There’s Julio,’ the little girl said, and then I saw his Italian face and his eyes as he sprang upon me” (88). Quentin is attacked first and foremost by the foreign, not by the defending brother. Julio represents another segment of the population that has followed him around all day, and his sibling relationship breaks Quentin’s connection to the little girl because she is now emphatically Italian, she is Julio’s Italian sister. At this point, Quentin is ostensibly apprehended by the local authorities and, together with the immigrants, the boys who found them, and the police, marches back into the town. Quentin sarcastically explains that “people [were] coming to the doors to look at us and more boys [were] materialising from somewhere until when we turned into the main street we had quite a procession” (89). The language Faulkner chooses to evoke this image creates an unmistakable parallel: In a brilliant reversal of the image first used to introduce Deacon, Quentin is here parading with Italians for the benefit of the locals; Quentin has now become an obverse reflection of Deacon; American southerners both black and white are now intertwined with immigrants and entrapped by the northern infrastructure.

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Quentin’s monologue registers Faulkner’s building commitment to the South’s besieged regional sovereignty and his resistance to both northern political power and immigrant claims on America. The significance of these interrelated elements to his southern commitments are confirmed by his unpublished 1933 introduction to The Sound and the Fury (to be discussed) and, more immediately, by the farcical court scene that follows Quentin’s parade. Godden reads the familial dynamics of the trial scene as creating an instance of “southern tragedy, relocated . . . as northern farce that precipitates Quentin into historical revision” (38). There is indeed a relocation of southern tragedy here, but the shift is not into a northern farce so much as into a contemporary, national reality, which is ultimately the reason for Quentin’s suicide. Faulkner writes the last of his Italian-immigrant English as Julio builds his case against Quentin, and his sympathies have clearly shifted.12 He is no longer interested in how an immigrant’s life in America is fractured by migration and alienation; rather, he is focused on how an immigrant’s presence in America fractures a native-born southerner’s claim to it, thus alienating him from his national origins. After sending his sister home with a threat, “‘I beat hell outa you,’” Julio then accuses Quentin of kidnapping: “‘Dont I catcha heem, eh? Dont I see weetha my own eyes-’” (SF 90). The dialect sounds like the cobbler’s but it appears in an altogether different context: Julio’s language does not give way to an eloquent description of an immigrant’s past loss; it is an ugly expression of a native-born’s present entanglements. In response to Sheriff Anse’s grumbled “‘Them durn furriners,’” Julio announces: “‘I American, . . . I gotta da pape’” (SF 90–91).13 Like Ras with his American flag, there is a “strange, out-of-joint quality” to this assertion of American identity (IM 160). But while Ellison’s immigrant characters are politically pragmatic in positing their American-ness, and, we recall, Rushdie’s are motivated by economic concerns and pop culture fantasies, Faulkner’s immigrants tenaciously avow their right to recognition as national citizens as an end in itself, even if they express this right rather clumsily. Faulkner’s presentation of an American identity based merely upon bureaucratic documentation is less than sympathetic; the choppy bluntness and bumbling syntax of Julio’s expression undercuts his claim to authentic American status while the sound of him scratching himself only serves to confirm, crudely, his unworthiness. Moments such as these render somewhat myopic Benedict Anderson’s central claim that “from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood, and . . . one could be ‘invited into’ the imagined community” (145). This scene from The Sound and the Fury, like the “Marse Jack” moment in Ellison, offers counter-evidence to Anderson’s presump-


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tion that “even the most insular nations accept the principle of naturalization . . . no matter how difficult in practice they make it” (145). While Rushdie’s novel strives to affirm this proposal, indeed to make it a constituent feature of “the mighty democracy of mispronunciation” that is the United States (Ground 19), it is the application of the principle that reveals it as problematic in Ellison and in Faulkner. Here, the juxtaposition is telling; a lineal American, with roots that extend back for centuries (as Faulkner sketched in the later appendix to the novel), must contend with a state-condoned equal, since bureaucratic documentation confirms Julio as a fellow citizen. Through Julio’s articulation, which recalls Ras’s “jine” and Brother Jack’s foreign tongue, Faulkner suggests the patent inadequacy of national identity based simply upon state-sanctioned acceptance (IM 374). And yet, the new American citizen has his rights; Quentin appears as the misguided, powerless southerner arraigned by a northern authority responding to an immigrant’s—to a fellow American’s—accusations. He must pay the northern justice and immigrant worker, for reparation and temporary freedom from both (91). Quentin’s friends chastise him for “fooling with these damn wops” as they leave the squire’s office and return to the Bland picnic (92). Quentin then sees the Italian girl for the last time: “We passed . . . [the] yard where the little girl stood by the gate. . . . I waved my hand, but she made no reply, only her head turned slowly, following us with her unwinking gaze” (92–93). The little girl’s fixed position before a traveling Quentin recalls the image of the old black man on a mule that Quentin saw on his way to Mississippi one Christmas. Quentin’s mixed feelings were clear in seeing that figure: [he was] “carved out of the hill itself, like a sign put there saying You are home again”; his “motionless and unimpatient” demeanor and “static serenity” brought to Quentin thoughts of home and roiled his insides (55). That man is as rooted in Mississippi as this young girl is (re)rooted in Massachusetts, leaving Quentin feeling displaced in the Old South and the New America. Faulkner captures Quentin’s displacement as the section nears its fatal conclusion: “Mississippi or Massachusetts. I was. I am not. Massachusetts or Mississippi.” (110) Here, juxtaposition concisely suggests meaning: this character is unable to maintain a regional identity within this contemporary America. Quentin is neither Massachusetts, where he failed to assume a new identity alongside his immigrant sister, nor Mississippi, where he failed to maintain his old identity as a chivalric southerner defending his blood sister. Barbara Ladd contends that The Sound and the Fury offers a “nexus of issues of racial (familial) purity and national legitimacy [that become] clearer

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as . . . the white southerner’s own struggle for cultural redemption, that is, for an escape from history into the millennial New World nation of the United States” (152–53). Unfortunately for Quentin, he cannot join the “New World nation of the United States” because it is already peopled with Old World immigrants who have escaped their own histories to take intervening root in it. America’s future, the novel’s events imply, rests in immigrant families with bonds stronger than their equivalents in the South, with black and white combined with Italian in a triangulated “obverse reflection” (SF 55). Unable to avoid or accept past, present, or future, death is the only available option for Quentin; he abandons his claim to America because it is now and will ever after be the “Land of the kike home of the wop” (SF 82). As we shall see, Faulkner’s concomitant abandonment of northern, urban settings in the major fiction that immediately followed The Sound and the Fury can be understood more properly as a recommitment to his native region, where the immigrant’s entry posed an unavoidable challenge to the South’s precarious black-and-white balance, which Faulkner could only envision retrenching through the darkest, most local assertions of racialized southern identity. V: THE IMMIGRANTS OF THE NEW, TERRIBLE SOUTH Light in August is Faulkner’s most incisive study of the South’s struggles to secure a place for itself in an increasingly modernized, hybrid world. In the novel, Faulkner delineates what he saw as the debilitating transformation of the South from its status as a region defined by rooted continuity to its position as a permeable space marred by ephemeral fragmentation. In descriptions of the South as it stood in the 1920s, roughly the novel’s setting, the region has been overrun by “the small, random, new, terrible, little houses in which people who came yesterday from nowhere and tomorrow will be gone wherenot, dwell on the edges of towns” (LA 211). Faulkner’s roster of adjectives, particularly the juxtaposition of “terrible” and “new,” conveys his anxiety over the South’s dissolution into a land full of disparate individuals in constant movement.14 Faulkner composed an introduction to The Sound and the Fury shortly after the publication of Light in August that explicitly links his anxiety over “new, terrible” changes in the South to a group that now, by virtue of its direct contact with his region, provokes rather open distaste. In unpublished 1933 remarks, Faulkner writes of northern cities teeming with “polyglot boys and girls progressing from tenement schools” to positions of cultural power, the descendants of “Irish politicians and Neapolitan racketeers” who represent the future of the nation that mortally


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distressed Quentin (SF 228). Here, Faulkner defines linguistic mixture— “polyglot boys and girls”—and the immigrant presence as linked threats to the integrity of the South. He considers the effect of the nation’s changing composition on his own region, lamenting that the “indigenous dream of [the South’s] collection of men . . . is old since dead” (229). In place of the once-homogenous region, “There is a thing known whimsically as the New South . . . but it is not the south. It is a land of Immigrants who are rebuilding the towns and cities” (229, emphases mine).15 What Quentin witnessed in Boston, Faulkner now laments as happening in his South: the transformation of local spaces performed by “random,” “terrible,” “new” peoples, whose presence fractures historical continuities. Faulkner’s South has been replaced by the “New South.” I preface my discussion of Light in August with these comments to stress two interrelated points: first, Faulkner’s frustration over his region losing its homogenous character and suffering a degrading makeover; second, Faulkner’s bald assertion that “Immigrants,” rather than racial or political legacies, are to blame for this downturn. The introduction to The Sound and the Fury speaks to Quentin’s time in Boston as much as it does to Faulkner’s vision of the South from Light in August, specifically his characterization of Joe Christmas and the transitory South which he moves through (and produces) as an immigrant worker. Examining the nature of the modernizing South in the novel from the perspective of gender roles, Patricia McKee suggests that the “transience of this place [is] a transience Faulkner identifies with masculinity” (123). We can modify McKee’s observation in analyzing the significance of Joe Christmas’s repeated characterization as a foreigner, more specifically as an Italian immigrant, throughout the novel. As we shall see, Faulkner identifies transience with the immigrant male worker who poses a threat to the local community in economic, racial, and sexual terms. Due largely to ambivalent feelings in the region about the (Italian) immigrant’s racial identity and his economic utility, immigrants represented either a promise or a threat to an impoverished, post-Reconstruction South. The region was in an acute labor crisis from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century due primarily to the exit of black labor northward, an event registered by The New Negro and Invisible Man. C. Vann Woodward explains that the South has had a longstanding history of openness to America’s newly arrived peoples; it actually invited “immigrants to fill up its sparsely settled territories, develop its resources, and supplement its labour supply” (297). Along the same lines, Jones argues that the South was able to attract immigrant labor only at the onset of the twentieth century, when it finally started to catch up to the rest of the nation in terms of large-scale

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industry (162–63). Joe Christmas’s initial appearance in Jefferson reflects the intertwining of industrialization and the immigrant’s entry into the South. Unlike the presence of rapacious immigrants in Rushdie’s America, or immigrant-led labor and political movements in Ellison’s, both of which only indirectly challenge local compositions, the appearance of presumed immigrants in Faulkner’s imagined geography poses the most immediate of challenges to the viability of a once-homogenous community. When he suddenly appears before the men working in a planing mill, Joe possesses an indeterminacy that frustrates onlookers’ attempts to comprehend him, a frustration constant throughout the novel. Through Byron Bunch, Faulkner tells us the only certainty we know about this mysterious stranger: “there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town or city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home” (LA 31). Joe’s homelessness has as much to do with his racial indeterminacy—the longstanding critical focus on the character—as it has to do with the town’s collective refusal to integrate him into its composition—my primary interest—so long as he appears, as one character suspiciously assumes, to be a “foreigner” (15). In offering the town’s repeated characterizations of Joe as an Italian immigrant, Faulkner follows Mark Twain in exploring how a southern locality responds to a seemingly foreign presence that becomes a challenge to its native-sprung homogeneity. Faulkner’s treatment involves larger migration and economic considerations, however, given the challenges of modernization (and increased immigration) that emerged in the South between Twain’s and Faulkner’s periods. Philip Weinstein observes that Joe’s “moves . . . tracked as they are by a variety of countrymen speaking out of their own orientations (not his), say nothing about ‘genuine’ racial traits and everything about the discursive practices through which racial identity is produced and recognized” (107). This premise frames Faulkner’s continued interest in the (primarily Italian) immigrant’s transmuting effect upon the composition of American identity. In light of the debate raging in his region over immigrants, Light in August locates Faulkner at the forefront of then-contemporary arguments surrounding southern identity and southern prosperity. A 1905 article in the South Atlantic Quarterly stresses the economic improvement enjoyed by other regions of the nation as their populations swelled with immigrants, and then asks: “The South needs white labor, but does the South want the immigrants? . . . [I]s the immigrant of today the kind of white man whom the South stands ready to welcome?” (quoted in Moquin 59). A “kind of white man” precisely indicates the swarthy European immigrant’s indeterminate racial position in early twentieth-century American ideas about race. Matthew Jacobson explains that


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Italian immigrants in particular “did not look white to certain social arbiters” and “occupied a racial middle ground within an otherwise unforgiving, binary caste system of white-over-black” (57). The “middle ground” that Italians occupied was simultaneously racial and economic; they were coded as either white or black depending upon whether their entry into the region was desired or resisted. Before charting Joe’s experience in the novel, we must note the importance southerners placed on containing the Italian in the region’s preexistent binaries. The Italian is either a “kind of white man,” or, as one historian observes, “connected with the Negro and . . . regarded as a racially different and inferior group” by whites (quoted in Leonard 91). This either/or attitude towards Italian immigrants reached a fever pitch in southern discourse of the 1920s, specifically in the political arena, over the 1924 Johnson–Reed Act, a Congressional motion to restrict the influx of unskilled immigrants into the United States by imposing a mandatory literacy bill. Louisiana senator N.C. Blanchard spoke against the measure and explicitly in support of his region’s need for immigrant labor. He declared: “It may do very well for certain sections of the country . . . to pass a measure as drastic as this one . . . but it does not do for the . . . South” which “would be in itself a magnificent Empire” by securing an immigrant workforce (16). Blanchard’s speech registers the region’s desire to assert its economic independence and the importance of unfettered immigration to this project. In light of Faulkner’s comments from his unpublished introduction to The Sound and the Fury, and his vision of a changing, modern South evident in Light in August, it is unlikely he shared Blanchard’s feelings. At the same time, he was far from being as stereotypically anti-immigrant as was Alabama Congressman William Richardson. This politician’s support for Johnson–Reed was premised upon a Judge Driscoll–type view of Italians: “Shall we . . . invite among us a people . . . coming from foreign lands bringing with them the murderous teachings and practices of the Mafia?” (91). If there was a political position on Italian immigrants in the South that Faulkner likely would have shared, it is Alabama representative Burnett’s. Henry Beardsell Leonard explains that Burnett, “a leading restrictionist, asserted that immigrants from southern Europe preferred ‘to consort with American negroes’ and would complicate the section’s race problems” (92). As we shall see from Joe’s effect upon Jefferson, his complicating the South’s race problems, however, relates explicitly to his status as an Italian immigrant. The Italian’s position in southern discourse and American immigrant history from the late nineteenth century onward and the Italian immigrant’s position in Faulkner’s fiction to this point together suggest that Joe’s possible immigrant identity explains why “[r]ather than race, Faulkner’s major

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concern [in Light in August] is the conflict between the almost rebellious openness of a socially mobile world and the need for social cohesion” (Railey 101). In short, Joe’s foreignness does not operate solely as a preparation for his unveiling as the “nigger murderer” in the novel’s climactic scene; it also allows Faulkner to admit, explore, and imaginatively reject an outside presence in the South. After the initial conversations at the mill about Christmas being some kind of foreigner, his identity as an immigrant in the town’s collective consciousness is confirmed by Joe Brown’s remarks subsequent to the Joanna Burden murder. Once the town becomes convinced that Christmas must be black, since only a “nigger” could commit such a heinous act upon a white woman, Brown chastises the sheriff and community for their misreading of Joe’s identity, and in so doing reveals a longstanding Jefferson assumption that Joe is an immigrant. Brown scoffs: “‘The folks in this town [who consider themselves] so smart. Calling him a foreigner . . . when soon as I watched him . . . I knew he wasn’t no more a foreigner than I am’” (LA 98). Brown himself is a rather questionable native. In an argument with the sheriff, Brown asserts his rights in a manner undeniably reminiscent of Julio’s: “‘I’m an American citizen,’ Brown said. ‘I reckon I got my rights’” (LA 426). Ladd persuasively reads Burch/Brown as a near double for Christmas, based on their social positions in the novel and their “dark-complected” faces (170). James Snead is even more emphatic on this line, arguing that the character “is Christmas’s darker double. He looks more like a ‘foreigner’ . . . than Christmas does” (164). An unprovoked assertion of national identity does not identify Brown-as-immigrant necessarily, but does reveal Faulkner’s persistent interest in how rootless individuals sought legitimacy as national subjects through hollow invocations of state-sanctioned citizenry, and also by defining another as an immigrant (which is to say, as not an American). Though chronologically prior to the mill-workers’ first appraisal of Joe as a foreigner, we learn only later that his early paramour, Bobbie, also assumed he was a foreigner. In bed, whispering about her lover’s past and his physical appearance, she admits to him: “‘I thought maybe you were a foreigner. That you never came from around here’” (LA 196). Joe’s response is significantly ambiguous: “‘It’s different from that, even. More than just a foreigner’” (196, emphasis mine). Through a key distinction, Faulkner ensures that Joe can still be read as more than just black-and-white, by having him admit tacitly that he is a foreigner, and something beyond that designation. Faulkner clearly conceives of Joe as defying the basic binary categories of southern identity, but not simply because he might be of a mixed racial background. In fact, more than any other American writer, Faulkner realized that


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a man of mixed black-and-white lineage had the most (U.S.) southern identity imaginable. Rather, Joe’s resistance to local categories of identity relates to his career across America and through the streets of Jefferson. It registers, in specific ways, Faulkner’s increasingly uneasy awareness of the immigrant’s growing presence in his nation, region, and (postage stamp of ) native soil, and it leads to an extremely violent group response. Prior to the climactic lynching scene, the most dramatic instance of anti-immigrant sentiment in the novel occurs between Christmas and Brown, when the latter’s use of racial epithets reveals his assumptions about his liquor-running partner’s identity. After Brown ribs Christmas for his nocturnal visits to Burden’s house, Joe viciously beats him. Brown flees, but not before challenging Joe: “‘You durn yellowbellied wop,’ he said, in a tentative tone . . . ‘You durn yellowbellied wop! I’ll learned you who you are monkeying with’” (275). Brown’s comments subvert his earlier claim to have known all along that Joe was not a foreigner. More significantly, in light of contemporary usage of “wop,” this moment in the novel also involves a labor-based anxiety. From what we know of Brown through Lena Grove, he is likely a member of the white lower-middle class that moved from mill town to mill town in the New South, searching for work (Saunders 748). This class competed for work with new immigrant labor to the region, and according to one contemporary source, “wop” was used among native workers as a way to alienate Italian immigrant workers (Foerster 402, 408). As Anderson notes, derogatory terms for immigrants represent a strategy of rejecting their claim to national recognition, since a word like “wop” “erases nation-ness by reducing the adversary to” a set of demeaning stereotypical features (148). In Brown’s present confrontation with Christmas, of course, there is little immediate evidence of labor anxiety; there is, however, evidence of the nationalistic divisions brought about by Brown’s reliance upon an ethnic epithet. The labor dimension appears as an undercurrent of the tension between the two characters, and between Joe and the rest of the town, while Brown’s attack on Christmas confirms Joe’s primary identity as that of an immigrant, from his time with Bobbie through the Burden murder—which is the homicide that accords him an identity the southern community is more comfortable in accepting. After murdering Joanna Burden, Joe’s complex identity collapses into a stereotype experientially understood by the community: he is now the “nigger murderer” deserving of a lynching. Yet subsequent to Christmas’s being defined as a black menace, locals still respond to him as an immigrant. When he hitchhikes away from the crime scene, Joe meets a young driver who speaks to him with words “chosen simply and carefully and spoken slowly

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and carefully for the ear of a foreigner” (284). Though he does not revert to the Italian-immigrant English of prior works, Faulkner again demonstrates an interest similar to Ellison’s in language as a signifier of national difference. Regardless of how Joe hears the words, they are spoken to him as if he’s nationally different from the local southerners he meets, an external difference that culminates in Joe’s mortal encounter with the most locally American of the novel’s characters. VI: FAULKNER’S SOUTH: “GRIMM” LOCAL COLORS Undoubtedly, Percy Grimm would have been a great admirer of Madison Grant, Waldo Frank, and the white nativist sentiment dominating debates over immigration in the 1910s and 1920s. Indeed, the nativism exhibited by Quentin Compson and local Bostonians in Sound appears in Light in August in the monstrous, clumsy Grimm, a characterization that distances Faulkner from these attitudes while still allowing him to admit their motivating force in native–immigrant encounters. Grimm captains the Jefferson national guard unit with the firm belief “that the American is superior to all other white races,” a presumption that chimes perfectly with Grant and other nativists’ attempts to intertwine American nationalism with white, AngloSaxon racial identity (LA 451).16 We can find a similar notion in The Wild Palms (1939), when a convict explains to his fellow convict that the group of people he found himself with on a boat as he tried to get to Parchman were “refugees,” meaning, they “were not white people” (657). His interlocutor presumes the “tall convict” must “mean niggers,” but is corrected: “No. Not Americans” (657). In this novel, the nativist description of the nonwhite/non-American refugees serves to stress how out of place the convict feels among such people. In Light in August, Grimm’s similar attitudes are meant to justify local action in a national framework. His actions are ostensibly designed to maintain the law against disorder and mayhem, but, as we shall see, they are also directed towards the maintenance of a tacit law against the immigrant’s entry (LA 452). Though Grimm claims to be acting explicitly on behalf of the federal government, he delivers a death sentence to Joe in explicitly local, extrajuridical terms. The act also involves the community of the novel in the longstanding tradition of lynching in the South, which Trudier Harris argues involves a certain “community spirit” and a collective attempt “to exorcise fear [of the black Other] from racial memory” (107, 105). After blacks, the next most notable targets for lynching in the South were Italians, and the most famous instance was the 1891 New Orleans incident.17 It is certainly


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plausible that Faulkner could have learned of the event during his own time among the city’s Italian immigrants, and that he in turn informs small-town Mississippi with the anti-Italian sentiments that emerged in 1891 New Orleans. This possibility opens up Owen Robinson’s otherwise black/whitefocused proposal that “To study Yoknapatawpha’s troubled construction of Christmas . . . [is] to examine its construction of itself, its codes and its apparently irresolvable conflicts” (121). I propose in turn that Joe’s death reveals the very apparentness of the “irresolvable conflicts” that encircle his identity; for the white community of Jefferson, his death represents the collective psychic passage and resolution of the unwanted Italian immigrant presence into the locally sourced, locally circumscribed role of “nigger murderer.” This interpretation emphasizes the need of a southern locality to fit Joe into a strict black-and-white binary, the need to stress that he be black at all costs: they accord Christmas this identity because it is internal and knowable, and, by comparison, more welcome than his other, as the external, unknown immigrant.18 Grimm’s motivations and, more importantly, his final pronouncement before killing Joe lend credence to the possibility that the event involves antiimmigrant motivations. Incensed that Hightower attempts to defend Christmas, Grimm exclaims, “‘Has every preacher and old maid in Jefferson taken their pants down to the yellowbellied son of a bitch?’” (LA 464) Immediately, we remember Brown’s description of Joe as a “yellowbellied wop.” Faulkner’s decision to repeat the adjective at this crucial moment suggests that the community is subconsciously seeking to eradicate more than a “nigger murderer.” Joe’s “yellowbellied” persona also involves his sexual challenge to a white nation. In a convincing account of contemporary white American attitudes towards Rudolph Valentino, Jeffory A. Clymer offers an estimation of the threat posed by the film star that coincides with the threat posed by Christmas: It wasn’t only that Valentino represented the spectacle of ethnic male sexuality in a xenophobic and sexist society, but that he blurred the neat lines of division between . . . white and non-white. . . . [and] if these categories weren’t preserved, white male heterosexuality would be doomed to extinction, making the American race dangerously susceptible to . . . racially degenerate immigrants such as Valentino. (182)

Joe was first an economic threat, as an immigrant arriving to work in the mill; then he was a racial threat, an immigrant somewhere between white and black in his various interactions with southerners. And in Grimm’s final

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sentencing, Joe is a sexual threat to the ladies of Jefferson and to heterosexuality in general, taking his pants down to preachers and women alike. Earlier, Max referred to him as “Romeo” and the “Beale St. Playboy”; now is he labeled along similar lines by Grimm, if with fury instead of sarcasm, as a “yellowbellied” immigrant (LA 213). Through a partial replication of Pudd’nhead Wilson’s solution to unwanted Italian visitors, the local southern community avoids the threefold threat posed by the immigrant’s presence. The immigrant is eradicated from their collective consciousness by being killed as a black man; Joe’s ethnically ambiguous identity is clarified and stabilized by a white gaze that strategically blackens its object. We thus see evidence of how “in the most intimate, spatially confined, geographically isolated situations, locality must be maintained carefully against various kinds of odds,” including, in this case, the entry of immigrant labor in the early twentieth century into the American South (Appadurai 179). Dying before an assembly of townsmen, Christmas becomes finally and fully contained within the “black blast [of his blood, through which] the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever” (LA 465). The community is subconsciously glad to admit this admittedly difficult memory of the lynched black menace because it is easier to accept than the alternative; the presence of an immigrant would represent an outside disruption of their local composition. They will never “lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes” (465). This final description of communal memory posits an internally circumscribed homogeneity: these men are united by this image of a dead black man, just as they are united in the mirroring faces of their children. A strangely idealized, if ugly, past ensures an unbroken line into the future, producing a continuity that Faulkner revealed was dependent upon maintaining an organic sense of American identity by viciously asserting the integrity of a regional identity against an exterior presence. Faulkner’s possible agreement with Quentin and the southern community’s attitudes towards the immigrant Italian become more apparent in light of his 1933 remarks on immigrants. This evidence offers a new, somewhat troubling context for reading Faulkner’s fiction. Trapped in the “New England dark” of “wop parades,” surrounded by the children of “Neapolitan racketeers,” we understand better now why both Quentin and Faulkner do not hate the South (AA, 303). For all of its problems, it remains home: admittedly fractured, undeniably mixed, yet strangely homogenous when compared with challenges from outside the intertwined borders of local, southern, and national space.

Chapter Five

Americans You’ll Never (Have To) Be

America starts today. Whoo-ee, she thinks, exhausted and astonished by the vehemence of her propaganda. Whoo. Well bang that drum, wrap me in the flag and call me Martha. —Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet Now I want you to tell me one thing more. Why do you hate the South? I dont hate it, Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; I dont hate it,’ he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark. I don’t. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it! —William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

This book has analyzed a series of literary attempts to represent and to come to terms with American national identity in light of encounters between new immigrants and under-recognized, indigenous minorities, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth-centuries. The chapters treated three major twentieth-century writers, each of whom provided a representative insight into a crisis of identity formation that paralleled historical and social changes affecting modern America, including the New Immigration, the Great Migration, and globalization under the auspices of American Empire. By involving theories of culture and globalization in this effort, I have sought to re-frame the perpetual fixation on black-and-white studies of American literature in a new critical context, which is simultaneously global in outlook and subject matter and local in its sensitivity to the persistent questions of mobility, race, history, language, and geography in America. Read together, the works of Rushdie, Ellison, and Faulkner appear to be structured around issues of continuity and disruption in imagined communities; renderings of language as a signifier of American identity; organic local affiliations challenged by trans-nationally mediated racial 107

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and political commitments; memory, geography, and blood as guarantors of American-ness as opposed to amnesia, mobility, and masquerade; and blackand-white understandings of American composition set against variegated ethnic patterns. Faulkner, Ellison, and Rushdie collectively shed new light on the commitments, concerns, and responsibilities of the American writer and, in a post-national era where American culture’s reach is global, the fluidity of the designation itself. Committing his art to a region of America regarded then as little more than a backwater, Faulkner expands the geographic purview of American literary culture, if diminishing would-be newcomers to the American scene in the process. Ellison devotes his writing to redefining the vernacular boundaries of American culture and the racial boundaries of American identity, in part by muffling alien voices and nationalities that clamored alongside native blacks in these efforts. Meanwhile, Rushdie dismantles concepts of American identity based upon internal geography and the indigenous culture that Faulkner and Ellison sought to defend. Exotic outlanders are allowed to enter and indeed define his America, but this expansion comes at the expense of rendering the complexities of historical American experience. I: FROM RUSSIA WITH A MISSISSIPPI ACCENT? Did Faulkner remain uniformly detached from the anti-immigrant sentiments and actions that he represents in his fiction? Not insofar as they appear as part of the native U.S. South’s response to the increasing modernization, and therefore migratory nature, of its local terrain. Faulkner was caught between defending the perpetuation of American identity based upon the black–white binaries of southern locality and admitting the increasingly global dimension of that same space. The immigrant, as the preceding chapter argued, was the provocateur for these synchronous impulses in his fiction. While Faulkner was generally resistant to the alien otherness of the immigrant, he was also alert to how firmly entrenched the immigrant always-already has been in the United States and, more specifically, in the local South. This awareness becomes evident from the background story that Faulkner provides for one of his most famously southern characters: V.K. Ratliff. From The Hamlet (1940) onward through the Snopes trilogy, Ratliff travels through Yoknapatawpha County, “retelling from house to house the news of his four counties with the ubiquity of a newspaper . . . and the reliability of a postal service. He never forgot a name, and knew everyone, man mule and dog, within fifty miles” (Snopes 16–17). Ratliff ’s authority


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and knowledge, strictly situated within the boundaries of the local space that he travels as “his” own, is unquestioned in The Hamlet. Faulkner, however, complicates the character’s seemingly organic relationship to his surroundings in the second and third novels of the trilogy, The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). There, we learn that Ratliff ’s initials, V.K., conceal a surprisingly alien background. V.K. stands for “Vladimir Kyrilytch,” the patrimonial designation of an Ur-immigrant from Russia. Embarrassed if not bitter that his concealed identity has been found out, Ratliff obliges Stevens with his familial history, admitting that no one has ever discovered what an eighteenth-century Russian was doing in one of them hired German regiments in General Burgoyne’s army that got licked at Saratoga [after which] Congress refused to honor the terms of surrender and banished the whole kit-and-biling of them to straggle for six years in Virginia without no grub nor money and the ones like that first V.K. without no speech either. (Mansion 480)

With this seemingly random bit of history, Faulkner in fact evokes arguably the first successful foreigner assimilation in U.S. national history. The first V.K. was among the Hessians, soldiers rented from Prussian and German states by the British to fight against the rebels in the American Revolution ( Jones 50, 55). According to Karl Crannell, “News that the Germans were coming to America caused widespread alarm” because “rumors circulated that Hessians were savage creatures, capable of committing unspeakable atrocities” (“The Northern Campaign”). Just as 1920s America and the South in particular resisted new immigrants in part because of their purported savagery, eighteenth-century America had a similar anxiety over frightening foreigners, if with more reason given the jingoistic context. Yet these German soldiers, defeated alongside Burgoyne’s other forces at Saratoga and sent to POW camps in Pennsylvania and Virginia, “were quickly absorbed” into the mainstream composition of white America (Jones 56). In light of this historical evidence, one wonders, why does Faulkner maintain the V.K. lineage over the course of two centuries as a concealed marker of foreignness? The simplest reason emerges in an amusing statement of the known immigrant’s inability to maintain a southern, rural identity: “nobody named Vladimir Kyrilytch could make a living as a Mississippi country man” (Mansion 257). Faulkner is doing more, however, than offering easy humor in placing an immigrant in his South. By referring to Ratliff as “V.K.” for hundreds of pages before disclosing his lineal name and background, Faulkner effectively tricks his readers

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and a local southern community into assuming that Ratliff is one of their own, only to reveal his essential and ineradicable foreignness. Like Rushdie, Faulkner here implies that most every American, even the most seemingly local one, originates from somewhere else and only plays at being native. But Ratliff ’s local authority remains intact during and after this immigrant revelation, in part because his racial identity allows him to pass easily into the local white composition (unlike Italians). More intriguingly, his revelation allows Faulkner to offer, through an immigrant—instead of against immigrants—a recasting of American history from its inception with the eighteenth-century War of Independence, through the nineteenth-century settling of the Deep South, to the bustling plurality of 1930s New York City. Ratliff decides to accompany Stevens on his trip North so that along the way, “when we go across Virginia I can see the rest of the place where that-ere first immigrant Vladimir Kyrilytch worked his way into the United States” (479, emphasis mine). In admitting a desire to search out his origin, Ratliff seeks remembrance not merely of his namesake, but of the first immigrant who bore his name. The distinction emphasizes his aboriginal status as an outsider. Once Ratliff reaches New York, Faulkner connects the character’s deep historical ties to the foreign to contemporary immigrant dynamics. Stevens brings Ratliff to an expensive New York men’s shop and introduces him to a countrywoman of sorts: “‘Myra Allanova, this is Vladimir Kyrilytch’” (481). Not surprisingly, as Ratliff explains, Stevens’s modes of address encourage the woman to make certain presumptions: “she looked at me and said something; yes, I know it was Russian” (481–82). Though unable to respond in kind, and despite two hundred years of American family history, Ratliff is nonetheless marked as a fellow newcomer by the woman whose response suggests the inescapability of his alien identity. Jean Weisberger argues that Faulkner evokes Dostoevsky with the “slavic exoticism” of this encounter and then reads the characters’ subsequent interactions as modeled on The Idiot (338). This strictly literary interpretation ignores not only the overarching immigrant frame that Faulkner creates between eighteenth- and twentiethcentury America in this episode, but also possible political and historical motivations. Ratliff has been a character in Faulkner’s writing since Sartoris (1929), where he appeared as V.K. Suratt. Faulkner changed the character’s name when a real-life Suratt complained, but thirty years passed before he offered the story behind “V.K.” (Runyan 132–33). Both the demographic reality of Russian immigrants in twentieth-century New York, which, we recall, Ellison registers in Invisible Man, and the fact that Faulkner completed this novel in the early years of the Cold War, after the xenophobic Red Scares that accompanied the rise of HUAAC, suggest that Faulkner’s revelation of


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the character’s background was a mocking response to his earlier, more vexed treatments of the issue of American identity and to the nation’s persistent obsessions.1 Faulkner decodes V.K. Ratliff, Mississippi sewing machine salesman seemingly since time immemorial, into Vladimir Kyrilytch, the descendant of an eighteenth-century Ur-immigrant-American and also the assumed fellow émigré of new immigrants in modern-day New York. Like Rushdie, Faulkner is aware, at least in this late novel, of the more absurd implications of basing national authenticity purely upon rooted history, or shared language. And unlike the comparatively intense and worried Ellison, Faulkner even admits, at least on this occasion, the pointlessness of such a xenophobic endeavor, showing us that it is hard to be more locally southern than the likes of V.K. Ratliff, even though he is marked as a “furriner.” We are left, then, with a divided portrait of Faulkner, and of the America he represents in his fiction. Although Glissant has persuasively argued for the existence of a split at the originating point of Faulkner’s fictional universe based upon competing European and New World/southern narrative responses to racial mixture, perhaps there is another fissure and another explanation: the rift between native and immigrant, and the chronological, cultural, racial, and linguistic efforts that every American has to make to erase the difference. To establish local purity, Faulkner had to reveal the foreignness at the origin of even the most local of Americans; though taken for native southerners, they are always also marked as Italian, Russian, or, as with his beloved Compson clan, Scottish immigrants.2 Thus Faulkner seems to admit the aboriginal heterogeneity of the American experiment, like Salman Rushdie and Ralph Ellison. Like Rushdie especially, he recognizes how longstanding, undeniable, and perpetual are the foreign components and additions to America, but, like Ellison, he was troubled by their modern manifestations when these challenged his primary commitment to a finally black-and-white U.S. South. As a neophyte cosmopolitan in New Orleans and as a writer treating matters of national concern both early (Sound ) and late in his full-fledged career (Snopes), Faulkner was sensitive to the plights, hopes, and strategies of immigrants seeking a place for themselves in America, but also to the difficulties they posed to native populations and more generally to determinations of American identity. As a committed U.S. southern writer during the major period of his writing, Faulkner was primarily concerned with delineating an authentic and reliable local space to play out the complex relations amongst native-born southerners, an intention in part provoked by immigrants directly challenging and potentially transforming that native ground. Faulkner certainly did not endorse the town’s final treatment of the “wop” Joe

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Christmas, but in order to indict it he had to conceive of it, finally, within the region’s racial binaries. In light of Faulkner’s treatment of immigrants in his fiction, it seems that, to paraphrase Ralph Ellison, for all his concern with the nature of a modern, changing America, Faulkner was actually seeking to protect a locally reliable vision of the South, while admitting and limiting its own historical portions of foreignness. His seeking was out of concern for his postage stamp of native soil and for his people both (and only) black and white; his writing was committed to helping the South endure its locally defined past so as to endure into a locally defined future. II: BLACK BLOOD, BLACK SOIL, BLACK AMERICA The continuities that Faulkner sought to establish in his fiction resemble Ellison’s in many ways. Ellison, however, confronted the fracturing of U.S. southern experience from its organic sources in trying to understand the Great Migration’s effect upon black America. This led him to convert native black experiences into a source of cultural capital for indigenous American blacks confronted with the ethnic mix of an alienating urban landscape in the North. Ellison attempted as much in response to what he viewed as the cultural and political dangers posed to blacks and to America by two foreign types, black trans-nationalists and European Communists. Their agitations led Ellison, in his only major fiction, to elaborate the interconnection of the American nation-state’s concerns with its indigenous black population’s commitments. To assist in this endeavor, Ellison relied in no small measure upon linguistic signifiers of national difference. These, as he represents them, were signs that 1930s and 1940s New York was transforming from an internallycircumscribed plurality into a porous polyglot setting comprising variously dislocated subjects clashing with each other. Unless redressed, this development would mean that native black migrants, historically undervalued contributors to national culture and unnoticed possessors of national identity, would be the invisible losers in such a struggle, while American life itself would be rendered increasingly dissonant. These concerns work into Invisible Man’s unfinished successor as well. Commenting on the connections between the two works, Thomas S. Engeman contends that through the unfinished novel’s strong religious component, “Ellison suggests [that] only Christianity possesses the emotional and spiritual sinews capable of uniting the fractured American communities still warring at the conclusion of Invisible Man” (99). Engeman too narrowly limits the proposed solutions to national discord by basing these only on Christian solidarity. The harmony that the novel seeks also involves a primordial,


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nationalist element. The fragment of the novel, published posthumously as Juneteenth (1999), is marked by repeated references to an unequal, black/ white binary as structuring the entirety of American history. Teaching the young Bliss about his nation’s history, Daddy Hickman explains that America was populated by white Christians who came over on the Mayflower and black Christians who came over “in those many-named floating coffins” of slave ships ( JT 120). The moment white Europeans “got free enough [from Europe’s tyrants] to breathe themselves, they set about to bow us down” (120). Soon thereafter, Hickman establishes, rather literally, the blood-andsoil national status of black Americans, though this claim is perpetually overridden by various types of white Americans: They laugh but they can’t deny us. They can curse and kill us but they can’t destroy us all. This land is ours because we come out of it, we bled in it, our tears watered it, we fertilized it with our dead . . . They laugh but we know who we are and where we are, but they keep coming in their millions and they don’t know and can’t get together. ( JT 130)

Hickman’s fiery speech suggests much about Ellison’s longstanding conceptions of whiteness, blackness, and American-ness. Black American origins are defined by a singular and forced entry into the nation, hundreds of years ago. The subsequent, if difficult, development of native black American identity has been closely entwined with the local geography blacks possess by historical right, which in turn guarantees them a clear and common identity. Their unified future is supported by a strongly Christian sense of community but also guaranteed by their deep roots in America’s past. By comparison, white America is ever changing, because like-colored immigrants “keep coming in their millions,” sowing confusion and disunity amongst the overall white population. Especially galling from Hickman’s position, not only have black Americans been maltreated by white Americans since the Mayflower, they are now put down by newcomers as well thanks to the European alien’s easy passage into the ranks of America’s racially predetermined citizenry. From Ellison’s vantage, America’s openness to new (white) Americans meant that the always-already synchronous presence of indigenous black Americans was forgotten in recurrent bouts of national amnesia. For Ellison, both in his major mid-century fiction and in the novel he worked on for decades afterwards, American identity was best understood as historically framed and organically developed. Ellison’s writing seeks to renovate a traditional concept of American identity by making newly visible what he regarded as the oldest unfulfilled claim to it, even if this meant in turn stigmatizing

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other minorities whose comparative success in America and inadequacies as Americans were a combined frustration to him. But beyond even stigmatizing new minority claims to American identity, Ellison seems at times to forget another primordial claim: the native Indian’s. Tellingly, the dedication in Juneteenth is to “That Vanished Tribe Into Which I Was Born: The American Negroes” ( JT ix). Lamenting the erasure of his aboriginal people, Ellison inadvertently erases another by borrowing the Indian marker of group identity to describe, somewhat melodramatically, his own “Vanished Tribe”: The American Negroes. Indeed, we should note the absence of native Indians as active factors in both Ellison’s and Faulkner’s evocations of American identity. Indians do appear throughout Faulkner’s fiction; they contribute to internal American hybridity, in their mixing with blacks, and stand in for the receding fullness of the natural world (Go Down, Moses’s Sam Fathers for example). They also appear in Ellison, specifically to embody the American past in Invisible Man (as in the Brotherhood’s poster) and to provide a frontier encounter for blacks migrating across nineteenth-century Oklahoma in Juneteenth. Both writers recognize that the foundational hybridity of the New World involves the mixture of African, European, and aboriginal Indian. But neither Faulkner nor Ellison involves the Indian in the present-day and future complexities of American identity because their more immediate commitments preclude such an investment. Dedicated to preserving a regionally-based, national space in which to work out the historical legacies of American race relations that persist into the modern era, Faulkner and Ellison had to conceive of American identity, in its active and re-active forms evident in native–immigrant encounters, as strictly indigenous black, white, or some combination therein.3 This erasure of Indian claims to present-day American identity parallels Faulkner’s and Ellison’s rejection of immigrant claims. The Indian’s presence is limited to a past-based frame that can exert no further pressures on American identity, while the immigrant’s presence is rejected because of its potential presentday and future impacts. In the case of both the Indian and the immigrant, Faulkner and Ellison seek to confine their respective influences so as to be able to emphasize what each writer regarded as the primary task of modern America: reconciliation between native black and native white along a continuous and exclusively national continuum. III: CALL WHOM ISHMAEL? The native Indian presence in Rushdie’s American writing also suggests limited interest and strategic erasures, though not based upon the binary


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commitments that Faulkner and Ellison exhibit. The protagonist of Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus (1975), was nominally an American Indian, known as Flapping Eagle, and the novel was vaguely situated in the nineteenth-century American Southwest. But Grimus’s abstruse borrowings from multiple national and cultural traditions, its manifold geographic confusions, and its confusing chronological experiments denude the character of any discernible significance, beyond representing valiant hybridity as a cause of threatened extinction and migration as a solution to that threat when one is confronted by a purist state culture. In Ground, the Indian’s presence is clearer, if still insubstantial. We recall, for example, that Vina freely draws on native Indian culture in her performances as a global American rock star, with little worry about questions of authenticity. Elsewhere, Rushdie devises an East/West connection that echoes the revisionist history of Elvis overriding black claims to the invention of rock music only to have Bombay Indians override his and theirs. When Rai’s parents try to decipher Vina’s American origin, the name of her town—Chickaboom—confuses them and then inspires a playfully heterodox retelling of the Indian presence in America: “You know . . . those Red Indian names sound darn South Indian to me . . . Chittoor, Chitaldroog, Chickaboom. Maybe some of our Dravidian co-nationals sailed off to America yonks ago in a beautiful pea-green boat. Indians get everywhere, isn’t it? Like sand.” (Ground 82)

Though obviously a joke, this statement registers a foundational tenet of Rushdie’s work: the inescapable, globe-spanning hybridity of all culture, a tenet subtly confirmed by the mixture of American slang and stilted colonial Indian English (“darn” versus “isn’t it?”). Faulkner and Ellison were similarly intent upon the inescapable fact of hybridity, though this reality was secondary to their primary goal: to devise through their fiction imaginative solutions to specific wrongs committed at the very origins of the New World American experiment. Rushdie, by comparison, is predominantly interested in emphasizing the impossibility of any singular point of origin—even the presumptively first peoples of New World America came from somewhere else—and in describing the natural and continual movement of peoples and cultures across national borders. In matching this career-long theme to America during the age of globalization, however, Rushdie inadvertently discloses the negative implications surrounding the contemporary cosmopolitan’s cultural agenda. For Salman Rushdie, the great jumble of pluralist America, resulting from perpetual immigration and related, contrived affiliations to the

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national past, opens up the possibility of constantly new national subjects and revisions of the American story. Unlike Faulkner and Ellison, however, this dimension of an immigrant-dominated nation does not trouble him. Rather, he regards it as a liberating force for peoples emerging from suffocating, local contexts outside America. Against estimations of the immigrant’s entry as a destabilization of internal composition and cultural-historical experience, Rushdie represents American identity as profitably permeable thanks to ever more immigrant arrivals. His view is not exclusively rosy, of course; in Ground, he updates archetypal tropes of the Promised Land to match the uneven terrain of modern economic-cultural globalization. The novel thus suggests how empire–colony interconnections within an American-dominated global media network convert Third World cultural and labor capital into sources of First World performance and consumption. Yet beyond this critique, and the obvious comic effects of Ground, Rushdie has also made it clear, in his own words, that this is “my first American novel,” a novel “about how the rest of the world [has] responded to America and how America has responded to the rest of the world” (Conversations 223–24). Rushdie’s mapping out of this dynamic in Ground seeks to establish the inadequacies of grounded forms of national identity in a globalized world dominated by a nation of immigrants. As twenty-first-century literary scholars willing to reassess Faulkner and Ellison in light of the retrograde, blood-and-soil nationalisms that emerge in their writing, Rushdie’s confident insouciance should also give us pause, despite the tempting and provocative de-centering of the U.S. literary tradition that would accompany his inclusion, which Rushdie clearly seeks, as is evident by his latest major novel and the related interviews he has given. The most obvious attempt at such an ambition in a novel replete with allusions to America’s cultural, historical, and literary traditions may occur when Rushdie’s narrator announces “Call me Ishmael”; or when Vina explains to Ormus his suitability as an American based upon a qualification that rests upon America’s imagined, complex past: “Of course there are Americans you’ll never be . . . [including] slave owners’ sons from Yoknapatawpha” (Ground 438, 331). Through one new American’s assurance to another, Rushdie simultaneously commits a gesture of postmodern self-reflexivity that defines his American novel in part as a departure from the work of a canonically American predecessor and also hints at precisely why Ormus will succeed in his imagined version of the United States. Unlike Faulkner’s or Ellison’s Americans, Rushdie’s are free from the trauma of the nation’s racialized past. Exempted by exterior origins and racial categories from the vise-like grip of America’s binary logics, foreign writers and their immigrant characters


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can approach America with a freedom that Faulkner and Quentin, Ellison and Invisible Man, can never enjoy. But while we can critique indigenous Americans for their bitter resistances to new national counterparts, we can also appreciate the historical and racial complexities of American life that provoke these responses—exacerbated in the twentieth century by rapid, unexpected incursions of the global upon the local through media and migration contacts. Moreover, the outsider’s privileged position cannot be permanent. Unavoidably, at some point the pre-existing problems of American life will descend upon the immigrant, just as they will confront any new American writer who commits to the tradition. Rushdie has thus far deflected this challenge, focusing instead on the innocent expectations and difficult pasts from elsewhere, reshaped by the coercive cultural and economic structures that lead Third World immigrants to the United States.4 In the end, however, the liberating logic of The Ground Beneath Her Feet absolves Rushdie from deeper responsibilities to the American scene that has so overwhelmed his imagination of late. His American fiction seeks to convince us that it emphatically does not matter that the United States imagined in Ground is so culturally, historically, and racially skewed from the versions of the nation we find in the experiences of Quentin Compson, Joe Christmas, and Invisible Man. In the mindset of a late twentieth- century Third World–immigrant narrator, such confusions are proof of his American status, not U.S. history’s burdens. He is not too worried about whether he will fulfill pre-existing images of an American because he has witnessed enough from afar to know how elastic and inventive that identity can be. He gets things wrong about his new country, but so does every other (immigrant) American, equally unconcerned with making sense of the nation’s legacies and just looking to get away from a past and get ahead in the present. This is precisely what brings them to America and makes them new Americans. They are at once confident and contrived, unlike those uncertain, authenticity-haunted southern sons.

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Frederic Jameson’s “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue” offers a convincing synthesis of economic and cultural forms of globalization that emphasizes their mutual dependence. His thesis is applied to Rushdie’s work in Chapter Two. 2. See, for a representative presentation of the diverse views on this topic, anthologies including The Cultures of Globalization (1998), edited by Jameson and Masao Miyoshi; and Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century (2000), edited by Patrick O’Meara et al. See also the so-called “Millennial Quartet” of volumes from the journal Public Culture, as discussed by Gaurav Desai in “Capitalism, Sovereignty, and the Dilemmas of Postcoloniality” (boundary 2 33.2, 2006). 3. In a 2006 boundary 2 article that examined recent globalization theory, cited above, Gaurav Desai concedes “I am keenly aware that, at the current moment, the half-life of any social commentary on globalization is bound to be very short” (179). That said, Desai cites Appadurai’s Modernity at Large as a book of especial and continuing influence (180). Appadurai’s own work on the subject has since developed (see Globalization, a wide-ranging collection of globalization studies that he edited in 2001). The theoretical formulations of his 1996 study, however, are particularly suited to this book’s argument about how imagined national identities and communities come under pressure during modernity, from unprecedented forms of media contact and new, intensified migration patterns. 4. Bhabha’s work is discussed in a subsequent section of this chapter. 5. See Paul Jay’s “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English”; John Muthyala’s “Reworlding America: The Globalization of American Studies”; and the PMLA special topic issue America: The Idea, the Literature (Djelal Kadir, coordinator, 2003) for a representative selection of recent scholarship in this area.

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6. There is, of course, a longstanding scholarly interest in immigrants and American literature. Thomas J. Ferraro’s Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth Century American Fiction (1993) and David M. Fine’s The City, the Immigrant and American Fiction 1880–1920 (1977) are representative works of the traditional approach to this subject, insofar as their arguments operate in tacit agreement with the traditional melting pot metaphor for immigrant assimilation. This study acknowledges this still-present trajectory, but seeks to complicate it by attending to immigrant representations by native-born modern writers who resist the melting pot as a means by which to incorporate new immigrants into the national population. The study also analyzes writing from a foreign, postmodern writer who questions the melting pot’s efficacy as a means of joining the national community. Rushdie’s American fiction commits rather explicitly to this traditional model of assimilation while simultaneously critiquing the monolithic nationalism that it is presumed to support. 7. Particularly through its readings of Rushdie’s work, this book seeks to contribute to critical interest in new, non-traditional forms of the immigrant’s presence in America, following, for example, Gilbert Muller’s New Strangers in Paradise (1999). Muller considers literature that treats of recent nonEuropean immigrants to America whose presence destabilizes the univocal, grand national narrative of Euro-centric assimilation into American identity that traditional immigrant writing has offered. 8. See Maldwyn Allen Jones’s history of American immigration, discussed in detail in Chapter Four, for a definition of the New Immigration. 9. Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus (1975), was ostensibly set in southwest Arizona but had very little to do with American experiences. It was instead an abstruse science fiction that drew on T.S. Eliot, Dante, and Islamic mythology, amongst many other elements. See also Chapter Five. 10. Rosemary George provides an apt characterization of how local boundaries function and why perceived points in common are of importance to such imagined communities: One distinguishing feature of places called home is that they are built on select inclusions. . . . grounded in a learned (or taught) sense of a kinship that is extended to those who are perceived as sharing the same blood, race, class, gender, or religion. . . . [Home is a] place that is flexible, that manifests itself in various forms and yet whose every reinvention seems to follow the basic pattern of inclusions/exclusions. (9) 11. See Maureen Ryan’s “Outsiders with Inside Information: The Vietnamese in the Fiction of the Contemporary South,” where she observes: “Whether liberated or destroyed by their relocation to America, [Vietnamese immigrant characters] are new Americans with a fresh, often critical perspective on their adoptive country” (244).

Notes to Chapter Two

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12. As Romine notes, Hugh Holman’s Three Modes of Southern Fiction (1966) identified different sub-regions within a presumptively monolithic South (35). Donald Hays and Leon Stokesbury’s A Southern Omnibus (1989) offers rather conservative definitions of southern-ness, related specifically to birth and longstanding presence in a region geographically limited to “the eleven states of the Old Confederacy plus Kentucky and West Virginia” (xiii). Susie Mee’s Downhome: An Anthology of Southern Women Writers (1995) attempts to diversify the South from a primarily gender-based context but again endorses traditional geographic boundaries for the location of the region. 13. See Handley’s Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (2000) and Smith and Cohn’s Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004). The 2003 Fall and 2004 Winter issues of Mississippi Quarterly, edited by Smith, Kathryn McKee, and Scott Romine, are also devoted to analyzing U.S. literature and culture in postcolonial and New World contexts.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. A.D. Needham, Using the Master’s Tools (2000); Jaina Sanga, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors (2001); Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (1992); Gillian Gane, “Migrancy, the Cosmopolitan Intellectual, and the Global City in The Satanic Verses” (2002). 2. Homi Bhabha has also commented upon the relationship of the postcolonial to the postmodern, particularly in regard to the consequence of a colonial signifier’s reconfiguration in a postcolonial setting. He argues that this “opens up disjunctive, incommensurable relations of spacing and temporality within the sign,” an interrogation possible only within the fragmentary matrix of postmodernism (182). This premise corresponds to Brennan’s observation on Rushdie’s removed interrogation of Third World experience, as discussed in this chapter. 3. See Ahmad’s chapter from In Theory on Shame for a harsh analysis of Rushdie’s resemblance to this narrator and for an explicit citation from an author interview confirming this (132 ff). 4. Clark faults the novel because in it Rushdie involves mythic elements yet “does not complete [their] meaning: he does not make [them] integral to the experiences of his own characters” (200). Clark contends that the novel lacks “complex other worlds,” an estimation that ignores the complications of how the United States figures as a part of local, Third World experience throughout Ground (202). 5. The novel is structured, in part, as a reworking of the Orpheus myth. 6. Maria V. Johnson’s article on Alice Walker’s “Nineteen Fifty-Five” in part examines Elvis’s debts, largely unacknowledged, to black musical predecessors and the cultural experiences they drew on in their music.

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7. Jaina Sanga’s explanation of this dimension of the novel uncritically accepts Rai’s (and Rushdie’s own) proposal that “a version of Westernness, especially the music, has always existed in Bombay” due to the city’s inherent mixture (GB 134). U.S.–Third World relations, however, are a more substantial and complex explanation for Ormus’s invention than a superficially cosmopolitan celebration of inter-cultural combinations. 8. See The Satanic Verses, Chapter III, “Ellowen Deeowen” in particular. 9. See, for example, Rushdie’s harsh commentary on aggressive U.S. border treatment of would-be immigrants in his 2002 Tanner Lectures, “Step Across This Line.” 10. The novel’s position on this point is qualified by only minor, humorous critiques of anti-immigrant sentiment, such as when a Hispanic man is beaten up by angry California natives who blame him for bad weather based upon a connection devised by their mangled understanding of his Spanish name (Elvis Niño) and the weather disturbance El Niño (GB 439). Ormus’s American experience also involves an anti-immigrant ripple. After VTO releases music particularly critical of the Vietnam War, the INS threatens Ormus with deportation, though eventually he is granted resident status thanks to agitation from the music community and Vina’s immigrant-based defense of his right to be in America: “He should have [the] right [to stay in America] . . . by reason of the gift he brings. He improved this town just by showing up” (GB 396). 11. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, while Rushdie views this immigrantbased version of American English as causing its evolution, Faulkner and Ellison represent immigrant attempts at the native language as causing its devolution. 12. Rushdie does involve Melville elsewhere in Ground, when contextualizing the relationship between this novel and its American predecessors, as discussed in Chapter Five. 13. This has been a theme of Rushdie’s since his first novel, Grimus (1975), where the protagonist, Flapping Eagle, is exiled from his home for being impure and undergoes a fabulist migration in search of a community and place where he might belong. It also works its way into Midnight’s Children (1980) and Shame (1983), particularly in comparing purist, nationalist Pakistan with the mixture and metropolitan elements of a Bombay-based representation of India. It is also central, of course, to The Satanic Verses (1988). Rushdie’s essay on Terry Gilliam, discussed earlier, offers the clearest and most concise evidence of his admiring interest in the malleable post-national subject’s effect upon, and agency outside of, the strictures of nation. 14. Vina’s role model status in the novel has been extended, in a manner of speaking, into the world of academic scholarship. Vasuki Nesiah invokes Vina in a recent theoretical article about feminism in the Third World,

Notes to Chapter Three

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

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contending that she finds the character’s “narrative stunningly evocative of both the challenges and passions of Third World feminisms” (30). Both Brennan and Gane have critiqued Rushdie for limitations in his approach to race in a U.K. context. Vina’s mother murders the entire family save Vina, for unclear reasons; Vina subsequently interprets being spared as a chance to break free from a suffocating local context in hopes of gaining worldwide fame and wealth. See Gane’s article, earlier cited, for a balanced analysis of the immigrant protest scenes in Verses; Gane is particularly attentive to problems of race and class that Rushdie erases in arranging the scene as essentially a struggle between native white and non-white immigrant groups within London. In his reading of this portion of Verses, Bhabha falls prey to a similar erasure of social distinctions for pan-ethnic victim solidarity (see 224 in particular). We will see a variation on this type of exemption in the courtroom scene of The Sound and the Fury. See earlier note regarding Elvis Niño’s experiences in California for further evidence of anti-immigrant sentiments arising in Ground in a humorous key. This description generally characterizes the conclusions to Grimus, Midnight’s Children, Shame, and Verses. See especially 441ff. for evidence of Rai’s firsthand knowledge of American global economic and cultural domination. In his 1999 Boston Phoenix interview with Peter Kadzis, Rushdie drew a series of explicit parallels between himself and the characters, substance, and concerns of the novel. For example, he compared himself to Rai in terms of outlook and interests and inadvertently revealed a parallel between how he gained access to American music in 1950s Bombay and how Ormus does in the novel. Most significantly, in light of dating the novel to the day he went into seclusion because of the fatwa, Rushdie admitted that he used Vina’s experience of damaging celebrity and sudden disappearance as a filter for his own difficulties (Conversations 216–27). See also Chauhan 255–296 for further evidence of the novel’s autobiographical investments.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Between 1880 and 1930, the black population of New York City increased from approximately 60,000 to over 300,000, almost exclusively because of migration from the American South (Reimers 44–45). Maldwyn Allen Jones’s history of American immigration describes the “New Immigration” that transpired from the late nineteenth through

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Notes to Chapter Three

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

the early twentieth century that brought unprecedented numbers of nontraditional newcomers to America, predominantly from Eastern Europe. Chapter Four discusses in detail the effect of the New Immigration on Faulkner’s conceptions of American identity and his representations of a U.S. South resistant to immigrant incursions. As Arnold Rampersad documents it, many of Ellison’s white, European friends and colleagues were Jewish from 1950 onward (256). Again, see Chapter Four for historical evidence attesting to anti-immigrant stereotypes in the South and in America at large, regarding new immigrants. Washington offered a modified version of his “Cast down your buckets where you are” metaphor in a speech to New York blacks in 1914: “Let us spend our pennies with ourselves” (Scheiner 71). This exhortation was directly inspired by black leaders seeing immigrant Jews, Germans, and Irish patronizing businesses within their own ethnic enclaves. Meanwhile, blacks were choosing immigrant-owned outfits over black counterparts. While Ellison chided “the white American’s Manichean fascination with the symbolism of blackness and whiteness” in his famous rejoinder to Irving Howe, he displays a similar fixation throughout his own writing, which is not obviated by statements about the evil connotations of such connections (CE 102). His own binary commitments feed his anti-immigrant positions when he contends that the nation requires little beyond its pre-existing, indigenous materials for crises or solutions. That these earlier pioneers were themselves primarily immigrants is a complicating point, of course, but their assimilation into the country, already complete, proves less of a challenge to southern blacks than did the assimilation of contemporary immigrants. See again Rushdie’s 2002 Tanner lectures, “Step Across This Line,” this time for a metaphoric explosion of the American frontier motif into a series of personal and political advancements. Ellison dedicated his unfinished follow-up to Invisible Man “To That Vanished Tribe into Which I Was Born: The American Negroes” ( JT, x). Ellison’s word choice is unusual in its aboriginal connotations; “Vanished Tribe” suggests the erasure of a constituent element of the nation. In Ellison’s view, the tribe of the American Negro, like native Indian tribes before it, has vanished from the American scene. See Chapter Five for a discussion of the erasure of the Native American’s presence evident in this substitution of “Negro” for “Indian,” and for a wider consideration of the native Indian’s status in Ellison and Faulkner’s binary black-andwhite America. The structure of Invisible Man has long invited allegorical readings. Marcus Klein observes that “between the Prologue and the Epilogue, the novel moves in a series of circles—concentric planes of meaning, each

Notes to Chapter Four

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

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traveling right back to its beginning, each mode of adventure confirming the circularity of the hero’s voyaging” (78). See Flora Griffin’s chapter on Ellison in “Who set you flowin?” The AfricanAmerican Migration Narrative for a strong reading of the type of community Mary Rambo affords Invisible Man. Jesse Wolfe notes that “[h]owever in keeping Ellison was with the anticommunist drift of American New Liberalism, not all readers were equally pleased by the large portion of [the novel] dedicated to exposing the predations of the Brotherhood” (630). Wolfe imprecisely presumes that the CP’s fictional counterparts were simply white, passing over questions of ethnic identity and national distinctions. See Rampersad for a further discussion of Ellison’s private frustrations with how the CP-USA’s interests in civil rights were limited by its efforts to agitate for the defeat of worldwide fascism by 1941, when it began to advocate U.S. involvement in WWII (143–45). In New York in July 1863, Irish immigrant animosity towards native blacks was intensified by a combination of the Conscription Act (1862), the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), and the enlistment of blacks to break an Irish longshoremen’s strike. These factors fed pre-existent Irish racial animosity towards blacks and fueled a vicious three-day riot (cf. Jones 145–51). See Naison, earlier quoted. Julia Eichelberger describes Brother Jack as a “[rhetorical] type: the white activist who really wants to exploit blacks rather than help them” (41). More precisely, Jack is an immigrant who assumes conventional American whiteness and assumes others will take him the same way. This strategy holds until Invisible Man’s native challenge. Lawrence Jackson’s analysis of the early versions of Invisible Man reveals Ellison’s interest in a novel with a more international scope, in which the protagonist searches for “the best method of fighting [global] colonialism” (427). Roi Ottley and William Weatherby explain that tension between black immigrants from the Caribbean and native-born Harlemites manifested itself in the encounter of dissonant dialects of English (193).

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. Homogenous mixture is only ostensibly a paradox; for Faulkner, like Ellison, combinations of black, white, and Native American language, culture, and racial identity are homogenous because they are rooted in the South’s past, in express contrast with the alien mixtures of newly arrived immigrants. 2. “New immigrants” is the technical term used in immigration histories of the United States to refer to individuals arriving from southern and eastern Europe—Italians and Slavs mostly—who constituted the majority of immigrants to America from 1880 onward (see Jones 152ff.). The term

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

distinguishes Italians and Slavs from the more traditional immigrants to America, the Nordic peoples swelled the immigrant ranks from the late eighteenth century through the late nineteenth (see Jones 54 ff.). In his notes to Faulkner’s unpublished story “Once Aboard a Lugger (I) and (II),” Joseph Blotner mentions that Faulkner claimed to have been a bootlegger, having worked with an Italian family while in New Orleans (US 699). The intertwining of the New Orleans underworld and Italian immigrants is clear in stories such as “The Kid Learns” and “Country Mice” from the Sketches, and in two other pre-1930 stories: “Peter” and “The Big Shot” (US ). Joseph Evan Kraus’s dissertation “The Immigrant and the Underworld” (2000) offers a chapter on the ambiguous ethnicity of Faulkner’s most famous shady character, Popeye from Sanctuary (1931). Kraus’s primary interest, however, is with the way the character “raises questions of social difference within the novel and serves as a transitional figure in Faulkner’s later focus on racial difference,” rather than with placing the novel in the context of Faulkner’s overall attitudes towards immigrants and national identity (iv). This roster of anti-Italian epithets summons the era’s general presumption that new immigrant groups were the “murder-breeds of Southern Europe” ( Jones 221). Though blacks were the predominant victims of lynching, Italians also fell under the South’s penchant for extra-juridical persecution. Eleven Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans in 1891, an event that Matthew Jacobson argues Twain reworks into Pudd’nhead Wilson (61–62). For a full history of the lynching, see James Gill’s The Lords of Misrule (145–54). Similar violence continued into the 1930s under the auspices of the American Protective League and the Ku Klux Klan (Leonard 108). Ellison’s commitment to redressing the invisibility of black Americans had to engage conceptions of American identity established by figures like Frank, in addition to engaging new immigrants who, he worried, were gaining national recognition ahead of native-born blacks. In his speech against “the coastal spew of Europe” in Intruder in the Dust (1948), Gavin Stevens also mentions the retreat of native New Englanders inland in response to new immigrants arriving on the coast (ID 400). The holiday in question lends irony to Quentin’s displeasure; Columbus Day marks the European discovery of America. Thomas Muller explains that U.S. “southern sentiment against immigrants reflected, in part, oppositions to institutions associated with the urban North,” which Faulkner plays into with his 1933 (unpublished) introduction to The Sound and the Fury (26). Quentin’s repeated references to the girl’s complexion emphasize her blackness. The Italian’s potential to resemble the black further destabilizes


11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

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Quentin’s relation to her, by indicating a racial identity that he cannot properly read or contain according to his southern-based, binary categories, which is a problem first implied by his initial sighting of Deacon. Faulkner will explore this black/Italian connection to greater effect in Light in August. Foreign blacks also appear in Faulkner’s fiction; Thomas Sutpen’s slaves, of mysterious Haitian origins, speak a foreign tongue and inspire fear and xenophobia among blacks and whites in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Julio’s volatile personality is reminiscent of the Italian henchman who follows his boss onto Pete’s ship in “Once Aboard a Lugger,” written prior to 1928 (US 699). Faulkner provides an ugly portrait of that character: “The wop was slobbering a little, his whole face sort of jerking and twitching. . . . [H]e shrieked, then began to cry. He babbled something in Italian, tears running down his face. His face was dirty” (US 364). Unlike with Julio, Faulkner does not intensify the character’s ugliness by having him speak immigrant English. The final time Faulkner uses Italian-English is in Pylon (1935); in a brief scene, Jiggs pays the very-drunk reporter’s tab at an Italian restaurant, sarcastically calling the irate waiter “‘Columbus’” (Pylon 874). The scene has continuities with earlier Italian immigrant moments in the fiction: first, it is a New Orleans restaurant (though the characterization is far from sympathetic); second, the Italian immigrant is only mollified by money, a premise Faulkner first used in the trial scene of The Sound and the Fury. The southern inflection of the southern-named justice, Anse, seems significant. It seems plausible that here Faulkner is juxtaposing two forms of American identity—Anse’s is developed internally compared with Julio’s, which is developed externally. The description also anticipates Gavin Stevens’s dismay over the “rootless ephemeral cities” into which the newly arrived “coastal spew of Europe” was entering (ID 400). In Faulkner’s much-anthologized “A Rose for Emily,” published between Sound and the composition of this introduction, he implicitly links immigrant labor and northern capital, the two forces assaying his South, in the figure of Homer Baron, the big “dark” northerner who heads a construction project in Miss Grierson’s town (CS 124). See, for example, Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, where he argues for the formation of an American race from the mid-nineteenth century onward, based upon an idea of the American as derived from pure Nordic, AngloSaxon lineage (74–79). The likeliest source for the novel’s lynching scene, it should be noted, is the 1906 lynching of a black man named Nelse Patton, for crimes similar to Joe’s (Gray 36). See Williamson (405) and Davis (132) for clear explanations of Joe’s defying black-and-white binaries, and the town’s need to contain him in either.

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Notes to Chapter Five

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. Jones explains that Russian immigration to the United States grew exponentially from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Generally understood as part of the New Immigration, Russian immigrants during this period were predominantly Jewish, and fleeing muscular anti-Semitism in the Slavic lands of the East (173). 2. See Faulkner’s Appendix to The Sound and the Fury, where he describes an Ur-immigrant to America, Quentin Maclachan, who “[f ]led to Carolina from Culloden Moor” shortly after 1746 (SF 204). 3. Walter Benn Michaels and Richard Slotkin provide two convincing readings of the Indian’s limited presence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. In Our America, Michaels argues that the image of the vanishing Indian acts as a stand-in of sorts for the vanishing Nordic white American during the period of the New Immigration. He connects this premise to Quentin Compson’s incestuous desires, as these are provoked by his suddenly living in a “land of the kike home of the wop” (SF 79). Richard Slotkin places the Indian’s presence in American literature in a wider historical frame. In Regeneration Through Violence, he argues that Indians were acceptable as romantic and heroic figures in American literature by Cooper and others, while, in real demographic terms, their numbers were decimated. 4. Rushdie’s latest novel, Shalimar the Clown (2005), is partially set in contemporary California and, like Ground, it features upscale Third World immigrants making their way through the wealth and chaos of American life. The novel’s main concerns, however, lie elsewhere, and its immigrant/American textures represent no significant advancement on Ground’s.

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Index

A Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 107, 127n11 Ahmad, Aijaz, 25, 121n3 American Dream, 25, 30–32, 47, 48–49 American Indians, see Indians American literary studies, 10, 11–12 American-ness; see also “Blood-and-soil” national status; Citizenship defined by place or by people, 2–4, 12 in era of globalization, 10 in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 16– 17, 32–37 past-based conception of, 6–9, 13, 68, 92 as process of self-discovery, 28 superficiality as component of, 9 and Third World, 27 American Scene (James), 85 Amnesia, see Historical amnesia Anderson, Benedict, 18, 19, 96–97, 103 Anderson, Sherwood, 82 Appadurai, Arjun “deep categorical treachery,” 74–75 globalization and the local, 5–6, 10 migration and the local, 7–8, 72, 106 primordialist concept of identity, 53, 71 Third World and globalization, 10, 27 Argio, Thomas, 81, 92–93, 93 Assimilation difficulties of, in Faulkner, 84, 86, 89 easy and continual, in Rushdie, 30, 34 easy for whites, in Ellison, 52

melting pot model of, 59, 120nn6–7, 124n6

B Baker, Houston, 66 Barlow, Andrew, 11 Bellow, Saul, 51 Bennett, Stephen, 70 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 28 Berger, Peter, 5 Beyond Ethnicity (Sollors), 19 Bhabha, Homi, 8, 13–14, 15–17, 121n2, 123n17 “The Big Shot” (Faulkner), 126n3 Black nationalism, 52, 75–77 Blackness absence from U.S. rainbow of, 69 as foundation of whiteness, 11, 63 Ellison and, 113, 124n5 of Italians, 126–127n10 Blanchard, N.C., 101 “blood-and-soil” national status; see also American-ness in Faulkner and Ellison, 8, 49 in Invisible Man, 57, 72, 76 in Juneteenth, 113 and primordialist concept of identity, 53, 71 vs. nation of immigrants, 2 Blotner, Joseph, 126n3 Bone, Robert, 59 Brennan, Timothy, 25, 48, 123n15 Burnett, John L., 101

137

138 Butler, Robert Olen, 14–15, 20, 80

C Cao, Lan, 20, 80 Caribbean immigration, 3, 20, 75–76; see also Immigration “Categorical treachery,” 74–75, 92 Citizenship; see also “Blood-and-soil” national status Caribbean immigrants and, 75–76 paper-defined, 31, 96–97, 102 as performance, 34 in Pudd’nhead Wilson, 87–88 unequal for blacks and whites, 53 Clark, Roger, 29 “The Clash of Civilizations” (Huntington), 6 Clymer, Jeffory A., 105 Cohn, Debra, 21 Communism in 1930s Harlem, 74 Ellison and, 68–69, 70 in Invisible Man, 75 Confidence Man, The (Melville), 35 Cooper, James Fenimore, 128n3 “Country Mice” (Faulkner), 126n3 Crannell, Karl, 109

D Daniel, Reginald, 55 Davis, Thadious, 92 Desai, Gaurav, 119n3 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 110 Draft riots of 1863, 71 DuBois, W.E.B., 54–55, 64, 76

E Eastern European immigration; see also Immigration; New Immigration historical details of, 109, 128n1 in Invisible Man, 70–71, 75 and trade union movement, 65, 75 Eichelberger, Julia, 125n14 Ellison, Ralph; see also individual titles binary conception of America, 55–58, 113–114

Index and Christianity as unifying force, 112–113 concept of “time-lag” and, 15–16 European influence upon, 51 Indians in works of, 114 involvement with Communism, 68–69, 70, 75 views on race and identity, 51–53, 111, 126n6 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 2 Engeman, Thomas S., 112 English, see Language Ethnicity; see also Race defined, 4 as fluid concept, 19–20 pan-ethnic Everywoman, in Ground, 39–43, 45

F Falconer, Rachel, 31 Faulkner, William; see also individual titles Indians in works of, 114 and industrialization of the South, 9, 15 Italian-English in, 84–85, 94, 96 Italian immigrants in, 80–85, 91–93, 101–102, 103 language as signifier of national difference, 80, 84–85, 104, 127n13 nativism, 104 in New Orleans, 82, 105, 111 representation of immigrants by, 12–13, 15, 79–82, 106 “unhomely” in works of, 15 Fine, David, 85 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 39 Foerster, Robert F., 91, 103 Foreign Affairs, 6 Fragmentation dissonance and, 58 postmodernism and, 121n2 of self, 28, 36, 38, 46 of society, 54, 79, 98 Frank, Waldo, 89–90, 104 Frontier motif, 61–62, 114

G Gane, Gillian, 25, 123n15, 123n17

Index Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 55 George, Rosemary, 18 Giles, Paul, 34 Gilliam, Terry, 24, 122n13 Glissant, Edouard, 80, 111 Globalization defined, 5–6, 7 in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 44–46 the local and, 5–8, 10–11 media and, 7, 10, 28–29, 37, 116 notion of “southern” and, 21 synthesis of economic and cultural, 4–5, 25, 45, 116, 119n1 theory, 4–5, 11, 45, 119n3 Godden, Richard, 95, 96 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner), 114 Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, A (Butler), 14 Grant, Madison, 89–90, 104 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 38, 39 Great Migration Ellison’s response to, 16 historical details of, 123n1 leading to racial conflict, 54 and the “New Negro,” 60–61 as “typical American experience,” 61–62 Griffin, Flora, 125n10 Grimus (Rushdie), 115, 120n9, 122n13, 123n20 Ground Beneath Her Feet, The (Rushdie), 23–49 anti-immigrant sentiment, 43, 122n10 autobiographical elements, 48–49 constructed identity, 32–34, 35–37 cultural imperialism of U.S., 28–30, 116 extraterritorialism of U.S., 39–43 immigration to U.S./U.K. contrasted, 30–32 neocolonization, 25 paper-defined citizenship, 31 pilgrim motif, 34–35, 61 southern-ness, 21–22 superficial rendering of U.S. history, 9, 16–17, 40–41, 48 as traditional immigrant narrative, 9–10 Vina’s constructed identity, 37–41

139 H Habermas, Jürgen, 9 Hamlet, The (Faulkner), 108–109 Handley, George, 21 Harris, Trudier, 104 Hays, Donald, 120–121n12 Heterogeneity, see Pluralism Higham, John, 89 Historical amnesia Ellison’s concerns about, 52, 113 Ellison’s positive use of, 62 response of Ellison and Faulkner to, 16 in Rushdie, 27 Holman, Hugh, 120n12 Howe, Irving, 124n5 Huntington, Samuel, 6 Hybridity; see also Pluralism excluding blacks, 69 external vs. internal, 12, 18, 33 linguistic, 84–85 scholarly interest in, 13 Vina in Ground as externally hybrid, 42

I Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), 110 “Imaginary Homelands” (Rushdie), 25–26 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 18 Imagined community, 6–8, 18–20 Immigration; see also Caribbean immigration; Eastern European immigration; Italian immigration; Jewish immigration; New Immigration; Vietnamese immigration Booker T. Washington on, 56–57 as constitutive element of globalization, 10–11 as disrupter of homogeneity, 13–14 Ellison’s views compared with Faulkner’s, 111 Ellison’s views of, 113–114 Faulkner’s views on, 108–112 nativism and, 89–91 Rushdie’s views of, 16–17, 30–32, 111, 115–116 the South and, 99–100, 100–101, 103 in U.S. literary studies, 120n6 Indians

140 absence as active factors in works of Faulkner and Ellison, 114 in American literature, 128n3 appropriation of Native culture in Ground, 39, 115 representing the past in Invisible Man, 69 in Rushdie, 114–115 Intellectual cosmopolitanism in Ellison and Rushdie, 51 negative aspects of, 25 reflected in literature, 7 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner), 126n7, 127n14 Invisible Man (Ellison), 58–78 black nationalism, 75–77 and failure of global anti-colonial solidarity, 75–76 Indians in, 114 influence of Booker T. Washington, 55–58 invisible immigrant made visible, 54, 73–75 linguistic dissonance, 58–59, 70, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78 paint-factory-as-national-allegory, 62–66, 69 pull of the regional/historical, 66–68, 71–73, 77 “tight spot” motif, 66, 70 union poster and black erasure, 69–70, 72 Israel, Nico, 39 Italian immigration, 3, 91; see also Immigration; New Immigration Faulkner and, 80–81, 82–83, 91–93 Henry James and, 85 and lynching, 126n5 Mark Twain and, 86–88 as sexual threat, 105 the South and, 100–102, 104–105 stereotypes related to, 87 J Jackson, Lawrence, 68, 69, 125n15 Jacobson, Matthew, 100–101, 126n5 Jaguar Smile, The (Rushdie), 26 James, Henry, 85 Jameson, Frederic, 35, 45, 119n1

Index Jay, Paul, 10–11 Jefferson, Thomas, 2 Jewish immigration, 85, 89, 124n4, 128n1; see also Immigration; New Immigration Johnson, Charles S., 60–61 Johnson, James Weldon, 62 Johnson, Maria V., 121n6 Johnson–Reed Act, 101 Jones, Maldwyn Allen, 75, 85, 99–100, 109, 123n1, 128n1 Jones, Suzanne W., 14, 20, 79 Judt, Tony, 4 Juneteenth (Ellison), 1, 112–114

K Kapur, Geeta, 39 Kawash, Samira, 4 Kellog, Paul U., 61–62 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruholla, 48 “The Kid Learns” (Faulkner), 126n3 Klein, Marcus, 124n9 Kostelanetz, Richard, 65 Kraus, Joseph Evan, 126n3

L Ladd, Barbara, 6, 20, 86, 97–98, 102 La Gumina, Salvatore J., 86, 87 Language as basis of black claim to American-ness, 62, 78 Ellison on American-ness and, 57–58 linguistic range in Faulkner’s work, 80, 84–85, 94, 104 nativism and, 89 Rushdie on American English, 58 as signifier of American identity, 8–9, 17–18, 33, 78, 96–97 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 1–2 Leonard, Henry Beardsell, 101 Light in August (Faulkner), 98–106 Christmas as economic threat, 103 Christmas as sexual threat, 105–106 Christmas as synecdoche for Faulkner’s world, 80 economic transformation of the South, 98–100

Index nativism, 104 racial indeterminacy of Joe Brown, 102 racial indeterminacy of Joe Christmas, 100, 101–102, 102–103, 106 Local Faulkner’s “postage stamp of native soil,” 1, 103, 112 globalization and the, 5–8, 10–11, 13–17 imagination of the, 18–19 role of literature in defining, 8 as source of inspiration, 1–2 Locke, Alain, 54, 60 Loury, Glenn, 54 Lynching in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 40 historical details of, 126n5, 127n17 in Light in August, 18–19, 104–106 in Pudd’nhead Wilson, 88, 106

141 Nativism beginnings of, 88–91 Faulkner and, 104 reflected in literature, 7 Needham, A.D., 24 Nesiah, Vasuki, 122n14 New American Studies movement, 11 New Englanders as American ideal, 89–90 New Immigration; see also Eastern European immigration; Immigration; Italian immigration; Jewish immigration defined, 125n2 Ellison’s response to, 16 historical details of, 123n1, 128n1 negative response to, 85–86 New Negro, The (Locke), 54, 60–61, 99 New Orleans Sketches (Faulkner), 83–85, 126n3 Nichols, William, 70

M Mansion, The (Faulkner), 109–110 Matthews, John T., 80, 93–94 Mayflower (pilgrim vessel), 32, 34, 35, 61, 113 McKee, Patricia, 99 McPherson, Jon, 62 McSweeney, Kerry, 63 Mee, Susie, 120–121n12 Melville, Herman, 35 Michaels, Walter Benn, 88–89, 128n3 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 48, 122n13, 123n20 Mignolo, Walter D., 8–9, 10 Modernity at Large (Appadurai), 7 Monkey Bridge (Cao), 20 Monteith, Sharon, 14, 20, 79 Moquin, Wayne, 100 Morel, Lucas, 70 Mosquitoes (Faulkner), 82–83, 91 Muller, Gilbert, 120n7 Muller, Thomas, 87, 126n9

N Naison, Mark, 74 National identity, see American-ness Native Americans, see Indians

O “Once Aboard a Lugger (I) and (II)” (Faulkner), 126n3, 127n12 Ottley, Roi, 125n16 Our America (Frank), 89 Our America (Michaels), 88–89

P Passing of the Great Race, The (Grant), 89–90 “Peter” (Faulkner), 126n3 Pirbhai, Mariam, 28–29, 45, 47 Pluralism; see also Hybridity metropolis as primary setting of, 16 in Rushdie, 10, 115–116 of U.S., 1–2 Poly-southern brotherhood, 76 Popular culture extraterritorial nature of, 29, 39–40 in Ground, 10, 25, 44 Postcolonialism and metropolis, 16 related to postmodernism, 121n2 in Rushdie, 24–26 and the “unhomely,” 15 and U.S. imperialism, 27–28 Postmodernism

142 related to postcolonialism, 121n2 in Rushdie, 25–26 Presley, Elvis, 16, 29, 41, 115 Pryse, Marjorie, 68 Pudd’nhead Wilson (Twain), 86–88, 106 Pylon (Faulkner), 127n12

R Race; see also Ethnicity binary black−white conception of, 11, 19, 55–56 as component of identity, 11, 19–20 deracinated celebrities, 40 Ellison’s resistance to solutions based on, 52 in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 40–43 Railey, Kevin, 95, 102 Rampersad, Arnold, 52, 124n2, 125n12 Reed, Ishmael, 52 Reimers, David M., 65 Richards, David, 85 Richardson, William, 101 Robinson, Owen, 105 Romine, Scott, 21 “A Rose for Emily” (Faulkner), 127n15 Runyan, Harry, 110 Rushdie, Salman; see also individual titles conception of American identity, 9–10, 12, 18, 117 hybridity of all culture, 115 immigrant imagination, 25–26 immigration as liberating force, 12, 115–116 inclusion in U.S. literary tradition, 116–117 notion of migrant sensibility, 24 U.S. melting pot, 120n6 Ryan, Maureeen, 120n11

Index Schmidt, Peter, 11–12 “Self-Reliance” (Emerson), 1 Shalimar the Clown (Rushdie), 128n4 Shame (Rushdie), 26, 27, 48, 122n13, 123n20 Shankman, Arnold, 57, 61 Singh, Amritjit, 11–12 Singleton, M.K., 56 Skei, Hans, 84 Slotkin, Richard, 128n3 Smith, Jon, 21 Snead, James, 102 Sollors, Werner, 19 Souls of Black Folk, The (DuBois), 54–55, 64 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 91–98 Appendix to, 97, 128n2 concept of hybridity, 13 Faulkner’s introduction to, 96, 98–99, 126n9 links with Invisible Man, 59, 94, 95, 96–97 paper-defined citizenship, 31, 96–97 Southern (poly-southern) literature, 20–22 Stella, Antonio, 87 Stephens, Gregory, 60, 64 Stephens, Michelle, 75–76 Stokesbury, Leon, 120–121n12

T Teverson, Andrew, 24 “Time-lag,” 8, 15–16 Town, The (Faulkner), 109 Transnationalism and American literature, 10–12 black, 76, 112 in Invisible Man, 76 and U.S. South, 14 Twain, Mark, 35–36, 86–88, 91, 100

S

U

Sanctuary (Faulkner), 126n3 Sanga, Jaina, 24, 37, 121n7 Sartoris (Faulkner), 110 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 30, 42, 48, 122n13, 123n20 Saunders, Rebecca, 103 Scheiner, Seth, 65

Up from Slavery (Washington), 55–57

V Valentino, Rudolph, 105 Vietnamese immigration, 14–15, 20, 120n11; see also Immigration

Index W Washington, Booker T., 14, 54, 55–57, 67, 86 Watson, James G., 83–84 Watts, Jerry, 58 Weatherby, William, 125n16 Weinstein, Philip M., 100 Weisberger, Jean, 110 “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (Ellison), 53 Whiteness celebrity and, 40 dependent upon blackness, 11, 63

143 Ellison and, 113, 124n5 non-native, 70, 74, 125n14 Whitman, Walt, 1–2 Wild Palms, The (Faulkner), 104 Williams, Raymond, 17–18 Wittenberg-Bryant, Judith, 82 Wolfe, Jesse, 75, 125n11 Woodward, C. Vann, 99 Wop, 91–92, 103, 111 Wright, Richard, 69, 70

Z Zender, Karl, 82, 93

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