Strangers at home: American ethnic modernism between the World Wars

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Author: Rita Keresztesi

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Strangers at Home

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Strangers at Home American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars [-3], (3)

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rita keresztesi

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University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London

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A portion of chapter 3 was originally published as Rita Keresztesi, “Romancing the Borderlands: Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village,” in Doubled Plots: Romance and History, ed. Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 107–26. A portion of chapter 4 was originally published as Rita Keresztesi Treat, “Writing Culture and Performing Race in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1927),” in Literature and Racial Ambiguity, ed. Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 187–208. © 2005 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United ⬁ States of America 䡬

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keresztesi, Rita. Strangers at home: American ethnic modernism between the World Wars / Rita Keresztesi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13 978-0-8032-2767-5 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn-10 0-8032-2767-1 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. American literature— 20th century—History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 3. American literature— Minority authors—History and criticism. 4. Politics and literature—United States— History—20th century. 5. African Americans— Intellectual life—20th century. 6. Ethnic groups in literature. 7. Ethnicity in literature. I. Title. ps228.m63k46 2005 810.9'112—dc22 2005003713 Set in Minion by Bob Reitz. Designed by Dika Eckersley. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. A Prologue to Ethnic Modernism: Melville’s Confidence Man

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2. Harlem Renaissance Masquerades Countee Cullen Nella Larsen Zora Neale Hurston

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3. Modernism with an Accent Anzia Yezierska Henry Roth Josephina Niggli

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4. Romantic Modernism, Modernist Realism 112 Mourning Dove 118 D’Arcy McNickle 133 John Joseph Mathews 151 An Epilogue: Ellison’s Invisible Man

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Notes Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

This book bears some resemblance to my 1999 dissertation of a similar title from the University of California, Santa Cruz. I would like to thank all who have helped making this book happen. The initial planning of the dissertation took place in Santa Cruz, but I wrote the bulk of it in New Mexico, and I made the crucial changes and revisions of turning the dissertation into a book at the University of Oklahoma. In the early stages of the planning and writing I received indispensable help and advice from my dissertation committee: Susan Gillman, Dick Terdiman, Thomas Vogler, and Hayden White at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I thank them all for giving me the perfect combination of freedom and guidance, of trust and critique. Their examples of mentorship and friendship have become models for my dealings with graduate students here at the University of Oklahoma. The three years I spent in Albuquerque, New Mexico, writing my dissertation while on a leave of absence from ucsc brought me the needed solitude and discipline to turn the notes and vague ideas into a dissertation that I could conceive of turning into a book later. I would like to thank Louis Owens who is not here anymore to read this note. His friendship and serendipitous guidance came at just the right time to make me see that the project was of interest and not only to me. Since I came to the University of Oklahoma in the fall of 2000, I have received tremendous support and guidance from my colleagues. I would like to thank them all, but my special gratitude is for Daniel Cottom, Catherine Hobbs, Melissa Homestead, Catherine John, Susan Kates, Vincent Leitch, David Mair, Francesca Sawaya, and Ronald Schleifer. They have each given me wonderful support and plenty of useful advice to see me through this process. I am grateful that they are not only my colleagues but also my friends. Parts of this book appeared in earlier versions in Literature and Racial Ambiguity, edited by Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks (copyright 2002 by Rodopi and reprinted by permission) and in Doubled Plots: Romance and History, edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden (copyright 2003 by the University Press

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of Mississippi and reprinted by permission). I am grateful for the permission to reuse this material. Ladette Randolph, the associate director at the University of Nebraska Press was a wonderful advocate for getting this book published from the very beginning since our first meeting at the 1999 mla convention in Chicago. She was prompt and admirably professional at each stage of production. I am forever grateful to her; thank you. I would also like to thank my two readers, Werner Sollors and William Boelhower, both of whose works and scholarship had been inspirational and fundamentally influential to my own research and interests. I am honored that they both agreed to read the manuscript, and I thank them both for their generosity in offering careful comments and suggestions in their readers’ reports. I would also like to thank my parents, who are still back in Hungary and whom I do miss: my father, Keresztesi Miklós, and my mother, Biró Amália. And finally, I would like to thank my son, Jacob Aronson, for just being there: for being patient and supportive of his mom. He is just the best, the son every mother can only wish for.

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viii acknowledgments

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Introduction

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?” “Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden force of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns“we”into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my differences arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

On Ethnic Modernism

Ethnic moderns have been the strangers in the house of American high modernism. Tom Buchanan’s view of the nation’s changing racial makeup in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby expresses the anxiety many felt during the early 1920s over the white race being overrun by the “colored” and immigrant masses. Similarly, advocates of literary high modernism have been unable and sometimes unwilling to account for ethnic and minority texts as modern. Du Bois’s lament

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about the status of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century and Kristeva’s later recognition of the “stranger within” are vivid and accurate depictions of the position ethnic and minority others have occupied within the nation-state in general and within American modernist literary discourse in particular. Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars attempts to reframe the way we conceive of modernist literature of this period and at the same time challenge conventional images of America and American literary history. By engaging with modernist literary studies from the perspective of minority discourse, I aim to achieve two main goals. First, I suggest that we rethink and redefine modernism with the help of critical tools that postmodernism and ethnic and postcolonial studies have introduced. Consequently, I question the validity of modernism’s claim to the neutrality of culture, the leftover cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment project. Second, I argue that American literary high modernism grew out of a racially biased and often xenophobic historical context that therefore necessitated a politically conservative and often prejudiced definition of modernism in America. The writers I discuss represent an international cast of ethnic artists, all of whom address the condition of modernity within the United States, in its borderlands with Mexico, and from the eastern, western, and southern ports that are its cultural contact zones with Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Strangers at Home examines American ethnic modernist fiction written by African American, Native American, and immigrant (Eastern European Jewish and Mexican American) writers during the era of cultural modernism. In the first half of the twentieth century new groups of American authors entered the literary scene with an unprecedented force and called into question the aesthetics and politics of high modernism. Up to the 1970s, critics focused their analyses of high modernism, both in Europe and the United States, on middleclass male white writers who were often sympathetic to racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and authoritarian politics even while being radical in the formal and thematic aspects of their art. The different ethnic groups examined in Strangers at Home wrote alongside and sometimes in direct response to high modernism’s discriminatory politics and to its restless impulse to formal innovation. In this book I argue that ethnic modernist texts exhibit aspects of language use, literary form, and address to their public closely analogous to canonical modernist works. Yet because their writers were addressing specific ethnic communities often outside of the metropolitan centers of modernism and because they were drawing upon the idiolects and narrative resources of these communities, they have been inappropriately considered regionalist or otherwise marginal to the modernist project. Considering them in light of modernism not only broadens the canon of works but also more adequately reveals the defining

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characteristics of modernist writing, which could and did occur in a variety of cultural settings, not just in literary London, Paris, and New York. For my argument I appropriate Werner Sollors’s term “ethnic modernism” because it best describes my argument’s historically, spatially, and culturally specific approach to the literary movement of high modernism, most often described as a cosmopolitan artistic phenomenon that took place in Europe and North America between 1890 and 1939. Ethnic modernism implies the converging of two literary traditions usually considered separate: the peripheral field of ethnic literatures and the literary canon of American high modernism. Ethnic modernism points to congruencies between the modernist project and ethnic writing between the two World Wars. Sollors suggests that “if ethnicity and modernity go well together, there are also important modernist writers who challenge all the clichés of ethnic discourse, if not ethnicity itself ” (Beyond Ethnicity 255). However, in this book I focus on how ethnic discourse poses a challenge to the critical construct of American high modernism. I argue that the condition of modernity was closely connected to the emergence of a multicultural and imperialistic political economy in the United States, a factor that should be considered when defining and drawing up the literary canon of modernism in America. Thus because of the varied racial and ethnic makeup of the American nation and because of its efforts for imperialistic expansion and world dominance, American literary modernism must be judged on different terms than those of its European counterpart. The purpose of developing the term “ethnic modernism” is to democratize the urban, Anglocentric (and Eurocentric), and often elitist definition of high modernism. Traditionally, the study of modernism excludes the texts of ethnic others from the American literary canon and banishes them to the peripheries of nonliterary studies such as history, ethnic studies, or American studies. Thus, the novels of Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston are discussed almost exclusively within the Harlem Renaissance movement but are hardly ever included in discussions about modernism. Similarly, the works of Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth are addressed in the context of the Jewish American literary experience as if they were outside of or irrelevant to the canon of American high modernism. Josephina Niggli is mentioned in American literary history only as a marginal figure of an emergent Mexican American literature. The novels of Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews are regarded as precursors to the American Indian literary renaissance of the late 1960s but are not worthy of being included in discussions of early-twentiethcentury American national literature. These authors are at the heart of my book, which argues for the need to rethink the canon and scope of American modernism in ethnic and racial terms. Moreover, I also use the term ethnic modernism as a period concept that may

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be viewed as a transitional term between the high modernism of the first two decades of the twentieth century and the beginnings of postmodern culture after World War II. 1 But most importantly, I use the term as a localized and culturally particular category that had to adapt to the cultural diversity and specific characteristics of American modernization. My use of “ethnic modernism” reflects a discourse that is produced by writers living in an American landscape that was increasingly and visibly multicultural and multiethnic. As such, it is a particular version of literary modernism in America that defines both a literary historical period and a more localized culture concept. Therefore, I would suggest that modernist studies must take into consideration different ethnic, racial, and cultural groups that engaged in unique ways with the “modern condition” in its specific American locales. Postmodernism and the academic disciplines of ethnic studies, American studies, and cultural studies have mostly focused on the production of culture from particular subject positions determined by situated gender, race, and class distinctions. I view ethnic modernism as a transitional period between high modernism and postmodernism that brought visibility to the writing and concerns of non-Anglo ethnic and racial groups the literary precursors to the Civil Rights era and to the ethnic renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. From the early 1910s on, modernism in the United States was situated within an expanding imperialistic nation-state that had become increasingly culturally diverse. Alienation and reification (as György Lukács uses the term) were not merely the generalized conditions of monopoly capitalism and modernization. They specifically involved selves and communities “other” than those that were Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, white, male, heterosexual, or middle-class whose members found their bewilderment about the rapid changes in contemporary life expressed in the experimental literary forms and genres of high modernism. Ethnic modernist writers, however, were more concerned with specifically American social, political, and economic conditions that contributed to a unique spatially and culturally situated version of modernism. I define ethnic modernism based on the presence of one or more of four features: 1) the effects of specific historical and political events such as the influx of a large number of immigrants from Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America during the first two decades of the twentieth century and the migration of southern and rural blacks to the urban northeastern centers of the country as opposed to a purely period concept of literary history in which modernism is usually defined, the decades between 1890 and 1939; 2) the importance of space or location as opposed to high modernism’s emphasis on periodization, time, and chronology; 3) the culturally specific recycling of genres from previous eras such as the romance narrative or the Bildungsroman as opposed to the narrow focus on formalist innovations of high modernism; and

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finally, 4) the emphasis on the cultural specificity and cohesion of an ethnic or racial group as opposed to the universalistic cosmopolitanism of Euro-Anglo high modernism. This book rethinks the project of American literary modernism from the perspectives and peripheral locales of ethnic writers. Looking at modernism from its perceived margins allows me to reconsider a number of its aspects. In particular, reading ethnic modernist fiction against and in dialogue with high modernist literary productions challenges the traditionally accepted notions of center and periphery in modernism not only geographically but also aesthetically. Moreover, ethnic modernist authors often freely recycle previously popular genres and modes of representation to “make it new” (in a manner not quite the same as Ezra Pound’s). The focus on ethnic peripheries exposes the ideological investment and interests served in the traditional definitions of modernism while it also widens its cultural import. The recovery of a more or less coherent ethnic modernist production that paralleled its high modernist “other” demystifies and brings to the surface the definitional processes and received ideas of high modernism. The term “ethnic modernism” best describes my critique of the narrow focus on the Eurocentric movement of high modernism. Ethnic modernism implies the converging of two literary traditions usually considered separate: the peripheral field of ethnic literatures and the “centrally” positioned literary works of high modernist American writers. Ethnic modernism signals a congruence between the modernist literary project and the writings of ethnic authors who often represented the avant-garde of modernity and progressivism through their diverse, often nonelitist, and politically radical themes and texts written between the world wars. By turning the focus on modernism’s ethnic other, Strangers at Home also takes on and questions the critical constructs of high modernism. 2 The general concept of modernism and its sister terms, modernity and the modern, used across the disciplines, have stirred much debate and confusion. 3 It is not my goal to settle those debates even though I will engage with some of them in order to set up my argument. Rather, I will focus on why I think there is a need for distinguishing between high or Anglo modernism and ethnic modernism. Raymond Williams has defined the terms “modern,”“modernism,” and “modernist” in the twentieth century as the equivalents of “improved,” as opposed to a previous nineteenth-century sense and its associates (where “modern” was [unfavorably] compared to “ancient” or “medieval”): “Modernism and modernist have become more specialized, to particular tendencies, notably to the experimental art and writing of c. 1890–c.1940, which allows a subsequent distinction between the modernist and the (newly) modern” (Keywords 208). Williams situates the concept of the modern within an historical continuum;

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thus, he defines it not only as a period concept but also as an ideological construct that is itself subject to historicization. The need to rethink modernism’s scope and place in history is even more urgent now at the beginning of the twenty-first century because of the insights the postmodern debates have provided on modernism in literary and cultural studies and also because our notions of majority or minority populations in political and social discourses have become problematic if not obsolete. 4 Since literary modernism is often associated with the twentieth century itself, the beginning of the twenty-first may allow for a much-needed distance from and perspective upon the critical construct of modernism. Lately, discussions on postmodernism have yielded to a productive reexamination of modernism itself. For example, when trying to define the “condition of postmodernity” David Harvey poses the problem through a set of questions and through various narratives about both modernism and postmodern culture (42). Harvey points out that “somewhere between 1962 and 1972 . . . we see postmodernism emerge as a full-blown though still incoherent movement out of the chrysalis of the anti-modern movement of the 1960s” (38). He then cites Ihab Hassan’s widely used chart to point out the polarities and continuities between the modernist and postmodernist phenomena in the forms of contingent dichotomies (Harvey 43; Hassan, “The Culture of Postmodernism” 123– 24). More recently, Hassan has been much less systematic about his definition of postmodernity. He says,“Like a ghost, it eludes definition. Certainly, I know less about postmodernism today than I did thirty years ago, when I began to write about it. This may be because postmodernism has changed, I have changed, the world has changed. . . . The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philosophers call an essentially contested category” (“From Postmodernism to Postmodernity” 1). 5 Fredric Jameson views modernism and the history of modernist literary criticism as products of the “paradigm or epistémé” of “late monopoly capitalism” or as prisoners of such ideology (The Ideologies of Theory 1: 117, 132). In his analysis, which relies heavily on György Lukács’s theories of ideology and realism and on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus for a critique of capitalism, Jameson sees realism and modernism as flip sides of each other in their responses to the advance of capitalist production and its impact on everyday life. According to such a paradigm the meaning-producing“machines” of both realism and modernism exclude and reject modes of expression “such as mass or media culture, lower-class or working-class culture, but also those few surviving remnants of genuine popular or peasant culture from the precapitalist period and in particular of course the oral storytelling of tribal or primitive societies” (117). He defines such “repressions” of cultural expressions from the realist or modernist canon as “the ultimate structural limits of that outlook” or

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as a “painful realization of the ethnocentrism in which we are all, in one way or another, caught”(117). Jameson leaves out the elements of culture and ethnic alterity from his analysis of the ideology of modernist literary criticism, and instead he focuses on the culturally unspecific and ubiquitous notion of “history”: according to the “cultural logic of late capitalism” an argument Jameson further promotes in his later work on postmodernism both realists and modernists “leave out history itself ” and “both positions are completely ahistorical” (122). Based on this logic, modernism is not a break with the older Victorian bourgeois reality; “it simply reinforces all the latter’s basic presuppositions, only in a world so thoroughly subjectivized that they have been driven underground beneath the surface of the work, forcing us to reconfirm the concept of a secular reality at the very moment when we imagine ourselves to be demolishing it” (130–31). Since reality Jameson’s “history” or the condition of “late monopoly capitalism” has become impossible to be told or narrated according to the generic attributes of realist expression, modernist writers took over “this wholly subjectivized untruth” and wrote it out in fragmented images and in forms of privatized speech (131). In that sense, modernism is just a more appropriate twentieth-century expression of the “truth” or mimetic principle of an outmoded nineteenth-century realist narrative mode. The form of the content has changed, but the story is still that of life under the both brutally exploitative and exuberantly liberating forces of an ever-expanding market economy. But for my own argument, it is the previously mentioned “ethnocentrism” of the ideology of modernism conspicuously not developed in Jameson’s critique that I would like to recover through my notion of ethnic modernism. 6 Recently Ronald Schleifer has defined “cultural Modernism” through its most problematic, symptomatic, and inextricably intertwined attributes: abundance and time (see Modernism and Time). Through his own abundant multidisciplinary argument he examines the transition from Enlightenment to postEnlightenment ways of understanding in science, mathematics, linguistics, economics, philosophy, music, and literature in Western thought. According to Schleifer’s definition, “twentieth-century Modernism responds to the second Industrial Revolution,” which took place between the late nineteenth century and World War I (4). During that time an “enormous multiplication of commodities” took place, fundamentally altering various disciplinary practices such as “production,”“wealth,” and “use,” ultimately revising the conceptions of temporality in the early part of the twentieth century (4). With the transition into an economy of abundance, a profound sense of crisis became normalized, disrupting previously and seemingly secure Enlightenment notions of subjectivity, agency, action, ethics, production, consumption, reason, narrative, and time (232). The material abundance, which upset the previous balance between production and consumption, subject and action, and reason and contingency,

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made its most visible and palpable mark on our sense of time and temporality. Accordingly, “Modernism” has become to figure as art’s “answerability” to the changes that took place in the social and technical discourses after the second industrial revolution (21–22). Schleifer appropriates a dialectical approach to the social and cultural discourses of modernism: “[T]he material, intellectual, and human abundance of this period, recorded in cultural Modernism and Modernist science, created a world in which abundance and scarcity existed side by side so that the modes of understanding conditioned by need that is, Enlightenment modes of understanding existed alongside modes of understanding conditioned by abundance” (36). Post-Enlightenment thought and culture“replace[d] (but not altogether) the principle of contradiction with temporal alternations, the economics of sufficient reason with overdeterminations, and the aesthetics of given moments with repeated, momentary comprehensions of time” (230–31). Schleifer’s argument follows these phenomena through the various disciplines and through selected readings of British modernist fiction. While he pays attention to issues of social stratification such as class and gender, there is a noticeable lack of mention of time’s “other” dimensions such as space and cultural difference. Thus, through his equation of modernity with temporality and abundance, he generalizes the experience of time as universal and not culturally or geographically specific. While I find it important to combine social and economic concerns with those of aesthetics and to point out temporality and abundance as the determining factors in the discussion on modernism, I find it necessary also to add the dimensions of cultural specificity and geographical location to the debate. As a result of a similar concern, Susan Hegeman incorporates spatiality and culture into her argument on modernism. She starts out by suggesting that modernism is “characterized by a nexus of related historical, intellectual, technological, and aesthetic developments,” as opposed to by a more narrowly defined “set of formal traits or styles” (19). Hegemen then describes the devastating effects of World War I; the “scientific concepts of relativity and uncertainty”; “Freud’s theory of the unconscious and infantile sexuality”; the effects and consequences of living in a “consumer culture” and in mass societies, various technological inventions and innovations (such as the camera, automobile, street lighting, steel-frame architecture, sound recording, moving pictures); the consolidation of “global-spanning European empires”; the emergence of the United States as a global empire, the eruption of “social revolutions”; an awareness of the “rapidity of change” and of a violent rupture with the past, among other developments (20). Ultimately, the project of modernism, according to Hegeman, is to break with previous models of “teleological progress,” linear development, and “superficial notions of evolution” in favor of “re-articulating historicity itself ”

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(35). She identifies as key to the rearticulation of historical time the concept of culture, more specifically a spatial rethinking of culture and difference. The need for such an inclusion of a “spatial culture concept” in discussions about American modernism is substantiated by several events and trends that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century. After World War I what had been previously thought of as stable notions of American identity became increasingly problematic: the seemingly secure hold of white supremacy was perceived to be under attack by the newly arrived “hordes” of immigrants and by the massive restructuring of the political and racial landscape of American society through internal migration. Hegeman herself argues for a revision of the usual suspects that signify the modernist critical canon: that it is international, cosmopolitan, a product of modern rootlessness and that it “belongs to the avant-gardes of a few European capitals” (20). Her work is a direct critique of Hugh Kenner’s definition of American modernism as a “homemade world.” She suggests that, instead of the clichés of apolitical cosmopolitanism, alienation, and formal experimentation, we must also pay attention to the culturally specific content of American writing between the World Wars. 7 Hegeman goes on to say that the “supposed opposition between formal experimentation and political activism” must be revisited and the “intercultural and interracial quality of aesthetic experimentation” be revealed and addressed as has been done by critics such as Ann Douglas, Houston A. Baker Jr., Cary Nelson, Walter Kalaidjian, and others (see Hegeman 21, 220). But as Hegeman astutely points out, it is not enough to just recover a new canon, which in turn would only produce “countercanons” (21). Instead, she calls for the need to historicize modernism both in the practice and the experience of modernity (22). Then, my challenge in Strangers at Home is to provide more than just adding more marginalized texts and writers to the list of canonical greats already promoted by Kenner and others. Therefore, I suggest that we need to rethink modernism as a complex set of concerns that consider particular cultures and subjectivities previously deemed marginal to the modernist project. Besides the temporal and universalizing dimensions of modernism, we must also take into consideration its spatial, cultural, or particular racial and ethnic aspects and its specific locations as well. The ethnic spatial and cultural dimension of modernism became a dominant feature of American literature after the Great Depression. Much in the same way as Susan Hegeman places modernism and modernity into the paradigm of the spatial rearticulation of culture, Thomas J. Ferraro also focuses on the chronological aspect of the concept, which he identifies as the decade of the 1930s when the “ethnic passage” occurred in American culture (“AvantGarde Ethnics” 2). Thus, he distinguishes the decade of the 1920s which gave rise to high modernist experimentation and to immigrant voices still speaking

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in realist tones and through autobiographical genres from the decade of the 1930s, which saw a peculiar convergence between modernism and ethnicity (16). As Ferraro explains: [E]thnic voices seem absent from the “forefront” of American literature in the crucial years, 1912–1930, because we have now accepted those years as the birth of modernism. During 1912 to 1930, the children of the immigrants shaped their literary ambitions in reference to the experimentation of the expatriates in Europe, continuing and indeed promoting the realist and naturalist techniques in self-conscious, if not always fully articulated opposition to high modernism. (2)

In his argument, Ferraro reiterates the familiar debate about modernism: could formal experimentation and aesthetic mastery be reconciled with the social and political commitments of ethnic writings that traditionally have demanded older realist forms? 8 Or, to put it more bluntly: could the modernists’ message of “universalistic high art” be combined with “parochial ethnicity” (Ferraro, “Avant-Garde Ethnics” 9)? The ethnic experience “mandated the sociological treatment that only realism could provide,” and “the literary experiments of London and Paris were regarded as threats to ethnic consciousness” during the 1910s and 1920s for writers in the ethnic and immigrant ghettoes (3). For several of the new writers of the 1930s, however, high modernist formal experimentation became the vehicle for the ethnic experience: “Entrance into the avant-garde was now conceivable without abandoning the problems experienced during one’s ghetto past and raised by leaving the ethnic community. The politicization of American letters and the ethnicization of the avant-garde went hand in hand, feeding off one another” (4–5). Thus, for Ferraro the period of the 1930s was that peculiar era when there was a democratic streak in modernism, a possibility for the “interpenetration between ethnicity and modernism” (Ferraro, “Avant-Garde Ethnics” 16). Ferraro’s main concern is to reconcile aesthetic value with social commitment, modernism with ethnic consciousness in the literature of the 1930s. Walter Kalaidjian picks up the project of “revisioning modernism” where Thomas J. Ferraro leaves it off: Kalaidjian revises the field of study by giving voice to the century’s “contentious social context” silenced by the postwar academic scholarship on high modernism (2). His goal is to redirect the modernist “canon’s narrow focus on a select group of seminal careers” (2) to a more varied chorus of voices, concerns, and genres. He seeks to recover the buried plurality of the modernist project within the paradigms of “transnational, racial, sexual, and class representation” and within the scope of a larger set of cultural texts that involve more than the aesthetic and formalist concerns of a limited circle of literary texts by a handful of canonized authors. He is concerned with a more interdisciplinary approach to literary modernism; that is, he places the issues of

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politics and social order, which are usually considered to be representative of nonliterary genres and symptomatic popular or low culture, beside and against the elitist aesthetic of literary high modernism. He also foregrounds the concern with “global multiculturalism,” which postmodern cultural critical practices have introjected into the rethinking of the modernist project (2). By employing the critical tools of a postmodern socio-aesthetics, he is hoping for a needed “spread of a more democratic field of cultural representation” (3). In defense of his “postmodern reading of American high modernism,” Kalaidjian argues that reading modernism from our own postmodernist moment would be beneficial for the following reasons: Such an exchange would negotiate between, on the one hand, the kind of populist aesthetics that reached fruition during the Great Depression and, on the other hand, a poststructuralist understanding of language, subjectivity, and the latter’s ideological investments in discursive form. What emerges from this crossing of the historical avantgardes and postmodernism is something that has long eluded the postwar academic canon: a post individualistic solidarity among sexual, racial, class, and ethnic subject positions, at once formally sophisticated and critically responsive to America’s cultural diversity. (5)

He then explains what he means by such cultural diversity within this new “revisionary modernism”: the contestations of “nationality and aesthetic formalism. Moreover, this new map of modernity would shift the boundaries of critical reception that have segregated the interbellum avant-gardes in the United States from contemporaneous transnational, African-American, feminist, and proletarian traditions of cultural critique” (5). Kalaidjian’s “revisionary modernism” promises to take on a spatial remapping of the field, very much like modernist anthropology’s understanding of the culture concept as practiced by Franz Boas and his students at Columbia University during the early decades of the twentieth century. But instead of the narrow ethnographic meaning of culture, the author adds the multigenred and multifaceted notion of culture that Raymond Williams defined as “a particular way of life” (qtd. in Kalaidjian 4). Indeed, Kalaidjian’s book is an exciting resource that relies on not only textual but also visual icons of contemporary American, as well as international, popular culture. Unfortunately, he accomplishes his task by a method that contradicts his message, because he almost exclusively relies on Continental critical theory. Also, while the author aims to mend high modernism’s elitism, his book focuses mainly on the issues of nationalism, class, and gender, excluding the equally important issues of race and ethnicity. Following but also revising Hegeman’s, Ferraro’s, and Kalaidjian’s examples, I suggest that we rethink American modernism not just on an individual level that is, who does or does not belong to the canon but also on a larger

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theoretical and critical scale. Therefore, we must look at modernism in specific spatial and cultural locales that harbor just as many differences as similarities. When modernism is examined as an ideologically laden critical tool for understanding diversity during the interwar era, the concept itself becomes an historically and socially constructed entity that is also subject to historicization just as its subject matter. In trying to establish a genealogy of modernism, I have found it useful to imagine it in several, sometimes coexisting, stages that function as “emergent,” dominant, and “residual” stages of modernism. 9 Ethnic modernism was in its “emergent” stage in the second half of the nineteenth century, and after World War II a new set of concerns emerged, making it a “localized period” in its “residual” stage. 10 Besides viewing modernism, both high and ethnic, as a literary-historical period concept that is also spatially located and culturally situated, I draw connections between texts that are thematically, geographically, and culturally connected and produced by historical and social forces that can be loosely collected under the label of “the condition of modernity.” 11 Strangers at Home makes clear that ethnic modernism is not a unified movement of writers with set aesthetic or political agendas. Rather, ethnic modernism is itself a self-conscious procedure of bringing into dialogue authors who are usually categorized as belonging to separate traditions African American, Asian American, Native American, and that of the immigrant. 12 This is not to make them members of a movement but to highlight their “family resemblances” so that historically and aesthetically significant connections become visible, connections that had been hidden in the high modernist attempt to “ghettoize” ethnic texts. Modernism thus becomes a category with nuance in its politics of aesthetics. By reimagining high modernism from its ethnic “others’ ” perspective, this conflict-ridden and exclusionary construct may become more self-aware of its artifice and less fixed in its boundaries. “Ethnic modernism” is a useful term only as long as it makes the critic aware of the preexisting theoretical and critical biases in modernism. By redirecting attention to modernism’s culturally and historically specific literary productions, we can tame the elitist streak in high modernist criticism. Following Marjorie Perloff ’s suggestion, we may even “forget about centering modernism to begin with” (“Modernist Studies” 171). Modernism then becomes a masquerade of different disguises in which ethnic modernism becomes one mode of self-creation among others. The monolith of modernism fractures into cultural particulars and localized productions, and ethnic modernism emerges as just another mask of the modernist project. In chapter 1, I make connections between ethnic modernism and emerging American multiculturalism through a reading of Herman Melville’s last published novel in his lifetime, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857).

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Melville previously an obscure writer of sea romances became a canonical figure of American literature after the posthumous publication of his short novel Billy Budd, Sailor (1924) as a result of American modernists’ attempt to define an elitist modernism. Still, Melville also suggests an alternative conception of literary modernism that includes the questions of race and ethnicity. In The Confidence-Man Melville allegorizes the nation as a “ship of fools” and represents participation in the national project as a confidence game. Taking as framing metaphors the figure of the stranger or confidence man and the allegory of the nation as a masquerade, I connect Melville’s period, the period of the emerging and gradually more ethnically and racially diverse nation-state during the last decades of the nineteenth century, with the modernist period when America became a truly multicultural and also xenophobic empire. In chapters 2 and 3, I continue my historical and political reassessment of American modernism as I focus on the Harlem Renaissance and on immigrant writing. Rather than merely defining modernism according to formalistic literary criteria, I pay particular attention to the enormous historical, political, and cultural impact caused by the sudden jump in the numbers of immigrants and internal migrations that changed the ethnic and racial makeup of the United States in the first few decades of the twentieth century. I demonstrate that modernism’s preoccupation with alienation, modernization, and industrialization took on a different emphasis when examined in the immigrant Eastern European and Mexican and African American contexts. In those communities bourgeois values of education, material prosperity, and urban life were considered positive goals. In chapter 2, I discuss the novels of Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, and in chapter 3, I discuss the texts of immigrant authors such as Henry Roth, Anzia Yezierska, and Josephina Niggli. In chapter 4, I discuss the importance of space and locale and their close conceptual connection to ethnic and racial identity within the context of earlytwentieth-century Native American culture. In their novels Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews grapple with the devastating impacts of changing federal policies concerning American Indian tribes between the 1880s and 1930s. All three authors respond to the political climate of the socalled “assimilation period,” when the U.S. government systematically opened up reservation lands for white settlement. Thus, modernization affected Native Americans quite differently from those, mostly of Anglo-Saxon origin, who enjoyed the benefits of membership in the nation. (Native Americans did not become citizens of the United States until 1924.) Because of the peculiar situation of Native Americans considered all but extinct but at the same time romanticized in popular culture I also address the contextual nature of Native American identity in both the social context of America and in the “textuality” of its romanticized representations within the larger culture. Mourning Dove, D’Arcy

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McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews were keenly aware that Native American identity had been extensively appropriated, narrativized, and colonized. Finally, in the epilogue, I revisit the issue of periodization within modernist studies by reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) as a transitional text between ethnic modernism and postmodernism. I argue that while it was necessary to create a term for ethnic modernism within modernist studies because of the formalism, cultural elitism, and cosmopolitanism of Anglo and Eurocentric high modernism, with the postmodern cultural turn, diversity and pluralism came to the front and became more visible (though still problematic) to American literary and cultural studies. I conclude my book with Invisible Man, published about a hundred years after The Confidence-Man, because I read the two novels as representatives of the emergent and residual stages of ethnic modernism. Moreover, Ralph Ellison’s novel explicitly addresses the maskedball quality of American race relations. 13 For Ellison the duplicitous political rhetoric of the nation-state that preaches unity at the expense of racial, ethnic, or cultural difference the confidence game of America reaches an extreme. Stripped of all options for resistance, Ellison’s nameless protagonist goes underground and accepts invisibility. A consummate confidence man, he is also the ultimate American stranger. One of the most common themes ethnic modernist texts share with high modernist narratives is what I call, using Georg Simmel’s term, the “discourse of the stranger” (see The Sociology of Georg Simmel). The figure of the stranger appears in both high modernist and ethnic modernist novels. High modernists cast the stranger in the role of the alienated figure of the artist; whereas ethnic modernist texts appropriate the figure of the stranger in different costumes such as that of the petty con man or woman, the trickster, or the outcast. The outcast has been a recurring figure in American literature, but in ethnic writing his or her character gains a special significance. The stranger of ethnic modernist texts exposes what Fredric Jameson calls the “political unconscious” of the discourse, or “confidence game,” of America.

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1. A Prologue to Ethnic Modernism Melville’s Confidence Man

Yes, we golden boys, the moderns, have geniality everywhere cast like noonlight. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

a bounty broad-

In short, the entire ship is a riddle. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

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fter the initial, and at best, puzzled reviews, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) did not receive a favorable critique until the modernist Melville revival in the 1920s and 1930s when a renewed interest was sparked in Herman Melville by both readers and academics in search of an “authentic” American literature. 1 As a result, Melville’s works became the center of literary interest and the symbol of a new confident voice of “homegrown” literature. Carl Van Vechten, a patron and friend to Gertrude Stein and Nella Larsen, was one of the first admirers of The Confidence-Man. In Vechten’s interpretation Melville was satirizing Emersonian transcendentalism as a philosophical confidence game. During the 1920s, however, there were only a few commentaries, most often by nonacademic literary people who were puzzled by the enigmatic structure and lack of plot, calling it an “abortion.” In the 1940s the academic study of Melville burgeoned, and Elizabeth Foster’s Yale dissertation (1942) was the first sustained interpretation of The Confidence-Man. Richard Chase’s Herman Melville (1949) called the novel a “supreme achievement” and read it as a coherent unified work as opposed to a collection of disorganized fragments. 2 The coincidence of the modernist literary movement and the recovery of Melville as a major American author is of interest to my argument on ethnic modernism since Melville’s modernity found a new audience at a time when American modernism was trying to find its own roots on the American continent as opposed to in Europe. For example, Billy Budd, a short novel written in Melville’s last years, was not published till 1924. Melville was brought forth at the

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height of the modernist movement and was read increasingly as a forebear of twentieth-century sensibilities. By including Melville in my study of American ethnic modernism, I would like to suggest a rather different understanding of his work. I am arguing that Melville had already foreseen what would become the dominant factor in the American union: not its revolutionary heroic beginning and religious tolerance, but its ambiguity toward racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural otherness. The Confidence-Man conveys an apocalyptic vision of the union and is sometimes compared to the twentieth-century apocalyptic text, Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), with which I conclude my argument. 3 In terms of literary periodization, they are both border texts: Melville’s novel forecasts a new multicultural and modernist paradigm, while Ellison’s points forward to a postmodern approach to subjectivity that reflects shifting power relations and intensifying political conflict. They both critique American nationalism, and they both argue, indirectly, for a more inclusive and tolerant that is, a truly democratic multicultural state. My purpose in rereading Melville’s novel is to show how it could be viewed as an emergent modernist text that critiques the homogenizing tendencies of the expansionist nation-state, a critique it shares with ethnic modernist texts of the first part of the twentieth century. The novel’s interpolated tales and metanarrative chapters function as counterdiscourses and alternative critical voices to an emergent American modernity. 4 Most critics have focused on the central narrative of the novel and have debated the confidence man’s identity and message. In my reading, there is another important narrative that runs through the five connected interpolated tales and the three metanarrative chapters. While the central story of the confidence man exposes a general lack of trust and confidence in metaphysical terms, the interpolated tales and metanarrative chapters make that theme culturally, racially, ethnically, and historically specific. The Confidence-Man was Melville’s last prose fiction published in his lifetime. He wrote the book during the course of 1855 and 1856 at Arrowhead, his farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Published on April 1, 1857, the novel was a failure and did not bring the financial and critical response Melville expected. It is also his most obviously American book and, in its tone and form, the most modern. The novel resists critical consensus or simple deciphering. Numerous readings approach it from different methodological and philosophical perspectives, each trying to grasp its “meaning” and contain its structural disintegration. 5 Formally, its modernity is manifest in a narrative complexity that deliberately lacks action. The novel also interrogates the rhetoric of racial and ethnic difference in the emerging American nation that is founded on violence genocide and slavery. The stylized and theatrical plot is set at the western boundary of the American colonial expansion: the narrative opens on April Fool’s Day aboard

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a Mississippi steamboat named Fidèle, moving downstream from St. Louis to New Orleans. Structured around a twenty-four-hour journey down the Mississippi, the narrative depicts a frontier citizenry as tested by successive incarnations of a confidence man aboard the riverboat Fidèle. The central story, in which a standard of “confidence” is set against that of “No Trust,” also includes the five intertwining interpolated tales involving Goneril, who is the wife of a man with a weed on his hat (which is a sign of mourning); an alms-seeking “Negro” cripple; the Indian-hater John Moredock; the prodigal son Charlemont; and the candle maker China Aster. In chapters 14, 39, and 44 authorial metanarratives interrupt the story, discussing the way fiction relates to reality. Critics agree that halfway through the novel the different confidence men merge into a single “cosmopolitan” figure, a composite confidence man. Repeatedly, the confidence man preaches charity but, instead, plants distrust. The different confidence men are unified as one protean supernatural character: variably, he is thought to be god-like (Jesus, the Inca Sun God, a trickster god, or the Hindu gods Vishnu and Siva) and is sometimes compared to Satan (see Bryant 335). The novel’s plot is only the external structure to the allegorical flow of the narrative contained within the five interpolated tales. The Confidence-Man opens with an allusion to the founder of the Inca Empire: “At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis” (3). 6 The “man in cream colors” is a stranger and a pilgrim with no clear origins besides the recurring theme that he might be the “mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East” (3). The allusion to Manco Capac is a reference to origins and founding both individual and national. 7 The reference to the mythical founding of the Inca empire at the opening of Melville’s novel is interesting to us when put into the context of American imperialism. For example, the origin of a new “civilized” Inca empire is connected to water: a new generation of Incas, a man and woman assumed to be brother and sister, emerges from the waters of Lake Titicaca but are descendants of the sun, thus bringing an alien culture and a new paradigm of law and order to a previously barbarous population. Secondly, Manco Capac is the founder of a new race with his sister, who is also his wife. 8 This incestuous relationship and the reference to a new race imply that they either repopulated the land with their offspring or that they mixed with the original population. Thus, the founding is closely connected to colonization, genocide, incest, and miscegenation. 9 Melville’s confidence man also represents the coming of a new social order and culture. He seems to have supernatural powers: he is omnipresent, overhears conversations, and disappears and reappears without logic or trace. His message is simple and this-worldly: his preaching of trust and confidence always

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involves monetary exchange. The protean confidence man appears on different decks, which represent segregation based on class status and on cultural and gender differences. While his supernatural features connect him to an earlier world of enchantment, his message is invariably connected to money. In an egalitarian manner of susceptibility to deceit he “whitewashes” the differences between the boat’s passengers: they all become knaves or fools. But if we accept the assumption that the confidence men are only another manifestation of the same character in different guises, then everyone is a fool but him, and the lowest common denominator is money and white or western values. The confidence man represents a paradigm shift from the republican ideal of national unity to a new monetary unity that can hold the diverse populations and ideas of the expanding nation together during the Jacksonian era. The Ship of Fools of America is a cross section of mid-nineteenth-century American citizens: merchants, investors, clergymen, beggars, immigrants, middleclass women, an elderly gentleman from the countryside, the barber, and other travelers are assembled on the Fidèle, the ship of devotion to and faith in the nation. Anxiety over racial and cultural difference is a constant feature of the narrative. While the narrative begins with a description of cultural diversity on the ship and in the nation, alterity soon conglomerates into sameness and uniformity. 10 The multitude of people becomes unified in the “cosmopolitan and confident tide” of the Mississippi River on the riverboat of America at the western boundary of the expanding nation. The multiplicity of cultures, religions, races, and national origins on the ship of pilgrimage is juxtaposed with the unifying cosmopolitanism of whiteness, the market economy, and Christianity. The new Mecca or Holy Land is America, and the unifying religion is that of money. The next figure to appear on the ship is the “Negro” cripple, Black Guinea: his identity as black or crippled is immediately questioned by a former custom house inspector fired from his job and who now limps along on a wooden leg. 11 Later the wooden-legged man reappears and questions Black Guinea’s authenticity, calling him a “painted decoy” (15). The gatekeeper of the nation, even though himself not a legitimate figure of authority anymore, tries to keep Black Guinea from the charity of the traveling citizens. Another, more elaborate, reference to racial diversity is told in the next interpolated story of the “Indianhater” John Moredock, in chapter 26, “The Metaphysics of Indian-hating.” But the storyteller leaves the question of race distant and abstract at the level of “metaphysics.” Moreover, racism is referred to as general “misanthropy,” as opposed to the confidence man’s “philanthropy.” Racial difference is repressed to the unconscious of the American republic. Melville brings to surface the “political unconscious” of racial and ethnic pluralism of the seemingly unified nation-state in his novel.


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In chapter 15 the narrator describes the ship’s“emigrant quarters”as a descent to “purgatory” or “Tartarus” (72–73). The dormitory is a Foucauldian “disciplinary space”: the beds resemble the “cradle of the oriole” or, “on a large scale, rope book-shelves” that swing wildly: “upon the provocation of a green emigrant sprawling into one, and trying to lay himself out there, when the cradling would be such as almost to toss him back whence he came. . . . Procrustean beds, on whose hard grain humble worth and honesty writhed, still invoking repose, while but torment responded” (73). The allusion to Procrustes, the mythical Greek robber who made all his victims fit his bed by either stretching or cutting off their legs, supports the previous homogenizing and standardizing image of the American nation-state but in the particular context of immigration, a topic I return to in a later chapter on immigrant writing. The opening tableau of diversity comes to an end in the last image in the novel: just before the light goes out, we see the cosmopolitan and the elderly gentleman frozen in time and space. The narrator promises, “Something further may follow of this Masquerade” (251). From the opening image of the sunrise to the ominous darkness of the night, the novel encompasses the figurative evolution of a day: from diversity to an absence of light and cultural difference. When Melville describes the traveling crowd as “one cosmopolitan and confident tide,” the image mobilizes conflicting interpretations: in Enlightenment terminology cosmopolitanism refers to freedom from nationalistic ties and religious dogma, but in the modernist context of “possessive individualism” the expression takes on a new meaning. “Confidence” can mean “trust for sale,” and as Susan Rubin Suleiman points out in Exile and Creativity, under certain circumstances “cosmopolitan” can be also a racial slur for Jews. The novel’s claustrophobic setting carefully leaves out almost all references to nature or individuality: the Fidèle becomes an allegory for the“all-fusing”spirit of American expansion, just a decade after the Mexican War in which western territories were annexed and added to the Union. 12 The colonial expansion, which coincided with an emerging market economy, brought about uniformity in several aspects of life: it wiped out the differences in class and the differences between town and country, and also between heterogeneous cultures and peoples. The initial multiplicity of individual differences gave way to the generic “wood-color” of “blended . . . varieties of visage and garb”(9). Westward expansion and the new ethic of exchange value wiped out individual and cultural differences. The last scene of the novel is a furtive glimpse at the coming of a paranoid system of American monopoly capitalism and imperialism in the twentieth century: “The next moment, the waning light expired, and with it the waning flames of the horned altar, and the waning halo round the robed man’s brow; while in the darkness which ensued, the cosmopolitan kindly led the old man away.” (251). The “waning light” and the submersion of the religious icons of


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the “horned altar” and “halo” in darkness carry uncanny similarities to Marx’s description of the “profanation” and rationalization of the world: bourgeois “naked self-interest” and “callous ‘cash payment’ ” strip away the “halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe” (Marx 223). Michael Paul Rogin situates the character of the confidence man in a larger historical context. In his interpretation, the political atmosphere after the Compromise of 1850 and the marketplace ethos of the antebellum era spawned confidence games, conspiracies, general distrust, and “persuasive role-playing in a mobile, acquisitive society” (241). Masquerade became a part of American life, and the character of the“confidence man exposes the absent core of marketplace reality itself ”: modern strangers come together to buy, to sell, and to persuade, revealing themselves only “by their performances” (238–39). Rogin, citing David B. Davis, describes an antebellum America in which there was a sharp increase in confusion over social roles, so that the freedom that allowed each citizen “to become a self-made man, also opened the way to mass deception” (239). In the psychic economy of antebellum “mass deception” the nation becomes a paranoid and psychotic space that Melville allegorizes as a floating ship. In his fictional and private writings Melville had noted that life might be allegorized as a practical joke (see Cohen 221–45). Combining the allegory of the nation as a floating ship with the allegory of life as an April Fool’s joke, the riverboat Fidèle becomes an ominous and claustrophobic space. The ideology of liberty combined with an increasingly exclusionary and racist rhetoric in the service of the expanding nation-state created a maddening and contradictory public discourse in antebellum America. The riverboat allegory expresses a telling picture of the Model Republic as a nation of strangers thrown together within the finite bounds of the nation-state slowly moving on its course from the north to the south along the western frontier. As a consequence to the mad project of creating a unified nation, the conflicting rhetoric of expansion and exclusion resulted in an ideological crisis best described by a moving vessel reminiscent of the Renaissance image of the Narrenschiff, or the Ship of Fools. Melville literalizes the westward expansion of the Jackson era in American history. By recalling the Renaissance imagery of the Ship of Fools, he connects the allegory of the nationstate to its history of violent disciplinary and exclusionary technologies. The ironic allegory of the nation as the Ship of Fools exposes the Model Republic as born in violence, domination, racial and ethnic difference, and inequality. 13 The mythic connection between water and madness in the case of the Ship of Fools allows for a more politicized and spatially specific reading of the metaphor: the boat is the locus of confinement, but its mobility also signifies freedom from communal and national ties. Like modern airports, these confined places of no one’s and everyone’s land serve as neutral grounds where political and national borders are deemed meaningless everyone is mad or a stranger. The


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trope of the Ship of Fools invaded the literary landscape in the fifteenth century; Melville’s confidence man is the traveling madman on a new, a modern Ship of Fools. Melville’s confidence man, especially in his first appearance in the novel, signifies radical otherness and estrangement. His most striking attribute is his solitude. He has no history, no family connections, and no stable identity beyond the roles he plays and the costumes he wears:“He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wondering of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger” (3). The new notion of the nation is not maintained by an imagined common culture, instead America is re-created as a common space inhabited by strangers. According to Benedict Anderson, the imagined community of the nation is held together linguistically and culturally by shared myths of origin. Thus, the history of the nation, on a narrative level, parallels individual biography. He sees both as narratives of identity that spring from oblivion, estrangement, and a loss of the memory of home and origins. For Anderson the nation is a product of a national imagination that combines individual biography with collective myths. Svetlana Boym, however, questions the relevance of such project for the modernist period since Anderson treats biography as a particularly nineteenthcentury popular genre, such as the confessional narrative, that begins with the narrative of parents and grandparents. According to Boym, the stories of internal and external exiles, misfits, and mixed-bloods are left out. Their narratives would offer “digressions and detours from the mythical biography of a nation . . . by resisting a coherent narrative of identity” (242). Such alien digressions refuse to allow the life of a single individual to be subsumed in the destiny of a collective. Instead of curing alienation, which the imagined community of the nation proposes, “they use alienation itself as a personal antibiotic against the ancestral disease of home in order to reimagine it, offering us new ways of thinking about home, politics, and culture” (242). In Boym’s critique, modernist texts have no place in Anderson’s account of the national literary imagination. What characterizes the imagined community of the nation in Anderson’s account is “a desire for the nonarbitrariness of the sign . . . a search for a sacred or private language proper to that community” (242). Following Boym, I suggest that Melville’s Confidence-Man and the texts I discuss in the following chapters function as “digressions” to the national narrative. They disrupt the national literary canon by telling the stories of others. Ethnic modernists appropriate the shared language of the nation to their own needs, and they add their own dialects and accents. The Melville revival of the 1920s looked back to what at the time was a marginal writer to find the roots of American national literature, but in doing so, it failed to notice how this


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attention to the racial and ethnic diversity of the nation-state upset the sense of modernity that Melville was supposed to represent. The confidence man is a stranger and a modern cosmopolitan who represents the ambiguity of values of reason and national belonging but does not resolve it. Melville’s Fidèle is the Ship of Fools of America, an allegory for the nation of strangers: it floats between geographical, cultural, and political boundaries, keeping those aboard in limbo and incognito. The personal, social, and ethnic specificity of the passengers dissipates once they are on the ship: all become homogeneous in their roles as passengers and strangers. Membership in the nation is as ephemeral, elusive, and impersonal as being a passenger on the riverboat Fidèle. In the 1850s the expanding Model Republic had to come to terms with racial and cultural diversity, and it had to reconcile its democratic ideals with the violence of its expansionist politics. During the modernist era, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the United States faced similar conflicts: an increase in ethnic and racial diversity because of immigration and the dilemma of exporting the ideology of democracy globally while turning the nation-state into an imperialistic megapower. Melville’s novel allegorizes the gap between official patriotic language and the unresolved issues of slavery and Indian relocation and genocide as a project gone mad. His novel further describes the coincidence between the deflation of political language and an expanding market economy that turned everything into a commodity. Melville’s novel assumes a loss delegated to a mythic past. The reader is led into a world from which confidence and charity are absent. Moreover, since no authentic self hides under the masks and costumes of the confidence man to guarantee self-identity, we are left with a confidence game on the stage of life instead. The characters in the novel are constantly at a loss about the authenticity and identity of the people they speak with, and the reader is at a loss to know who anybody is. For example, in chapter 36 a mystic, Mark Winsome, warns the cosmopolitan confidence man Frank Goodman of Charlie Noble. To Frank’s question of what he thought of Charlie Noble, Mark Winsome responds with more questions: “What are you? What am I? Nobody knows who anybody is. The data which life furnishes, toward forming a true estimate of any being, are as insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to determine the triangle” (193). In chapter 41 Frank Goodman and Winsome’s disciple Egbert reenact the encounter between the cosmopolitan and Charlie Noble concerning a “friendly loan.” At the end of the role-playing scene the twice refused Goodman storms off enraged: With these words and a grand scorn the cosmopolitan turned his heel, leaving his companion at a loss to determine when exactly the fictitious character had been dropped,


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and the real one, if any, resumed. If any, because, with pointed meaning, there occurred to him, as he gazed after the cosmopolitan, these familiar lines: ‘All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players, Who have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.’ (223)

It is an impossible task to determine authentic identity not only for the reader but also for the novel’s fictitious players. Prefiguring a theme to which I will return later in a discussion of Mourning Dove’s Cogewea (1927), identity here is as deep or authentic as a costume change. Melville further develops the political allegory of the Ship of Fools by adding a sense of theatricality and confusion about authentic identity as a general commentary on the condition of modernity. Some of his characters do not have names but are identified only by their clothes and appearance. For example, in the first four chapters of the novel, costumed characters walk in and out of the “stage”: among them “a man in cream colors” (3), “a grotesque negro cripple” (10), “the wooden-legged man” (12), and finally the confidence man in his first attire or identity, “a man in mourning clean and respectable, but none of the glossiest, a long weed on his hat” (18). In the confusion of who each traveler is, an argument develops in chapter 6 in which “the wooden-legged man” plants the suspicion that the “negro cripple” is just “some white scoundrel”: “A white masquerading as a black” (31). The ensuing discussion between “the man in gray” and “the young clergyman” focuses upon the connection between being and acting, between authentic identity and its performance: “Tell me, sir, do you really think that a white could look the negro so? For one, I should call it pretty good acting.” “Not much better than any other man acts.” “How? Does all the world act? Am I, for instance, an actor? Is my reverend friend here, too, a performer?” “Yes, don’t you both perform acts? To do, is to act; so all doers are actors.” (31)

The allegoric narrative’s theatrical setting allows Melville as the stage manager to be both present and absent from his narrative. His interactions are limited to reflections that are mediated through language. He writes of “mere phantoms which flit along a page, like shadows along a wall” (69). Following Baudelaire, Paul de Man uses the term “dédoublement as the characteristic that sets apart a reflective activity, such as that of the philosopher,” from everyday consciousness (de Man, Blindness 212). The confidence man’s masquerade of different identities makes personal the division of the unified subject into multiple perspectives while containing each within the catch-all entity of the modern


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“stranger.” Difference on the ship is channeled through his baffling and homogenizing consciousness which is already a mere reflection of reality in fiction. Some critics have argued that The Confidence-Man is a thinly veiled parody of Emersonian transcendentalism and Thoreau’s writings on friendship. 14 More generally, it is also a self-conscious critique of realist mimetic representation. 15 Melville’s allegorizing of the nation as the Ship of Fools and personifying modern subjectivity as being a stranger, or a shape-shifting confidence man, register a discomfort with the past in the national discourse. By painting a tableau of travelers moving downstream along the western frontier of the Mississippi, he juxtaposes the allegorical timelessness of the plot, the lack of action and character development, with the inevitable movement of temporal and social changes. Since the past is only accessible through memory construed in the present, [10], (10 fiction and reality are intimately connected. Melville’s narrative solution for representing the past within the present is using the narrative device of theater. Drama is the in-between genre of life and fiction, the blurring of the boundaries Lines: 10 between action and acting. 16 ——— Through the discussion of the relationship between fiction and reality, Mel13.0pt ville addresses a more general question. He asks, What is the relationship be——— tween nature and artifice, between life and its fictional reproductions? In The Normal P Confidence-Man everything seems to be borrowed, from costumes to language. * PgEnds: E Melville sometimes parodies his predecessors Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Milton when drawing up his characters. “Original characters” in fiction are rare, [10], (10 laments the narrator of the last metanarrative chapter: “But they can hardly be original in the sense that Hamlet is, or Don Quixote, or Milton’s Satan” (238). The aesthetic and political questions Melville asks point toward the puzzling issues of modernity: How is one to cope with the new market economy? And, how to represent it in language? Melville also grapples with issues of identity and citizenship in a growing and diversifying nation that still holds dear its republican ideal of homogeneity. His struggle is akin to that of his contemporary, Karl Marx, who conceptualized the problem of representation through the fetishism of the commodity, which also takes the form of a masquerade (see Marx 436– 37). Marx’s notion of “[t]his Fetishism of commodities” (436) is also a blueprint for a larger fetishization of reality: with the cloaking of actual material and social relations, life itself becomes opaque as do language and narrative expression. Melville’s The Confidence-Man reenacts the opacity of social life as a masquerade of the nation-state. A common thread in the narratives of modernity is a sense of loss in the world, a loss of something profoundly authentic and meaningful in itself. Walter Benjamin calls such mystery an “aura.” Melville’s own concerns with loss are specifically ethical and political; he sets aside aesthetic considerations and addresses them in the metanarrative chapters. The novel’s


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allegoric and ironic expression is a commentary on the inadequacy of a realist representation of America on its way to become a global empire. In The Confidence-Man there is no space, actual or imagined, left for nostalgia and utopian thinking about the nation-state. Instead, the novel allegorizes the modern state as a community of strangers. Cosmopolitanism being at home everywhere by the mid-nineteenth century has disintegrated into metaphysical and political homelessness. In a more ethnically specific and historically situated interpretation of homelessness, the German Jewish philosopher-sociologist, Georg Simmel, distinguishes between modern strangers, such as the European Jews, and the ancient Greek notion of the stranger as barbarian in his essay, “The Stranger” (1908). For the Greeks the barbarian was an alien with no past or family, someone who did not speak Greek. For Simmel the modern stranger is a “positive relation: it is a specific form of interaction” (402). Simmel calls him an “inner enemy” and a “potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going. . . . But his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself ” (402). His mobility within the closed group “embodies the synthesis of nearness and distance” (402). Because of his mobility, the stranger encounters members of the community to which he is not organically connected. The stranger can offer a “positive and specific kind of participation”: his is a freedom of detachment (404). Simmel’s category of “strangeness” is thus an alternative to membership in the nation: “The stranger is close to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features of a national, social, occupational, or generally human, nature. He is far from us, insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people” (406). The stranger’s presence in the community allows for an identification that is beyond the restrictive categories of difference or sameness that justify national boundaries and define citizenship. The stranger’s presence questions a community’s belief in its authenticity and uniqueness. Strangeness is a generalized condition that laces even the most intimate relationships. A feeling of estrangement appears with the recognition that a relationship (personal or national) is not unique, that it has happened before “that they experience an experience that has occurred a thousand times before” (406). Elsewhere Simmel defines modernity as a psychological response to new social relations that render the stranger the norm and the community an aberration. For Simmel the experience of modern life connects the ephemeral to the eternal: “The essence of modernity as such is psychologism, the experiencing and interpretation of the world in terms of the reactions of our inner life and


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indeed as an inner world, the dissolution of fixed content in the fluid element of the soul, from which all that is substantive is filtered and whose forms are merely forms of motion” (qtd. in Frisby, Georg Simmel 325). His explanation of modernity thus has more affinity with Baudelaire’s painter of the passing moment than with Weber’s notion of rationalization. 17 The repeatability of experience eliminates the “aura” of originality or authenticity. The stranger personifies a “more general . . . more insurmountable” strangeness in modern social relations: “harmony, and nearness are accompanied by the feeling that they are not really the unique property of this particular relationship” (Simmel 407). The only commonality that sustains the stranger within the group is his or her “generally human commonness,” which keeps the stranger “near and far at the same time” (407). Moreover, being a stranger to the “country, city, race, etc.,” the generality of commonality, is nothing but “merely the strangeness of origin: common to many strangers” (407). For this reason, “strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regards to them than the element of nearness” (407). Simmel’s point of reference is the history of European Jews, but his assessment of the dynamics of modern social relations allows for a more general interpretation. If estrangement is a necessary part of everyday life, then the stranger is a pertinent member of the nation. With globalization comes the stranger who is from the countryside, another city or country, or from an other race. But strangers eventually may outnumber the citizens. The riverboat Fidèle is a microcosm of the nation where everyone is a stranger, including the confidence man or cosmopolitan. While Simmel points out only the positive aspects of the stranger’s presence in a community because of his (or her) capacity for offering an unbiased perspective, Melville’s is a much more pessimistic approach. In his fictional world there is no basis for trust since the Fidèle’s traveling community (America) is unsure of its identity as a group. Although many of the characters exhibit confidence, they each base their trust in some kind of a gain, such as health, money, security, or charity all with the “help” of a confidence man. Since the confidence man is a stranger, his promises are not guaranteed by a community. In The Confidence-Man the modern-day cosmopolitan or stranger is an ambiguous figure: he points back to earlier times where the law of confidence could hold solely on the authority of the Bible and spread the word of philanthropy, but he is also a knave who takes advantage of fools who do trust. 18 In the cultural and economic climate of “No Trust” the confidence man both challenges contemporary assumptions and takes advantage of them. The Indian Wars and the growing national tension about slavery created an atmosphere of crisis in confidence that Melville captures in the image of the nation as the Ship of


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Fools. The “foreign” bodies of Indians, black slaves, and the growing number of immigrants threaten to sink the American republic. In Melville’s imagination an alternative form of nationalism is the encompassing cosmopolitanism of strangers that can incorporate all foreign bodies. In his imagery the incorporation is literal, sometimes violent. In the novel’s narrative economy the nation becomes uniform through commodity exchange. The new community is constituted of strangers who wander the “decks” of the nation and engage in anonymous transactions. Melville anticipates the rise of cosmopolitan corporatism as an alternative to the classic republican national narrative. The new citizen of the American nation is the cosmopolitan and the stranger. When the nation is asked to identify itself, Melville sees a new entity born: “[W]ho in thunder are you? A cosmopolitan, a catholic man; who, being such ties himself to no narrow tailor or teacher, but federate, in heart as in costume, something of the various gallantries of men under various suns” (132–33). The stranger sees and exposes the violence necessary for creating homogeneity within the national body. He critiques the “science” of categorizing people and the “scientific measurements” used for predicting behavior;19 he is cynical of counterfeit medicine (the story of the “OmniBalsamic Reinvigorator,” chapter 16, 83) and of purely monetary relations (128). Under such circumstances life seems like a masked ball: “Life is a pic-nic en costume; one must take a part, assume a character, stand ready in a sensible way to play the fool. To come in plain clothes, with a long face, as a wiseacre, only makes one a discomfort to himself, and a blot upon the scene” (133). Consequently, the novel announces a new modern era. It is defined by a diverse population that questions previous notions of the nation. Melville imagines the changing image of the United States as a nation of strangers: “Out of the old materials sprang a new creature” (180) and an alternative view of the individual “self ” in the cycle of metempsychosis, that is, the transmigration of the souls. 20 Melville’s novel allegorizes the crisis of national identity that had already started in the second half of the nineteenth century. Modernization produced a new subjectivity, that of the stranger. Melville’s vision of America as a “nation of strangers” anticipates the political and literary debates on nativism and pluralism that became dominant in the ethnic modernist era between the world wars.


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2. Harlem Renaissance Masquerades Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston

One finds emancipation in strange places, and in strange forms. Countee Cullen, “The Dark Tower,” My Soul’s High Song

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fter the initial appearance of the confidence man as a deaf mute on the Fidèle in Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the next person to beg for charity is Black Guinea, a “grotesque negro cripple.” His identity is immediately questioned and taken for a masquerade by the wooden-legged man: “He’s some white operator, betwisted and painted up for a decoy. He and his friends are all humbugs” (14). Black Guinea plays on the stereotype the passengers of the Fidèle or America have imposed on him: grinning, shuffling, and beating his tambourine, he exudes the jollity all expect of him. Carolyn L. Karcher takes the wooden-legged man’s accusations of Black Guinea seriously and suggests that he may indeed be neither black nor crippled:

Black Guinea, who may after all be only a white masquerading as a black, incarnates the confidence man’s joke on America: that the phantasm of race, in whose name Americans had refused to extricate themselves from the slave system that was destroying them, may not exist except in the white mind. Even more subversively, Guinea’s masquerade indicates that there is no way of ascertaining whether he is black or white hence no way of being sure that the treatment American society has reserved for him as a black man may not have been “mistakenly” inflicted on a white. (206)

Moreover, the character of Thomas Fry (Happy Tom) in one of the interpolated tales bears a resemblance to Black Guinea. In fact, both characters may be disguises of the confidence man: both are crippled and “good natured and laughing all the time” (95). Ambiguous and unstable identities and “abject” bodies (see Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror) are recurring themes in Melville’s novel. The crippled bodies of Black Guinea and Happy Tom, along with the first appearance of the confidence man as a deaf mute, signify the memory of a loss marked in the flesh. By keeping the confidence man’s identity ambiguous, Melville puts on a minstrel

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show of the whole nation. The costumes and masks of the confidence man hide his identity and racial and cultural difference in general under the guises of a trickster who dons stereotypical gestures and speaks in clichés. Writings against the tradition of minstrel shows, popular with white audiences at the turn of the twentieth century, and against widespread racial stereotyping and racial masquerade were central to the literary imagination of the Harlem Renaissance. In this chapter, I read Countee Cullen’s only novel, One Way To Heaven (1932), as a coherent though schizophrenic narrative about a lower-class one-armed con man. In my interpretation, the novel’s competing story lines function as counterdiscourses to the Harlem Renaissance’s bourgeois ideology of the “New Negro.” In the next section I suggest that Nella Larsen’s novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), are symptomatic of the estrangement some of the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance experienced at the time of conspicuous consumption before the crash of 1929. The collapse of the stock market was devastating for both blacks and whites. Some critics place the end of the Harlem Renaissance at the Depression and the petering out of white patronage; others connect it to the Scottsboro tragedy of 1931, which was a traumatic experience in the black community.1 I will conclude my discussion of the Harlem Renaissance with a reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). I suggest that her text projects an imaginary all-black national utopia upon the “nativist,” racially segregated, and white-dominated reality of early twentieth-century America. While these texts are hardly ever included in the modernist canon, I suggest that by virtue of their subject matter they express ideas that critique the modern condition in the United States, often through innovative textual forms. The condition of “modernity” in America refers to a broad range of interrelated historical forces including economic relations of production, distribution and consumption; the new technologies of mechanical reproduction; the effects of neocolonialism, imperialism, and black migration from the South to northern urban centers; the new waves of immigration from Europe, Asia, and the Americas; urbanization and democratization; and the rearticulation of normative systems based on race, class, nationality, sex, and sexuality. “Modernism,” in its broadest sense, refers to the cultural forms, practices, and relations elite and popular, commercial and folk through which people attempted to make sense of and represent the worlds of modernization and modernity. The modern implies alienation from and nostalgia for an imaginary past. “Nostalgia” in its etymology refers to the medical condition of unbearable “pain to return home.” 2 This temporal and spatial displacement is projected as a standard of culture against the modern. 3 The psychological experience of the modern reflects the crumbling of seemingly stable political and social entities. Modernism is an expression of loss and

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a sense of melancholic despair over what Melanie Klein calls “primary internal objects” in their condition of permanent loss.4 The heterogeneous movement of literary modernism radically questions the nature of modern selves and problematizes the means whereby selfhood can be expressed. Modernism is haunted by “object loss”: the loss of a coherent and autonomous self, a social order or national cohesion, metaphysical guarantees, and colonial empires. Ethnic modernist narratives capture such personal and collective losses and express them as fractured identities. The literature not only mourns the splitting of the ego, however, but also celebrates the diversity of selves that open up possibilities for role play, impersonation, mimicry, stereotyping, masquerade, passing, and phantasmagoric identification. 5 During the 1920s Harlem was a center for fashion and entertainment for African Americans trying to escape the segregation, racial persecution, and economic deprivation of the South. The New Negro movement that flourished there and led to the Harlem Renaissance encompassed art, literature, music, film, and theater. The Harlem Renaissance, while centered in a particular section of New York City, was a product of broad national and international social, political, and cultural influences. It occurred simultaneously in a number of other urban centers such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Similar to the larger pattern of post–World War I racial segregation of the country, the literary establishment had also kept its separation of white and ethnic literatures. Such segregation is still the case in American literary criticism. It is a rare exception that the Harlem Renaissance is included in discussions of American modernism. By dedicating a chapter to the Harlem Renaissance, I intend to bridge the gap between the ethnic peripheries and the high modernist centers in literary studies. Generally, not much attention has been paid to the important connection between ethnicity and modernism either in high modernist criticism or in writings about the Harlem Renaissance. For example, even the quite thorough and informative monograph by Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (1988), stays clear of making connections between the two parallel literary movements. Wintz cites several practical reasons for his decision to exclude the white literary establishment from his discussion, including the idea that “black writers faced unique problems that were related to the racial situation in America,” and, therefore, black writing should be examined “as a distinctive body of literature” (4). He concludes,“Race and race-consciousness were constant themes in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance; this was not true of white literature during the period. Instead, during the twenties white writers ignored the race question more than at any other time in American literary history” (4). Still, some critics have attempted to establish political and aesthetic ties be-

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tween the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism. 6 Houston A. Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987) bridges these separate fields. Baker argues with Nathan Huggins’s seminal assessment of the Harlem Renaissance, which calls the movement “provincial” and a “failure” because the majority of writers (except for James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison), wrote in traditional nonexperimental genres. Baker defines modernist black literary “sounds” as the functions of specifically African American discursive practices. He reads high modernist texts, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and instead of a generalized falling apart of Western civilization, he sees a threat to white male bourgeois supremacy from a “rising tide” of color. He concludes that under the “threat” of multicultural challenges art must resort to elitism, to representations of the unconscious and the primitive, or to the advocacy of authoritarian movements and institutions. 7 In Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (1988) Baker redefines the Harlem Renaissance movement in more politicized terms: its agenda was to remove the majority of the black population “from the poverty, illiteracy, and degradation that marked southern black agrarian existence” (4). He identifies a very different task for black intellectuals from that of their white counterparts in Europe and the United States: instead of bashing the bourgeoisie, they rather attempted to create one; rather than dissenting against existent black expressive forms and genres, African American writers sought to enhance them and bring them before a sophisticated audience; and finally, rather than repudiating the emergent modern age they welcomed the new century free of slavery, racism, and impoverishment (4). Thus, ethnic modernism, which includes the Harlem Renaissance, is a precarious mix of the old and the new concerning the writings of ethnic and racial minorities within the modernizing nation-state. 8 I would like to expand upon Baker’s argument and suggest that the New Negro movement of racial uplift, led by the “talented tenth” W. E. B. Du Bois propagated, proved suffocating and limiting to some. 9 Among those, Countee Cullen found the role of a “racial poet” too limiting; and women authors such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston felt like outsiders within the mostly male and urban middle-class elite of the New Negro movement. Moreover, there was an internal rift between the Jamaican Marcus Garvey’s “back to Africa” program that defined black nationalism on separatist terms and the middle-class literati of the Harlem Renaissance who looked to racial uplift within the hegemonic nation-state through assimilationist American social values. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association set more radical goals than its political rivals’. Garvey critiqued his contemporaries by saying that “[t]here is many a leader of our race who tells us that everything is well, and that all things will work out themselves and that a better day is coming” (Lewis, The Portable Harlem


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Renaissance Reader 23). But, Garvey maintains: “You have to treat this world as the world treats you; we are living in a temporal, material age, an age of activity, an age of racial, national selfishness . . . we are calling upon the four hundred million Negroes of the world to take a decided stand, a determined stand, that we shall occupy a firm position; that position shall be an emancipated race and a free nation of our own” (23–24). The failure of Garvey’s Black Star Line company sealed the fate of black separatism for several decades till its revival with the leadership of Malcolm X. 10 Henry Louis Gates Jr. develops the concept of the “black cultural sublime” in discussing the Harlem Renaissance as a narrative invention of writers and thinkers of the decades between the world wars: “Harlem, as a site of the black cultural sublime, was invented by writers and artists who were determined to transform the stereotypical image as ex-slaves, defined as members of a race inferior biologically and environmentally unfitted for mechanized modernity and its cosmopolitan forms of fluid identity into an image of a race of culture-bearers” (“Harlem” 162). The cultural movement identified as the “Harlem Renaissance” is an artificially constructed “imagined community” of unified ideas and a common heritage. The movement propagated and popularized the agenda of racial uplift by the help of an elite class of the “talented tenth,” but such constructions were constantly transgressed and critiqued. The often nationalistic, masculine, bourgeois, and heterosexist tone of the New Negro movement, itself lodged within the discourse of white hegemony and imperialism, had created an intellectually and politically ambivalent climate for writers who questioned such values. The works of Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others, mark the margins of the nationalist and patriarchal construct of the Harlem Renaissance. In his political writings W. E. B. Du Bois psychologizes the diverging impulses of the African American experience. In the often cited The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois names the black experience as both American and other, as a case of “double-consciousness.” This experience of alienation from white society is described as being “shut out from their world by a vast veil” (2). The “souls of black folk” are constructed through the gaze, the judgment, and violence of a dominant society that thinks it sees as it veils: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (3). The veiling of African Americans by a racially divided society also enacts a dynamic of self-masking and playing upon projected (and introjected) stereotypes. 11 In modernist narrative, different forms and voices proliferate and blur the


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boundaries between distinct forms and genres by utilizing strategies of collage and hybridization. In ethnic modernist texts, the formal innovation of mixed genres also involves the message of mixed cultures and races. Concerning the intimate correspondence between genre and message, Celeste M. Schenck suggests that we “think of genre, not as a pure, hypostasized, aesthetic category, but instead as a highly textured, overdetermined site of political contention, a literary space constructed often ex post facto from the conflicting materials of critical, political, racial, and sexual bias” (243–44). She also points to the paradox of formal innovation and political conservatism in literary modernism: “[I]f, as both Lukács and feminist critics have demonstrated, the radical poetics of Modernism often masks a deeply conservative politics, it might also possibly be true that the seemingly genteel, conservative poetics of women poets whose obscurity even feminists have overlooked might pitch a more radical politics than we had considered possible” (230–31). Schenck’s insights on the political radicalism of traditional forms in women’s poetry during the modernist period can be extended to the seemingly anachronistic narratives of romance and melodrama in African American fiction. While the radical poetics of the modernist movement attracted much critical attention over the years, the recycled genres of romance and melodrama have been mostly ignored, even though they give form to radical critiques of modernism and modernity. Such texts may be formally traditional, but their aesthetic and social critique is often radical. The novels of Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston get critical attention only in the context of the Harlem Renaissance and not as examples of modernist expression. All three authors were marginalized even within the literature of the Harlem Renaissance: Cullen’s only novel is still thought of as a narrative failure when set against his “race poetry;” Larsen was considered by her peers to be too ambivalent about her racial and class allegiances; and Hurston was chastised by her contemporaries for playing on the less favorable racial and rural stereotypes of blacks. Susan Gillman in “The Mulatto, Tragic or Triumphant?” associates the genre of the melodrama in its tragic mode with an individualized stance against racism and in its romance mode with a communal conception of race (242). 12 Gillman identifies a coherent body of racially determined fiction at the turn of the century, which had previously been contained within “mulatto fiction” or the “novel of passing” in American literature (221). She situates the racial melodrama, usually associated with the figure of the mulatto, in the legal and scientific discourses of miscegenation, blood, race, and sex. Gillman argues that the genre of the race melodrama focused on the situation of the black family, usually of interracial genealogy, and on the issue of race mixture as a means of negotiating the social tensions surrounding the formation of racial, national, and sexual identity in the post-Reconstruction years. Gillman reads


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the melodrama as a socially progressive genre that grapples with unresolved racial issues. Such stories represent particular races, regions, or class interests that must come together in the service of racial and national unity (222–23). Gillman’s project to read the lowbrow genre of racial melodrama as part of a politically progressive discourse restores the genre’s respectability (225). 13 Miscegenation, stereotyping, and textual hybridity are symptomatic of a racially divided culture. To adapt Susan Gillman’s category of the race melodrama to the conditions of the interwar era, in this chapter I focus on novels that reuse this popular cultural form to fit their critical and politically progressive agendas. Nella Larsen’s novels have been categorized as “novels of passing,” while Countee Cullen’s only novel has been dismissed as a narrative failure because of its two plots. Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) codes hybridizations, both racial and linguistic, through the metanarratives of slavery and rape told in the fragmented stories of Janie’s grandmother and mother, even though Hurston chooses a seemingly autonomous all-black community for the setting of her racial melodrama. Countee Cullen’s novel is a critique of the narrative construct of the New Negro. He stretches the genre of the race melodrama to contain a parody of Harlem Renaissance bourgeois salon life. Critics usually regard Cullen’s only novel to be structurally flawed because of its two plots, which are divided along class lines. Nella Larsen’s novels (along with Jessie Fauset’s) are unfavorably compared to Zora Neale Hurston’s portrayals of independent black women. In the highly politicized and race-conscious atmosphere of the Harlem Renaissance the figure of the “tragic mulatto” was suspect. While Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen were well known in their times, they have become quite obscure compared to the critical success and idolization of Zora Neale Hurston after her rediscovery by Alice Walker in the early 1970s. What follows is a rereading and critical revaluation of the novels of Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. They each subvert the narrative and ideological paradigms of the New Negro movement in order to express urgent political, aesthetic, and epistemological critiques that are particularly modern and especially American.

Countee Cullen Just now I can really imagine nothing quite so emblazoned with interest as being a Negro. It is to be a la mode: and who would be the fashion should remember that in a slip shod world to be the vogue is also to be peculiar, and apart. Countee Cullen, “The Dark Tower”

After the astonishing success of his first collection of poems, Color (1925), in 1926


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the fresh Harvard graduate Countee Cullen became assistant editor to Charles S. Johnson at Opportunity, the magazine the National Urban League had started just a few years earlier. They wanted to make the magazine available for the manuscripts of young talented blacks to prepare their way for acceptance by other publications. Countee Cullen reviewed new books and commented on the literary and art scene in his column, “The Dark Tower” (1927–28), writing from Harlem and Paris. In one of his columns (April 1928), Cullen describes his journey to the “far South,” to Talladega, as “a fair college brimming with eager young Negroes intent on drinking at the Pierian well despite the indifference of their native states” (Cullen 544). 14 While there, he is struck by the landscape which is “red and raw with welts of oppression” that barely hides the signs of racial violence: “[A]nd we shuddered at the sight of a charred bit of stick stretched like a slumbering snake along the road; we knew not of what insane rites it might have been part, what human torches it once might have served to light” (545). Juxtaposing the scenes of racial violence with an affirmation of black pride, he also recalls a story, a “tribute to one of ours,” that is told by the conductor of his train. Cullen remarks, while crossing the Jim Crow section of the South: “One finds emancipation in strange places, and in strange forms” (545). Such a comment could be said of Countee Cullen’s literary career also: he was a noted poet of traditional and romantic lyric forms, who was later castigated for his lack of political and racial commitment. In an interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (February 10, 1924) Cullen said the now famous words that puzzled and even angered many of his contemporaries: 15 If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be poet and not negro poet. That is what has hindered the development of artists among us. Their one note has been the concern with their race. That is all very well, none of us can get away from it. I cannot at times. You will see it in my verse. The consciousness of this is too poignant at times. I cannot escape it. But what I mean is this: I shall not write of Negro subjects for the purpose of propaganda. That is not what a poet is concerned with. Of course, when the emotion rising out of the fact that I am a Negro is strong, I express it. But that is another matter. (23)

He often struggled with the dilemma of the color line. For example, at the end of his poem, “Yet Do I Marvel” (Color 1925), he exclaims: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” (Cullen 79). He was an old-fashioned poet who wrote his senior thesis on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Later, while earning his master’s degree at Harvard, he became enchanted with the poetry of John Keats. He puzzled many by writing in the traditional forms of sonnets and ballads at the height of the modernist movements that experimented with new forms and genres. James W. Tuttleton attributes Cullen’s subsequent poetic decline to his turning to white literary romanticism instead


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of turning to the literary forms produced by of “rising black consciousness” in Harlem (131–32). Tuttleton concludes that “the application of modernist techniques to problems of racial identity and experience would have deepened the impact of poems like ‘Heritage,’ ‘The Black Christ’ ” (134). Blanche Ferguson, Countee Cullen’s biographer, marks 1929 as the beginning of Cullen’s creative decline: “He was writing now more from force of habit than from inspiration. He was plagued by the fear that he might keep on writing when he no longer had anything significant to say” (118). The critical reception of Cullen’s only novel One Way to Heaven (1932) was mixed. In his monograph on Cullen, A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams, Houston A. Baker mostly focuses on Cullen’s poetry. In Alan Shucard’s assessment, the novel “suffers the consequences of having two plots that touch each other only tangentially and are never adequately reconciled by incident or tone” (72). Most critics agree that the novel is flawed because of its two only vaguely connected plots. Such a structural flaw becomes even more visible, when compared to the formal mastery of Cullen’s earlier poetry. James O. Young reassesses Cullen’s poetry and novel from the perspective of the post-Depression generation’s political and socialist radicalism. Young comments that “it is significant that a novel in which the plot is concerned with the salvation of ‘low-life’ figures, the most carefully delineated character is a middle-class socialite” (209). Young assumes that because the novel’s detailed description of Constancia’s character and social circle overwhelms the working-class plot, Cullen is more interested in bourgeois values than in issues of race and class. Such reading of the novel discounts Cullen’s ironic and highly critical take on the new phenomenon of an emerging black middle class encouraged by the ideology of racial uplift and by the New Negro movement. One Way to Heaven was published after Cullen’s last book of poetry, The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929). Critics agree that with the publication of his last book of poetry a phase of Countee Cullen’s literary career had ended. In the 1930s Cullen explored other genres besides lyric poetry: the novel, the drama, song lyrics for musical comedy, children’s literature, literary translations. Most of Cullen’s earlier poetry in the collections such as Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Ballad of the Brown Girl: An Old Ballad Retold (1927) is racial and Christian in its themes. The poems often deal with his feelings of ambiguity about being a black pagan poet overburdened by Christianity. Gerald Early, in his introduction to a collection of Cullen’s works, views such ambiguity and disjuncture as a peculiar existential position that meshes the sacred with the secular and the religious with the political. Thus, Early concludes his point that to be a “black Christian is to be caught always between ideology and theology, to be unsure whether one’s major concern is eschatology or a power struggle” (Early in Cullen 58). Besides the ambiguity about Christianity, lying, deception,


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and hypocrisy were the central themes of Cullen’s career in the 1930s. The long poem, “The Black Christ,” and his novel both address the theme of religious conversion, either real or feigned.

‘‘the black christ’’ (1929) Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy. . . . Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Countee Cullen wrote“The Black Christ” in 1929 and published The Black Christ and Other Poems in 1930 when he was already a star of the Harlem Renaissance. The long poem is the story of a lynching in which Christ appears and offers himself for the intended victim, Jim, who had struck down a white man and is condemned to death by a mob. Jim, an agnostic worshiper of the spring, is in the company of a white woman and commits his assault because a white man laid a “hand on spring” and insulted his love. He is mysteriously resurrected after the lynching, and his brother, the narrator, finds faith again: O world grown indolent and crass, I stand upon your bleak morass Of incredulity and cry Your lack of faith is but a lie. (Cullen 208)


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The poem recalls tragic events that lead to renewal, retribution, and confirmation of faith in transcendental justice. Initially, the world in the poem is abandoned by providence and is taken over by hatred and prejudice: “God, if He was, kept to His skies, / left us to our enemies” (212). In the final scene of resurrection and regained faith, Cullen puts law and order back in the world, even if it is through mystery and religious epiphany. Such resolution to explicit racial violence is wishful thinking on the poet’s part, just like his romantic but also ironic vision of an imagined Africa, “three centuries removed,” in his poetry from the mid-1920s (“Heritage” in Color). Cullen resolves the conflict between paganism and Christian belief with a resignation to the latter. A reviewer in The Christian Century suggested that Cullen made the “lynched Negro the savior of his race” (Smylie 170). 16 A decade before, the naacp closely examined and adopted the findings of the report on lynchings, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States (1919). Out of 3,224 known lynchings and burnings, 2,522 of them were black, most for alleged murders, many for alleged rape of white women. The report documented the breakdown of legal process and the reign of lawlessness in many communities.


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In his long narrative poem written in rhymed tetrameter Cullen correlates the crucifixion with lynching. In A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917) Walter Rauschenbusch describes the crucifixion as a lynching, an act of mob spirit and mob action, and the cross as providential self-sacrifice and solidarity with humankind (Smylie 160). Cullen incorporates both themes in his long narrative poem. Similarities between “The Black Christ” and Melville’s short novel Billy Budd have been noted by critics (see Early 207 or Smylie 162). Although there is no proof that Cullen read it, it is known that he had read other books by Melville. Themes of Christian resignation, revolution, and the necessity of order are apparent in both works. Like Billy Budd, Jim of “The Black Christ” is tempted and rebellious but resists temptation; like Billy, Jim kills another man. While Billy Budd goes to the gallows to satisfy the demands of the king’s law, Jim hangs on the tree for his challenge on the southern racist taboo of “gynecolatry” and his impulse to avenge innocent love. Both texts judge and comment upon the injustices of society. Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, just like Cullen’s poem, ends in an apocalyptic vision of the world. Melville’s resignation to the condition of modern skepticism and impending violence in the name of the nation and white supremacy exposes the superstitious naiveté and disastrous weakness of the Fidèle’s passengers that makes them vulnerable to the scheming of a mysterious confidence man. 17 Cullen’s vision is less sinister, even though there is a palpable violence lurking in the coded images of his poetry. Though Cullen’s poetry is not as explicit a critique of racial violence and of white supremacy as that of the protest literature of the 1930s, his voice is deeply politicized while also stylized and romanticized.

one way to heaven (1932) . . . the second as farce. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

In Houston A. Baker’s reading, “The Black Christ” is a conversion tale: “it is one of those recountings complete with mysterious events and marvelings at the Lord’s way that characterized the black church during Reconstruction and that can be heard today to ‘testify’ ” (Afro-American Poetics 82). One Way to Heaven is also a conversion story but, lacks the solemn tones of “The Black Christ” with its mystery and miracle of the resurrection. The novel, written only two years later, repeats the theme of conversion as farce.


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Cullen wrote “The Black Christ” in Paris. One Way to Heaven, on the other hand, is an American book whose themes of conversion and justice are ironic interpretations of law and order in a schizophrenically split and segregated nation. From the distance of Paris, lynchings and American race relations in general may have seemed amendable and easy to transcend. A later poem, “To France,” published in The Medea and Some Poems (1935), depicts France as a place where blacks most feel free. Cullen gives “The Black Christ” the subtitle, “Hopefully dedicated to White America.” Such poetic hopefulness is missing from the novel. The parallel stories of Sam Lucas and Constancia Brandon expose naive faith in both religion and the possibility of remedying racial violence through soirées and intellectual debates. By the early 1930s Cullen comes to the conclusion that such middle-class genteel solutions cannot amend the scars of racial and class injustices. The disjunction between the novel’s two plots has been the target of critics from early on. They find Cullen’s novel to be structurally flawed because the story of Sam’s conversion and marriage compares unfavorably to the elaborate and more convincing depiction of Constancia Brandon’s salon. 18 Yet, the novel’s plots, which connect only tangentially, address the very divisions between African American middle and lower classes, blacks and whites, and between the realms of the sacred and the profane. Sam Lucas is a black confidence man with an abject body, who puts on a masquerade of religious faith and honest conversion. His first appearance in the story recalls a series of losses: Sam Lucas, striding through the raw, mordant December night felt that he had chosen an ill moment in which to come to Harlem. New York was bright and gay, and these colored people looked happy, as he had been told he would find them; but they also seemed too intent upon their own affairs to promise much attention to an illstarred stranger. Their faces did not radiate that hospitality which he had left behind in the southland. He had been years getting here, dallying on the way, making love and turning tricks, settling here and there for a month or two, or a year, but with his eyes and his heart set more loverlike on New York than they had ever been set on a woman. Time and time again he had unloosed himself from the tightening knots of an embrace and had set his feet on the way he felt he had to go. He had begged rides in wagons and trucks from town to town (it was a long way up from Texas); he had swung on to freighters and would bear their mark upon him till he died. It was over six years now since he had lost his left arm when, clambering down to escape detection, he had missed his footing and had fallen, with his arm stretched out like an enticement for the sharp rear wheel that had kissed him into unconsciousness. Ever after he had had a feeling of having been buried before his time. (351–52)

Cullen’s description of Sam Lucas depicts the con man through events of loss.


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First of all, he is leaving behind the South that offered hospitality and a benignly gullible audience for his card tricks. Harlem, on the other hand, proves to be an unwelcoming place even against its reputation for being the new “race capital.” Moreover, on the way to the North, he is physically maimed in an accident. His stretched-out arm recalls the image of the Black Christ who sacrifices himself in vain for the sake of humanity. Thus, instead of the Mecca of black pride and racial uplift, Harlem becomes a tomb that buries one alive “before his time.” It is clear from Cullen’s depiction of Harlem, that even though “New York was bright and gay, and these colored people looked happy,” the newcomer Sam Lucas won’t find the fortune and freedom he hopes for. Instead, he is doomed to function there as “an illstarred stranger” who meets his untimely death at the end of the novel. During his wanderings in Harlem, Sam stumbles upon the Mount Hebron African Methodist Episcopal Church, which holds its last “watch-night service” of the year. Rev. Clarence Johnson, the “famed singing evangelist from Texas,” is leading the congregation of the “largest Negro church in New York City” (352– 53). As the members of the congregation step forward to testify their faith, the pressure to step forward concentrates on the newcomer: “And then Sam Lucas and the devil stepped in” (363). Sam throws a pack of cards and a razor on the floor masking his “abject and confused misery” in the pretence of “strong and religious faith” (370). The preacher immediately recognizes him to be the confidence man who four years before has feigned conversion at a revival in Memphis that turned out to be the “best night of converts” (369). The novel exposes both religious faith and belief in the occult (through Aunt Mandy’s hoodoo practices) as masquerades and empty pretenses. Moreover, Sam Lucas’s feigned conversion before his death is a farce of faith he acts out for Mattie’s sake. He is scarred in body and psychically marked as abject from the first moment he appears in the novel. He comes to Harlem not to be part of the New Negro movement but to try his luck. Cullen’s narrative is a parody of the “Harlem novel.” His ironic critique of the bourgeois literati who gather at Constancia’s soirées competes with Sam and Mattie’s melancholic melodrama. Cullen subverts the genre of the melodrama to expose the class bias and patriarchal ideology of the New Negro movement as farce. Melville’s Protean confidence man who begs for trust but spreads paranoid disbelief takes on the costume of a religious convert in Countee Cullen’s novel.19 While the turn-of-the-century race melodrama usually resolves the riddle of mistaken identity through the pseudoscientific narrative device of “one drop of blood” by the end of the story, in the modernist version of the race melodrama there is no resolution to racial conflicts. 20 Sam dies with a lie on his lips, his body broken by illness, and his marriage to Mattie in shambles. The novel centers on Sam Lucas’s fake conversion and Constancia Brandon’s


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soirées that provide occasions for free speech. Constancia likes to repeat: “In my home you are in a veritable temple whose reigning deity is free speech; if I stooped to facetiousness I might even say of unbridled loquacity” (457). Sam Lucas is the modern version of Melville’s confidence man who, in the Harlem of the 1920s, exploits people’s desire for transcendental resolutions, while Constancia creates a masked ball of racial tolerance through mixing and matching her guests in her parlor. Her middle-class guests, artists and new aristocrats, are entertained by the freak show of Sam and Mattie’s wedding put on by Constancia. Her soirées offer only theatrical resolutions to social injustice. Sam Lucas is a con artist, so is Constancia. Her gatherings function as elaborate confidence games of free speech and tolerance. Cullen exposes such pretences as fake through a poignant scene: Constancia invites a white supremacist ideologue, Prof. Seth Calhoun from Alabama, to lecture on “The Menace of the Negro to Our American Civilization.” She also invites the Duchess of Uganda, née Mary Johnson, and Lady Hyacinth Brown who advocate a Garveyist backto-Africa, “Africa for Africans” separatist perspective. In an ironic twist, the two camps find themselves uneasily on the same side. Cullen’s narrative position is markedly ironic and outside of the two featured ideological positions, thereby exposing the common bigotry and naiveté of both: By way of explaining the duchess and Lady Hyacinth, it may be noted that the Back-toAfrica movement was the heart and entrails of a society whose aim it was to oppose to the American slogan of “The United States for the White Man” the equally noninclusive shibboleth of “Africa for the Black Man,” in this case, the favored descendant of Ham being the American branch. The society held its meetings in a large barn-like building which had once been a church, and certainly one not dedicated to the gods of Africa. Credit must be given the society for realizing the importance of something most organizations for civic or racial betterment are inclined to ignore, namely an appeal to the pleasurable instincts of man. With the Back-to-Africa movement went costumes that rivaled those of the private guard of the king of England; parades up and down the broad avenues of Harlem every Sunday and once or twice during the week; thunderous orations at the seat of the cabal; and wild heady music blared forth by a specially trained, constantly practicing brass band. Added to this was the beautifully naïve and romantic way in which the society marched forward to meet the future. . . . The Back-to-Africa movement realized that it was simply a matter of constantly lessening time before Africa should be back in the hands of its rightful sons and daughters; therefore, in order to speed the zeal of the members, the officers began to parcel out what they already considered as properly, even if only remotely, theirs. Out of deference to the existing powers they did not proclaim an Emperor of Africa, but they did elect a President for the Nonce [of the African Empire]. With his election their deference to lesser dignitaries ceased, and the far-off, unsuspecting African territories were parceled out left and right, as dukes,

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counts, and marquises of Africa were created without stint and without thought of the complications which might arise should the Negroes, once returned to their ancestral home, decide upon a republican form of government. (472–73)

By emphasizing the arrogance and theatricality of the movement, complete with costumes and parades, Cullen points to the stylized and imagined nature of nation building: the community imagines itself through putting on a performance of the African Empire, which is similar to the nostalgic and fictional depiction of African scents and images in his earlier poem, “Heritage,” but this time as farce. Moreover, the enactment of a new founding repeats the English colonial structure: the new colonists reestablish the royalist power structure and parcel off the land to an alien, Western, proprietary class. 21 The novel’s double plot may be read as a narrative of the splitting of the self along racial, class, and gender lines. One story line is about a lower-class, abject-bodied, terse, and deviant black male character, Sam Lucas, while the other is about an upper-class, educated, loquacious, and ambiguously passing (simultaneously black and white) female character who freely moves between classes, races, and discourses Constancia Brandon and her social circle. Sam’s abject body is a representation of the projected (and introjected) stereotype of the lacking and castrated black self, which is schizophrenically joined with Constancia’s material and verbal excesses. The two characters personify both black and white stereotypes of racial uplift and assimilation, while the two plots allegorize racial subjectivity under the scrutiny of the double gaze. 22 Constancia has a light complexion and could pass but chooses not to, repeating the stereotypical cliché of “black hedonism” for preferring to “stay” black: “I enjoy life too much, and enjoyment isn’t across the line. Money is there, and privilege, and the sort of power which comes with numbers; but as for enjoyment, they don’t know what it is” (471). Her soirées are fashionable gatherings for those who like to masquerade in the guise of blackness. She herself is a fantasy the ego-ideal to her class-conscious guests: “Constancia Brandon, for whom Mattie worked, was the mirror in which most of social Harlem delighted to gaze and see itself. She was beautiful, possessed money enough to be willful, capricious, and rude whenever she desired to deviate from her usual suave kindness; and she was not totally deficient in brains” (407). The recognition of one’s image in the mirror, according to Jacques Lacan, is an illuminatory mimicry. The mirror image is a gestalt that symbolizes the mental permanence of the “I” at the same time it prefigures its alienating destination (Lacan, Écrits 4). Constancia serves as the “Ideal-I” for her guests to gaze at and gain recognition from. On the other hand, Sam Lucas is the image of the fragmented and real-life ego. The formation of black subjectivity is split along class and color lines in Cullen’s novel. Blyden Johnson, one of the early critics


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of Cullen’s novel, notices the split between the two plots. He speaks of Cullen’s novel’s two plots: one “with the charm of a fairy tale,” the other “too stilted and self-conscious for good satire” (338–43). Constancia’s narrative is coded as a fairy tale fantasy, as ideal and timeless. She simply disappears from the narrative after one of her soirées. Sam Lucas’s scarred and abject body serves as the organizing center for the second, trickster, narrative. The novel is a series of maskings: Sam Lucas pretends to convert to Christianity, while Aunt Mandy keeps two faiths. She is a practicing Christian who also consults her cards for good fortune. She represents traces of the conjure woman of black folk tradition. Seemingly, Constancia’s salon is a haven for racial mixing where the guests move around freely under various guises as if in a masked ball. For example, Stanley Bickford, one of Constancia’s guests, is described as “tall, indolent, and so Nordic that he spent the major part of his time patiently explaining that he could look as he did and according to American standards be colored at the same time”; while his girlfriend, Lottie Smith, “was so unlike what she ought to be; more like a successful business man’s or a doctor’s wife in appearance than like a blues singer” (421). When Sam Lucas enters Constancia’s salon for his wedding, he feels out of place, as the guests look at him with a castrating gaze: “They were not of his world. They had what he hadn’t and didn’t want money and schooling; they were society. He eyed them insolently, not bending his head when they bowed to him, raging inwardly as he saw them gaze in astonishment at his lonely arm” (425). Cullen counteracts the discourse of exoticism of the New Negro movement with a narrative of abjection and death. In order to expose white desire for the “black sublime” (for primitivism and sexualized and linguistic exoticism) as well as black moral exceptionalism (already present in turn-ofthe-century race melodramas and later in Alain Locke’s program for the New Negro) as artificial and displaced fantasies, Cullen projects a castrating image of black male sexuality and a pretence of religious conversion: “That velvety streak which a knife-wound had left on Sam’s face, and the imperfection of his empty sleeve, made them think of dark and sinful doings, gambling and drinking and fighting. He was mystery and miracle and the confirmation of faith to them” (366). Seemingly, Constancia’s salon is home to free speech: “it is the one place in which the vaunted Yankee freedom of speech and thought are really given full leeway. Here one says what he thinks, and whether it be boresome, brilliant, or brutal, his right to say it is seldom challenged” (445). The professed freedom only masks judgment and prejudice: A case in point was Samuel Weinstein, the Columbia University student who was assembling a thesis on Negro writers; he not only bought and read books by Negroes, but

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had the embarrassing habit of remembering plots, authors’ names, and isolated lines of poetry. He was a thorn in the flesh of most of the darker members of the society, for whom the chief raison d’ être of Constancia’s soirées was the impromptu program, the buffet collation, and the inevitable dancing which brought the evening to a close. (446)

What is truly at stake in Cullen’s novel is the instability of racial identity: Who is a “real Negro”? What counts as an authentic racial African American self? The novel’s divergent plots capture the built-in ambivalence of racial stereotypes. While the New Negro is in vogue in the arts and entertainment, the movement has only created a new stereotype for the race, a new metaphor in the rigid signifying chain of racism, but actual segregation, oppression, and violence have not disappeared. Even though there is a new class of African Americans, like the emerging middle class of Constancia Brandon’s salon society, the racial stereotypes are still fixed in a fetishistic gaze that denies difference: the metonymic chain of signification and the polarized power structure have only gained new metaphors of identification. Such a racialist discursive situation produces stereotypes that are the products of fantasy on both sides, black and white, creating a simulacrum of racial origin. One of Constancia’s guests offers a glimpse to the fantasy of origins: Mrs. Johnson was a teacher in the New York public-school system, and ipso facto a person of more than ordinary importance in Harlem Society. Her race consciousness dated back some seven or eight years. She had, as it were, midwifed at the New Negro’s birth, and had groaned in spirit with the travail and suffering of Ethiopia in delivering herself of this black enfant terrible, born capped and gowned, singing “The Negro National Anthem” and clutching in one hand a pen, in the other a paint-brush. (448)

Cullen’s ironic tone expresses his ambivalence about the rigid and dogmatic program of racial uplift propagated by his contemporaries. Critics have faulted Cullen for not creating a coherent and mimetic plot in prose, as opposed to his formal and stylistic mastery in poetry. But, it is precisely the novel’s structural “incoherence” that captures the discursive ambivalence of racial stereotyping. The novel’s narrative hybridity and its two plots sound out a dialogic critical discourse of race. I suggest that we read Cullen’s novel as an ironic text set against his earlier conversion story “The Black Christ” and not merely as a roman à clef of the Harlem Renaissance. 23 The narrative satirizes and ironically represents Cullen’s disillusionment in the New Negro movement, his earlier romantic and poetic modes of expression, his ambivalence about the binaries of pagan and Christian beliefs, and his dissatisfaction with the rigid lines between black and white identities. The turn from metered and controlled classical lyrical forms to prose and from romanticism to irony signal a drastic change in Cullen’s expression. His voice is politicized by racial undertones: the earlier


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romantic imagery of a phantasmagoric and wishful Africa (in “Heritage”) gives way to a modernist farce and deeply disillusioned irony in his vision of America. His critique of the philosophy of the “talented tenth,” propagated by Du Bois, uncovers the middle-class bias within the ideology of racial uplift. The two plots also code class difference. The imagined geographical distance between Sam’s neighborhood and Constancia’s street translates into the psychic distance between the ideal and real images of the self: “There is more rapport between Constancia’s neighborhood and fashionable Fifth Avenue, than between the latter and that of Sam and Mattie, although Sam and Mattie, too live on Fifth Avenue” (Cullen 488). Sam and Mattie feel physically uncomfortable in Constancia’s falsely harmonious salon milieu. Sam Lucas plays confidence games on gullible church crowds hungry for transcendental solutions to real social problems, racial abjection, and class exclusion. Constancia’s trickery plays on the narcissistic and alienating acceptance of middle-class and white values that offer only theatrical solutions to racial and class tensions. The constructed nature of racialized language is manifest in the stylized conversations of the soirées and Constancia’s own flowery diction. Her language is the white Ideal-I to Sam and Mattie’s black dialect: But her tongue was her chief attraction, ornament, and deterrent. Her linguistic powers, aided by an uncanny mnemonic ability, had brought her high honors at Radcliffe and the headlong devotion of George Brandon. Her schoolmates called her Lady Macbeth, not that she was tragic, but that she never spoke in a monosyllable where she could use a longer word; she never said “buy” when she might use “purchase,” and purchased nothing to which she might “subscribe.” The first night he met her at an Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity ball George Brandon had pleased her mightily by dubbing her Mrs. Shakespeare. (408)

Constancia’s language is similar to the religious speech exploited by the preachers who try to gain new converts through the testimonials of formulaic language worn out by repetition and, finally, devoid of all meaning: “Their testimonials were repetitious and rich in homely similes” (355). In Constancia Brandon’s speech, language becomes reified in the endless performance of speech for speech’s sake. Sam and Mattie speak in dialect. There is hardly any interaction between them and Constancia’s social circle. In opposition to Constancia’s excess of language, Sam is at a loss with words; he is a “[creature] of action and not of speech” (402). In the novel’s narrative economy language is the last hope for reconciliation with god, between social groups, and between Sam and Mattie. But such illusionary hope for reconciliation fails in each case. To illustrate the inflated and impoverished quality of speech, let me point to the example of the


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Reverend Johnson. He tries to convince the congregation to convert through his repeated and semantically empty banter: “Who will come? Who will change his way of living? If I were you I’d make a change, If I were you I’d make a change, If I were you I’d make a change, Oh, my friend, can’t you hear God calling, Won’t you make a change?” He had come down from the rostrum, and now he stood within the little railing that encircled the lower pulpit. As he sang he held his hands extended toward them, pleading. (360–61)

Ironically, the preacher gains more converts through Sam’s performance of conversion than through his own preaching. The novel performs a complex system of stereotyping: it constructs Sam as abject and Constancia as excessive in her desire. Sam’s abjectness is a projected white view through the judging gaze of Constancia’s social circle. They disapprovingly ask of Mattie: “However will you manage with a husband lacking an appendage?” (415). Mattie and Sam’s discomfort in the company of the Brandons’ wealth, language, and superficial social mingling is exacerbated by the marriage ceremony Constancia puts on. She treats her maid as an object and their wedding as a spectacle (see 419). Because the novel tries to resolve class, racial, and gender differences through narrative performance and language an impossible task the text fragments. The two plots speak alongside and against each other in a complex web of dialogic voices and against dominant white and New Negro discourses. The linguistic hybridity of black dialect and educated middle-class speech that is, white fictional characters in blackface and the absurdity of white supremacists and black nobles sharing the same solution to the racial divide creates a cacophonic narrative. Melville had allegorized the racial and cultural hybridity of the nation aboard the Fidèle through the constantly changing persona of the confidence man. Cullen tells two stories: he writes one plot over the other and stretches the melodrama to an excess thereby producing a subversive trickster narrative. Cullen’s novel belongs to the double-voiced trickster discourse of African American literary tradition in which one point of view is self-consciously layered on or against another to produce a hybridized critical speech. 24 The racial melodrama in its modern version does not simply play on hidden identities that would clearly expose the tragedies of slavery, miscegenation, and rape by the end of the narrative. Rather, the injuries are made opaque through an intricate


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narrative play on racial, class, and gender masquerades where the identities are known to be only masks and costumes. There is no grand finale of unmasking that identifies the cast of characters by their identities and social injuries. The modernist racial melodrama leaves identities ambiguous and solutions to the racial, class, and gender conflicts unresolved. The themes of racial passing and the emerging of the black middle class, which occupy center stage in Cullen’s novel, are somewhat altered in the novels of Harlem Renaissance women writers. For example, Nella Larsen’s narratives add the new dimensions of gender and passing to the scope of the modernist race melodrama.

Nella Larsen

[33], (20) One day I went to an awful tea, terribly dicty [snobbish]. Dorothy was there. We got talking. In less than five minutes, I knew she was “fay” [white]. Not from anything she did or said or anything in her appearance. Just just something. A thing that couldn’t be registered. Nella Larsen, Passing


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[In] the “Real,” where I would situate the politics and the reality of “race.” Hortense J. Spillers, “All the Things You Could Be by Now”

The orgiastic revival meeting that Sam Lucas attends in Countee Cullen’s One Way to Heaven recalls a crucial scene in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928). On her return to Harlem, the “obscure” Helga Crane (Larsen, Quicksand and Passing 8) ends up in the gutter (literally) after her desperate trans-Atlantic search for home and community. She is rescued by “a grotesque ebony figure” that takes her inside the black mission church and a religious orgy opens to her eyes with “wild ecstatic fury.” A “crazed creature” cries out to her: “A scarlet ’oman. Come to Jesus, you pore los’ Jezebel!” (112). Nella Larsen opens her second novel, Passing (1929), with a stanza from Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” from Color (1925): “One three centuries removed / From the scenes his fathers loved, / Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, / What is Africa to me?” (Larsen 140). Larsen’s characters are strangers, exiled from an imaginary and “three centuries removed” African homeland. In her novels the race melodrama is transfigured into a story of melancholic object loss; that is, the modernist story of the loss of traditional communities. Marita Golden calls Nella Larsen’s heroines “emotional nomads, women whose intelligence and genius for rebellion make them ill suited for the proscribed existence ordained by whites for blacks in the 1920s and ’30s segregated America. No tragic mulattos here” (vii). Both Countee Cullen and Nella Larsen question the feasibility of defining race in nationalistic


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terms to re-create an imagined community through literary narratives and political slogans. Instead of reconciling race with unity in nationalistic terms, they both point to disunity within the urban black community based on class and gender differences. Their characters do not find salvation or unity within the confines of a nation, church, or marriage. Cullen’s One Way to Heaven and Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing challenge the patriarchy, middle-class bias, and nationalistic tone and agenda of the Harlem Renaissance movement. Nella Larsen, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black West Indian father, established her reputation within the Harlem Renaissance as a fashionable novelist in the late 1920s. Her short writing career ended in controversy over charges of plagiarism of her short story, “Sanctuary” (1930). She then disappeared from the literary and social scene and later died in obscurity, a life story quite similar to Jean Toomer’s and Zora Neale Hurston’s. 25 Nella Larsen is usually categorized as a writer of “novels of passing.” In Barbara Christian’s critical assessment, passing is “a phenomenon that exemplifies the shakiness of the upper middle class blacks” (44). What is not explained in this definition is that black women did not take on the risky business of passing for whites lightly. While passing was a way to cross class and racial lines, its dangers often overwhelmed the benefits. If found out, a passing African American woman or man could pay for the indiscretion with their life. Therefore, I would suggest that African Americans who pass, instead of merely being shaky about their racial affinity, as Christian suggests, rather intricately and courageously negotiate the boundaries of racial masquerade and ethnic mimicry to the end of “upward” mobility. Instead of the backwards-looking aspect of passing that recalls the “tragic mulattas of the antebellum novels” (Christian 45), in Larsen’s novels passing is a form of political resistance that is similar to the subversive stance of colonial mimicry Homi K. Bhabha identifies. For Bhabha mimicry “repeats rather than represents”: it is a “partial presence” or a “partial representation [that] rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence. . . . [It is a] metonymy of presence. . . . Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind the mask” (Location 88–89). Similarly, Nella Larsen’s characters play on the camouflaging and subversive powers of racial and gender mimicry. While Bhabha celebrates the power in mimicry that “radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history” (90), Larsen exposes the psychic horror of lacking a racial, class-identified, or gendered “essence” in the masquerade of identities. Her characters suffer physically and mentally under the stress of ambiguous identities: Helga Crane feels suffocated by her lack of a stable racial and ethnic belonging, and, thus, she listlessly moves between blacks and whites, between countries and continents in Quicksand. Furthermore, Irene’s mounting hostility for Clare’s passing leads to an aggressive and fatal resolution to racial and gender ambiguity at the end of Passing.


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Nella Larsen and her alter ego characters personify the restlessly moving ships that cross the hybrid spaces of, what Paul Gilroy calls, the “Black Atlantic”: they are in constant motion “across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean” (4). Their recurring experiences are those of exile, relocation, and displacement; that is, being permanent strangers at home and in the world. Gilroy interprets such a “transcultural reconceptualization” (17) as a “desire to escape the restrictive bonds of ethnicity, national identification, and sometimes even ‘race’ itself ” (19). Thus, the Black Atlantic is “defined through this desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (19). Nella Larsen adds another dimension to the political categories of Bhabha’s colonial mimicry and Gilroy’s transnational and transcultural Black Atlantic: she also explores the issues of gender and sexuality. Judith Butler in “Passing, Queering” suggests that one possible solution to the puzzling ending of Passing is to read Irene and Clare’s relationship not in a dominantly heterosexual context, the two women competing for the attention of Irene’s husband, Brian, but as homoerotic. Therefore, the triangulation of desire in Larsen’s novel is similar to the pattern Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet identifies as homosociality, where the opposite sex usually mediates homoerotic desire. Nella Larsen’s heroines are more confused about their place in the world at the end of the narrative than in the beginning: Helga Crane in Quicksand is back in the south, pregnant for the fifth time, her listless search for home and community still not resolved. The puzzling ending of Passing can be read either as a suicide or as a murder of one friend by another. Judith Butler interprets Passing as a latent homosexual attraction, “queering,” between Clare and Irene, adding the dimensions of class, gender, and sexuality to the novel’s racial theme of passing. In the following section I will expand upon my reading of Larsen’s fictional works as ethnic modernist texts that are critical of the nationalistic, patriarchal, heterosexist, and middle-class tone of the Harlem Renaissance movement.

‘‘the wrong man’’ (1926) In 1926 Nella Larsen published two short stories in Young’s Magazine: “The Wrong Man” in January and “Freedom” in April. Later she would denounce these as “hack writing.” Both stories are free of racial commentary most likely because of the magazine they appeared in. The first, “The Wrong Man,” already contains one of Nella Larsen’s dilemmas that she would repeat in both of her novels: how to be an independent woman and still maintain respectability in a society that values marriage and family.


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The heroine of “The Wrong Man,” Julia Romley, upon entering Myra Redmon’s party, immediately surveys the crowds, nervously anticipating whom she might encounter. Now that she is securely married, Julia wants to hide her past: “The old nursery rhyme came into her mind . . . ‘Rich man, poor man, / Beggar man, thief, / Doctor, lawyer, / Indian chief.’ George nodded. ‘Yes, that’s it. Everybody’s here and a few more. And look, look! There’s the “Indian chief.” Wonder who he is? He certainly looks the part’ ” (Larsen, Intimation 4). To her horror, she finds herself face-to-face with a man who has reappeared unexpectedly from her hoped-to-have-left-behind past. She recognizes the costumed stranger to be Ralph Tyler, who years before financed her studies in art school. She sends a note with the maid to arrange a meeting in the summerhouse that evening. There she begs him to keep their past a secret: “You think that even now I should tell him [her husband] that I was your mistress once. . . . He wouldn’t understand that, when a girl has been sick and starving on the streets, anything could happen to her; that she’s grateful for food and shelter at any price” (8). In this passage Larsen emphasizes the cumulative effects and disadvantages lowerclass women are subjected to. Even though Julia has achieved respectability by way of a middle-class marriage, she cannot leave behind her past of indigence and moral failure. In a surprise ending to the story, she confesses her secret to a stranger. It may be the maid’s mistake of having taken the message to the wrong man, though it is not clear why Julia would not notice that she is not talking to Ralph. Even though the man interrupts her several times to let her know that he is not the person she thinks he is, he cannot stop her desperate self-exposure. In an ironic twist, the Indian chief costume that the “real” or assumed (the person’s identity is left ambiguous and rather exotic) Ralph Tyler wears, covers the body of “an explorer just back from some godforsaken place on the edge of nowhere. . . . Been head of some expedition lost somewhere in Asia for years, given up for dead. Discovered a buried city or something; great contribution to civilization and all that, you know. They say he brought back some emeralds worth a king’s ransom” (6). In this encounter of mistaken identity, Ralph participates in the archetypal male journey of self-discovery through encounters with other cultures (the usual quest stories of missionaries, colonial explorers, and professional and amateur anthropologists), and masquerades as the other as an object of the colonial fantasy in his Indian chief costume, while Julia mimics the appearance of female respectability through her marriage. In Larsen’s later works the issue of black female respectability resurfaces, but this time around it is specifically connected to issues of race, class, sexuality, and political and national belonging, as opposed to the race-neutral representations in her short stories. Helga Crane of Quicksand is constantly and dangerously close to losing respectability because of her lack of a family.


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Moreover, she is constantly ambivalent about affiliating with and committing to the black community around her and the philosophy of racial uplift of the Harlem Renaissance. In Passing Clare Kendry passes for a white woman and marries a wealthy white man in order to escape poverty. In the marketplace of women, marriage either in the context of a religious community such as the Reverend Green’s congregation in Alabama in Quicksand or in the context of a middle-class milieu and social program of racial uplift in Passing seems to be the only solution for middle-class status quo and respectability. But in each case, the institution of marriage fails to fulfill its promise to provide black women with lasting financial and emotional security or with a nurturing and culturally supportive community. Zora Neale Hurston is one of the first writers to abandon the masculine, urban, and middle-class message of the Harlem Renaissance that confined black women to respectability exclusively through marriage. Hurston, herself a sharp critic of patriarchy and the institution of marriage, suggested that solidarity between black women was key to the agenda and success of racial uplift for African American women.

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quicksand (1928) The family of James Vayle, in near-by Atlanta, would be glad. They had never liked the engagement, had never liked Helga Crane. Her own lack of family disconcerted them. No family. That was the crux of the whole matter. Nella Larsen, Quicksand

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Quicksand appeared in 1928 to enthusiastic reviews. Both black and white reviewers recognized Nella Larsen’s talent as a new novelist, particularly in the depiction of the psychology of her characters. W. E. B. Du Bois, in the Crisis, hailed her work as “on the whole, the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt.”Alain Locke, in Opportunity’s“1928: A Retrospective Review,” called the novel a “study of the cultural conflict of mixed ancestry . . . a social document of importance, and as well, a living, moving picture of a type not often in the foreground of Negro fiction. . . . Indeed this whole side of the problem which was once handled exclusively as a grim tragedy of blood and fateful heredity now shows a tendency to shift to another plane of discussion, as the problem of divided social loyalties and the issues of the conflict of cultures.”26 Larsen chose the epigraph of her novel from Langston Hughes’s poem “Cross”: “My old man died in a fine big house. / My ma died in a shack. / I wonder where I’m going to die, / Being neither white nor black?” With this quote Larsen situates the main character’s ambiguity about her racial belonging


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within the context of slavery. Helga Crane much like Nella Larsen herself is of Danish and West Indian descent. She likes to surround herself with expensive things, and she is constantly on the move because she feels trapped by the limitations of her race and gender. The episodic structure of the narrative follows her geographical movements. In search for community and belonging, Helga moves from the South to the North, to Harlem (with a short stop in Chicago where she is denounced by her white uncle’s new wife, who wants no associations with the black side of the family), then to Europe (Denmark), and back again to the American South, where the rural Alabama community finally suffocates and possibly kills her. Following a nervous breakdown, she is pregnant again with her fifth child. In the last scene of the novel, she is shown as she is lost in a desperate and melancholic fantasy: “It was so easy and so pleasant to think about freedom and cities, about clothes and books, about the sweet mingled smell of Houbigant and cigarettes in softly lighted rooms filled with inconsequential chatter and laughter and sophisticated tuneless music” (135). The novel opens with an image of the bored, pampered, and isolated Helga Crane, who is suffering from the perceived provinciality of the small southern college town. Even though she is engaged to a fellow teacher who would offer her financial security, family, and community, she decides to leave all behind in search of something vaguely better. In Naxos, the all-black southern college, her fiancé, James Vayle, is bothered by Helga’s lack of familial ties. Their engagement is a result of both being new at the small black college: “She had been engaged to him since her first semester there, when both had been new workers, and both were lonely” (7). He quickly finds his place in the college: “He was now completely ‘naturalized,’ as they used laughingly to call it” (7). She, on the other hand, stays “queer” and an “outsider” to his community, with no intentions to conform to the “unmistakable Naxos mold” (7). Helga breaks off the engagement and leaves the restrictive environment of the school, which was modeled on the Tuskegee Institute. First she goes to Chicago to reclaim some familial ties on her white mother’s side, but she is immediately rejected by her uncle’s new wife. Her next stop is in New York, the center of black life among the upper-class circles of Harlem. For a short time she appears satisfied. She especially enjoys living with Anne Grey, a well-to-do cultured widow, whose company provides her with an access to Harlem society. She experiences “joy at seeming at last to belong somewhere. For she considered that she had, as she put it, ‘found herself ’ ” (44). This lull of contentment does not last long either. Anne’s rigid views on “social inequality” and “equal opportunity for all,” and her obsession with the “race problem” alienate Helga (48), whose desires are immediate and mundane: “Some day she intended to marry one of those alluring brown or yellow men who danced


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attendance on her. Already financially successful, any one of them could give her the things which she had now come to desire, a home like Anne’s, cars of expensive makes such as lined the avenue, clothes and furs from Bendel’s and Revillon Freres’, servants, and leisure” (45). In her hopes for happiness, she has bought into the culture of “possessive individualism.” She desires a life of things and commodities that most Jazz Age middle-class white women accepted as a fashionable fact of life. American high modernist fiction is filled with female characters who dedicated their lives to shopping and to addictions of other sorts (see the novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cather, or Barnes). Helga’s alienation from Harlem society leads her to Copenhagen to visit her mother’s sister and, possibly, to finally settle down in Denmark. Aunt Katrina and Uncle Herr Dahl represent family for Helga, and Denmark is a place of escape from racism in the United States. Nonetheless, once in Copenhagen she soon discovers that she is a stranger and an exotic “other.” She finds the portrait her Danish suitor, Axel Olsen, paints of her disturbing: “It wasn’t, she contended, herself at all, but some disgusting sensual creature with her features . . . although collectors, artists, and critics had been unanimous in their praise and it had been hung on the line at an annual exhibition, where it had attracted much flattering attention and many tempting offers” (89). The picture is an accurate representation of the grotesque and alien images projected upon her by the surprised gazes of passers-by on the streets of Copenhagen: The day was an exciting, not easily to be forgotten one. Definitely, too, it conveyed to Helga her exact status in her new environment. A decoration. A curio. A peacock. Their progress through the shops was an event; an event for Copenhagen as well as for Helga Crane. Her dark, alien appearance was to most people an astonishment. Some stared surreptitiously, some openly, and some stopped dead in front of her in order more fully to profit by their stares. “Den Sorte” dropped freely, audibly, from many lips. (73)

Even though the racism is somewhat toned down on the streets of Denmark, nevertheless, it is palpable to Helga. The seeming adoration and curiosity she experiences there is just a less violent version of American home-grown racial hatred due to the ignorable numbers of peoples of African-descent in the northwestern parts of Europe. Similarly, many expatriate blacks, like Josephine Baker, Claude McKay, and James Baldwin, among others, spent some time in France hoping for some relief from racism in the United States. But all they found was a different version of discrimination. They were accepted as entertainers or as lovers but not as equals. When Axel Olsen proposes marriage to Helga, she realizes that she is a mere sexual art object for him. Moreover, she misses the companionship of other blacks in her new all-white environment. The only place she can occupy in Danish society is that of a curiosity or a grotesque spectacle, like the African


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American artists in the circus she so much despises. In the circus, after a dull program, the black artists “bring down the house,” making Helga even more uncomfortable and estranged: [U]pon the stage pranced two black men, American Negroes undoubtedly, for as they danced and cavorted, they sang in the English of America an old ragtime song that Helga remembered hearing as a child, “Everybody Gives Me Good Advice.” At its conclusion the audience applauded with delight. Only Helga Crane was silent, motionless. More songs, old, all of them old, but new and strange to that audience. And how the singers danced, pounding their thighs, slapping their hands together, twisting their legs, waving their abnormally long arms, throwing their bodies about with a loose ease! And how the enchanted spectators clapped and howled and shouted for more! (82–83)

She feels exposed by the performance and disturbed by the white audience’s response. The performers on the stage grotesquely mirror Helga’s ostentatious clothes and jewelry chosen by her aunt. Both spectacles are admired by the white audience but despised by Helga. Her repeated visits to the circus keep her in a dazed double gaze. She sees herself as other by watching the watchers, simultaneously identifying with and being repulsed by the black singers on stage: “But she returned again and again to the Circus, always alone, gazing intently and solemnly at the gesticulating black figures, an ironical and silently speculative spectator” (83). While in Copenhagen, at first, Helga feels at home because of the seeming absence of overt racism, though she feels stared-at and alien because of her status as a curiosity. Larsen uncovers the hidden dynamics of superficial cultural tolerance in a homogeneous white society. The absence of an actual black population in Danish society conveniently veils deep-seated xenophobia and nationalism: Fru Fischer was late. As usual. She apologized profusely. Also as usual. And, yes, she would have some coffee. And some smørrebrød. Though she must say that the coffee here at the Vivili was atrocious. Simply atrocious. “I don’t see how you stand it.” And the place was getting so common, always so many Bolsheviks and Japs and things. And she didn’t “begging your pardon, Helga” like that hideous American music they were forever playing, even if it was considered very smart. “Give me,” she said, “the good oldfashioned Danish melodies of Gade and Heise. Which reminds me, Herr Olsen says that Nielsen’s ‘Helios’ is being performed with great success just now in England.” (80)

Copenhagen becomes an unbearable place for Helga. After she rejects Axel Olsen’s marriage proposal, she returns to New York. But her reentry into black life in Harlem is even more problematic than it was the first time around. She experiences the same narrow-minded nationalism and showy pledge of


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patriotism she was repulsed by in Europe Americans:

but this time performed by African

Nevertheless she felt a slightly pitying superiority over those Negroes who were apparently so satisfied. And she had a fine contempt for the blatantly patriotic black Americans. Always when she encountered one of those picturesque parades in the Harlem streets, the Stars and Stripes streaming ironically, insolently, at the head of the processions tempered for her, a little, her amusement at the childish seriousness of the spectacle. It was too pathetic. (96)

Her familiar sense of alienation is revived by the jingoism of the Harlem street parade. Shortly after her return to Harlem she suffers a nervous breakdown. Helga wanders the wet streets aimlessly after an embarrassing encounter with Dr. Anderson. She is tossed by a whirl of wind into the rain-swollen gutter, finding herself in front of a church, in which the revival meeting turns into a grotesque frenzy: “Little by little the performance took on an almost Bacchic vehemence” (113). In the midst of the religious orgy she suddenly finds the hope for a community: “It was a chance at stability, at permanent happiness, that she meant to take” (117). She tries to resolve her constant longing and feeling as a stranger in the world by putting her fate into the hands of “God and man” (117). In her desperation she marries the preacher and moves with him to Alabama. Helga starts a new life in the southern rural black community with her husband, the Reverend Pleasant Green. He offers Helga an uncomplicated life as a minister’s wife and as a member of the religious community. But Helga finds no relief in her new community. The novel ends abruptly with another mental breakdown and with her fifth pregnancy: “and hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, she began to have her fifth child” (135). In her introduction to Nella Larsen’s novel Deborah E. McDowell suggests that fighting to overcome a “heritage of rape and concubinage,” nineteenthand early-twentieth-century novels about black women imitate the purity of the sexual morality of the Victorian bourgeoisie: “Since the very beginning of their history running over roughly 130 years, black women novelists have treated sexuality with caution and reticence, a pattern clearly linked to the network of social and literary myths perpetuated throughout history about black women’s libidinousness” (xii). According to McDowell, Helga Crane’s restlessness signifies anxiety about sexuality. Referring to previous critics who read Quicksand only in terms of the divided racial self, she warns, “in focusing on the problems of the ‘tragic mulatto,’ readers miss the more urgent problem of female sexual identity” (xvii). Instead, she suggests that “Helga is divided psychically between a desire for sexual fulfillment and a longing for social respectability” (xvii). Helga must pay a dual price, marriage and pregnancy, for sexual expression.


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The climax of the novel, then, is the religious orgy that brings with it marriage and sexual release. McDowell concludes,“Closing the novel on this note, Larsen openly castigates the dual price marriage and pregnancy/childbearing that women must pay for sexual expressions. The novel’s images of suffocation culminating in the title, ‘quicksand,’ reinforce the point” (xxi). While McDowell’s interpretation complicates the “tragic mulatto/a” theme further by putting it into the context of African American female writing and the taboos surrounding black women’s sexuality, it is also important to point out that Helga Crane’s restlessness is rooted in her permanent status as a stranger among both blacks and whites, men or women. Her restlessness is not only motivated racially and sexually but also by a dissatisfaction in being be fixed in one identity whether it is religious, political, national, racial, or gender. She is a nomadic figure, not unlike the nomadic subjects Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe as “desiring machines,” the modern units of consumption and consumerism. The feeling of claustrophobia Helga experiences in her marriage and through her pregnancies also applies to Larsen’s critique of all other social units and institutions: besides those of marriage, gender, sexuality, and race, she also exposes the limiting and suffocating aspects of nationalism within European, American, or African American contexts. The last may be also read as a direct attack on the black separatist nationalist message propagated by Marcus Garvey. Denmark is a paranoid space for Helga, xenophobic while also obsessed with the exotic. So is America. Larsen critiques the United States as a similarly paranoid space through the proliferating images of entrapment and “asphyxiation” (134) and through representations of Helga Crane as “grotesque,” a “curio” or “peacock.”27 Larsen explains Helga’s curious status in both white and black society as due to her being neither white nor black; that is, being a mulatto. Hortense Spillers comments on the ways in which the mulatto represents both a taboo and a solution in a racially divided society. The figure of the mulatto the literary cliché of the nineteenth-century white“plantation school,” both black and white abolitionist writers is a literary device for articulating and at the same time concealing miscegenation. Spillers defines the ambiguous position the mulatto occupies in American society as follows: Created to provide a middle ground of latitude between “black” and “white,” the customary and permissible binary agencies of the national adventure, mulatto being, as a neither/nor proposition, inscribed no historic locus, or materiality, that was other than evasive and shadowy on the national landscape. To that extent, the mulatto/a embodied an alibi, an excuse for “other/otherness” that the dominant culture could not (cannot now either) appropriate, or wish away. An accretion of signs that embody the “unspeakable” of the Everything that the dominant culture would forget, the mulatto/a,


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as term, designates a disguise, covers up, in the century of Emancipation and beyond, the social and political reality of the dreaded African presence. Behind the African-becomeAmerican stands the shadow, the insubstantial “double” that the culture dreamed in the place of that humanity transformed into its profoundest challenge and by the impositions of policy, its deepest “unAmerican” activity. (“Notes” 165–66)

Spillers defines the figure of the mulatto in the context of American nationalism where national identity covers up racial difference. Her gothic reenacting of “doubles,”“shadowy” presences,“disguises” and “cover ups” reenacts the unconscious romantic narrative of the nation. Larsen pushes her story of the tragic mulatto beyond issues of nation and race and asks what it also means to be a modern self that possesses uncertain familial, racial, and ethnic origins as well as ambiguous sexual desires. Her heroine is introjected into a modernizing landscape that makes it even more difficult for neither the black nor white sides of her character to find community and satisfaction. Helga Crane desperately tries to feign familial ties to hide her lack of connections. Her mark of “strangerness” (after Georg Simmel’s use of the term) and her abjection are hidden: her lack of family is not evidently marked upon her body, though she can never shed the stigma of having no legitimate familial relations. Dr. Anderson, the principal of the black school at which Helga teaches, tries to keep her at Naxos by referring to her being a “lady” who has “dignity and breeding.” Her rebuke to him is, “If you’re speaking of family, Dr. Anderson, why, I haven’t any. I was born in a Chicago slum. . . . The joke is on you, Dr. Anderson. My father was a gambler who deserted my mother, a white immigrant. It is even uncertain that they were married. As I said at first, I don’t belong here” (21). Helga fills the emptiness of family and community with things. She is the modern female subject who comes into being through materialistic appropriation and consumption of goods, mostly jewelry and clothing. She vies for a comfortable middle-class existence that would fill her need for meaning and connections to a group. Helga’s fantasy of material comforts recalls Constancia’s salon in Cullen’s One Way to Heaven. From a middle-class educated African American woman’s perspective, the “inconsequential chatter” of salon life at least offers a possibility for independence, social status, and freedom from want even if such comforts come at the price of alienation. Sam Lucas carves out an existence from a life of lies and tricks. He compensates for his lack of education and loss of an arm by “playing his cards right.” For the black female subject such ambiguity would mean moral demise and certain exclusion from proper society. The modern stranger, if an African American woman, always risks losing her social and moral respectability. Throughout the novel Helga is constantly on the verge of slipping into the category of the “fallen woman.” Her mark of abjection


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is a consequence of her lack of family a lack of stable racial identity and social status. The modernist solution to satisfy one’s personal needs with compulsive wants of consumption fail to fulfill in Helga’s case. She desires what Constancia Brandon already has: material success and social influence. Helga’s restless seeking has no end in sight: she cannot find what she seeks. She is the modern female consumer whose desires can never be satisfied. If we read the character of Irene in Passing as the continuation of Helga’s persona, then Irene has everything Helga dreams about: money, family, and respectability. Still, by the end of the second novel, Irene’s world comes crashing down, proving that the desired secure middle-class existence is not a viable solution for black women in a society dominated by whites. Donna Haraway’s notion of the “cyborg” and her appropriation of the “confidence game” of interpellation suggest the possibility of a new subjectivity that celebrates hybridity while also posing a threat to previous subject positionalities: “A cyborg subject position results from and leads to interruption, diffraction, reinvention. It is dangerous and replete with the promises of monsters” (“Promises” 333). 28 Helga Crane’s monstrosity manifests in her being a stranger in every sense: in terms of her racial and national belonging because of her lack of family and because of her incapacity to commit to any cause or community. Racial hybridity, being a mulatto, is just one aspect of her identity. Her rootlessness and lack of easily identifiable familial, national, and racial origins eject her from all stable structures of belonging. Instead of the exuberance of Haraway’s cyborgs, Helga suffers from being isolated from any kind of community. Her radical social disjunction is the price of free movement between racial, national, and social groups and is, ultimately, the cause of her mental and physical breakdown at the end of the novel.

passing (1929) “Claude Jones!” and launched into the story of how he was no longer a Negro or a Christian but had become a Jew. . . . A black Jew, he calls himself. He won’t eat ham and goes to the synagogue on Saturday. He’s got a beard now as well as a moustache. You’d die laughing if you saw him. He’s really too funny for words. Nella Larsen, Passing Well, take my own experience with Dorothy Thompkins. I’d met her four or five times, in groups and crowds of people, before I knew she wasn’t a Negro. One day I went to an awful tea, terribly dicty [snobbish]. Dorothy was there. We got talking. In less than five minutes, I knew she was “fay” [white]. Not from anything


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she did or said or anything in her appearance. Just couldn’t be registered. Nella Larsen, Passing

just something. A thing that

Nella Larsen’s second and also last novel, Passing, appeared just one year after Quicksand. Her epigraph is a quote from Countee Cullen’s most famous poem, “Heritage,” and she dedicates the novel to Carl Van Vechten and his wife. The irony of such juxtaposition is that she quotes from Cullen, who stirred controversy by not wanting to be remembered as a “negro poet” but rather to be judged based on his mastery of form; then she dedicates the book on passing to the most famous white patron of African American arts during the Harlem Renaissance. Known for his Negrophilia, Vechten often hoped to pass for black. Both figures, Cullen and Vechten tried to appear as somebody else: Cullen mimicked the formal mastery and discipline of classical English poetry, and Vechten wrote about the local color of the Harlem Renaissance in his controversial novel, Nigger Heaven, while masquerading in blackface. Passing is the story of a chance meeting of two childhood friends, both from Chicago. Irene Redfield is married to a successful medical doctor in New York City. The mother of two sons, Irene is part of the upwardly mobile middle class in Harlem society, where she enjoys social prominence and material comforts. She is a successful and content counterpart to Helga Crane’s listlessness. While Irene’s complexion is light enough that she could pass for white, she rejects the opportunity; moreover, she morally condemns others who do so. The novel’s other character, Clare Kendry, is the daughter of a drunken white janitor who “had seduced ruined, they called it a Negro girl,” and who later died in a barroom fight (159). Raised by her father’s white aunts, Clare escapes a life of poverty, possible moral demise, and drudgery by marrying a wealthy white man who assumes that she is white. Irene could pass but chooses not to, while Clare slips into middle-class existence by pretending to be white. Irene’s husband Brian is dissatisfied with life in the United States because he longs for freedom from the racism that impinges upon his existence despite his relatively insulated middle-class status in the black community. Irene is content with the security and stability of their life and is unwilling to consider the move to Brazil that Brian so much desires. Her daily routine and comfortable existence are upset by Clare Kendry’s reappearance in her carefully managed life. Clare now passes for white as Mrs. John Bellew. Her husband unknowingly and jokingly calls her “Nig” because of her “gradually darkening” complexion. He is unaware of his wife’s racial heritage and proudly “bellows” racist comments in her and her friends’ presence. In a highly ironic scene Clare, Irene, and another friend, all passing as white in Clare’s house, sit around sipping tea,


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when Clare’s husband comes home and greets her with his usual “Hello, Nig” (170). In an effort to explain his choice of words he expresses confidence in being securely surrounded by whites. To Clare’s question about what difference it would make after their many years together if she turned out to be “one or two per cent coloured,” John Bellew responds, “ ‘Oh, no, Nig,’ he declared, ‘nothing like that with me. I know you’re no nigger, so it’s all right. You can get as black as you please as far as I’m concerned, since I know you’re no nigger. I draw the line at that. No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be’ ” (171). Irene sums up the situation in thought: “And you’re sitting here surrounded by three black devils, drinking tea”(172). In this confidence game of racial purity, to assume whiteness is merely a gamble with no guarantees. Clare is the most enigmatic figure in the novel. Her mimicry of white middleclass social status hides another taboo besides that of race (“being not white”), the taboo of homoerotic desire. As Judith Butler suggests, besides passing for white Clare plays another game on American national confidence, that of “queering.” Clare provocatively plays on the coincidence of “homosexuality and miscegenation to converge at and as the constitutive outside of a normative heterosexuality that is at once the regulation of a racially pure reproduction” (“Passing, Queering” 266). Reviewing the literature on Larsen’s novel, Butler identifies two critical trends, one historical and one psychological (271–73). Some critics put the two critical views together in order to suggest that race and sexuality are “inextricably linked” and thus Larsen’s “text offers a way to read the racialization of sexual conflict” (here Butler refers to Hazel Carby’s and Deborah McDowell’s readings)(272). Butler offers another interpretation: she suggests that “passing” is a form of “queering” (272). Both subvert the masculine and heterosexual economy of the white bourgeois family and of the Harlem Renaissance literati’s agenda of racial uplift. Butler’s reading uncovers the fault lines of race, gender, and sexuality that rupture the rigid hierarchies of heterosexual desire, white supremacy, and racial purity. Such interruptions introduce not only the risk of interracial desire but also the risk of homoerotic “queering,” which are both counterproductive to the normative reproductive technologies of the nation. Queering is a threat to the institution of bourgeois marriage but also to the discourse of racial uplift. Irene’s husband, Brian, desires another woman, Clare (or so Irene assumes), and also the exoticism of foreign travel: “It’s South America that attracts him,” says Irene about her husband (173). Brian’s longing for foreign travel,“that old, queer, unhappy restlessness . . . that craving from some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous effort to repress, and which yet faintly alarmed her” (178). Brian’s restlessness and his longing for the exotic and travel mask dissatisfaction with his marriage and a “dislike and disgust for his profession and his


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country” (187). Judith Butler makes a convincing argument about the combined subversive powers of miscegenation and homoerotic desire that threaten the discourses of racial purity and compulsory heterosexuality. But, there is another threat involved, one against the discourse of the nation. Consequently, Irene’s policing of Clare’s passing and Brian’s possible philandering (both sexual and national) is aimed at maintaining the status quo of the nation whose foundation is the racially pure, heterosexual, and monogamous bourgeois family. Consistent with Helga Crane’s character and her permanent dislocation in Quicksand, Clare and Brian in Passing represent similar themes of modern homelessness and being strangers at home. In my reading of the novels, racial and sexual homelessness should be viewed within the context of the modern nation. Helga Crane tries to find home in a proper marriage (she marries “within her race” and returns home to a homogeneous southern religious community in Alabama) in order to overcome her racial and sexual alienation. But her story ends with a final and disturbing image of her broken soul and body. A racially appropriate marriage does not offer a viable solution in the first novel. Helga’s marriage is mirrored in Irene’s middle-class family. In both cases, marriage proves to be a trap rather than a solution, even though the feelings of entrapment and suffocation are transferred to Irene’s husband Brian in the second novel. Nella Larsen’s notion of gender and sexuality is not fixed or limited to distinct binaries. Her novels mostly focus on the estrangement and entrapment of female characters, but Irene’s husband Brian also feels estranged in and entrapped by the confines of traditional bourgeois marriage. Sexuality crosses gender lines as well, through a free-flowing and detached desire that can be both heterosexual and homoerotic and that involves both blacks and whites. By bringing non-American examples, such as Denmark and Brazil into the American (black or white) national narrative, Larsen exposes the claustrophobic character of nationalist discourses in general. Judith Butler suggests that the illicit homoerotic desire between Clare and Irene is a seed for a future political alliance between women a community already present in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.29 But, if we take into consideration Brian’s longing to travel and his feelings of entrapment in his marriage to Irene, a marriage that lacks passion and is based on security and racial alliance, then there is an even more inclusive discourse at work: that of the stranger who, regardless of gender, social class, race, and national belonging, cannot find a home anywhere and whose only constant experience is that of suffocation and entrapment. The “discourse of the stranger” codes a psychologically destructive and physically disabling modern subjectivity (much like the con artists of Melville’s and Cullen’s novels) that also serves as a powerful critique of oppressive political institutions such as the bourgeois marriage, distinct and exclusionary class, race, and gender alliances, and national particularity.


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In Passing, Brian wants to flee the United States because of the inescapable racism, even against black professionals living in the “race capital” of Harlem. Irene wants to protect their sons from “queer ideas about things some things from the older boys” (189) and knowledge about racial violence: At dinner Brian spoke bitterly of a lynching that he had been reading about in the evening paper. “Dad, why is that they only lynch coloured people?” Ted asked. “Because they hate ’em, son.” “Brian!” Irene’s voice was a plea and a rebuke. Ted said: “Oh! And why do they hate ’em?” “Because they are afraid of them.” “But what makes them afraid of ’em?” “Because ” “Brian!” “It seems, son, that is a subject we can’t go into at the moment without distressing the ladies of our family,” he told the boy with mock seriousness, “but we’ll take it up some time when we’re alone together.” (231)

The exchange between Brian and Ted expresses solidarity between father and son against Irene who wants to spare her sons from knowing about racism in America. Irene wants to protect them from another danger as well, that of sexuality. Judith Butler has suggested in her analysis of the uses of the word “queer” that it is always connected to silences and silencing about both race and sexuality. In the above quote, Irene performs such an act of silencing. She wants to expunge all discussions on sex and race from their family’s conversations. She insulates herself with the comforts of bourgeois consumerism and the protective enclosure of her family to shut out racial tensions and sexual desire from her world. Clare represents the exoticism of Brazil in Brian’s life. He wants to leave the country in order to leave his profession, racial tensions in the United States, and constant reminders of the indigence of his clients. Clare gets around racial discrimination and violence through intricate games of passing and masquerading. Her confidence game of playing at white and middle-class status in a racist society still leaves space for her to freely project her sexual desire toward Irene. Passing allows for class and racial mobility without having to leave home or the United States. She can be a stranger at home in “white-face,” constantly risking being found out. Through the course of the novel, she becomes more and more reckless in her passing, which ultimately suggests that she desires to be found out. In the final scene, she disappears through the window of a Harlem apartment, with John Bellew present to watch her demise and with Irene’s (helping?) hand on her arm as she begins to fall. She is purged from the narrative in the midst of knowing gazes: “One moment


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Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone” (239). Brian’s desire to leave behind his passionless bourgeois and racially convenient marriage, the violence of American racism, and the poverty of Harlem’s black community connect him to Helga Crane’s character. Helga still thinks that bourgeois existence would allow for freedom and personal contentment: at the close of novel’s day-dreaming scene she imagines herself back in her single life, surrounded by clothes and beautiful things. In the later novel, Brian’s suffocation is induced by middle-class existence. Reading the two novels together one cannot help feel being caught in an endless loop of flight and entrapment. Helga Crane’s escape to Europe is merely a temporary escape from racism, and Brian’s fantasy of Brazil could prove futile as well. Nella Larsen exposes the traps of institutional discourses: those of marriage, race, gender, sexuality, class, and the nation. Each is only a temporary solution for the radical alterity of her characters. And while homelessness, masquerading, passing, and queering prove painfully and dangerously disorienting to the characters, so do the nostalgic dreams of forced unity and homogeneity (such as heterosexual marriage, middle-class status, a religious community, homoerotic desire, and national or racial unity). Her novels anticipate the postmodern discourse of alterity: but while “cyborgs” and “monads” are celebratory incarnations of such alterity, Nella Larsen depicts the psychological strain such radical dislocation places on the self. Her solution is not a nostalgic escape to exclusionary and nostalgic unity either. Her two novels, when read together and against each other, exhaust all easy political solutions, even those of possible female solidarity or homoerotic desire. Moreover, the forced middle-class patriarchal and racial unity of Harlem Renaissance ideology proved to be confining for many African American women writers. Nella Larsen’s novels are modern in their disillusioned and critical look at the irreparable tear in the fabric of unified selves and bourgeois institutions. The broken bodies of Helga Crane and Clare Kendry show the price of becoming victim to hegemonic discourses, even though they may promise liberation (such as the discourses of desire, sexuality, religion, or racial uplift). Like Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen puts into dialogue the disjunctive discourses of race, sexuality, and cultural belonging. Cullen narratively resolves the conflict through a dialogic form, writing one discourse over the other: writing the flowery locution of Constancia over Sam and Mattie’s black and lower-class dialect, or the chatter of the middle-class salon life over the silences and abjection of the black underclass. Cullen exposes the instability and emptiness of racial and religious categories through the illicit masquerades and trickery of a petty con man on one level and through the exhaustion of language’s signifying power in middleclass salons and the church on another.


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Melville’s confidence game on the concept of the nation and the genre of the epic novel, set aboard the Fidèle, becomes claustrophobic in the palimpsest of Cullen’s trickster narrative where one plot erases and writes over another. Larsen takes the hybridity of Cullen’s double narrative inside the psyche and creates a narcissistic and paranoid mimicry of self and other encapsulated within one body. The double plot has moved into a single intra-psychic voice and functions like the internal monologues of the high modernist novel where the speaker is elusive and multiple voices speak in internalized monologues. Larsen’s characters are constantly self and other, shifting their perspectives at a maddening pace. Her heroines, especially Helga Crane of Quicksand, map their ambivalence and horror over their selves’ “lacking” onto a constantly changing racial, cultural, sexual, geographical, and national topography. Helga breaks down physically and mentally after her last attempt at mimicry, this time in the Deep South as the constantly pregnant wife of a black preacher. Irene must get rid of Clare, who is both her rival and alter ego, thus the ambiguously induced plunge of Clare from a window at a Harlem apartment party that concludes Passing. But while the high modernist Anglo novels create elusive characters that are split and ambiguous at their core, ethnic modernist texts situate the cause of the split self within a racially and economically divided and hostile society on American soil. Barbara Johnson suggests in her article,“The Quicksand of the Self,” that the final chapter of Larsen’s life as a writer is instructive in the context of her creative work. After her two successful novels Nella Larsen wrote a short story entitled “Sanctuary,” in which a black woman harbors a fugitive from justice only to find out that he killed her own son. Johnson notes, “The character and the plot were an unusual affirmation of black folk speech and racial solidarity for Larsen,”who had used black dialect only once before in the crucial conversion scene of Quicksand. Johnson continues: “But upon its publication she found herself accused of plagiarism: another writer, Sheila Kaye-Smith, had published a strikingly similar story entitled ‘Mrs. Adis’ about white laborers in Sussex eight years earlier” (263). Larsen responded to the charge of plagiarism that she had heard the story from a black patient in the hospital where she worked as a nurse. Her publisher produced several drafts that more or less exonerated her from the charges. After the exposure, she traveled to France on a Guggenheim fellowship, and then she returned to her previous profession of nursing for the next thirty years. She never published again. Mary Dearborn, in Pocahontas’s Daughters, raises questions about the nature of ethnic female authorship based on this precedent. She suggests, ethnic authorship seems to hinge on the ownership of stories. Does the woman who sets down a folk tale then own the tale? Are folk tales fit matters for fiction? . . . These ques-


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tions may seem trivial, but they seem to surround ethnic female authorship with some impenetrability; we have seen how the fiction of American Indian women raised similar questions, and they arise again around the work of Zora Neale Hurston, a folklorist and novelist, who was also accused of plagiarism. (57)

Thus, in a telling manner, being a stranger and an outsider also haunts the lives of ethnic modernist authors not just their plots.

Zora Neale Hurston I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusion. Zora Neale Hurston’s letter to Countee Cullen (March 5, 1943) 30

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Before Zora Neale Hurston was rediscovered, her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) was an underground phenomenon. In a personal essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” written for Ms. magazine (March 1975), Alice Walker describes going to Florida, where wading through weeds she found what she thought was Hurston’s grave. She placed on it a marker inscribed: “Zora Neale Hurston / ‘A Genius of the South’/ Novelist / Folklorist / Anthropologist / 1901–1960.” Walker’s marking of Hurston’s grave and the publication of the essay launched the Hurston revival, which in turn reignited a new renaissance of black woman writers. 31 In addition to four novels, three nonfiction works, and numerous short stories, plays, and essays, Zora Neale Hurston is acknowledged as the first black American to collect and publish African American folklore. She studied anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University with Franz Boas, an experience that profoundly influenced her work. During this period, Hurston began publishing short stories and establishing friendships with many important black writers. In 1927, together with Langston Hughes and other artists, Hurston founded the cash-strapped and short-lived Fire!!, a literary magazine devoted to African American culture. After graduation, Hurston returned to her hometown Eatonville, Florida, for anthropological study. The data she collected there would be used later both in her collections of folklore and in her fictional works. Hurston’s originality both in literature and in ethnography justifies her inclusion in my project about ethnic modernism. Hurston was the last of Franz Boas’s students. Her professional training in ethnographic methodology makes it feasible for the critic Arnold Krupat to discuss her fiction in the context of ethnography in Ethnocriticism. Krupat suggests that


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a text like Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, for all that it is rich in ethnographic detail, could not fairly be categorized strictly as ethnographic fiction. . . . [Rather] Hurston’s novel is more nearly modernist in its esthetic its commitment to verbal and linguistic richness and ingenuity, and a “poetics” very different from realist poetics or prosaics and in its intentionality, at least partly animated by the concern of her friends associated with the Harlem Renaissance, to show that the “Negro” may be the subject of “high” literary culture.” (73)

Krupat’s categorization of Hurston’s novel as high culture and part of the modernist movement raises questions about the canon of modernist American literature. Krupat points to Hurston’s “determinedly poetic narrative style privileging the spoken over the written, and . . . its questioning of accepted gender relations” (74). By combining the literary with the scientific and breaking down the boundaries between detached observer and participant, Hurston is seen as also “contributing to a redefinition of ethnography” (74). Beth Harrison makes a similar argument connecting ethnic fiction’s use of ethnography with literary modernism in her article about Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Austin. She calls for their inclusion in the modernist canon: Far from simply recording or romanticizing “primitive” African and Native American cultures, these two authors critique the relationships among narrator, subject, and audience and construct complex narrative structures which incorporate oral form. Their narrative techniques link them to so-called high modernists like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, whose experiment with multiple points of view and oral narrative are not, consequently, unique. (89)

She compares the influences of Franz Boas and his contemporaries’ participantobserver ethnography, and the new anthropological concepts they developed on modernist writing with psychoanalysis’s influence on the development of stream of consciousness narrative. Hurston’s unique stance as a female researcher and literary artist and, moreover, her position as both insider and outsider provided her with the tools to develop a new genre, that of ethnographic fiction. Hurston’s writings uneasily fit into the constricting patriarchal and urban discourse of the New Negro. She was criticized on all sides: for not writing properly detached and disinterested academic narratives of ethnography, a stance which Franz Boas insisted upon, and for not writing proper New Negro fiction that would help the agenda of racial uplift. Instead, she wrote stories about lowbrow folk themes and characters in black dialect. 32 It is not surprising that her authorship also became the center of controversy. In Pocahontas’s Daughters, Mary V. Dearborn addresses the complex issues that surround ethnic women’s authorship. She identifies a pattern concerning the difficulties ethnic women writers faced:


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As a writer, Hurston confronted each of the factors that have so often complicated ethnic female authorship: because she was an important folklorist, her work raises considerable questions of genre; as a struggling black woman looking to make something of herself she was provided for by a succession of white patrons, and her work affected by the condition of patronage; because she was a black artist working in the context of the 1920s and 1930s, she participated in the on-going political/aesthetic debate in ethnic women’s lives. (62)

Like Nella Larsen, Hurston had to face doubt and suspicion concerning her creative work. Because she writes on the margins of the literary canon and at the intersection of two disciplines, literature and ethnography, critics are often puzzled how to properly classify her works. Robert Hemenway, Hurston’s first biographer, wonders about the relationship between oral folk tradition and written culture and between ethnographic collecting work and the writing of fiction (Hurston 65). He asks, “Was Hurston lying in 1931, passing off her own creative work as folklore [in “Hoodoo in America”]? Or had the 1925 version [“Black Death”] been simply a redaction of a folktale remembered from Eatonville?” (78). The recent new biography of Hurston by Valerie Boyd is less concerned with issues of originality. Rather, Boyd focuses on the context of writing; that is, on Hurston’s constant lack of funds to support her ethnographic and creative interests. Thus, Boyd takes issue with the necessity for white patronage, which profoundly influenced Hurston’s choices of genre and subject matter. Still, Hurston’s borrowing from African American folklore in her fictional work does raise questions about authenticity, authority, and authorship. Hurston discusses the importance and meaning of imitation and originality in black culture in her “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” an article she wrote at Nancy Cunard’s request for the anthology Cunard edited, Negro: An Anthology (1934): Everyone is familiar with the Negro’s modification of the whites’ musical instruments, so that his interpretation has been adopted by the white man himself and then reinterpreted. In so many words, Paul Whiteman is giving an imitation of a Negro orchestra making use of white-invented musical instruments in a Negro way. Thus has risen a new art in the civilized world, and thus has our so-called civilization come. The exchange and re-exchange of ideas between groups. (Hurston, Sanctified 59)

Hurston points to the instability and constructed nature of all original literary texts and assumes that both black and white speech are the results of a complicated borrowing process. The issues of genre, authenticity, and authorship are further complicated within the modernist context as Mary V. Dearborn explains: “during the Harlem Renaissance, folklore was valorized as preserving an inherent black dignity and tradition” (63). On the other hand, fiction that used dialect and


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elements of folklore was open to criticism on the grounds that it was a lowbrow form which hindered the agenda of the “New Negro” and catered to white readers’ interest in the primitive and the exotic the standard modes of portrayal of black life. Moreover, Hurston was financially dependent upon a number of white patrons. 33 Hurston was able to subvert her dependent relationship on her patrons, especially on Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, by playing the trickster that she so often portrayed in her writing: “And all the time, there was High John de Conquer, playing tricks of making a way out of no-way. Hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick. Winning the jackpot with no other stake but a laugh. Fighting a mighty battle without outside-showing force, and winning his war from within” (Sanctified 70). Hurston not only played the trickster in her own life, seeing it as maybe the only viable authorial strategy for a black woman writer, but she also used the figure of the trickster in her stories and novels often. For example, she ends her rendition of the story of “High John de Conqueror” with a critique of the emerging black middle class that traded its spiritual freedom for the comforts and confines of bourgeois existence: “So after a while, freedom came. Therefore High John de Conquer has not walked the winds of America for seventy-five years now. His people had their freedom, their laugh and their song. They have traded it to the other Americans for things they could use like education and property, and acceptance. High John knew that was the way it would be, so he could retire with his secret smile into the soil of the South and wait” (Sanctified 78). Indirectly, her critique is aimed at the “talented tenth” of the Harlem Renaissance literati who also viewed the iconoclastic Hurston with suspicion. Mrs. Mason’s patronage of Hurston ended in 1932 with a last commissioned return to her hometown Eatonville, Florida. Hurston’s career as a writer took off with Jonah’s Gourd Vine, a novel written in Eatonville about her parents. The success of this autobiographical fiction made it possible to find a publisher for her earlier folktale collection, Mules and Men, previously owned by Mrs. Mason. In Mules and Men she transforms her collection of folklore from an academic and scientific manuscript into a fictional narrative for lay readers. The outcome is a hybrid genre that carries the characteristics of collected folklore, participant-observer descriptions of hoodoo practices, and of autobiographical writings. Hurston’s best known and most successful novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), focuses on the main character’s journey to self-affirmation and freedom after two previous unhappy relationships and a third but brief marriage to a fun-loving petty con man and gambler, Tea Cake. The novel is set in an all-black community to which Janie returns after a long absence. This time, her return is not initiated by romance. By not attaching herself to yet another man, she can be independent, somewhat of a stranger, and still belong to the


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community. She kills the man she loves in order to protect herself: Tea Cake attacks her in a delirious rage caused by rabies he contracted while saving her from the attack of a mad dog during the floods. By not ending the story in the “muck” of the Florida swamps, with Janie and Tea Cake living happily ever after, Hurston favors individuality within community over the claustrophobia of marital bliss. By not staying with the marriage plot and by making it clear that the all-black community is constantly threatened by its surroundings and by impending natural and social disasters, Hurston subverts the literary cliché of the “tragic mulatto/a.” Some critics call the ending of the novel “highly melodramatic” with Tea Cake forever living in Janie’s memory (see Turner 106). But it is also important to point out that Tea Cake is indeed dead, killed by Janie moreover. The novel does not end with Janie’s memory of Tea Cake but with the image of Janie’s horizon opening up: “Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see” (184). Moreover, because of the novel’s circular narrative structure, the ending of the story is connected to the first chapter where Janie starts telling the tale of her adventures to her friend, Pheoby. Rhetorically the ending image of the horizon that Janie pulls in like a fishnet is also part of the opening image: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment. The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. (1)

The novel not only questions the logic of linear narrative structure, but it also asserts the truth of dreams and personal memories over the logic of facts and reason. Most of the narrative consists of Janie telling her story to Pheoby and, indirectly, to the larger female community of Eatonville. Hurston blends the black oral folk narrative tradition of the South with the stylized and ritualized structure of written forms. She also blends ethnography with fiction. By


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centering the plot on dreams, memories, myths, and oral folk culture written in the first person, Hurston transgresses the horizon of male discourse (“ships at a distance”) and brings her memories close by, making them tangible and practical (“draped it over her shoulder”). In all three of her marriages, especially to Joe Starks, Janie is silenced and exploited. And, even though she follows Tea Cake of her own will, she is still his property. In an incident, Tea Cake whips Janie so as to have “reassured him in possession” and to show the “Turners who is boss” (140). In the novel, Janie’s liberation from the self-professed “slave morality” of her grandmother who marries Janie off for safety’s sake (to save her from the legacies of rape and slavery) is narrated in a new form: Hurston subverts the traditional marriage plot and the literary cliché of the tragic mulatto/a and rewrites the genre as a mixture of the oral and the written, of folklore and fiction, and of autobiography and modernist novel. The novel’s circular narrative structure brings Hurston’s text into the company of others that apply a similar technique, such as Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), among others. In Joyce’s Wake the “last” sentence is finished in the opening sentence: There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keyes to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the Paris, 1922–1939. (628)

§ riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by commodious vicious of recirculations back to Howth Castle and Environs. (3)

Joyce’s text also hovers on the edges of orality and highly structured written language and ultimately, of intelligibility. Hurston’s thematic and narrative formal modernity justifies her place within the modernist canon. Because of her use of black dialect, borrowing from oral tradition, blending of genres and disciplines, and experimentations with form, Hurston is more akin to the modernists than to her New Negro cohorts or to the protest literature of the 1940s and 1950s. She was an outsider and a stranger in the circles of the Harlem literati, because she was from the rural South and proud of it and an academic who wrote fiction, and because she held some surprisingly idiosyncratic political views. 34 Being a stranger and an outsider is a recurring theme in Their Eyes. When Janie is six-years-old, she and her grandmother live with “quality white folks up


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dere in West Florida” (8), her picture is taken. It is only then she realizes, to her surprise, that she is not white: “So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast, ‘where is me? Ah don’t see me.’ “Everybody laughed, even Mr. Washburn. Miss Nellie, de Mama of the chillun who comeback home after her husband dead, she pointed to de dark one and said, ‘Dat’s you, Alphabet, don’t you know yo’ ownself?’ “Dey all useter call me Alphabet ’cause so many people had done named me different names. Ah looked at de picture a long time and seen it was mah dress and mah hair so Ah said: “ ‘Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!’ ” (9)

Helga Crane in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand is mirrored twice: first as African American in the Circus show, then later as “some disgusting sensual creature with her features” in Axel Olson’s portrait. Her gender and racial identity are separate and disjointed till that point. It is significant that both mis/recognitions happen abroad where she is a stranger and an exotic other. But the double mirroring does not result in a unified gestalt. She cannot integrate the pieces of her mirrored images, even after her incorporation into the all-black religious community in Alabama. The image her husband’s community tries to force on her is as alien as the previous two projected on her in Denmark. Janie’s recognition of herself as black, moreover as the only African American child in the picture, makes her realize her peculiar status within the white community where her grandmother works. When with black children at school, she is pointed out for her peculiar dresses handed down to her from the white children: Us lived dere havin’ fun till de chillun at school got to teasin’ me ’bout livin’ in de white folks’ back-yard. Dere wuz uh knotty head gal named Mayrella dat useter git mad every time she look at me. Mis’ Washburn useter dress me up in al de clothes her gran’ chillun didn’t need no mo’ which still wuz better’n whut de rest uh de colored chillun had. And then she useter put hair ribbon on mah head fuh me tuh wear. Dat useter rile Mayrella uh lot. So she would pick at me all de time and put some others up tuh do de same. They’d push me ’way from de ring plays and make out they couldn’t play wid nobody dat lived on premises. (9)

She is rejected again, this time for dressing as if she was white. Her grandmother is painfully aware of being black in a society dominated by whites, as well as of being a black woman within a patriarchal social system either black or white:


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You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in a queer ways. You in particular. Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do. Dat’s one of de holdbacks of slavery. But nothing can’t stop you from wishin’. You can’t beat nobody down so low till you can rob ’em of they will. Ah didn’t want to be used for a work-ox and a brood-sow and Ah didn’t want mah daughter used dat way neither. It sho wasn’t mah will for things to happen lak they did. Ah even hated de way you was born. But, all de same Ah said thank God, Ah got another chance. (15)

Nanny wants to save Janie from both legacies of rape and slavery: she was raped by her white master on a plantation in Savannah, Georgia, just before the end of the Civil War; and her daughter, Janie’s mother, was raped by her white schoolteacher when she was seventeen. Nanny’s solution is to be financially independent, but for Janie she wants protection through marriage. But Janie has to find her own solutions to the double legacies of slavery and rape. Both Janie’s grandmother and mother forfeit an escape through romantic love, because of its entanglement with past violations. Instead of accepting Nanny’s advice for her, or her mother’s path of alcoholism and self-destruction, Janie forges new models and asserts her vision of modern black womanhood in a new era of racial pride and gender equality. Janie’s (and Hurston’s) solution offers a critique of contemporary patriarchal values avowed by the New Negro movement. In opposition to shying away from a joyous affirmation of black female sexuality, Hurston celebrates female pleasure that is often independent from the institution of marriage. Janie’s closest identification is with the blossoming pear tree in her grandmother’s backyard. When she is sixteen-years-old, just before being forced to marry Logan Killicks, she is under the tree daydreaming: She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. (10–11)

Besides the obvious sexual and orgasmic imagery of the pear tree and the languid Janie stretched out under it, there is another trope embedded in this passage, that of a rooted tree. By connecting the image of the flowering pear tree in Nanny’s backyard with the grandmother’s views concerning the rootlessness and of African American experience (“us colored folks is branches without roots” [15]), Janie’s identification with sensuality and cosmic interconnected-


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ness gains significance on another level. The close relationship between grandmother and granddaughter is situated within the context of their shared experience of black womanhood. But they manage to become financially independent (“Ah raked and scraped and bought dis lil piece uh land so you wouldn’t have to stay in de white folks’ yard and tuck yo’ head befo’ other chillun at school” [19]) from white patrons and from men in general (“Ah wouldn’t marry nobody . . . cause Ah didn’t want nobody mistreating mah baby” [18]). Still, Nanny could not protect her own daughter:“Dat school teacher had done hid her in de woods all night long, and had done raped mah baby and run on off just before day”(18). Because of such history, it is understandable that Nanny wants Janie to marry at age sixteen for protection, even though her argument why Janie should marry Logan Killicks contradicts her own life experiences and personal philosophy: “And Ah can’t die easily thinkin’ maybe de menfolks white or black is makin’ a spit cup outa you: Have some sympathy fuh me. Put me down easy, Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate” (19). In Nanny’s thinking, formed by the memories of slavery and rape, marriage is still a better solution for young black women than being uprooted and vulnerable to both white and black men. On the other hand, a new generation of black women, like Janie, grew up in relative affluence and security and suffer from a new set of conditions such as the confines of bourgeois marriage. Thus, instead of escaping the previous evils of slavery and rape, they now seek freedom beyond the confines of race, class, and compulsive heterosexuality. They also seek relief outside of the national and continental boundaries of the United States. Ultimately, they try to re-create their own “imagined communities” (the term Benedict Anderson coins for defining the nation) away from the ideologies of race and outside of bourgeois national discourses. In order to create a livable imagined reality (through “thought pictures” in Nanny’s words) the characters play the confidence game of racial and sexual “mimicry” (the way Homi K. Bhabha defines the term) while practicing the discourse of the “stranger” (see Georg Simmel). For Janie marriage is both oppressive (for example, her marriages to Logan and Joe and her idealized relationship with Tea Cake even though he whips her to assert his ownership of her) and pleasurable (for example, the companionship and sexual fulfillment with Tea Cake). She is submissive in her previous marriages, but she also manages to break away physically (she leaves Logan) and psychologically (she maintains her autonomy despite Joe’s tyrannical behavior). Within the marriage to Tea Cake she is more powerful than her husband: she is older and also financially independent from him. After his death she returns to Eatonville alone, not to marry again. By telling her story to Pheoby, there is a hint of female camaraderie and a newly found rootedness that Nanny could only hope for in the familiar all-black community: “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as


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Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see” (14). But Janie’s homecoming is far from victorious and joyous. The female community is suspicious and jealous of her wealth and youthful looks: “It was mass cruelty” (2). They gossip about her running off with a younger man and then returning home alone. She is at home but still a stranger and an outsider. Hurston’s novel is a critique of modern alienation through the fantasy of an all-black community. To overcome the melancholy of modernity, she must project the fantasy of an ideal community into mythic proportions. The narrative is mediated through Janie’s retelling of her story to Pheoby. Mary Helen Washington cites Thadious Davis in her introduction to the novel: “while Janie is the teller of the tale, Pheoby is the bearer of the tale” (xii). Critics have read Janie’s telling her story to her friend as a message to be transmitted back to a community that is still hostile to the stranger who has come back. 35 The town is suspicious of Janie and is not willing to hear her story firsthand. They send Pheoby to get the details first. The novel becomes rather a hope for a new future and a feminist rewriting of male-dominated African American folklore. 36 But to be able to critique both modern alienation and male domination, Hurston must take her narrative back to the psychic realm of the imaginary in order to subvert the symbolic order of logocentrism and patriarchy. Through a mythical tale she puts the supernatural (and “enchantment”) into her narrative world. Hurston’s narrative is a utopia, which does not make racism, white oppression, or patriarchy disappear. But, the catharsis in telling and retelling Janie’s tale does allow for an imaginary escape, something that is missing from Nella Larsen’s novels but is present in Countee Cullen’s (through Sam Lucas’s final, conversion, even though it is a pretence). Hurston’s novel has become inspirational for African American women writers and academics in the last thirty years. As Sam Lucas’s masquerade of conversion brings the most converts to the altar, Zora Neale Hurston’s joyous utopia has attracted a lot of enthusiastic followers. But even Mary Helen Washington, as a self-confessed fan of the novel, feels there are unanswered questions in it: such as the author’s “ambivalence toward her female protagonist,” the “uncritical depiction of violence toward women,” and finally, the troubling aspect that “Janie’s voice is dominated by men even in the passages that are about her inner growth” (xiii–xiv). On the other hand, Mary V. Dearborn sees Hurston’s text as “wholly self-sufficient and unmediated” against the odds ethnic female authors must face, such as the questions of “mediation, authentication and authority, influence, patronage, and politics” (Pocahontas’s Daughters 69–70). The self-consciousness and self-reflexivity of the text subvert the traditional narrative structure and voice, easing the odds against female ethnic authorship. By framing her story within the context of storytelling and adding long sec-


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tions of ethnographic descriptions in the oral folk tradition (for instance the section on male banter and “telling the dozens” 37 on Joe Starks’s storefront or the spinning of “mule talk” in chapter 6), Hurston destabilizes expectations of linear narrative structure, realistic representations of folk life, and the unity of individual voice. The novel emphasizes its artificiality by once removing the narrative into the mediated genre of retelling. Janie’s story is inserted into the conversation between her and Pheoby. Thus, the reader is “framed” in the confidence game of eavesdropping on a seemingly private and intimate conversation between two friends. But, it is also clear that the story is meant to be overheard; moreover, it is Pheoby’s job to disseminate Janie’s story to the rest of the community. Hurston emphasizes the imaginary nature of her story by referring to memories as “thought-pictures” or “mind-pictures.” For example, when Nanny tries to explain her reasoning for Janie’s marriage to Logan Killicks, her mindpictures are mobilized: “Old Nanny sat there rocking like an infant and thinking back and back. Mind-pictures brought feelings, and feelings dragged out dramas from the hollows of her heart” (16). Later, when the townsfolk (mainly men, though Janie eventually and significantly participates instigating the decline of Joe’s health and power and also of their marriage) sit around and talk, it is thought-pictures they exchange: “The store itself was a pleasant place if only she didn’t have to sell things. When the people sat around the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that they thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to” (48). The reader cannot help thinking that Hurston’s stories are thought-pictures passed around, made a little nicer and bigger than life. Or, to refer to the opening of the novel, again: “The dream is the truth. Then they [women] act and do things accordingly” (1). Hurston’s Their Eyes subverts the expectations set by the New Negro movement: instead of furthering the agenda of the “talented tenth,” that is creating a (mostly male) black middle class, she uses a lower-class woman’s perspective, black dialect, and a rural setting to tell her tale. Her notion of “racial uplift is manifest in gender terms and void of propagandistic overtones. Her use of a complex narrative structure and of ethnographic techniques opens the novel to a new kind of experimentation. Hurston’s text is modernist in its introspective voice and recursive story line; but her reach for black folklore and the combination of fiction and ethnography lead the narrative in a slightly different direction away from the high modernist novel. Their Eyes is neither a purely Harlem Renaissance nor a truly modernist novel. A more fitting categorization would be what Werner Sollors calls “ethnic modernism.” Her combination of ethnography with fiction opened a new direction for both literature and anthropology at the height of American modernism.


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3. Modernism with an Accent Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, and Josephina Niggli

[A] beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire

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Émigrés, exiles, expatriates, refugees, nomads, cosmopolitans the meanings of those words wary, as do their connotations. Expatriates can go home any time they like, while exiles cannot. Cosmopolitan can be a term of self-affirmation, straight or postmodernly ironic, or else an anti-Semitic slur. Over and above their fine distinctions, however, these words all designate a state of being “not home” (or of being “everywhere at home,” the flip side of the same coin), which means, in most cases, at a distance from one’s native tongue. Is this distance a falling away from some original wholeness and source of creativity, or is it on the contrary a spur to creativity? Is exile a cause for optimism (celebration, even) or its opposite? Susan Rubin Suleiman, Exile and Creativity Most immigrants put on their finest clothing for their arrival in America. One photographer observed, “At times the Island looked like a costume ball with the multicolored, many-styled national costumes.” Barbara Benton, Ellis Island My mother and father came from a small town in Poland. They had three sons. My father decided to go to America, to 1. stay out of the army, 2. stay out of jail, 3. save his children from everyday wars and pogroms. Grace Paley, “The Immigrant Story” And besides, he [Ezra Pound] comes out with one fairly lipped cornet blast: the only distinctive U.S. contributions to the arts have been ragtime and buckdancing. William Carlos Williams, “Preface,” Kora in Hell: Improvisations

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The Adobe Indian hag sings her lullaby: The beetle is blind The beetle is blind The beetle is blind The beetle is blind, etc., etc. and Kandinsky in his, Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst, sets down the following axiom for the artist: Every artist has to express himself. Every artist has to express his epoch. Every artist has to express the pure and eternal qualities of the art of all men. So we have the fish and the bait, but the last rule holds three hooks at once not for the fish, however. William Carlos Williams, “Preface,” Kora in Hell: Improvisations

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n Hugh Kenner’s definition, internationalism is mandatory for modernism. For him the prototypical American modernist is Ezra Pound, the expatriate artist who claims “world citizenship” for himself. On the other end of the spectrum then are those deemed provincial and mere regionalists, such as William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner (see Kenner, The Pound Era; Hallberg, Canons). Against the cosmopolitan internationalism of the expatriate modernists stands William Carlos Williams, who saw Eurocentric bias against things American and an elitist privileging of the erudite and learned in the self-imposed exiles of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and H.D. In his 1918 preface to Kora in Hell: Improvisations, William Carlos Williams launches a vitriolic attack on American expatriatism that calls for an American modernism based in indigenous American culture as opposed to the “great tradition” of Europe. Thus he favors the imagination of his mother, African American work songs, and Native American lullabies the art of the marginalized as opposed to the “pure and eternal qualities of the art of all men” (Imaginations 26). The disagreement between Pound and Williams addresses geographical, class, gender, and cultural preferences (the formally experimental, “writerly,” modernism of Europe as opposed to the “readerly” modernisms of American authors). 1 Here I would like to move the boundaries beyond the simple opposition of Europe and America, or cosmopolitan versus homemade. While Hugh Kenner reiterates the familiar center versus periphery argument in his criticism, taking the side of the center (see Kenner, Pound Era and Homemade World), Williams takes the side of the periphery by championing the cause of America’s “little tradition” (see Williams, In the American Grain). In this chapter I will discuss immigrant ethnic modernist writers who traditionally would not fit into Hugh Kenner’s definition of modernism. 2

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§ Millions of immigrants entered the United States between 1890 and 1924. Millions of others were barred from entry by racial exclusion laws and quotas that provided the model for the infamous immigration restriction laws of the 1920s. The successful drive against immigration tapped into the white majority’s fears over the growing numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants in the United States. Native-born white Americans doubted the nation’s ability to absorb the newcomers who brought different values and customs with them. Many of the new immigrants were Catholics or Jews, whose religion clashed with the country’s dominant Protestantism. Moreover, large numbers came from peasant rural backgrounds to the urban areas. Decades earlier, prejudices against Asians had already closed off immigration from Japan and China. 3 In 1917 the newly established literacy test for all immigrants deterred only a few. In 1921, Congress passed a bill limiting the number of immigrants to 3 percent of each national group, based on the 1910 census. The new law produced results that same year. The National Origins Act of 1924 limited immigration further, to 2 percent of each nationality as reflected in the 1890 census (that time there were still very few from the “undesirable” areas of southeastern Europe and Russia). The 1924 quotas cut the total annual immigration to 164,000 (the majority of which came mainly from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany). The law admitted only 4,000 Italians; and it excluded Japanese and Chinese immigrants entirely (for historical information concerning immigration laws see Henretta et al.). A more restrictive system took force in 1929, and President Herbert Hoover lowered the quotas even further in 1931. During the Depression years more foreigners left than entered. In contrast, 1,285,000 immigrants had entered the country in 1907, the peak year of immigration the year the first chapter of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) is set. With the gates of immigration closing tight in the 1920s, the sole loophole permitted unrestricted immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere, letting in only Canadians and Central and Latin Americans, who crossed the border in increasing numbers, filling the places vacated by Asians and eastern and southern Europeans. The National Origins Act was just one example of the rise of nativist prejudices during the 1920s. Colleges instituted quotas to limit the enrollment of Jewish students, and many law firms refused to hire Jewish lawyers at all. Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism, his warning against the menace of the International Jew, was well known. The term “cosmopolitan” became an anti-Semitic slur (Suleiman 1) and nationalism was equated with American self-assuring nativism. The most extreme example of nativism of the 1920s was the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which had reemerged at the end of 1916. The new Klan not only attacked blacks, but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. Confirming the

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power of modern media, the Klan found encouragement in D. W. Griffith’s epic film Birth of a Nation (1915), a glorification of white southerners fighting to overturn the social and political changes introduced by the Civil War and Reconstruction. The fear of miscegenation is encoded in the film’s melodramatic plot in which the Klan becomes the rescuer of endangered white southern womanhood and of native Protestant white supremacy. Although the revived Klan was mostly a hate organization, Klan members saw themselves as the defenders of an older American order threatened by foreigners, foreign cultures and religions, and modernity itself. Thus, indirectly and surprisingly, the ethnic threat was entangled with the threat of the modern and of the new. Stopping the flow of immigration also had the unexpected consequence of prompting migratory streams of Mexicans and African Americans into the very [65], (4) regions vacated by eastern and southern Europeans. The result was an intense period of immigration, migration, and remigration that set into motion two seemingly contradictory movements: the racist and xenophobic sympathies of Lines: 89 to American nativism and hyperassimilationism and the creation of a multiethnic ——— United States. In the climate of nativist hostility, issues of immigration, ethnic13.0pt P ity, and race became indivisible. Mexican and Latin American immigration and ——— the migration of blacks to the North became the direct outcome of the 1924 Normal Pag immigration restrictions. * PgEnds: Eje The resulting situation created an intricate web of prejudices, all under the auspices of U.S. nationalism. For example, labor unions discriminated against [65], (4) immigrants when considering admitting new members, blacks were hostile to immigrants, and immigrants in response feared losing their jobs to northbound blacks, and even Mexican Americans felt uneasy about Mexicans crossing the border in search of better employment possibilities. Moreover, public figures, scholars, and political leaders expressed overt prejudice against Jews, African Americans, and new immigrants. The desire, harbored by many immigrants, to become “Americans,” led to conflicts between the generations, while the seemingly democratic processes of assimilation led to exclusions based on culture, religion, and race and to institutionalized coercion by the state. At the same time, the drive to assimilate Native Americans also intensified. The resulting xenophobia was driven by the fear that immigrants (from eastern and southern Europe, Mexico, China, and Japan), African Americans, and Native Americans were exploiting America without becoming part of it. Native Americans did not formally become citizens till 1924, and even then they were denied the right to vote by the western states where they mainly resided. Many descendants of the Mayflower preferred a white Protestant New England to the quagmire created by the waves of immigrants, black and Mexican migrants and the “unresolved problem” of Native Americans, often referred


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to as the “lesser breed without the law.” In her study on immigrant women’s writings Magdalena Zaborowska notes, Charlotte Perkins Gilman [in her autobiography] remembers how appalled she was by the multinational composition of New York, “that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so that the American” because of the “rapidly descending extinction of our nation, superseded by other nations who will soon completely outnumber us.” To Henry James, walking through the streets of “his” Boston, the Puritan legend of old seems irrevocably erased by “a huge . . . sponge saturated with the foreign mixture and passed over almost everything I remembered.” (4)

Moreover, the xenophobic hostility of nativism pitted the women’s movement against the immigrants’ cause: women from eastern Europe and the Balkans were seen as threats to the cult of the New Woman (Zaborowska 23). Moreover, immigrant women were often perceived in sexualized terms, not unlike black women who were hesitant about expressing sexual desire in their writings. Black women often feared writing about themselves in sexual terms, even if they were victims of rape by their white masters (see Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861) because they wanted to distance themselves from promoting the widely circulating stereotypes of unchecked black female sexuality that would result in miscegenation (see Barbara Christian’s book on this topic, Black Women Novelists). Immigrant women were also excluded from the women’s suffrage movement because some (like Charlotte Perkins Gilman) rejected the idea that immigrants should have a vote equal to theirs and thereby influence matters concerning the United States Similar fears fueled the exclusion of Native Americans from voting even after the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924. The most common experience immigrants recount is their alienation from their cultures, both the new and the old. They cannot assimilate completely, even though some can make it economically. The feeling of being at home in their new environment is often absent, not only for political and economic reasons or because of the palpable xenophobia around them but also for psychological reasons. Anzia Yezierska’s loneliness in the New World is a recurring theme in her fictional and autobiographical writings a feeling that did not ease one bit till her death in 1970. Similarly, and a few generations later, Julia Kristeva writes on the themes of the inner foreigner, of international otherness, and of being “strangers” in the world and “to ourselves” (see Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves and Nations without Nationalism). 4 Modern estrangement and the discomfort of being at home nowhere is literalized in the immigrant experience. While Modernism depicts the condition of modernity through psychological exploration and experimental expression, immigrant narratives tend to tell seemingly realistic and psychologically straightforward stories but the


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experiences both high and ethnic modernists narrate are quite similar. The figure of the stranger is specifically and tangibly materialized in the narratives of immigrants and in the experimental novels of high modernists. In her essay on H.D., “Exile in the American Grain,” Susan Stanford Friedman identifies expatriation that is, a “self-imposed exile from the parochial and provincial for the cosmopolitan and international” as the founding gesture of American modernism: The two are not unrelated, for Victorianism in both its English and American forms is akin to parentalism, a cultural dominance, a parental superego prescribing duty over pleasure, obligation over freedom, social order over personal rebellion. . . . The young moderns growing up in the Victorian era had to leave home. Alienation from family, religion, and nation by the archetypal weight of Stephen Dedalus’s ringing Non Serviam at the end of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church.” (88)

Friedman connects exile with the artist’s survival, where self-imposed alienation from one’s culture evokes “both fleeing from oppression and flying in freedom” (88). While Friedman’s focus is on the migration of American artists to western Europe, the pattern of fleeing oppression and seeking personal, economic, and artistic freedom was also true for the migration of African Americans to the urban North (to Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, and other cities), for the immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, as well as from China and Japan, and to some extent for Native Americans from U.S. government reservations to western urban areas (starting in World War I and accelerating during World War II). Friedman sees H.D. as an important connection between the internationalist and the homegrown trends of American modernism, between the cosmopolitanism of the expatriate American artist colony in Europe (in Paris and London) and the intentional American regionalism and nativism of those who stayed in the United States. She calls H.D. an “exile in the American grain” who reenvisioned and (en)gendered modernism by incorporating racial and psychological marginality, the “state of being perpetually alien, decentered at the fringes of the mainstream like the women, Jews, and the commoners in Virginia Woolf ’s ‘society of outsiders’ in Three Guineas” (“Exile in the American Grain” 90–91). Friedman sees in H.D. (especially in the film Borderline H.D. and Paul Robeson starred in, as well as in the film’s accompanying pamphlet that H.D. wrote) a “link between expatriatism, modernity, and marginality” (93). In narratives written by immigrants, cultural conflict is often represented as a clash between the old and the new both in economic and political terms. Anzia Yezierska’s story of “A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New” in Bread Givers (1925) familiarizes and psychologizes


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(or rather Oedipalizes) the large-scale trends of modernization. But to identify such trends only within high modernist texts, as Kenner does, reveals an elitist bias. My goal is to prove that works often exiled to the ghetto of regionalism or provincialism are actually modernist texts. Terms such as “ethnic modernism,” “exile in the American grain,” or “modernism of marginality” stand between the two extremes of Eurocentric expatriatism and xenophobic nationalism during the interwar era in the United States. When such interlopers as Nella Larsen or Anzia Yezierska are let into the sacred realm of modernism, the larger categories of modernity and modernist studies must be mobilized in order to establish a culturally, aesthetically, sociologically, and politically inclusive body of works that could fit into what I call ethnic modernism. I am aware not only of the heated debates about the usage of “modernism” but also of its questioned relationship to postmodernism. There is also debate between modernist scholars about how to date the “modern.” I tend to agree with Marxist scholars who make connections between capitalist mode of production and modernity. My delineations between modernism and postmodernism are based on Fredric Jameson’s work. My present project is limited to bringing together authors and “regions” of literature that I feel are connected under the project of modernity regardless of strict formal, aesthetic, racial, ethnic, or gender confines. Although, one might call my project revisionist, I am not simply suggesting substituting one set of texts for another in the name of modernism, rather I want to rethink the category of modernism itself through the close readings of selected texts. I am interested in how individual texts theorize modernity and modernism, and vice versa, how theories reread and rewrite individual texts. By comparing texts written by African Americans, Native Americans, (eastern) European Jewish immigrants, and Mexican migrants, I want to free modernism from its Eurocentric elitist preoccupations as well as from the claustrophobia of American nativism in order to include the texts and concerns of ethnic modernism. As William Boelhower puts it in his book titled Through a Glass Darkly on “ethnic semiosis in American literature,” writing from the periphery of American literary critical production while at the American Institute of the University of Venice: “the ethnic sign and the empirical traces of ethnic discourse are so capillary, so pervasive, so inseparable from the mainstream literary corpus that any effort to relieve American literature of its ethnic corpuscles by means of critical blood-letting could only result in bleeding to death” (37). Here Boelhower is responding to Werner Sollors’s remark: “American literature as a whole can be read as the ancestral footstep or coded hieroglyph of ethnic group life of the past and ethnic tensions in the present” (qtd. in Boelhower 36–37). In Melville’s novel the confidence man is still elusive and protean, and his


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cosmopolitanism is a symbol of the depersonalizing and “white”-washing of an emerging market economy and of the modern nation-state. As opposed to eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism (whose agents are mostly educated and aristocratic “citizens of the world” in search of freeing themselves from nationalistic ties and religious dogma), the stranger’s cosmopolitanism in Melville’s The Confidence-Man threatens diversity and anticipates xenophobia. It is still somewhat less defined than the alienation of the modern artist or of the modern everyman that high modernism depicts (for example, the character of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; or that of Leopold Bloom, the “Wandering Jew,” in Joyce’s Ulysses). While enlightened cosmopolitanism associates itself with the international brotherhood of intellectuals and citizenship in the world, Melville’s cosmopolitan is a stranger with no discernable racial, ethnic, or national affiliation. In fact, he is not quite human in his shapeshifting (like the Aristotelian alien or foreigner whose situation is likened to that of a wild beast within the Polis). His confidence game is embodied in the undecidability of his ethical values. A similar theme could be noted in the “Proteus” section of Joyce’s Ulysses. Cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century gains a more definite and pejorative meaning. Instead of the elusive foreboding presence of Melville’s stranger, the empty signifier of the “cosmopolitan” is filled with antiforeigner, antistranger, anti-immigrant, and ultimately anti-Semitic significations. The authors I discuss in this chapter all react to this modern condition of cosmopolitanism and “strangerness” in one way or another. Their narratives encode their strangerness or being “exiles in the American grain” in realistic, naturalistic, fairy-tale-like, stream of consciousness first-person, magical realist, autobiographical, novelistic, or fragmented intertwining narratives. As there is no monolithic and all-inclusive modernism, immigrant writers also tell their stories in pluralistic plots and forms and in multiple, not easily cataloged, stories.

Anzia Yezierska The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte So there it was, the problem before us the problem of Father still unresolved. . . . [But] I felt the shadow still there, over me. It wasn’t just my father, but the generations who made my father whose weight was still upon me. Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (296–97)

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I saw that it was the glory of America that it was not yet finished. And I, the last comer, had her share to give, small or great, to the making of America, like those Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower. Fired up by this revealing light, I began to build a bridge of understanding between the American-born and myself. Since their life was shut out from such as me, I began to open my life and the lives of my people to them. And life draws life. In only writing about the Ghetto I found America. Anzia Yezierska, “America and I,” Open Cage

When she was fifteen at the turn of the century, Anzia Yezierska immigrated from Russian Poland to the United States. Her father, a Talmudic scholar, dedicated his life to the full-time study of the sacred books and authoritative laws of the Jewish faith, while his wife and children sustained him and their household through menial labor. In America Yezierska sought to free herself from poverty and the oppression of her Orthodox Jewish patriarchal roots to begin a “new life in a new language” (as Eva Hoffman, Yezierska’s compatriot, puts it in her autobiography, Lost in Translation, 1989). Studying English at night and working in a sweatshop by day, she earned a scholarship to study domestic science at Columbia Teacher’s College three years after her arrival. However, her subsequent career as a teacher was short-lived since she found herself to be temperamentally unsuited to the job. In 1910 she married an attorney, but the marriage was annulled the same year. Shortly thereafter she remarried and gave birth to a daughter. Finding domestic chores and maternal responsibilities to be oppressive, Yezierska left her family and devoted the remainder of her life to pursuing a career as a writer. Yezierska made her literary debut in 1915 with the publication of “Free Vacation House” in the Forum. In 1919 another short story,“The Fat of the Land,” was published in Edward J. O’Brian’s Best Short Stories of 1919. A year later she published a collection of short works entitled Hungry Hearts. The volume caught the attention of Samuel Goldwyn who produced a silent film with the same title in 1922. The film turned the young writer into a celebrity with publicists of the day calling her “Queen of the Ghetto” and “The Immigrant Cinderella.” After a yearlong, unhappy and lonely stint in Hollywood, Yezierska returned to the Lower East Side. Back in her old neighborhood she began her first novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923). Its plot revolves around a young, uneducated, and headstrong immigrant woman who falls in love with and marries a wasp philanthropist. The marriage fails because of their temperamental differences, where passion clashes with rational and measured coolness. The author’s subsequent works rewrite and repeat similar marriage plots. Her heroines find the relationship with an American-born man passionless and unfulfilling because he cannot understand her past. The proximity of Yezierska’s plots to her biogra-


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phy led contemporary critics to question her creative gift, calling her a reporter and an autobiographer, rather than a fiction writer. The most praise her critics allowed was the vividness of her voice and the melodramatic quality of her scenes. 5 Anzia Yezierska’s novels portray her heroines fighting on two fronts: against the patriarchy of Jewish orthodoxy and against the similarly patriarchal and oppressive culture of the New World they are so set on becoming part of. The wish to become an American, or as Yezierska puts it in her second novel Bread Givers (1925), to “make myself for a person” in America, leads Sara Smolinsky, the heroine of the novel, through an arduous path of (self-)education and hard labor (172). Yezierska’s novels have been labeled melodramatic because of their clichéd happy endings involving predictable intermarriages with wasps or uptown Jews. Here I mainly focus on Bread Givers, because this semiautobiographical novel brings up issues of confidence and trust in the “golden land” and of being a stranger and an outsider in America and in the world, as well as issues of gender and genre within and against the literary context of modernist formal experimentation. Yezierska’s commentary on America, and on modernity itself, offers an ambivalent first-person and psychologically rich critique of the modern condition from a Jewish immigrant woman’s perspective. Her female characters’ restlessness is reminiscent of Nella Larsen’s frenzied plots of always seeking and never finding. Yezierska’s Bread Givers was not republished till 1975, when Alice Kessler Harris rescued it from the fate of out-of-print books. In the novel the author records Sara Smolinsky’s life from arrival in America with her parents and three sisters to her first job as a schoolteacher and her subsequent marriage to the principal (an assimilated Jew) of the school in her old ghetto. Her story covers about a twenty-year period in her heroine’s life, from age of ten to thirty. When seventeen, Sara leaves her dysfunctional family behind to make a life of her own (in a “room all alone to myself ”) and to avoid her sisters’ miserable fates in unhappy marriages brokered and bartered by her father (158). The circular journey of the youngest daughter leaving home, family, and her Orthodox Jewish tradition in order to try her luck in the world (of American-born gentiles), then only to return to her roots at the end is the typical plot of the fairy tale (Vladimir Propp), of the hero’s journey (Joseph Campbell), or of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. Yezierska adds a sometimes latent and often explosive feminist twist in the cultural and historical contexts of Orthodox Judaism and American early-twentieth-century patriarchal nativism. Her Cinderella stories use the plot of the fairy tale in conjunction with an almost naturalistic and grittily realistic depiction of ghetto life. The two conventions work alongside and against each other in order to rewrite the expected and idealized Horatio Alger, ragsto-riches “ideologeme” (see Jameson, The Political Unconscious) of immigrant


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narratives. Between the fault lines of the fairy-tale plot and the realistic depictions of the daily grind of immigrant life is the uncontainable and unrepressable mass of anger, disappointment, and irreparable loneliness that “life in a new language” and in modern America involves. 6 The schizophrenic coexistence of fairy-tale wish fulfillment with the reality of America is psychologically necessary for survival. Coming to America is an elaborate confidence game: the newcomer has to have faith before she would know what she has bargained for. The gap between fantastic expectations and reality bordering on the absurd is filled narratively in the novel. The boundaries between the mimetic and the uncanny coexist to unsettle the conventions of immigrant realism and romance. As Hugh Kenner observes in a different context (in a chapter discussing Hemingway’s quest for the true sentence leading him to wordlessness, and ultimately, to self-parody): “Joyce began Ulysses in naturalism and ended it in parody, understanding more profoundly than any of his followers that naturalism cannot end anywhere else. . . .” (Homemade 155). Similarly, Yezierska’s texts become parodies of themselves and her closures continue “writing beyond the ending,” to use Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s term. DuPlessis suggests that twentieth-century women writers of the romance genre reinterpreted and subverted the plot, which usually ends in marriage or death for the heroines. Modernist women authors seek other endings, and thereby, they disrupt the patriarchal hold on women’s traditional stories and offer new kinds of narrative endings and imagine more revolutionary, or at least more ambivalent, real-life solutions. Through such strategies they put to test the patriarchal ideologies of American individualism and nativism. In Bread Givers, the realistic narrative is often interrupted by didactic Biblical stories and by Russian (and Greek) fairy tales told by Reb Smolinsky, Sara’s father. But with an increasing frequency the main story line itself jumps back and forth between realism and the fantastic. Rosemary Jackson, relying on Tzvetan Todorov’s study of the fantastic and the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, positions the genre between the “realistic” and the “marvelous” registers of literary representation. Such uneasy positioning allows for a subversive reading of the surrounding cultural and social order that deflects desire yet refuses to have recourse to “compensatory, transcendental other worlds” (180). According to such a reading, the fantastic is a profoundly modernist and secular genre produced by the economic and social conditions of monopoly or advanced capitalism: “It exists alongside the ‘real,’ on either side of the dominant cultural axis, as a muted presence, a silenced imaginary other. Structurally and semantically, the fantastic aims at dissolution of an order experienced as oppressive and insufficient. . . . By attempting to transform the relations between the imaginary and the symbolic, fantasy hollows out the ‘real,’ revealing its absence, its ‘great Other,’ its unspoken and its unseen” (180).


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Yezierska’s narrative reveals the impossibility of maintaining the genre of immigrant realism under the conditions of modern America: the continuing xenophobic patriarchy that Sara’s parents try to escape from in Russian-occupied Poland still haunts them in the New World, transforming the past into a marvelous fantasy. Yezierska’s personal and narrative dilemma is how to critique and subvert the dominant culture and ideology of America while simultaneously trying to assimilate. The alternative is unthinkable: a maddening suspension between borders and cultures, between languages and communities. Ultimately, Sara’s plan to become a person in America proves unachievable unless she buys into the system: she marries an American Jew and reembraces her father and his Orthodox tradition. But the ominous shadow is still over Sara in the image of her at the end of Bread Givers, leaving the impression that nothing gets really resolved with the concluding marriage scene: it is the “writing beyond the ending” that suggests a harsh critique of the patriarchal institution of bourgeois marriage. For Sara being married is as good as being dead: she is back in the same system of patriarchy that she fought to escape from throughout the novel. Moreover, Sara is still uncannily suspended in the Purgatory of Heimlich and Unheimlich, between the Old World and the New. Even after she is educated and, in theory but not in practice, makes herself an American, she is still a stranger. At the beginning of the novel memories of “old Russia” are full of details about a past of plenty. Sara’s mother lapses into lavish memories to escape the poverty, dirt, and hunger of their present life: The kitchen walls melted away to the far-off times in Russia, as Mother went on and on with her fairy tales till late hours of the night. “I was known in all the villages around not only for my beauty: I was the first dancer on every wedding. You don’t see in America such dancing like mine. The minute I’d give a step in they’d begin clapping their hands and stamping their feet, the fiddlers began to play, and sing the song they played. And the whole crowd, old and young, would form a ring around me and watch with open mouth how I lifted myself in the air, dancing the kozatzkeh.” Once Mother got started she couldn’t stop herself, telling more and more. She was like drunk with the memories of old times. (30–31)

Sara is the voice of reality when she reminds her mother of the political reasons for them leaving behind such a beautiful dream of a life: “ ‘But why did you leave that rainbow tablecloth and come to America?’ . . . ‘Because the Tsar of Russia! Worms should eat him! He wanted for himself free soldiers to make pogroms. He wanted to tear your father away from his learning and make him a common soldier to drink vodka with the drunken mouzhiks, eat pig, and shoot the people.’ ” (33). Even in the fairy-tale memories there are competing stories of their life: of


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material comfort, dancing, the value of chanting “by heart Isaiah, Jeremiah, the songs of David, and the Books of Job” (32), the skill that got Reb Smolinsky the richest and most beautiful girl for wife in the village; but there are also the stories of pogroms and Russian peasants robbing the Jewish rural community of its men, its wealth, and ultimately its way of life. Sara’s mother becomes like a good fairy herself when she shows up unexpectedly, carrying a feather bed on her back from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the freezing and starving Sara, disheartened, lonely, and miserable in her room of her own: A rap came to the door. It was repeated over and over again before I could drag myself out of my coverings to see who it was. “Mother!” I cried. Yes, there stood my mother, a shawl over her head and a big bundle on her back. She threw her arms around me and kissed me hungrily. “In a night like this, I thought you’d need a feather bed,” she said, throwing her bundle on my cot. . . . Here’s a jar of herring I pickled for you,” she said, unwrapping it from an old newspaper. (170)

The mother, recognizing Sara’s isolation in the city but not being able to sympathize with her ambitions to become a schoolteacher, would rather see her daughter married. Sara’s response to the prospect of marriage, having witnessed her mother’s marriage and the unhappy and joyless marriages of her three sisters is,“But to marry myself to a man that’s a person, I must first make myself for a person” (172). Instead of living a fairy-tale existence authored by her father (that in every case, without exception, turns into a nightmare), Sara wants to (as Yezierska does) write her own story. Sara’s sisters, Mashah and Fania, try to escape through daydreams and fantasies of romance. Mashah manages to live in their family’s tenement home as if she were somewhere else: “Worry or care of any kind could never get itself into Mashah’s empty head. Although she lived in the same dirt and trouble with us, nothing ever bothered her” (3–4). Her romance with Jacob Novak, the son of a big department-store owner, ends after his father’s visit to the Smolinsky home: “And all Mashah’s beauty couldn’t stop the cash-register look in his eyes, that we and our whole house weren’t worth one of his cuff buttons” (58). Later, when she is married off to Moe Mirsky, who pretends to be a diamond dealer but barely manages to hold onto a job as a store clerk, Mashah escapes into manic cleanliness. Dirt and grime, as well as hunger, are the constant metonyms for immigrant life. While still living at home, Mashah tells astonishing stories that “by those Americans, everybody in the family had a toothbrush and a separate towel for himself, ‘not like by us, where we use one torn piece of a shirt for the whole family, wiping the dirt from one face on to another’ ” (6). Thus she saves up


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money to buy a toothbrush, a towel, and “even a separate piece of soap” for herself (6). Once she is married to the “crook” (94), thanks to her father, she does not even have daydreams left to rely upon, she sublimates her aspirations for love and middle-class existence into the achievement of a clean house: “But at least I can keep my own house clean. . . . Beauty was in that house. But it had come out of Mashah’s face. The sunny colour of her walls had taken the colour of her cheeks. The shine of her pots and pans had taken the lustre out of her hair. And the soda with which she had scrubbed the floor so clean, and laundered her rags to white, had burned and eaten the beauty out of her hands” (146– 47). Because she cannot have control over her husband’s life, she sublimates her energies into maintaining a clean home. 7 The other sister, Fania, escapes her oppressive home and work routine through the fantasy of a romance: In the airshaft, facing our kitchen, he lived. He was a boarder with Zalmon the fishpeddler. . . . And he began writing her every day love poems, such grand, beautiful thoughts that read like from a book. And sometimes, Fania would read the poems the young man sent her to the girls on the stoop. And nobody would believe that such burning high thoughts came from that pale-faced, quiet-looking man that lived in that dark airshaft hole with Zalmon the fish-peddler, and who was only a sweeper and cleaner in the corner drugstore. (36–37)

The contrast between the beauty of poetic passion and the mundane details of immigrant life creates a fantastic effect: the uncanny simultaneity of a pale life lived in an airshaft and the production of beautiful thoughts in poetry. Once her father finds out about the romance, Fania is hastily married off to a “cloaks-andsuits manufacturer” (82) who turns out to be an obsessive gambler in Los Angeles. While the married Mashah lives vicariously through her excessive cleaning, Fania resigns herself to be a gambling widow buried in the expensive jewelry and clothes that muffle the tragedy of her botched and hopeless life again, brought about by their father. But the seemingly realistic main story full of naturalistic details of grime and dirt reveals itself, at a closer look, to be a series of fantastic stories and events. The novel opens with the impending eviction of the Smolinsky family for not having paid the rent: “I already saw all our things kicked out on the side-walk like a pile of junk. A plate of pennies like a beggar’s hand reaching out of our bunch of rags. Each sigh of pity from the passer-by, each penny thrown into the plate was another stab into our burning shame” (1–2). Sara’s “dark thoughts” almost come true when the landlady barges in and interrupts Reb Smolinsky’s prayer and holy singing with her shrieks: “ ‘Don’t you know me? Haven’t I come often enough? My rent! My rent! My rent I want!’ . . . She took one step towards him and shut his book with such anger that it fell at her feet” (17–18).


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The outraged self-appointed rabbi of Hester Street, the “light of the block” and the “flame of Torah in America” (48), slaps the landlady on the cheek so hard that blood starts running. When the father is arrested, the whole neighborhood rallies to his help. He becomes a local hero: “It was like a holiday all over the block when they had Father’s trial” (24). They even raise money for the “best American-born lawyer to take his part” (24). In a dramatic scene, the lawyer produces Reb Smolinsky’s Torah mysteriously and conveniently with the landlady’s muddy footprint on it: “For weeks after, everybody was talking about Father. By the butcher, by the baker, by the fish market, everybody was telling everybody over and over again, as you tell fairy tales, how Father hit the landlady when she stepped on the Holy Torah” (25). The event turns the holy man into an instant celebrity. The tragedy of reality is turned into comic fantasy, into farce. In another instance when tragedy is disguised as comedy, Bessie, the oldest daughter, is bartered away in marriage to Zalmon the fish peddler. It is one of the most disturbing, but at the same time, most comic scenes of the novel. Based on the speed with which Reb Smolinsky marries off his two middle daughters (as it later turns out, one to a liar and the other to a gambler), he becomes an expert in matchmaking in the eyes of the community. When Zalmon’s wife dies, he turns to Reb Smolinsky to find another wife who would take care of his five children and his household. The father sells his oldest daughter for “a little money to start myself in business, so as to let go her wages” (97). For the occasion of meeting Bessie, the usually unkempt and fish-smelling Zalmon perfumes himself, puts on a suit, and shaves his face: “Only by the thickness of his bushy eyebrows, and the wart on his nose, did we begin to recognize that this new-shaved man was Zalmon, the old fish-peddler, without his beard” (99). In stark contrast to the potentially festive and happy occasion, Bessie is devastated by the prospect of being sold to be “Zalmon’s fishwife”: “Bessie got into a nervous fit, crying and tearing her hair and cursing the day she was born” (98). With the speed of a fairy tale the story twists and turns, from the plausible to the unbelievable and from the tragic to the comic. Zalmon first appears in the novel as the landlord of Fania’s poet suitor. After his wife’s death, he becomes Bessie’s suitor, and his dead wife’s “lodge-money” (a kind of local life-insurance policy through membership in a lodge) becomes Reb Smolinsky’s down-payment for an ill-fated grocery business. The wedding transaction between Bessie and Zalmon is laconically summed up at the end of chapter 6: “When the wedding day came, she went quietly from our house to Zalmon’s the burden bearer had changed her burden” (110). Possibly, the most centrally positioned example of life gone absurd in the “golden country,”is the story of Reb Smolinsky’s purchase of a store in Elizabeth, New Jersey, with Zalmon’s money. From the absolute high of having made it in America: “After all our black years, we lived to see our own bought store in


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America! . . . We’ll yet be people in this New World!” (116), comes the absolute crash of the American Dream. The “false appearances” (121) hide nothing but an “empty fake of a store” in a “dead town” (128): “The shelves had goods only in the front row. The whole space behind was empty. Mother stabbed a knife into the tub of butter and hit into hard wood beneath the thin spread which had been plastered against the fake wooden bottom” (119). Instead of sugar, the barrels are full of sawdust and bricks, the shelves “faked with emptiness, the windows full of dummies,” and the bargain prices marked on the goods are set artificially low (120). The confidence game of coming to America, the land of promises, turns out to be a gamble in trust. To the mother’s accusation that her husband places more trust in strangers than in his own wife and family, Reb Smolinsky reiterates his view of America as a confidence game, sounding quite similar to Melville’s confidence man preaching “philanthropy”: “You think I’m like you, mistrusting everybody? I trust people. The whole world is built on trust. The bank, the mines, the Government could never exist unless people trusted each other.” “Oh-h-h-h! Of all the troubles on earth, is there anything so terrible as to have to live with a fool?” (124)

The theme of being taken for a fool is repeated several times in the novel with a fairy-tale-like repetitiousness. Again and again, Yezierska hammers home the message that trust and confidence are misplaced when they are hung on the idea of America. Mashah and Fania marry “a swindler and a crook,” and Bessie is sold into marriage by her father to be “Zalmon’s fishwife” (142). For Yezierska the up-from-the-ghetto narrative cannot be sustained within the confines of romance or the realism of immigrant narratives. Her books are usually read either as examples of immigrant realism (in opposition to Henry Roth’s stream-of-consciousness modernism) or as protofeminist manifestos against Jewish orthodox patriarchy but always within the conventions of realism and the marriage plot (see Dearborn, Ferraro, Harris, Schoen, and Zaborowska). The script Reb Smolinsky writes for his family follows the myth of American individualism: “Woman! How do you suppose Rockefeller, or Morgan, or any other of those millionaires made their start in America? They all began with empty hands. Their only capital was hope, courage to work out their ideas”(133). While belief in the rags-to-riches cliché is mostly shared by Sara’s parents and sisters, Sara has her own mythical hope for how to “make myself for a person” (172): through education and marriage to an “American-born.” Her blueprint for success in the New Land comes through the medium of the newspaper: “And then it flashed to me. The story from the Sunday paper. A girl slaving away in the shop. Her hair was already turning gray, and nothing had ever happened


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to her. Then suddenly she began to study in the night school, then college. And worked and studied, on and on, till she became a teacher in the schools” (155). But Yezierska subverts the Horatio Alger script when telling the immigrant experience: she cannot tell a realistic tale with a happy ending of assimilation, as does Mary Antin’s “immigrant classic,” The Promised Land (1912). Yezierska’s story hovers between immigrant realism and its parody and between the mimetic and the fantastic. She also subverts the novel’s happy ending, since Sara’s marriage is not the completion of the plot but the beginning of the same story over again, making her narrative be part of a growing list of modernist both high and ethnic authors who use circular structures in their novels, such as Joyce in Finnegans Wake, Roth in Call It Sleep, or Ellison in Invisible Man, or who make allusions to circularity, such as Hurston:“I suddenly realized that I had come back to where I had started twenty years ago when I began my fight for freedom. But in my rebellious youth, I thought I could escape by running away. And now I realized that the shadow of the burden was always following me, and here I stood face to face with it again” (Bread Givers 295). The fight for personhood and against patriarchy pushes Sara from her father’s impetuous misogyny to the controlling persona of her school-principal husband. Sara’s rationalization that her marriage to a fellow countryman and an educator would lead to a more equal union is undermined by the textual images of “Hugo Seelig’s muddy footprint” left behind on her freshly washed floor (280) or the “shadow” of patriarchy still hovering over her even after their union in marriage. The abject conditions most immigrants faced upon arriving in America, the expectations of the golden land and the grittily naturalistic details of daily life could only be reconciled and told in the mode of the fantastic: through fairy-tale-like fantasies where the tragic is absurdly positioned beside the comic and through a melodramatic resolution of the marriage plot into a plot of radical alterity. In Bread Givers, Yezierska closes the story with Sara’s impending marriage to the principal of her school, Hugo Seelig, a fellow Pole: “We talked one language. We had sprung from one soil . . . here we are born friends. . . . You and I, we are of one blood” (278). Here Yezierska reiterates the American nativist concept (as Walter Benn Michaels uses the term) in order to sustain the early-twentiethcentury ideologies of racial purity and cultural commonality. Even though Sara seemingly tries to erase all traces of her blood relationships with her family, or as Werner Sollors puts it, she places more importance on “consent” than on “descent” (Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 6): “And here, in America, where girls pick out for themselves the men they want for husbands, how grand it would be if the children also could pick out their fathers and mothers” (Yezierska, Bread Givers 76). But, at the end of novel, she picks a father figure for her husband. For example, during Sara’s first interaction with Hugo in his role as principal,


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he corrects her English pronunciation in front of the class she is teaching. He also encourages her to take her father in with them after the father’s second marriage, to Mrs. Feinstein, goes sour: “Then Hugo’s grip tightened on my arm and we walked on. But I felt the shadow still there, over me. It wasn’t just my father, but the generations who made my father whose weight was still upon me” (297). The last image of Sara held tightly in the grip of patriarchy is the modernist subversion of the traditional romance plot. In the modernist version, the heterosexual union at the end of the story is neither a happy resolution nor a finite death sentence handed to the heroine. Sara is suspended in a vicious circle, in the “eternal recurrence” of the hegemonic repetition of liberation followed by a new form of submission. Sara’s quest for becoming educated in America leads to just a more sophisticated version of abjection in the New World. The complexity of modern life reassigns the roles of oppressor and oppressed according to gender divisions. There are no easy solutions left, such as the euphoria of overcoming class or regional differences through romantic unions or the female character asserting her need for freedom and independence but almost certainly choosing death over marriage as in the romantic fiction of a previous era. Yezierska repeats the themes of loneliness and seething anger over and over in her writings. The menace of unshakeable strangerness in the world, especially in America, is also the key theme of Bread Givers. First, it is the tyranny of her father (“a tyrant more terrible than the Tsar of Russia”) that makes her feel alienated from her siblings and, ultimately, from her family: “I began to feel I was different from my sisters” (65). Then, her marriage to Hugo repeats and re-creates the same feeling of estrangement. Her confessed discontent with her father and with the male symbolic order he represents (patriarchy, language, correct grammar and pronunciation, tradition, family, and marriage) differentiates her from her sisters. The first time she encounters loneliness is when she is the only daughter left in the home. Her sisters are married off, and she and her parents move to New Jersey to run the grocery store: “What would become of me if I remained out here, day in and day out, without friends. My arms would wither at my sides. I’d forget how to shake hands. My tongue would grow dumb in my mouth. And all my longing for people would shrink in my frozen heart” (129). But her loneliness and feeling as a stranger increase even more after she escapes from her family and from New Jersey when she is seventeen. With the defiant gesture of leaving the “olden times” (137) behind in order to author her own life, she sinks even further into isolation and almost unbearable loneliness. From the emotional high of “I’m going to live my own life. Nobody can stop me. I’m not from the old country. I’m American!” (138) comes the ultimate low of “having made herself for a person” being alone and a social outcast. At first, she feels exuberant about having a room of her own: “I, alone with myself,


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was enjoying myself for the first time as with grandest company” (157). When visiting with her married sisters, Sara finds them as lonely in their marriages as if they were single: Fania has no friends and her husband is off gambling; Mashah is tied up with her babies and the never-ending chores of keeping the house tidy, while her husband plays the dandy; and Bessie is too busy with selling fish and raising Zalmon’s children to even think of herself. In that context Sara’s blessed aloneness is a virtue: “It’s not a picnic to live alone. But at least I’ve no boss of a husband to crush the spirit in me,” she concludes (177). But, eventually, her loneliness becomes unbearable. From chapter 8, “Outcast,” on, the theme of her estrangement in America takes center stage: for example, she feels left out in the laundry where she works. The ascetic drive to get educated becomes a deadening force. When looking in the mirror, a “gray” and “stone” face looks back at her: she has “[t]urned to stone from not living” (181). Her attempt to bring life back to her features (with makeup, lace, and red roses for her hat) and thus make herself accepted among her peers in the laundry proves to be a futile attempt at mimicking life: “I was like a dolledup dummy fixed for a part on the stage” (183). A look at her “false face” and suffocating “mask” in the mirror makes her ashamed that she has “tried to be like the rest and couldn’t” (183). Her only hope then is to “get to the educated world, where only the thoughts you give out count, and not how you look” (183). But she finds college life as inhuman as the sweatshop world: “Was the college only a factory, and the teachers machines turning out lectures by the hour on wooden dummies, incapable of response?” (224). She also overhears her professors complaining about being overworked and underpaid (225). On campus she is ignored and is an outcast, again: “Sitting side by side with them through the whole hour, I felt stranger to them if I had passed them in Hester Street. Wasn’t there some secret something that would open us toward one another?” (214). She is still an outsider, alone, and “like a lost ghost”: “I was nothing and nobody. It was worse than being ignored. Worse than being an outcast. I simply didn’t belong” (219). Instead of “character or brains” only “youth and beauty and clothes” matter in the American world of education: “Even in college I had not escaped from the ghetto” (220). Sara’s intense loneliness resonates with the invisibility Ralph Ellison’s unnamed underground-dwelling main character experiences in Invisible Man (1952). His response to the ghostlike existence forced upon him is to tap into the power grid itself and drain the system through the 1,369 light bulbs he burns in his underground hibernation hole. Ellison’s novel resolves, as does Yezierska’s, the absurdity of being black or a stranger in modern America by writing in the fantastic register within a realistic and mimetic narrative frame. Yezierska’s marriage solution for Sara is equivalent to Ellison’s character’s invisibility and retreat to living underground: they subvert the conventions of


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the female romance plot or the male Bildungsroman. Sara’s marriage to her principal and her agreeing to take her father as well as his tradition into her home is almost as nightmarish as Gregor Samsa’s turning into an insect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Thus, Yezierska rewrites both immigrant realism and the nineteenth-century marriage plot in the register of the fantastic under the conditions of modernity and as an example of ethnic modernism. It has been often said that immigrants, émigrés, or exiles can never return to the home of their memories and that they do not feel completely at home in their new country either. And there is some of that recorded in Bread Givers, but the intensity of Sara’s aloneness in the novel and her failed attempts to fit in and be part of a community (family, ghetto, college, and marriage) point to a more profoundly structured “strangerness” (as Georg Simmel uses the term). Part of it is cultural since she rejects Orthodox Judaism and with it her family and her community in the ghetto (she refuses to tear her clothes after her mother dies; and by leaving home at age seventeen she also refuses to participate in the institution of arranged marriage). But partly, her alienation is personal: Sara has an ascetic drive to be educated and thus become a “real American” (210). Her obsessive drive to get a college degree is similar in intensity to her father’s obsession to keep the flame of spirituality burning in the America of assimilated Jews, ready-mades, cool wasp self-control and reason, and secular individualism and economic success. Sara does not see her family for six years while she is on her quest to become educated. She only returns home after she has earned her teaching degree, just when her mother is on her deathbed. Because she wants to be educated, she does not fit in with the lighthearted company of her fellow workers in the laundry where she earns her living by ironing, and she does not fit in college life either. Her hunger for knowledge would lead her to the offices of her professors, but her eagerness, lack of selfcontrol and reason alienate them from her too. Her psychology professor, Mr. Edman, finds her company a nuisance when she moves into his building and practically stalks him. Sara’s final pained resolution to turn to marriage and patriarchal tradition is more of a critique of the ideology of America and modernity than an enthusiastic support for them. Mary Dearborn lumps Yezierska into the category of early writings by ethnic women (along with Mourning Dove). Dearborn asserts that both Yezierska and Mourning Dove insert themselves into the rhetoric of “America,” reproducing its “received myths, heroes, and modes of discourse” (71–72). 8 Yezierska’s obsession with being an outsider and an outcast in America gives a psychological insight into the uncanny existence of being an immigrant and a stranger. Throughout her writings, Yezierska compulsively tries to understand the gap that separates her from the “American-born.” Expatriate Amer-


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ican modernist writers escaped to Europe only to find the same incoherence and a world broken into pieces. Immigrant writers in the United States found a similarly incoherent America. Yezierska, in Bread Givers, records such a state of things through the narrative conventions of immigrant realism, but she pushes the up-from-the-ghetto narrative to its limits and turns it into its own parody. Sara Smolinsky deflects and distorts the image of America as the Promised Land. The land of promise turns into an intricate confidence game: in exchange for trust it offers opportunity but only if the customer is of the right class, religion, or culture. Otherwise, she is taken for a fool with no other option open to her but to marry and to conform, even at the price of her vitality. Mashah’s vitality is bleached out in her obsessive and desperate effort to maintain a facade of control through excessive cleanliness, at least within her own home. Feelings and passions are supplanted by the commodities that surround Fania. Bessie, the “burden bearer,” works herself into a machinelike existence, while Sara represses all pleasure and desire in her quest to make a person of herself according to the rules of the confidence game of America. Sara, finally, gives in to marriage and to the iron rule of patriarchy. Yezierska closes her novel with a hopeless rage that may be only tamed by or sublimated into education. It is such anger that Julia Kristeva taps into when she tries to domesticate the ever-present foreigner or stranger within us all under the conditions of modernity: Foreigner: a choked up rage deep down my throat, a black angel clouding transparency, opaque, unfathomable spur. The image of hatred and of the other, a foreigner is neither the romantic victim of our clannish indolence nor the intruder responsible for all the ills of the polis. Neither the apocalypse on the move nor the instant adversary to be eliminated for the sake of appeasing the group. Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks the abode, the time in which understanding and affinity flounder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns “we” into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities. (Strangers to Ourselves 1)

Henry Roth Behind the ship the white wake that stretched to Ellis Island grew longer, raveling wanly into melon-green. On one side curved the low drab Jersey coast-line, the spars and masts on the water-front fringing the sky; on the other side was Brooklyn, flat, water-towered; the horns of the harbor. And before them, rising


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on her high pedestal from the scaling swarmy brilliance of sunlit water to the west, Liberty. The spinning disk of the late afternoon sun slanted behind her, and to those on board who gazed, her features were charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane. Against the luminous sky the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep Above the even enthusiasm of the kindly faced American woman: “And do you know, you can go all the way up inside her for twenty-five cents. For only twentyfive cents, mind you! Every American man, woman and child ought to go up inside her, it’s a thrilling experience. The Statue of Liberty is ” Henry Roth, Call It Sleep I’m somebody else. I’m somebody else Henry Roth, Call It Sleep

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Henry Roth’s first novel, Call It Sleep (1934) opens with the arrival of Genya and her son David on Ellis Island. The two are greeted by Albert Schearl, Genya’s husband. From the moment mother and child set foot on American land, Albert is suspicious of the baby’s origins. David is said to be seventeen-months-old, though physically he is well over two years, and his birth certificate is missing. The novel immediately focuses the reader’s attention on ambiguous origins (both in terms of family and nationality) in the “Golden Land.” Who is David’s father? Albert Schearl or Ludwig, the Christian organist? Is he Jewish or a gentile? Or, is he Austrian or Polish, a foreigner or an American? The story ends with David’s rebirth and him becoming an integral member of his family and of America. Through dramatic processes of Christian redemption and resurrection, he is distanced from his dubious European and Jewish origins and from familial and national illegitimacy. He re-creates himself through a self-inflicted electrical shock that also brings about Albert’s pity and his possible acceptance of David as his son. The family regenerates itself in order to survive in America. Sin and guilt are at the psychic core of each character: they left behind the Old World in order to start with a clean slate, but they find that the Old World has come along. David is the sacrificial lamb, Isaac or Christ, who takes on the doubts and sins of his people and of his parents only to be delivered and saved from death in the last moment. To be delivered from death, and from the ghosts and nightmares of the past, the new generation has to leave the sins (and the language and religion) of its ancestors behind and take on the



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language, culture, and dominant faith of the New Country. Thus David’s rebirth is imagined within the Christian paradigm of resurrection and redemption. David and his mother step off the boat on a day in May 1907: “the year that was destined to bring the greatest number of immigrants to the shores of the United States” (3). The steamer that brings Genya and David to America is ironically named the Peter Stuyvesant, after the Dutch governor who attempted to prohibit the immigration of the Jews to New Amsterdam in 1654 (see Sollors, “ ‘A World Somewhere, Somewhere Else’ ”138). In Henry Roth’s depiction the boat carries a diverse group of immigrants who all seem like costumed participants in a masked ball: All that day, as on all the days since spring began, her decks had been thronged by hundreds upon hundreds of foreigners, natives from almost every land in the world, the joweled close-cropped Teuton, the full-bearded Russian, the scraggly-whiskered Jew, and among them Slovack peasants with docile faces, smooth-cheeked and swarthy Armenians, pimply Greeks, Danes with wrinkled eye-lids. All day her decks had been colorful, a matrix of the vivid costumes of other lands, the speckled green-and-yellow aprons, the flowered kerchief, embroidered homespun, the silver-braided sheep-skin vest, the gaudy scarfs, yellow boots, fur caps, high-pitched voices, the astonished cries, the gasps of wonder, reiterations of gladness had risen from her decks in a motley billow of sound. (3–4)

The small steamer that delivers the immigrants from their homelands is reminiscent of the Mississippi riverboat, Fidèle, in Melville’s novel, The ConfidenceMan. Both boats collect people from different cultural backgrounds, staging a masked ball of the ever-changing American nation. Melville’s pilgrims also start out as a “cosmopolitan and confident tide” of people hoping for a better future at the end of the journey. But the trip downstream on the Mississippi ends in the apocalyptic image of a homogeneous traveling crowd, connected to each other by greed and self-interest. The opening tableau of diversity comes to an end in the last scene of the novel: after the confidence man “extinguish[es] this lamp” the masquerade of diversity is enveloped in the uniformity of ensuing darkness (217). In Roth’s Call It Sleep, the journey from Europe to America ends in the barracks of Ellis Island and in the “stench and throb of New York tenements” (3). Albert, waiting for his family at the port, has already taken off his European Old World costume: “His clothes were the ordinary clothes the ordinary New Yorker wore in that period sober and dull” (4). Alexis de Tocqueville had noted the equalizing but also homogenizing tendencies of American democracy a hundred years earlier. From his perspective the new democracy had already established its dangerous side-effects of conformity. Similarly, early-twentiethcentury immigrants both embraced and scorned the melting pot of America. The novel is narrated from a child’s, from David’s, perspective. It is an ac-


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count of his fragmented impressions of the world around him. Through his consciousness we learn of his parents’ previous history in the old world of his mother’s affair with a gentile and of his father’s indirect role in David’s grandfather’s death and of their difficult transition into a modern and culturally diverse American society. But the novel is also the story of the Oedipal familial romance between mother and son at the expense of intimacy between David and his father, Albert. Their relationship is further burdened by Alfred’s suspicion that David’s real father is Genya’s gentile lover. Through the narrative we follow David’s progress from a prelinguistic symbiotic stage with his mother toward individuation, discovery of himself and his sexuality, and to personal, social, and cultural integration into the New World. Call It Sleep starts with a prologue and is divided into four books, each marking a developmental stage in David’s life. The prologue sets up the narrative situation by placing the story in the year 1907 David is about two-yearsold when the largest number of immigrants reached the shores of the United States from Europe. Here Roth also establishes that, because David does not have a birth certificate, he is free to author his own life and the story of his origins in “the land of freedom, of immense opportunity, that Golden Land” ominously represented by the looming figure of the Statue of Liberty (12). In “Book I: The Cellar,” David is already six-years-old and very attached to his mother. His father is given to outbursts of uncontrollable anger and violence. For example, at the print shop where he works, he nearly kills a fellow worker with a hammer (25). David fears and hates his father, and the dislike is mutual. David has his first sexual experience with Annie, a neighborhood friend, in the closet; then he is beaten up by Yussie, another neighborhood kid. He hides in the cellar in order to recover from both traumatic experiences. Instead of recovery, he is further traumatized in the frighteningly dark cellar: “It was horrible, the dark. The rats lived there, the hordes of nightmare, the wobbly faces, the crawling and misshapen things” (116). In the next section, “Book II: The Picture,” David is thrown into a new kind of confusion. Instead of the inarticulate and nightmarish jumble of early childhood experiences, David gets a clearer glimpse of his history and cultural legacy. Through a conversation between David’s mother and Aunt Bertha, in the “secret” language of Polish, the growing boy learns of the history of the picture that shows blue cornflowers, a picture from the old country, which Genya saved from her past. The picture reminds her of the affair with the “goy organist,” Ludwig, who may be David’s father (266). In this book, the convoluted and nightmarish image of the cellar finally gains a specific meaning. Albert’s hostility and violence also begins to make sense in the context of this secret. In the next chapter, “Book III: The Coal,” David’s education finally takes place in an organized and institutionalized setting. He attends Hebrew school where he learns the means and the language to make


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sense of his earlier incomprehensible and frightening experiences; that is, his fear of being an illegitimate child, anxieties over his sexuality and over his close relationship with his mother, and the inability to put his experiences into words and a coherent narrative. Learning about the ritual of Passover and the Biblical story of Isaiah give him the tools of the symbolic order to make sense of his own past and of the adult notions of sin and cleansing in sociocultural terms. In the final section, “Book IV: The Rail” David finally integrates the fragmented pieces of his past, of the legacy of being a Jew, of the possibility that he is the son of a gentile and most importantly, of his being in America where he can author his own story of origins. He pieces his memories into a coherent narrative through the Christian parable of death, redemption, and resurrection. This experience signals a new generation is born that must integrate the different cultural, religious, and national fragments into a new identity in a new language on a new land. He must forget his past and invent a new family and a culture in order to rid himself of the sins of his parents and from the baggage of the old world. Thus, a new identity and a new integrated American self is reborn through violence, repression, and self-creation, a process that is reminiscent of the collective ideology of assimilation in the American melting pot. In the last pages of the novel the Statue of Liberty reemerges, this time as the figure that unites multiple languages, cultures, and religions into one, thereby redeeming the “huddled masses” on American soil (574). David is reborn through the “mothering” of the Statue of Liberty whose controversial image is recalled again in Ellison’s Invisible Man (in the Battle Royal scene where she is represented as a naked blonde white woman with a “small American flag tattooed upon her belly” entertaining the male audience of the boxing match, [Ellison 19]). America then is both a liberating place but also a place of loss the “short circuiting” of diversity and individuality (Roth, Call It Sleep 594). One of the best illustrations of the ambiguity of the immigrant experience in the novel is the comic story of Aunt Bertha (whose farcical characterization mocks the image of Lady Liberty), which combines marriage with economic opportunism once she is in the New World. She is the stereotypical immigrant who succeeds in the Golden Land: her love of candy takes her to the dentist, who replaces her decaying teeth with gold ones. She also meets her future husband in the dentist’s waiting room. Once married, they open, fittingly, a candy store. Aunt Bertha’s story follows the narrative conventions of immigrant realism, but her character is also the most grotesque and ironically distanced in the novel. Aunt Bertha is grotesque both in her appearance (obese and notoriously unkempt) and in her unbridled and emotionally excessive behavior. Most immigrants, especially those who came during the first two decades of the twentieth century, bought into the Golden Land image of America and assimilated accordingly. Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912) is one of the


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most prominent promoters of such exuberant visions of America as a land of opportunity. 9 Henry Roth’s 1934 novel incorporates the cliché and its critique simultaneously. For example, he describes the normative images of immigrants on Ellis Island with their exotic attires and gestures only to contrast them with the Schearls’ atypical behavior. The time frame of the novel, 1907–13, is juxtaposed with that of the Great Depression, the time of the writing of the novel (Roth started writing Call It Sleep around 1929). Thus the novel is both a representation and a subversion of the immigrant experience: it uses and then exposes the commonplace images through narrative irony. The same is true for his handling of Judaism in the text: it is both profoundly present, making it a Jewish ethnic novel 10, and it is also denied and subverted from an outsider’s perspective (see the section where David explains certain aspects of Judaism to his Catholic friend, Leo Dugovka, in chapter 8, 414–17). The prologue of the novel is a dystopic image of the New World: America is a series of disappointments for each member of the Schearl family. Genya hardly recognizes Albert because he is so thin: “Then here in the new land is the same old poverty” (6–7). Albert sees his son for the first time upon their arrival on Ellis Island. There is immediate distrust between father and son and an unusual coldness and lack of affection between Albert and his wife. Instead of the expressive behavior usually displayed by reunited immigrant families, the Schearls exhibit only suspicion. Their behavior also signals that they both want to leave the Old World completely behind, demonstrating no remnants of affection or nostalgia for the old and the familiar: “Except for this [David’s ‘odd, outlandish, blue straw’] hat, had the three newcomers been in a crowd, no one probably, could have singled out the woman and child as newly arrived immigrants. They carried no sheets tied up in huge bundles, no bulky wicker baskets, no prized feather beds, no boxes of delicacies, sausages, virgin-olive oils, rare cheeses; the large black satchel beside them was their only luggage” (5). Henry Roth’s vision of immigration lacks any excitement about starting anew in America. 11 This is a somber arrival, the Schearls leave an unhappy life behind and do not look forward to the new one either. They were strangers at home, Jews speaking Yiddish in the predominantly Catholic and Polishspeaking community of Veljish in the then Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia; and they are still strangers in America and to each other. In her introduction to New Essays on Call It Sleep, Hana Wirth-Nesher cites Werner Sollors’s concept of ethnic modernism as an apt description of Roth’s novel that bridges the divide between modernism and ethnic literatures in the first part of the century: “Roth’s novel is representative of second-generation immigrant literature. In such texts, Jewish immigrant childhood (or any ethnic immigrant upbringing) merges with American modernism to form ‘a haunting bilateral descent myth.’ Sollors challenges simple notions of origins” (13).


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Furthermore, Sollors suggests a connection between the ethnic and the modern experience: they both involve alienation and constant reminders of one’s strangeness and being an outsider: Perhaps the very disconnection of second-generation immigrant urban writers from a specific rural life that they still heard about from their elders in fragmentary reverberation made these artists so receptive to the “mythical method” in art that T. S. Eliot advocated in his review of Joyce’s Ulysses. The mythical method permitted artists to unite past and present and to incorporate the modern experience . . . letting modernism function as an equivalent for twentieth-century nostalgia, and as a perfect response to modernity, especially for urban immigrant writers. (“ ‘A world somewhere’ ” 148)

Not only is Roth’s novel “specifically Jewish” and modernist in form, but it is also “essentially American.” In a 1972 interview with Bonnie Lyons from his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home Henry Roth reflects upon the circumstances of and his feelings about estrangement. Roth’s was speaking of his decadelong relationship with Eda Lou Walton, twelve years his senior and his English professor at New York University. Walton, Roth’s muse, wrote her dissertation on Native American poetry and wrote on Renaissance writers: –Interviewer: Did your relationship with Eda Lou and the fact that she was older and non-Jewish estrange you from your family? –Roth: The estrangement took place first. Like so many first generation American Jewish youth, I had already come to dissociate from family, Judaism, the whole thing and to embrace the American scene, the new American attitudes. (Lyons 161)

Roth experiences estrangement both as an immigrant and as a Jew in a profoundly gentile and modern environment. Henry Roth’s characters, both in Call It Sleep and in the Mercy of a Rude Stream cycle sixty years later, grapple with the same issues the author was trying to work through all his life.12 Although most of the authors I discuss in this book use some autobiographical details in their novels, Henry Roth’s stories follow the events of his life the most closely. In that sense, Mercy of a Rude Stream falls in the genre of the memoir. It is hard not to see the author in his characters, as David Schearl of Call It Sleep or as Ira Stigman of the Mercy project. When issues of incest and sexual exploitation are discussed, the closeness of fiction to reality, or to “remembered reality,” is often unsettling. In a 1967 interview with David Bronsen Henry Roth himself reflects upon the fragile boundaries between his life and its fictionalized version: The characters in the novel [Call It Sleep] have a cohesion of their own, but to really understand them you have to go through the characters and back to the author to find out what was motivating and disturbing him. I needed empirical reality for the sake


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of its plausibility, but I took off from it on a tangent. In other words, I was working with characters, situations and events that had in part been taken from life, but which I molded to give expression to what was oppressing me. To a considerable extent I was drawing on the unconscious to give shape to remembered reality [italics mine]. Things which I could not fully understand but which filled me with apprehension played a critical role in determining the form of the novel. (Bronsen)

Henry Roth accentuates estrangement being a Jew and an immigrant not only thematically but also through the uncomfortable permeability between the functions of author and character, life and fiction. “Remembered reality” leaves the reader wondering whether all the elements of the “family romance” (incest between son and mother, between brother and sister, between Ira and his cousin, Ira’s father and the same young cousin, and the molestation of Ira by Uncle Moe) really took place in the actual Roth household. By the last published segment of the Mercy project, Requiem for Harlem, readers cannot help feeling that they know too much. The narrative itself promotes a strong sense of alienation from the protagonist. Ira Stigman of Mercy of a Rude Stream has become a perpetrator, as opposed to the passive victim, David Schearl, in Call It Sleep. Besides the psychological and individual damages that ravage the dislocated immigrant family, the Schearls (and the Stigmans) become a case study in the breaking down of the bourgeois family and Puritan morality in the modernizing New Word. 13 The perspective of the outsider, what I have called the “discourse of the stranger,” mediates an ironically critical view of modern American culture and politics. The immigrant experience is specifically connected to the developmental stage of language-acquisition: in Call It Sleep David Schearl cannot speak when he arrives on Ellis Island. He has no mother tongue yet, and he learns Yiddish and English simultaneously. He is still in the Lacanian mirror stage, still in a symbiotic relationship with his mother. His entrance into the symbolic order takes place in a new language and in connection to an alien father figure (both figuratively and symbolically, since both father and fatherland are alien to him). Moreover, Albert doubts his paternity from the first moment he gazes at the baby. David is marked by his white “German” skin as “not Jewish.” The story starts with David’s ambiguous origin and missing birth certificate in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and ends with the boy’s near death and miraculous survival-rebirth under the cacophony of voices and dialects of Jewish-Irish Harlem. One of those voices, the voice of “the kindly faced American woman,” promises a trip up the body of Lady Liberty for only twentyfive cents. America’s hollow body allows for coming out of the birth canal anew through a spiritual and physical rebirth, by taking a trip into her cavernous body. The trip through Lady Liberty is cheap, she can be bought like a prostitute


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(503). In a sense, David buys his American identity through his near death and by absolving his parents from their Old World sins: his mother’s affair with a Catholic organist and his father’s role in his own father’s death. Thus, the Old World’s legacy is betrayal, patricide, paralyzing guilt, and seething rage. Genya hides her pregnancy behind a hurried marriage to Albert and by calling the baby premature. Albert covers up his patricide by marrying Genya. He “killed” his father by passively looking on when a bull attacked him. Albert’s mother blames her son for the death. Albert can only redeem himself through marriage, by marrying the only woman in the village who herself has something to hide. Once in America, Albert becomes sexually impotent and, at the same time, physically violent. He is also tortured by paranoid fantasies. 14 David is the sacrificial lamb on the altar of his parents’ marriage masquerade, hidden secrets, and paralyzing guilt. First, he tries to resolve and undo his parents’ sins through the Jewish tradition (the story of Isaiah’s purification frames David’s own story), but it requires a command of Hebrew. David’s second entrance into the symbolic order is through his studies of Hebrew in the “cheder” with a sadistic and unkempt rabbi, Reb Yidel Pankower another alien father figure. David abandons his Hebrew education once the family moves from the Lower East Side to Harlem. He is just about to study the “chumish,” translating and understanding the Biblical text as opposed to just sounding out the words without meaning, when he stops his studies and moves into the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Harlem. Thus, the reading and understanding of Hebrew texts would come at a later stage in his life, as a second entrance into the symbolic order. But learning Hebrew is also a throwback to the Old World. 15 Eventually, David (and then Ira) leave both Judaism and the Old World behind. 16 In Call It Sleep the Hebrew scripture is a puzzling secret, along with the story of David’s origins. Both secrets are locked in languages to which he has no access: the story of Isaiah is told in Hebrew and the story of his mother’s affair with Ludwig is alluded to in Polish with bits of Yiddish. The secret of Isaiah remains inaccessible to him during the celebration of Passover, in the chapter “The Coal”: “Now I’ll tell you a little of what you read, then what it means. Listen to me well that you may remember it. Beshnas mos hamlech.” The two nails of his thumb and forefinger met. “In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw God. And God was sitting on his throne, high in heaven and in his temple Understand”? He pointed upward. Mendel nodded, grimacing as he eased the bandage round his neck. Gee! And he saw Him. Wonder where? (David, his interest aroused, was listening intently. This was something new). “Now!” resumed the rabbi. “Around Him stood the angels, God’s blessed angels. How beautiful they were you yourself may imagine. And they cried: Kadosh! Kadosh!


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Kadosh! Holy! Holy! Holy! And the temple rang and quivered with the sound of their voices. So!” He paused, peering into Mendel’s face. “Understand?” “Yeh,” said Mendel understandingly. And angels there were and he saw ’em. Wonder if “But when Isaiah saw the Almighty in his majesty and His terrible light Woe me! he cried, What shall I do! I am lost!” The rabbi seized his skull-cap and crumpled it. “I, common man, have seen the Almighty, I, unclean one have seen him! Behold, my lips are unclean and I live in a land unclean for the Jews at that time were sinful ” Clean? Light? Wonder if ? Wish I could ask him why the Jews were dirty. What did they do? Better not! Get mad. Where? (Furtively, while the rabbi still spoke David leaned over and stole a glance at the number of the page.) On sixty-eight. After, maybe, can ask. On page sixty-eight. That blue book Gee! It’s God. “But just when Isaiah let out his cry I am unclean one of the angels flew to the altar and with tongs drew out a fiery coal. Understand? With tongs. And with that coal, down he flew to Isaiah and with that coal touched his lips Here!” The rabbi’s fingers stabbed the air. You are clean! And the instant that coal touched Isaiah’s lips, then he heard God’s own voice say, Whom shall I send? Who will go for us? And Isaiah spoke and ” But a sudden blast of voices out doors interrupted him. Running feet stamped across the yard. The door burst open. A squabbling tussling band stormed the doorway, jamming it. (304–5)

I quote this section in such length because it contains the key themes of being “unclean” and “sinful” that are at the core of Call It Sleep and its four-volume sequel, Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994–98). There has been much speculation about the almost sixty-year long silence or bad case of writer’s block that kept Roth a one-novel author till the publication of the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream in 1994. In various interviews Roth gives different answers to the question about his long silence: he blames the hindering aesthetics of socialist realism and the controlling ideological standards of the Communist Party he joined right after finishing Call It Sleep, his own psychological immaturity, the breakup with Eda Lou Walton around 1939, his family’s move to the multiethnic and predominantly Christian Harlem, and his own subsequent ambivalence about and abandonment of Judaism; but ultimately, Henry Roth and his alter egos come back to the same core themes, those of shame, guilt, sin, and being “unclean.”17 The deus ex machina ending of Call It Sleep God cleansing Isaiah’s mouth with the burning coal, David’s electrocution with the hindsight furnished by the four Mercy sequels seems wishful about David’s innocence and Roth’s own long silence as a writer but not completely truthful. Another critic, Marshall Berman, assumes that the death of his wife, Muriel Parker, in 1990 may have


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freed Roth up finally recount the unsayable events of his youth. According to interviews with Roth’s editor, Robert Weil, just before Roth’s death, Muriel Parker, whom Roth married a year after his breakup with Eda Lou Walton, did not read any of the manuscripts Roth supposedly already started composing in the late seventies and early eighties (see Berman, “The Bonds of Love” 25–30). 18 Most critics (such as Wirth-Nesher, “Jewish, American, Modernist, Classic”; McHale; Lawrence; and Sollors, “ ‘A world somewhere’ ”) agree upon the modernism of Roth’s narrative in Call It Sleep, though others rather situate it in the “proletarian” tradition (see Ledbetter). Critics usually point to chapter 11 of “The Rail” section, the famous electrocution scene, where the cacophony of immigrant and street voices “speak over” and “alongside” David’s consciousness to demonstrate the novel’s kinship to high modernism. But the novel’s historical location in modernity with its themes of dislocation and estrangement, the marked Oedipal and psychoanalytic self-awareness of the narrative (though Roth maintained till his death that he had only fleeting knowledge of Freud), the Schearl family’s move from a rural and traditional society into a modern urban megalopolis, the claustrophobia of the bourgeois family structure, the fragmentation of the central consciousness (child-immigrant-Jew), and the fragmentation and collagelike structure of the narrative all point to a more profound connection with modernism than that of the stream of consciousness form by itself. Form and content speak the same language of modernity in the novel. The apocalyptic pyrotechnics and the cacophony of voices and languages are the climactic and redemptive events in the plot of Call It Sleep. David nearly electrocutes himself in a shower of sparks by the third rail of a New York City trolley line. The religious aspect of the ending is God’s terrifying revelation and the possible acceptance of David by his father (and by America) the son proving his worthiness as both Albert’s and America’s son by cleansing himself from his Old World baggage of parental sins and orthodox Judaism. But on psychological and ethnogenetic levels Roth himself struggled with the shame and secrets of youthful sexual indiscretions the son already has his own sins, and nothing is really resolved in the New Word (see Halkin; Berman, “Bonds”; and Kermode).19 There is no end in sight to the cycle of sin and cleansing: alienation and shame follow the immigrant and stranger where she or he goes. Coming to America in order to leave the baggage of the Old World behind brings forth a new set of complications. David’s innocence is compromised from the moment he is born: he is a Jew but from an illicit relationship with a “goy.” He is the best student in the“cheder,”but he is fascinated by Leo Dugovka and his Catholicism. With his self-electrocution he is reborn as “pure” and “Puritan” in America, but he already carries his own confessedly shameful secrets. There are several mythical allusions in Call It Sleep: besides the earlier-men-


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tioned references to Isaiah and Christ, David is also a part of the Oedipal family triangle. A young boy’s attachment to his mother is clearly a key theme throughout the volumes of Call It Sleep and Mercy of a Rude Stream. Myth and psychoanalysis are in a symbiotic relationship in a modernist fashion. The past is only accessible through stories (personal, mythical, and Biblical) and through a strong attachment to the only stable figure in the boy’s life his mother. David Schearl suffers a swollen foot when he electrocutes himself in chapter 11 of “The Coal” section. He is marked on his foot like Oedipus: they are both strangers to their societies and to themselves. Being an outsider and a foreigner brings the danger of committing a sin out of ignorance of one’s origins. David does not know for sure who his father is, and he has no attachment to the community he and his family left behind in Galicia. His only sure and secure attachment is to his mother. In the later volumes of the Mercy project, the adolescent and young adult protagonist, Ira, transfers his attachment to his sister and then to his cousin thus, the libidinal attachment stays within the family. The Oedipal theme of incest is transported to the immigrant experience: the outsider looks for the familiar-familial because of his alienation from the new cultural environment and because of his status as a stranger. Bruce Robbins reads the novel’s ending as a positive integration of the self and the world: David’s touching of power integrates his subjectivity and empowers him in his family and in America. By piecing together the fragments of what he has seen and heard, he creates a myth of his own origin a personal past. According to that story, his mother had a gentile lover; then because he is illegitimate, he can free himself from his father’s authority. David’s thrusting the milk dipper into the tram track is his way of “plugging into the system that rules the New World” and of stopping “the frenzied motion of the street”; thus, he permanently shifts “the balance of power in his family” (245). Based only on Call It Sleep, such hopeful reading is justified, but if we add Roth’s posthumously volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream, then the young protagonist’s integration either into his family or to America is doubtful. Victoria Aarons in A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction (1996) suggests that American-born Jews, “[f]ar removed from the Eastern European shtetlach, from the arduous process of immigration and relocation, from the religious frame and dictates of orthodox Judaism” and almost half a century before from the Holocaust, are “portrayed in search of stories from the past” in order to “form identity through memory” (88). While Victoria Aarons’s focus is contemporary Jewish literature, her insight is also appropriate in the case of early-twentieth-century immigrant Jewish writers. 20 David Schearl has to reinvent himself as illegitimate and not Jewish, but such a rebirth in America still does not guarantee integration. Ira Stigman of the Mercy series is not only the victim of his parents’ past and a hostile Christian


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neighborhood but also a victimizer. Incest is a form of refuge from the genteel and gentile environment of his college years: the security of the same away from the puzzling other. David pieces a past together from scraps of memories spoken in Polish and Yiddish with the help of pictures and artifacts (such as his mother’s picture of blue cornflowers and his father’s bull horns). In order to justify his incestuous relationships, Ira creates his own legacy, with Edith’s approval, of an overly sensitive artist and stranger. The last two published volumes of the Mercy series, From Bondage (1996) and Requiem for Harlem (1998), follow the pattern of the Fall, from innocence to shame and sin, as opposed to the movement from sin to purification in Call It Sleep. Throughout Requiem for Harlem Ira is reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, thus the mythic references of Call It Sleep shift from Isaiah and Oedipus to Milton’s Satan. Instead of Isaiah’s story, in the later novels Milton’s fallen angel dominates the narrative. Anzia Yezierska resolves the question of “remembered past” through juxtaposing nostalgia for a plentiful past with memories of violence, the fairytale narrative with naturalistic details and their ironic parody. Henry Roth’s relationship to the past is anything but nostalgic. In Call It Sleep, instead of his parents’ sentimental artifacts of the past, David Schearl fabricates a fantastic past. In Reb Yidel Pankower’s retelling of the story: “His father a goy, and organgrinder an organ player in a church! His mother dead! She met him among the corn ”; “Mrs. Schearl, His aunt!” (526–27). David Schearl reimagines his own story of origins, as Henry Roth also must re-create himself in his literary alter egos. As the explanations for Henry Roth’s writer’s block changed over the years, the author’s alter egos went through changes as well: from the innocent David Schearl and the still-victimized adolescent Ira Stigman to the selfmocking, self-hating, and self-absorbed last image of the young adult Ira as a perpetrator himself. The ending of the last segment of the Mercy series, Requiem for Harlem shows Ira leaving his parents’ home for good to move in with Edith Welles. In Victoria Aarons’s observation, American-born Jews are “always in the process of rewriting the self ” in order to establish their identity (91). Aarons goes on to explain: “The specter of the past plays a centrally defining, yet increasingly intangible role in the fiction of American Jewish writers,” thus changing their responses to an imagined ancestral past (170). The immigrant writer’s relationship to his or her past and sense of self in the early part of the twentieth century is already ironic, distanced, and prone to revision. The dislocation of the immigrant or stranger brings with it an ambivalent relationship to the past and to cultural identity. They both must be reinvented and reimagined in America over and over again. Mary V. Dearborn, in Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (1986), argues that American selfhood is profoundly influenced by its origins in immigration; thus it is based on


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a “seemingly paradoxical sense of shared difference” (3). She says that “ethnicity allows us to see in a new light the ways in which difference . . . has always been an integral part of American culture” and that the “outsider can best represent what it means to exist within American culture” (4). David Schearl must renounce his father, but not only for the purpose of assimilating into the New World. His is a psychologically complex story, completely modern in its psychoanalytic Oedipal sensibilities and in its representation of a child’s view of a fragmented and disempowered world. Henry Roth focuses on the unshakable powers of the past, which do not let one go even in the New World. The final scene is not a tapping into the power system of New York City and of the United States; rather, the protagonist’s electrocution is an act of defiance and a Luddite resistance. It is a “rage against the machine” and [95], (34) also against the exclusionary political-cultural system of America. In the Mercy project, Ira Stigman taps into the moral fabric of American society: his incesLines: 382 to tuous relationships with Minnie and Stella are in clear defiance of American assimilationism and Puritan morality. His retelling of the immigrant story is ——— 21 * 26.0pt P laden with self-hatred the price paid for not assimilating. The ethnic literary ——— text reveals its otherness and modernity in terms other than those of modernist Normal Pag form: the language of the dominant culture is subverted to express ethnicity. PgEnds: TEX Like the confidence man who masquerades in the guise of respectability, the ethnic text can appropriate the form and vocabulary of the dominant other. [95], (34) In Call It Sleep, Roth closes David Schearl’s narrative with the possibility of cultural and national assimilation as most critics (especially Bruce Robbins) read it. But the sequels in the Mercy of a Rude Stream project suggest otherwise, leaving the first novel’s conclusion ambivalent and open-ended, as is the case with Ellison’s Invisible Man. The immigrant protagonist becomes more and more subversive and alien in the sequels. Call It Sleep is modernist in form but, tentatively, suggests assimilation through a mythic and Biblical cleansingrebirth narrative. The Mercy project is more traditional in its form, the linear text mimics the biography of the author, but its subject matter progressively becomes more and more subversive and offensive according to middle-class Anglo-Saxon American moral values. In Call It Sleep, Henry Roth rewrites the immigrant narrative of rebirth and redemption the master narrative of Puritan founding. His is a monstrous picture of rebirth on a new continent, just like the defiled image of Lady Liberty in the electrocution scene of the first novel: “Der’s a star fer yeh! Watch it! T’ree Kings I god. Dey came oon huzzbeck! Yee! Hee! Hee! Mary! Nawthin’ to do but wait fer day light and go home. To a red cock crowin’. Over the statue of. A jerkin’. Cod. Clang! Clang! Oy! Machine! Liberty! Revolt! Redeem!” (569). 22


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Josephina Niggli Here is a microcosmic bit of Mexican history being played out in terms of family rather than of nation. Josephina Niggli, Mexican Village

Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village (1945) is a unique case history of modernist nostalgia and ambiguous national and racial identities that also functions as a domestic and historically burdened counterdiscourse to the Western paradigm of modernization and modernity. The novel makes the locale of the MexicanAmerican borderlands its central theme. In the fictional microcosm of the small Mexican frontier town of Hidalgo, Niggli sets the stage for encounters among Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and American cultures, as well as between those of Europe and the Americas. Her characters are not only concerned with the TexasMexico border zone, but also with the larger context of a modernizing society, which places the Great Revolution of Venustiano Carranza the Mexican revolution of 1910 side by side with the Irish fight for independence and the trenches of World War I. Josephina Niggli (1910–83) was born in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon State, Mexico, to immigrant American parents. Her father, Frederick Ferdinand Niggli, whose Swiss and Alsatian forebears immigrated to Texas in 1836, moved to Mexico in 1893 and worked as the manager of a cement plant in the village of Hidalgo, not far from the industrial city of Monterrey; her mother, Goldie (Morgan) Niggli, was of Irish, French, and German descent. Josephina Niggli grew up in Mexico, and her childhood was indelibly influenced by Mexican culture and the Mexican Revolution of 1910: she grew up bilingual and bicultural, identifying as both Mexican and American. She symbolically acknowledged her strong connection to Mexican culture by changing her name from Josephine to Josephina. Her early books were published under the name Josephina Niggli, while her later works bear her name with the Spanish spelling Josefina (see Eberly). After the 1913 assassination of Francisco Madero, the leader of the Mexican Revolution against Porfirio Diaz’s dictatorship, Niggli and her family left Mexico for San Antonio, Texas. For the next seven years Niggli’s family roamed the southwestern United States, never finding a home until they moved back to Mexico in 1920. Because of the continued violence in Mexico, Niggli was sent back to San Antonio, Texas, where she finished her high-school education. At fifteen, she enrolled at Incarnate Word College in San Antonio where she started writing poems and short stories. She went on to study playwriting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1937 with a master’s degree in drama. Before she published her most famous and influential piece,


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Mexican Village, she had published a collection of poems, Mexican Silhouettes (1931), and several plays including Soladadera (1937). 23 All of her works were written in English. Later she published another novel titled Step Down, Elder Brother (1947), and her last significant literary work, Miracle for Mexico, was published in 1964. Niggli taught at the University of North Carolina from 1942 to 1944, and then at Western Carolina University from 1956 to 1975. When she died in 1983, she was considered one of the most influential Mexican American authors of the century (for a more detailed description of Niggli’s life and literary career, see Dvorkin, Eberly, and Stone). Although Niggli’s work is not well known within the American literary canon, critics of Mexican American and Chicano literature have celebrated Mexican Village for years. They value the text as a transitional work in the development of Chicano fiction (see Paredes “The Evolution of Chicano Literature” in Baker Three American Literatures; for the first book-length study of Chicano literary history, see Tatum). In Raymund A. Paredes’s assessment: In its sensitive evocation of rural life, its emotionalism, and affectionate portrayal of exotic experiences and personalities, the book culminates the romantic tradition in Mexican-American writing. But Mexican Village also pointed forward to an emerging school of realism, confronting such issues as racism, the oppression of women, and the failure of the Mexican Revolution. Before Niggli, no writer of fiction in the United States, with the exception of Katherine Anne Porter, had so vividly depicted the fundamental tensions in Mexican life: the sometimes volatile interaction of Spanish and Indian cultures, the profound sense of history and traditionalism pulling against the fascination with that which is modern and voguish. But Niggli’s greatest achievement was to delineate an important aspect of Mexican-American experience and to create a distinctive ambience for its presentation. (55)

While Paredes emphasizes the literary historical significance of Niggli’s novel in preparing the road for contemporary Chicano writers, I focus on Niggli’s reworking of the romance to create a hybrid genre that I call the “borderlands romance.” The novel retells the complex story of the Mexican Revolution’s aftermath between 1920 and 1930 in a culturally and racially hybrid and historically layered romance plot in order to explore connected narratives of family and nation within the locale of the Mexican-American borderlands. Moreover, corporate economic interests turn the village of Hidalgo into a producer of raw materials for the American-owned cement plant in the nearby town of Monterrey, “that strange city of contrasts, which industry had transformed into a Texas suburb, and which had yet remained so essentially Mexican that it was hated and envied by the entire Republic” (Niggli 462). Thus, the imagined and romanticized “Mexican village” is a culturally tainted and industrializing community not a bucolic and purely Mexican space, which is how most of


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the novel’s critics wishfully read the story. Both Hidalgo and Monterrey are culturally and politically hybrid spaces produced by modern industrial and economic development, antagonistic social alliances, and unchecked cultural contact, migration, and miscegenation. The quintessential modernist figure is the stranger on his or her way to another land or culture, but in this novel, instead of the usual immigrant destination of North America, the Yanqui Bob Webster migrates back to his Mexican homeland. Niggli’s fictionalized Hidalgo is not merely the story of a traditional Mexican community; rather, Mexican Village is the narrative of the Mexican uncanny portrayed as an historically layered romance within the colonized and recolonized, transnational, and culturally hybrid Mexican-American contact zone. José David Saldívar calls the two-thousand mile United States–Mexico border [98], (37 zone a “paradigm of crossings, intercultural exchanges, circulations, resistances, and negotiations as well as of militarized ‘low-intensity’ conflict” (Border Matters ix). In examining the borderlands, Saldívar suggests that we focus on the Lines: 41 alternative narrative of “the ethno-racialized cultures of displacement” in place ——— of the “North’s monopoly of cultural nationalism” (7). While Saldívar is mainly 13.0pt concerned with the theoretical reconceptualization of the borderlands within ——— American cultural studies, his comments are helpful in my rereading of Niggli’s Normal P novel as an ironic romance and not as a simple precursor to Chicano literature * PgEnds: E or as an authentic and monologic Mexican nationalist narrative that is therefore outside the scope of American modernism. 24 [98], (37 While early-twentieth-century European immigrants literalize the melancholia and estrangement of the modern condition within the context of the American urban landscape of New York City, as do Yezierska and Roth, the border discourses of migration, especially the circular crossings of the United States–Mexico border, produce a frontera imagination literalized as romance. The dialogical linguistic and cultural hybridity of border texts conceptually dislodges the neat cartographic demarcations of arbitrarily drawn political borders. These texts carve out a third zone, what Mary Louise Pratt calls the“contact zone” and Saldívar renames as the “Transfrontera contact zone” (14). Examining narratives of European and Asian immigrants as well as narratives of migration across the United States–Mexico border sheds light on how to rethink identity, culture, and nation in a modern imperialist context. Amy Kaplan coins the term “borderlands” to better grasp the cultural, historical, and political complexity of such regions. She says, “the conceptual limits of the frontier, by displacing it with the site of the borderlands,” links the “study of ethnicity and immigration inextricably to the study of international relations and empire” (16). Niggli’s modern borderlands romance vividly illustrates such a displacement from the United States’ western frontier to the southern borderlands and critically ad-


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dresses the growing tensions between ethnicity and national belonging within the exploding American empire of the 1920s. Border writers facilitate the intercultural exchange between familiar and alien narrative practices through translation and cultural mediation. As Emily Hicks suggests: “What makes border writing a world literature with a ‘universal’ appeal is its emphasis upon the multiplicity of languages within any single language; by choosing a strategy of translation rather than representation, border writers ultimately undermine the distinction between original and alien culture” (xxiii). Immigrant writers (in fact, ethnographers and ethnic writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Mourning Dove) also use the strategy of translation adapted by border writers. But there is a difference in the strategies employed by ethnic modernist writers: their narrative strategies are consistent with the proximity to and the permeability of the physical and cultural borders. The back-and-forth migration between Mexico and the United States, as well as the migration from Asia to North America, presented alternative myths to the “universal American Bildung” of Ellis Island as the central immigrant space within the nation (see Wong 124). For Mexican immigrants and migrants the southwestern borderlands of Texas, Arizona, and California, and for Asian immigrants Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay displaced the cultural and sociospatial myths of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Saldívar recommends that we shift our “critical paradigms away from linear narratives of immigration, assimilation, and nationhood” towards “multifaceted migrations across borders” (Border Matters 1). He later suggests rather that we read such narratives as plots depicting “ethno-racialized cultures of displacement” as opposed to narratives of the “North’s monopoly of cultural nationalism” (7). Following Saldívar’s logic of disrupting the geographically divided and gender-specific narrative binaries of north versus south, or the imperialistic antagonism of the United States versus Mexico, Niggli’s novel tells of the complex and fantastic underworld of sexual and political transgression in a nonlinear romance plot. Thus, I read Mexican Village in the context of historical narratives about the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and within the culturally hybrid political locale of the Mexican-American borderlands. While the events of the Revolution are often told in the popular and masculinized genre of the Mexican “political novel,” I argue that Niggli rewrites the plot as a “borderlands romance.” As opposed to reproducing the bloody details of the revolution’s aftermath in the naturalistic narrative form of the political novel, which normatively couples the ideology of patriarchy with that of the nation, Niggli rewrites and intentionally subverts the genre as a feminine and transnational romance. She decouples the interlocking narratives of the United States’ neocolonial imperialistic penetration into Mexico and the macho violence of the Mexican Revolution and transforms them into the domestic romance narratives


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of multiple, interracial, and transnational love stories. In the process, she paints an historically layered composite picture of Hidalgo in the 1920s. Niggli’s borderlands romance consists of ten interconnected tales, each focusing on a different character or a romantic liaison. The diverging plots are contained by the locale of the Sabinas Valley in the borderlands and anchored by the central character Bob Webster (who often disappears and then reappears). Niggli subverts the linear narrative of the Revolution’s aftermath by layering her story diachronically and then reassembling the pieces synchronically. Thus, the story of the ten years Bob Webster spends in the Sabinas Valley is inscribed over the implicit narratives of Mexican history and recent international events. Before moving to Hidalgo, he lives in Texas, travels to Europe, to Ireland and France, and then to French colonial Morocco. Instead of participating in the Mexican Revolution, like the heroes of the political novel, Webster is notably somewhere else. He does not even visit Mexico until 1920, ten years after the revolution. The first chapter is dated “March 1920,” while the last one is from “December 1930.” Each story refers to a consecutive year between 1920 and 1930. While the surface structure of the book follows a linear pattern through the decade, the stories cover a much longer period: Webster’s family history goes all the way back to the middle of the nineteenth century, and the story of Hidalgo also includes the history of Mexico’s indigenous Indian populations. Bob Webster is a Tejano mestizo born to a Mexican mother of Spanish and Indian descent from Hidalgo and to an American father from San Antonio. His character holds together the loosely connected episodes of the narrative. He is a wanderer and a stranger who leaves the United States when his American father rejects him for his dark complexion: “Are you suggesting that I admit an Indian is a son of mine? Damn it, I’m a white man!” (29). Feeling alienated from his family and America, he leaves for Europe and joins the fight for Irish independence in Dublin along with his Irish American school friend, Ned Kelley from San Antonio. Bob barely escapes with his life from the Irish prison where Ned is hanged. 25 He then moves to another colonized space, to Frenchruled Morocco, and then he drifts to France and fights in World War I, first with the French side, then with the Americans. After the war, he returns to his ancestral but never-seen-before “home” of Hidalgo, the revolution- and warravaged northern frontier of Mexico. His crossing of the United States–Mexico border takes place within the context of increasing European immigration to the United States. Niggli’s text juxtaposes the American nativist (as Walter Benn Michaels uses the term) hostility against immigrants and other outsiders with Hidalgo’s own version of nativism and suspicion of outsiders narrated in the nostalgic and, from a modernist literary perspective, anachronistic genre of the romance. Initially, Bob intends to stay in Hidalgo for only a year in order to make


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some money and then return to the United States, but the familial and cultural connections he uncovers during his visit tie him to Mexico permanently, making Hidalgo his home. Life in the Sabinas Valley hovers between the magical and the real: folk legends and ghost stories blend into the story of the bloody aftermath of the Great Revolution. The episodic novel breaks down the boundaries between the real and the miraculous, the pagan and the sacred, and the intranational and the international. Niggli’s characters move freely between ambiguous national and cultural (which are often described in racial terms) identities Spanish, Indian, Mexican, Irish, or North American. To make her point, Niggli recycles the genre of the late-nineteenth-century race melodrama (as Susan Gillman uses the phrase) in order to disinter the coded and institutionalized violence that maintains the idealized sexual, racial, and cultural integrity of the nation. The genre of the racial melodrama draws attention to ambiguous racial origins and to the nation’s anxiety over miscegenation. The novel’s male protagonist finds a romantic but also ironic resolution to the modern condition of political, cultural, and racial ambiguities within the nostalgic fantasy of the traditional Mexican village of Hidalgo. When gazing at his compatriot Joaquin Castillo, the Spanish overlord of the Sabinas Valley, Bob Webster observes the “theatricality” and “travel poster” quality of the image that is “painted to entice the tourist,” but which is not completely real, though not truly false either (434–35). Bob Webster, the mysterious stranger, becomes the new quarry master of the local cement plant. He is surprised by the simultaneous modernity and anachronism of the place. The startling view juxtaposes Indian cave dwellings with skeletal New York tenement houses, creating an uncanny impression where the present and the past coexist in a narrative bricolage: “He followed Don Anselmo around the curved slope, and then paused in speechless astonishment. The quarry was a deep, ugly wound in the mountain side, but above it, small ledges for walking having been carefully retained, was row after row of cave openings, so that the towering wall had a cynical resemblance to a New York apartment house sheered through the center” (9). Webster’s arrival in the Sabinas Valley is a simultaneous step back to Mexico’s repressed precolonial past and a step forward to its neocolonial modernity. He is more familiar with the icons of the modern cityscape than with the architectural landscape of a traditional village. His point of reference for making sense of cave dwellings, by translating and recoding them into his own idiom, produces the image of immigrant quarters in a New York tenement house (which also uncannily recalls Melville’s description of the immigrants’ quarters on the Fidèle). Niggli repeatedly disinters multiple layers of historical realities. In another example, she balances the sinister image of American industry creeping across the border to Monterrey (see 462), with the visually and linguistically rich image


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of the local Indian witch’s animal sacrifice. The mostly invisible Malicheño Indian population of Hidalgo is foregrounded in the text’s description of an ancient secret ritual: As she swayed and dipped and turned, her feet made no noise on the moss-grown trail. There was silence everywhere in the sky, in the mountains, at the crossing of earth and water. Then a whisper of sound came from the woman, so faint, so nebulous, that it was no sound at all. But the awareness of sound was there, and the sound became a word, a word in the language the Spaniards thought they had destroyed with the death of the last Malicheño Indians in the closing year of the seventeenth century. The mountains remembered the word, and echoes tossed it back to the woman, so that her voice rose and other words came, and the old names: Juquialán, Pitale, Corianúa. The chant grew wilder and higher in pitch. The dancing jumps came faster and faster. There was a sudden swing of the right hand towards the cock’s throat and red blood spattered on the corn threads in the dish corn threads along which traveled as on a highway the desire of the worshiper to the minds of the sleeping gods. (91–92)

Niggli recovers and reproduces the almost foreclosed language and rituals of the local Malicheño Indians. Tía Magdalena, Bob Webster’s housekeeper, performs the sacrifice in order to keep him in the Sabinas Valley. Seen as a witch, Tía Magdalena conjures up the residual memories of an Indian past that has survived several hundred years of Spanish colonial rule. 26 In Hidalgo life is conducted in Spanish, which Niggli then translates into English, but the truly important events are only accessible in the lost language of the Malicheño Indians. When the author describes the ritual sacrifice, she not only translates the words from the indigenous language to Spanish and then to English, she also acts as a cultural mediator who has access to dormant Indian languages and rituals from before the Spanish Conquest. Niggli, thus, positions herself as a member of the secret society of Hidalgo witches such as Tía Magdalena the eagle witch, Nimfa the herb woman and town witch, and Lolita the daughter of a gypsy and negotiates the chasm between the precolonial past and the neocolonial present in Mexico. Her position as an outsider, who travels between borders, languages, and cultures, allows for a unique vision. As a strategically positioned borderlands subject, much like her protagonist Bob Webster, she is not blinded by the intense nationalism and patriotic fervor of either side on the Mexican-American border. Moreover, she is able to project the still lingering indigenous voices of pre-Columbian Mexico. Similarly, as both an insider and outsider, Niggli is able to depict an alternative picture of the Mexican Revolution as opposed to the usual gritty and violent war accounts. In a passage near the end of Mexican Village, Bob Webster picks up an actual contemporary popular political novel about the revolution, Martín


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Luís Guzmán’s La sombra del caudillo [The shade/shadow of the commander]. 27 After reading the opening paragraph of Guzmán’s novel, Niggli’s character impatiently tosses aside the book, which he considers to be just another partisan retelling of the political intrigues of the revolution’s aftermath: “Forgive me, señor. You are a frontier man? I am sure that your general must have been very grand.” . . . The grand generals, Bob thought with amusement. How consumed Mexico is with its own history. All its paintings, its sculpture, its literature born from its history. He pulled a new novel from his bag and looked at the title: The Shade of the Commander, by Martín Luís Guzmán, and read the first paragraph: “The cadillac of General Ignacio Aguirre crossed the streetcar tracks on the Avenue of Chapultepec and came to a stop a short distance from the headquarters of the Insurgents . . .” He shut it with a snap and tossed it on the bed. Another story born of the Great Revolution. Guzmán had been one of the Intellectuals who had found themselves trapped between their two commanding geniuses: Zapata in the South and Villa in the North. If I had been in Mexico then, Bob wondered, whom would I have followed? . . . The boy was right. I am a frontier man. (459)

Bob Webster’s derisive gesture signals Niggli’s own critical commentary on telling the story of the Mexican Revolution as a polarized, extremely violent, and exclusively male political and Mexican nationalist narrative. According to the critic, Lanin A. Gyurko, “political power and violence were inextricable” within the contemporary genre of the Mexican political novel (545). Commenting specifically on Guzmán’s book, Gyurko suggests an “initial atmosphere of superficial cordiality and unity . . . adumbrate[s] a horrendous cycle of violence begetting increased violence” (548). Niggli rejects both the violence and the polarization; instead, she situates Webster as a“frontier man,” that is as a“border subject” or a modern stranger who does not identify with either of the political factions in revolutionary Mexico. He prefers the position of an outsider who can freely move between borders, nations, and cultures. Mexican Village thus, functions as a domestic and historically burdened counterdiscourse that refers to the Mexican Revolution only through its poignant absence from the narrative. Such a shift in perspective and plot structure allows the author to explore the less visible familial relations behind the more readily available public arenas. While the political novel tells the story of the revolution through a straightforward realist narrative plot, Niggli’s story constitutes a more opaque narrative, the historically layered and ideologically coded genre of the borderlands romance. This genre accommodates the intercultural, interracial, international, and historically determined personal encounters that make up what Fredric Jameson calls the “political unconscious” of a nation. Niggli’s racially and culturally ambivalent characters localize distant collective


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memories of Mexico through the narrative recovery of the three coexisting layers of Mexican history: the indigenous Indian presence from before the conquest, the era of Spanish colonial rule, and finally, the neocolonial aggression of American imperialism Niggli’s present. Niggli’s novel makes the hidden historical layers visible and intelligible by foregrounding the forgotten contexts of miscegenation and neocolonial American imperialism. Bob Webster is the descendant of an illicit union between the Spanish Isabella Castillo and the Indian Mariano Menendez, even though the Castillo family represses the story of Isabella’s abduction by and subsequent marriage to Webster’s Indian great-grandfather. Niggli’s counterdiscourse to the genre of the political novel, which makes the Mexican Revolution its sole theme and overtly promotes one side or another, rather reaches back historically to Mexico’s indigenous cultures which still coexist with the revolution’s aftermath. She also keenly observes that in the 1920s the United States was increasingly involved with moving some of its heavy industry south of the border. Her narrative dialectically contains both the romantic nostalgia for a simpler and seemingly organic past she sees in the Malicheño Indians’ preserved language and rituals and the ambivalence over the consequences of modernization. Modernization and the mass production of goods and commodities have a corresponding effect on a mass-produced citizenry. Niggli allegorizes conflicts not only between families or villages but also between Mexican and American economic interests. When Monterrey becomes a “Texas suburb,” the border zone suffers cannibalizing effects because of the relentless progression of American political and economic interests into Mexico. The seemingly quaint and authentic Mexican village and its inhabitants are transformed into mere commodities, into fetish objects for consumption the usual tourist kitsch: In his silver-encrusted gray suit, with the silver-weighted gray sombrero beside him, he [Joaquín Castillo] looked like a travel poster painted to entice the tourist. He had the theatricality that was as false and yet as real as the theatricality of Mexico itself. Outside the window, an Indito paused to admire the flowers. Here were two sides of Mexico’s golden coin: the stolid earthen creature, and the quicksilver figure; the reality and the romance, the humility and the arrogance. Then the Indito walked on, and the picture dissolved into the pleasant view of distant mountains. (434–35)

Such images suggest the feminized and exoticized perception of Mexico as the fetish object of the neocolonial North American male gaze. Within the modern economic context of transnational trafficking in goods and citizens, tourism becomes the neutral third term between the familiar and the alien, between self and other. As Bob Webster observes toward the end of the novel: “A passage in a travel book he had read returned to him: ‘Mexicans have a peculiar quality to patriotism. Other nations regard their country as sacred ground. . . .


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Not so the Mexican. To him his country is at once his mother and his mistress, his child and his wife. His country is a woman, and its symbol is a woman the brown Virgin of Guadalupe’ ” (486). Niggli depicts Mexico as selling its image in tourist brochures that depict the country in exotic, feminine, and erotic terms. Furthermore, she displays an embellished and self-consciously fake travel poster image of the region that cannot hide the ambiguously composite racially and historically layered picture of Mexico in the 1920s. Fredric Jameson suggests that we read the romance as a symbolic struggle between different socioeconomic groups during times of crises such as the disappearance of a central authority and the subsequent chaos of “the war of all against all” or the move from an older to a newer mode of production that is, we view the romance as an ethical struggle between archetypal heroic figures of good and evil. But Jameson moves beyond these simple binaries by borrowing the conceptual frameworks of the uncanny and the misrecognition of the self as other from the psychoanalytic arsenal of repression and ego formation. The recognition of the hero’s self within its villainous other parallels the historical processes of forgetting and remembering that structure the development of national identity at a larger, societal level. In romance narratives, according to Jameson, individual characters allegorically represent the mores and developmental conditions of social groups and historical epochs (see Jameson, The Political Unconscious 115–50). While the political novel of the Mexican Revolution ignored the indigenous peoples of Mexico and while the desperate situation of Indians in whose name the revolution of 1910 was fought disappeared from public discourse in the ensuing struggles for political power, Niggli’s romance returns the repressed history of Mexico’s indigenous population to the country’s political conscious. Niggli gives voice to the Indians, as in the powerful description of the ancient Indian bird-sacrifice ritual performed by Tía Magdalena. Feminist critics read the romance genre as an ideologically burdened and historically determined critical narrative form. When examining the narrative techniques of late-nineteenth- or twentieth-century women writers of romance, both Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Susan Gillman read the genre of the romance narrative, much as Jameson does, as a “socially symbolic act, as the ideological but formal and immanent response to a historical dilemma” (Jameson 139). DuPlessis defines the “marriage/death closure in the romance plot as a ‘place’ where ideology meets narrative and produces a meaning-laden figure of some sort” (19). She also suggests that twentieth-century women writers subvert the romance genre in order to interrogate “cultural conventions about male and female, romance and quest, hero and heroine, public and private, individual and collective” (ix). Similarly, Susan Gillman discusses the romance, and melo-


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drama in particular, as the genre that “responds formally with varying imaginary resolutions to an array of social contradictions generated in the postReconstruction era by the conflicting demands of racial, sexual and national identities” (“The Mulatto, Tragic or Triumphant” 225). She transposes the feminist definition of the romance into a specific historical period, which signifies the genre not only in terms of gender but also in terms of race; Gillman calls it the “nineteenth-century American race melodrama.” These interpretations of the romance genre as the expression of an historically situated ideologeme prove to be productive when making sense of Niggli’s seemingly anachronistic and hybrid text. Niggli appropriates the genre of the romance in order to historicize the revolution and its aftermath, which she retells as a feminine romance plot of miscegenation within a transnational and colonial context; that is, while the historical imagination about the Mexican Revolution’s aftermath is preoccupied with a monologic story and with separating the revolution’s heroes from its villains, Niggli’s romance plot penetrates the surface structure of intrigue and politics and unearths historical and cultural layers and hidden genealogies in the Mexican-American borderlands. She breaks the narrative into distinct stories and replaces the single omniscient perspective with dispersed subjectivities. The final product is a richly polyphonic and dialogic text that conveys the modern experience of being between borders, cultures, and historical realities. Niggli’s narrative solves the dilemma of the repetition and misrecognition of the self as other, when she inserts the hostile other into the self within the family but in a transnational context. Through the synecdochic allegory of an individual character taking on the characteristics of a whole region, Niggli makes visible the Heimlich/Unheimlich of the borderlands. By giving three characters the same name “Bob Webster” is also the name of the protagonist’s father and half-brother she conflates the familiar with the strange, the self with the other. The novel’s historically determined but opaquely structured subplots of family romances and stories of miscegenation the subsumed interconnected stories of the three families that make up Bob Webster’s heritage linger just below the seemingly transparent story of the revolution’s aftermath in the offcenter locale of Hidalgo. It is not an obviously recognizable romance plot that ends with the heroine’s or the hero’s marriage or death at the end of the narrative. The heroes or heroines, such as Isabella Castillo or Tía Magdalena, are submerged under historical time and narrative layers. The conventional ending of death or marriage has already taken place even before the story begins. Bob Webster’s genealogy is a replica of the sedimented history of Mexico. The father, also named Bob Webster, rejects his son as illegitimate (Niggli 29). But family is also history. The secret of the son Bob Webster’s connection to the Huachichil Indians is revealed through a letter his grandmother wrote just


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before her death but which did not reach its addressee until ten years later, the time of the narrative. It discloses that he is a descendent of the Castillos, the local Spanish colonial aristocratic family and of Huachichil Indians. He is the great-grandson of Isabella Castillo, the eldest daughter and lawful heiress of the Castillos who was kidnapped by the Indian Mariano Menendez at her own brother’s orders in the 1840s. Instead of killing herself as the Castillos claim, she marries her abductor. Their son is Daniel Menendez Castillo who later becomes the legendary bandit known on the frontier as El Caballo Blanco. The recovery of Webster’s family romance is a clue to the history told as transnational borderlands romance. Niggli literalizes the uncanny return of the self as other who immediately misrecognizes himself. She orchestrates an encounter between Bob Webster and his blond half-brother, also named Bob Webster, at a nightclub in Monterrey. The “blond Bob Webster” is the “father Bob Webster’s” legitimate son meeting the “illegitimate mestizo Bob Webster”: “I [the superintendent of the American-owned cement plant in Monterrey] asked for Bob Webster and with you there the waiter made a natural mistake. You shouldn’t have such an ordinary name. Would you give the fellow I want a message for me? He’s a blond, about your height, in a party with one woman and two other men. They’re all from the States.” . . . It had suddenly occurred to him why he had thought he recognized the blond American. We’re brothers, he thought dazedly. Half brothers. It was myself I saw in him. Myself and . . . (466–67)

The intentionally confusing overuse of the name “Bob Webster” the dearth of signifiers in relation to signifieds suggests that the borders are porous, unable to keep cultures and races as separate. Niggli excavates the repressed and sometimes foreclosed secrets of individual and national origins and emphatically connects the private and erotic domains with those of the public and the political. She prefers to tell the story of the Revolution as romance and to foreground the microcosm of the family instead of the totality of the nation. In the romantic liaisons between members of the three families, Niggli demonstrates that under colonial or neocolonial rule nations and families forge hybrid, transnational and interracial, liaisons: “Here is a microcosmic bit of Mexican history being played out in terms of family rather than of nation” (452). In order to examine the connection between family and nation, Doris Sommer’s reading of the romance genre provides a helpful conceptual framework. Sommer’s theory of the “national romance” focuses on the domestic sphere, in particular on the role of heterosexual desire within the project of nation building. Sommer’s theory of “coupling” the family and the nation supplements DuPlessis’s reading of the romance as a “trope for the sex-gender system” and Gillman’s notion of the “nineteenth-century race melodrama” that makes the


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narrative technology of the racialized sex-gender system visible. In her work connecting the “erotics of politics” with the genre of the “national romance,” Sommer suggests that we read “national projects coupled with productive heterosexual desire” (2). For Sommer romances function as “new versions of historical narrative,” which she explicitly identifies in the magical realism of Latin American literature (3). She writes, By romance here I mean a cross between our contemporary use of the word as a love story and a nineteenth-century use that distinguished the genre as more boldly allegorical than the novel. The classic examples in Latin America are almost inevitably stories of star-crossed lovers who represent particular regions, races, parties, economic interests, and the like. Their passion for conjugal and sexual union spills over to a sentimental readership in a move that hopes to win partisan minds along with hearts. (5)

Sommer locates the erotics of politics in novels that allegorize “nonviolent consolidation during internecine conflicts” through plots concerning heterosexual love and marriage (6). She reads such plots as “wish-fulfilling projection[s] of national consolidation and growth, a goal rendered invisible” (7). Sommer argues that romance is the preferred historical and literary genre of the Americas. Niggli appropriates the romance narrative to diffuse the assumed opposition between the political and the private domains. Her use of romance fits Sommer’s definition of the national romance since Niggli’s narrative is both a familial love story and a national allegory. Mexican Village has several plots that center on conflicts between groups or communities but that can only be resolved through romantic unions. For example, Niggli composes a story on the romantic union between Isabella Castillo and Mariano Menendez. Chapter 4, titled “The Street of the Hidden Water,” functions as a parody of the Romeo and Juliet story where tragedy is recycled as farce. A decade-long feud between two villages is resolved through marriage between a Hidalgo man and a girl from San Juan but only after a failed attempt to settle the case with a public cockfight. The initial conflict concerns the remains of a revered Mexican historian who was born in Hidalgo but died in San Juan Iglesias. After the wedding ceremony, the two villages erase the symbolic chalk line between them and put an end to their bloody feud: “The priest lifted a handful of dust and sprinkled it over the white line that divided the two valleys. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said firmly, ‘Don Serapio can blot out this line. There is no more need of it’ ” (219). Such acts of erasure of and confusion about boundaries and borders characterize Niggli’s novel as a whole. The allegorical marriage plot of heterosexual desire stands in for the political plot: in this case, Niggli opts for a “coupling ending” to the feud between the villages. Niggli also obliterates the borders between languages in her novel. Linguistically, Mexican Village often reads like an English translation from the nonex-


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istent Spanish original. Phrases such as “the Family Castillo,” “frontier man,” or Niggli’s translation of the title of Guzmán’s novel as “the shade of the commander” instead of the somewhat more appropriate “the shadow of the leader,” simulate Spanish diction by reproducing Spanish syntactical and idiomatic qualities. Each chapter begins with a literally translated Mexican proverb. For example: “Rivers rise in flood and destroy,/ Brooks water the land and sing” (2), or “He who eats with his nose, pays with his mouth” (64). As these examples suggest, Niggli’s translations of the Mexican proverbs do not always make sense in English. She does not clearly convey the message of the proverbs carry; instead, she translates the idiomatic phrases word for word. Thus, her translation, while it may be accurate, has an alienating effect. Her translations mirror and expose language as an uncanny alienating device: the familiar Mexican proverbs are reflected back to the English-speaking and -reading audience of the novel as alien. Moreover, Niggli often steps into the narrative by inserting intrusive glosses that are intended to aid the reader; they often contain English translations and explanations of Spanish words and expressions. In one memorable instance, Niggli draws attention to the problem of translation: in chapter 2,“The Street of the Three Crosses,” Webster calls his friends in Hidalgo his compadres, a word Niggli translates in her glossary as “Untranslatable. Literally, co-father. A term used between very intimate friends. The feminine is comadre” (91). The gloss gives a literal translation of the word instead of explaining its meaning in a particular context it is a translation that confuses more than it clarifies. Niggli’s alienating narrative technique draws attention not only to problematic organic units such as the self, the family, the village, the nation, or the genre of the romance but also to her own authorial position. She distances herself from academia and learning through the somewhat humorous character of the Little Professor of the Hidalgo Boys’ School who is afraid of his pupils. On a date with the mayor’s homely daughter, Chela, the Little Professor describes the sunset in convoluted scientific language. He tells the truth of the sunset in terms of scientific facts, which the villagers translate into fiction and fantasy: He cleared his throat, and from some filing card in his memory, stated in precise tones, “It merely means that the upper limb of the sun, because of a change in the earth’s atmosphere causing the light rays to appear other than they are, sinks beneath the level of the visual horizon as caused by the diurnal revolution of the earth.” . . . No one believed these amazing tales, and he soon had a reputation for being as great a liar as Don Timotéo Gonzalez, the maker of cheese, but everyone liked him. (378–79)

While Niggli’s book does not invoke scientific terms, it tells a true story by way of translation, displacement, and historical layering. Niggli writes the truth of the borderlands through the lies of romantic fiction. Instead of a factual and politically accurate account of the various fights


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and assassinations that followed the revolution, she focuses on the domestic. Niggli’s dialogical borderlands romance exposes as untenable the rigid distinction between history and fiction, between private and public domains, and between the past and the present; she also erases the hierarchical divisions of geographical or political centers as artificially drawn and socially constructed. Niggli breaks up the linearity of the plot and interrupts the hierarchy of central and minor characters. The result is an archaeology of histories, none more dominant than another. Historical and personal events are only random artifacts from the shifting perspectives of different characters and geographical locations. History and fiction, dominant and minor motifs and characters, political hierarchies of the north and the south, and the temporal hierarchies of the past and the present become random distinctions in Niggli’s novel. Furthermore, the layerings of space upon time, past upon present, culture upon culture, and languages upon each other can create paradoxical connections such as the kinship the Tejano mestizo Bob Webster feels for his Irish American friend, Ned Kelley. In Niggli’s borderlands romance Tejano-mestizo subjectivity is coded as subordinate, similar to the Irish under English colonial rule. When his father rejects him, Webster understands racism in terms of the heightened sensitivity to difference in the border zone whether it is between Mexico and the United States or between the Irish and the English: His reception had cut into his pride, even though he knew that in Texas, that in all the border States, the prejudice against the border Indito is very strong the Tejanos , who are neither Mexican nor North American, who speak a patois rather than a language, who are in their way as illegitimate as Bob was in his. . . . Ned came from an immigrant Irish family which had come to the States after Ned’s father was killed in one of the Rebellions. The two boys had worked their ways across the ocean on a cattle boat, and the warm odor of a barn still brought vivid recollections of that trip and Ned’s pleasant voice telling tales of Irish heroism against oppression. Something in the stories fired Bob’s imagination. He felt himself a spiritual brother to the black-browed heroes. (470)

As Niggli translates the centrally positioned extraordinary or heroic political novel of the revolution into the peripheral borderlands romance of the everyday, she is able to reinsert the cause of indigenous populations of Mexico into the national consciousness. Rachel Blau DuPlessis recommends that we rethink the genre of the romance as a subversive narrative device or tool that female authors use to dismantle the sex-gender system. I would like to suggest that Niggli’s novel performs a similarly subversive narrative act. Niggli rewrites the male narrative of the Mexican political novel within a feminine and domestic mode as a romance. Yet the romance does not achieve a traditional ending. Instead of focusing on the male protagonist’s heterosexual love interests, such as the Indito Candelaria


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and the mysterious Maria of the River Road, Niggli ends her novel not with death or marriage but with Webster’s renewed ties to his male friends: “He said politely, ‘Shall we go, cousin?’ Joaquín’s laughter was fresh and free. ‘The word is compadre, or twin, or even brother, not cousin.’ Bob, pleased with his private jest, said firmly, ‘The word is cousin, I prefer it’ ”(491). Webster has several ambivalent relationships with women throughout the novel. Candelaria and Maria of the River Road, to whom he is romantically tied at various points, play inconsequential roles compared to the men he considers to be his friends. Webster cultivates important friendships with several of the characters such as the Irish American Ned Kelley, Tommy Eaton the Harvardeducated and entrepreneurial war buddy from the States, the three Hidalgo men (Porfirio, the carver of wood; Andrés Treviño, the owner of goats, and Pepe Gonzalez, who resolves the feud between two villages by marrying Sarita from the rival San Juan Iglesias), and the two Spanish colonial aristocrats (Alejandro and Joaquin Castillo). He calls them all his compadres, a word Niggli translates in her glossary as “co-fathers” or “very intimate friends” (91). The novel ends with the image of the two “cousins,” Bob Webster and Joaquín Castillo, and the two Indian women, Candelaria and Tía Magdalena, walking out of Webster’s house and out of reader’s vision: They both grinned at her, linked arms, and walked Bob, earth-solid and firm, Joaquín, air-light and arrogant out of the patio. The two women waited for a decent interval. Then they draped their shawls over their heads, and they, too went to the church. The patio, with its tiled pool, its roses in bloom, and its trees in fruit and in flower, was quiet in the golden light. (491)

In the closing image of Mexican Village Niggli translates maleness into its feminine other, and the borders and boundaries between the genre of the political novel and the genre of the romance, between the American north and the Mexican south, and between the precolonial past and the neocolonial present slowly dissolve in the “golden light” of the afternoon sun.


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4. Romantic Modernism, Modernist Realism Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews

For however charitable it may be to view Indians as members of the Society of Friends, yet to affirm them such to one ignorant of Indians, whose lonely path lies a long way through their lands, this, in the event, might prove not only injudicious but also cruel. At least something of this kind would seem the maxim upon which backwoods’ education is based. Accordingly, if in youth the backwoodsman incline to knowledge, as is generally the case, he hears little from his schoolmasters, the old chroniclers of the forest, but histories of Indian lying, Indian theft, Indian double-dealing, Indian fraud and perfidy, Indian want of conscience, Indian blood-thirstiness, Indian diabolism histories which, though of wild woods, are almost as full of things unangelic as the Newgate Calendar or the Annals of Europe. In these Indian narratives and traditions the lad is thoroughly grounded. “As the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.” The instinct of antipathy against an Indian grows in the backwoodsman with the sense of good and bad, right and wrong. In one breath he learns that a brother is to be loved, and an Indian to be hated. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man Cogewea reflected bitterly how her race had had the worst of every deal since the landing of the lordly European on their shores; how they had suffered as much from the pen as from the bayonet of conquest; wherein the annals had always been chronicled by their most deadly foes and partisan writers. Mourning Dove, Cogewea This, his home, was a strange country. D’Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded A visiting Indian, a Ponca, by the characteristic circular mirror, encircled by turkey tail feathers placed just above his buttocks, danced and twisted, and jerked his head fantastically; he did the black bottom, the Charleston, and other clownish tricks until Chal looked away in disgust, but he could hear murmurs of approval

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from the visitors on the benches. The Ponca had been on a vaudeville stage, and he knew how to please white people. John Joseph Mathews, Sundown

M

y focus in this chapter is what Louis Owens calls “contextual identity” of Native Americans. The early-twentieth-century Native American authors, Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews were keenly aware that Indian identity has been extensively and historically appropriated, narrativized, and colonized. Native Americans experienced a particular kind of alienation within the urbanizing, modernizing, and expanding U.S. empire during the 1920s and ’30s. The “stranger” of Native American fiction is usually a mixed-blood character who is rejected by the national discourse and often by native tribal communities. Native American authors, such as Mourning Dove, McNickle, and Mathews, whose novels I discuss in this chapter, address and narrativize the issue of “contextual identity” through lowbrow genres and traditional narratives that are focused on issues of race and ethnicity within a modernist context and philosophical and social framework. In response to the long history of Anglo narrative appropriations of Indians within American literature, each of these authors utilizes traditional mimetic narratives in order to subvert the very genres that have historically denied them realistic and authentic subjectivity and self-representation in fiction. Thus, they do not employ the formal experimentation of Anglo high modernism on purpose. They reuse and subvert the narrative clichés used by mainstream white authors for ideological purposes that are external to Native American identity, and they write in traditional genres such as realist or naturalist fiction or romance. Instead of representing Indians either as barbarians or as the idealized but absent original population of the nation (as opposed to the very visible and present growing immigrant and African American populations in the cities), early Native American authors describe their life and culture from within. Even though they do not make use of the formal mastery and experimentation of Anglo high modernism during at its height, they nonetheless still develop a poignant critique of the modern condition in the United States that is inseparable from issues of race, ethnicity, and culture. Mourning Dove, McNickle, and Mathews write in the old-fashioned nineteenth-century genres of the romance and western dime novel or in realist and often naturalistic narratives in order to expose the destruction of indigenous cultures and the devastation of the physical environment. They explore the modernist issues of alienation, being strangers on their own lands, and the environmental degradation that were the byproducts of industrialization and modernization. Thus the issues of ethnicity and modernity are intimately linked. The first American Indian to publish a novel, the Cherokee John Rollin

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Ridge, was a contemporary of Herman Melville. Fleeing the consequences of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which stipulated that the tribes of the Southeast and the Old Northwest be moved to the wilderness west of the Mississippi River, John Rollin Ridge settled in California in 1850. At the U.S. Supreme Court’s order the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and other tribes including the Shawnees were forced to relocate to Indian Territory (today’s Oklahoma). The Trail of Tears resulted in the death of four thousand Cherokees (see Owens, Other Destinies 32–40). The Indian-hater Andrew Jackson, as president, turned prejudice into national policy. In his view, Indians blocked the advance of citizen farmers and republican virtue; therefore, their removal from the path of civilization was necessary. Jackson promoted the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which offered the tribes land west of the Mississippi in exchange for their eastern holdings. Consequently, in national policy making the rhetoric of republican liberalism was intimately tied to the rhetoric of racial prejudice and to the practice of genocide. The rhetoric of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” clashed with the rhetoric of nationalized Indian hating, while the ideals of democracy were in dire opposition to the practice of exterminating Native Americans and to the institution of slavery. Melville’s novel allegorizes the Jacksonian legacy of the masquerade of mass murder of Indians as progress, as a necessary step toward greater (economic) freedom in the Model Republic. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade exposes the violence of such political rhetoric. Chapter 26, subtitled “Containing the metaphysics of Indian-hating, according to the views of one evidently not as prepossessed as Rousseau in favor of savages,” is Melville’s take on the ideological masquerade of genocide as philanthropy. 1 The Indian-hater backwoodsman protagonist of this chapter is described as the symbiotic other to his object of hate: “As the child born to a backwoodsman must in turn lead his father’s life a life which, as related to humanity, is related mainly to Indians it is thought best not to mince matters, out of delicacy; but to tell the boy pretty plainly what an Indian is, and what he must expect from him” (146). The backwoodsman is described in terms identical with those used to Rousseau’s noble savage the European signifier for Native Americans. According to Melville, the Indian hater lives in “solitude,” he is “strong and unsophisticated,” “impulsive,” and he must only rely on himself (144). Later, D. H. Lawrence would convey the same message in a more psychoanalytically informed terminology. According to Lawrence, at the heart of America’s history of Indian hating there is in fact a yearning to be Indian (see Owens, Other Destinies 3). In the atmosphere of conflicted political rhetoric in antebellum America it is not surprising that Melville’s contemporary, the Cherokee John Rollin Ridge would write a novel of literary masquerade. The public discourse of political

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and economic deception readily yields to the rhetoric of confidence games. Ridge’s novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) is based on the popular nineteenth-century myth of Joaquín Murieta, a Mexican bandit who became a folk hero in California. His story has been written into the history of the state; sensationalized in books, poems, and newspaper articles throughout America, Spain, France, Chile, and Mexico; and even made into a motion picture (see Jackson xxxv–l). According to the myth, the wronged Murieta and his outlaw band of over two thousand men terrorized Californians during the time of the Gold Rush by kidnappings, bank robberies, cattle theft, and murders. In Ridge’s novel, the originally “mild and peaceable” Murieta moves to California seeking adventure and fortune (Ridge 8). He becomes a successful miner who amasses “a fortune from his rich mining claim” and marries a “beautiful Sonorian girl (8–9). Envious of his fortune and prejudiced against Mexicans whom they view as not white, American “lawless and desperate men” force Murieta to leave his claim by striking him violently in the face, tying him up, and raping his wife in front of his eyes “with no other excuse than that he was ’en infernal Mexican intruder” (10). He tries to make an honest living in a different county but is met with the same fate. That is when “the character of Joaquín changed, suddenly and irrevocably” (12). From then on he dedicated his life to revenge: “He had contracted a hatred to the whole American race, and was determined to shed their blood, whenever and wherever an opportunity occurred” (14). He becomes an outlaw and a bandit at age nineteen. He and his men rob and murder their way through California. The authorities put up a reward if he is found dead or alive (68). Murieta arms his men to “make a clean sweep of the southern counties.” He promises: I intend to kill the Americans by “wholesale,” burn their ranchos, and run off their property at one single swoop so rapidly that they will not have time to collect an opposing force before I will have finished the work and found safety in the mountains of Sonora. When I do this, I shall wind up my career. My brothers, we will then be revenged for our wrongs, and some little, too, for the wrongs of our poor, bleeding country. We will divide our substance and spend the rest of our days in peace. (75)

Finally, the state takes a legislative action against the feared and famed bandit and authorizes Capt. Harry Love and his Mounted Rangers to capture or kill Murieta (145). In a dramatic final shootout Murieta is killed. The rangers cut off his head as well as the hand of his ally, Three-Fingered Jack. As an act of intimidation and to prove the end of terror, Murieta’s head is exhibited “over a large portion of the State,” along with the preserved hand. Ridge then closes his story with a moral that almost reads like a threat on the occasion of the death of “an extraordinary man”: “He also leaves behind him the important lesson that there is nothing so dangerous in its consequence as injustice to individu-


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als whether it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source; that a wrong done to one man is a wrong to society and to the world” (158). Louis Owens starts his literary history of the American Indian novel, Other Destinies, with a close reading of Ridge’s novel (32–40). According to Owens, the first published Native American novel is about a Mexican American bandit in California during the Gold Rush. There is no mention of the Trail of Tears in Ridge’s romantic frontier tragedy, except through a “disguised act of appropriation, an aggressive and subversive masquerade” (33). In the atmosphere of intense Indian hatred, oppression, and displacement, Ridge himself becomes a shape-shifter (similar to Melville’s protean confidence man). The author hides his message between the lines, creating a deeply encoded and subversive narrative:“the surface plot [the demise of the California bandit] rides over the subtext [of Indian Removal] like a palimpsest” (Owens 32). The only direct reference to the author’s affiliation with the Cherokee tribe is in the “Publisher’s Preface,” possibly for marketing purposes. Ridge’s writerly masquerade is also within the tradition of the Indian trickster who is the antihero of or antithesis to the normative cultural order and values.2 Ridge’s text follows the generic code of the dime novel romance, the same genre Mourning Dove would use several decades later in her novel, Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1927). In Louis Owens’s reading, the dime novel romance is a “discourse arising from the Eurocentric conflation of heroic quest and manifest destiny, and one that Ridge appropriates to make it ‘bear the burden’ of his subtext” (38). Subsequent Native American fiction (written by and about American Indians) has been more openly intent upon the recovery and rearticulation of identity. Previously, Indian identity had been the focus of intense fictional speculation by non-Indians, from Columbus’s initial misnomer to the literary production and colonization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Owens points out, the result is an invented (as opposed to a true or real) identity: “In fact, the Indian in today’s world consciousness is a product of literature, history, and art, and a product that, as an invention, often bears little resemblance to actual, living Native American people” (4). Because Native Americans, more so than any other ethnic group in the United States, have been systematically imagined as either noble savages or as the hateful associations Melville lists in his chapter,“The Metaphysics of Indianhating,” Native American writers have always written against the tradition of an already fixed and imaginary identity. In a telling passage Melville exposes the unstable and shape-shifting signification for the concept and the word “Indian” in antebellum America: A race whose name is upon the frontier a memento mori; painted to him [the Indianhater backwoodsman] in every evil light; now a horse-thief like those in Moyamensing;


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now an assassin like a New York rowdy; now a treaty-breaker like an Austrian; now a Palmer with poisoned arrows; now a judicial murderer and Jeffries, after a fierce farce of trial condemning his victim to bloody death; or a Jew with hospitable speeches cozening some fainting stranger into ambuscade, there to burke him, and account it a deed grateful to Manitou, his god. (146) 3

In the above passage the term “Indian” is not fixed either culturally or racially. The only fixed signification that remains stable within the changing notions of identity is the branded-on marks of criminality and deviance. To counter the long history of codified fictional stereotypes Native American authors must appropriate a new kind of narrative strategy and write intertextually. Louis Owens calls this phenomenon an “issue of contextual identity” (5). Prior to N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), most fiction about Native Americans had been written by non-Indian authors in a process that Owens calls “literary colonization” (23). As he notes, before 1968 the dawn of the Native American Renaissance, only ten novels by American Indian authors had been published. 4 In their ethnic modernist novels Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews respond to the political climate of the so-called assimilation period (from the 1880s through 1934) when the U.S. government forced “Indians into a cash nexus while systematically opening up reservation lands for white settlement” (A. K. Brown 274). Brown refers to the 1887 General Allotment (or Dawes) Act, which led to the loss of two-thirds of the original treaty lands by 1934. According to the Dawes Act tribal lands were individualized that is, parceled into private property and surplus land could be appropriated by white settlers (Owens 30). During the assimilation period mission and boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia) violently propagated white cultural values to “eradicate Native tribal identities”: children were “removed from their homes” and “punished for speaking indigenous languages” (A. K. Brown 274). Native Americans did not gain American citizenship until 1924 (four years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment ending the campaign for women’s suffrage), which was a direct response to Indians’ growing enlistment in the military. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (also called the Indian New Deal) was meant to reverse the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 by promoting more extensive self-government through tribal councils and constitutions. With the appointment in 1934 of John Collier to direct the bia, more humane federal Indian policies were enacted. In 1953 a new wave of assimilationist policies dominated U.S. governmental involvement in tribal affairs: House Concurrent Resolution 108 ruled the “unilateral termination of the trustee relationship between the federal government and Indian tribes” (Owens 30). Its goal was to solve the

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centuries old “Indian problem” (similar in purpose to Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830) by terminating tribes by dissolving their sovereignty over their land and as a group and thus forcing Indians now as individuals to join the mainstream, a process that promoted the establishment of large urban intertribal Indian communities. The following discussion of three Native American authors will shed light on the effort to counter the literary and cultural stereotypes piled upon Native Americans since first contact. Mourning Dove directly addresses and critiques an early-twentieth-century ethnographic novel through her own version of the genre of the western romance. D’Arcy McNickle writes in a realistic and often naturalistic style in order to give an accurate insider’s picture of the dilemmas and the fate of contemporary Indians. And finally, John Joseph Mathews gives an unflinching account of the consequences of urbanization, modernization, and industrialization on a rural Indian community through the narrative of a young Osage man. Mathews’s story is a contemporary rewriting of the Bildungsroman and an exposure of its failure as a genre for properly depicting the coming of age and maturing of Native American men during the modernist era.

Mourning Dove (Hum-ishu-ma) He [Alfred Densmore] was hardly satisfied with his surroundings. Where were those picturesque Indians that he was promised to meet? Instead, he had been lured into a nest of half-bloods, whom he had always understood to be the inferior degenerates of the two races. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, The Half-Blood

In the first section of this chapter I examine how Mourning Dove imagines and textually performs the dilemmas of cultural hybridization and racial ambiguity in her ethnic modernist novel, Cogewea, The Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (1927). By calling Mourning Dove’s novel ethnic modernist, I suggest the text specifically brings to the surface and debates such issues as cultural, ethnic, or racial belonging as well as the issues of gender and class through its use and appropriation of the narrative modes and techniques of what Judith Butler calls “subversive repetition” and “discursive resignification” (see Butler, Gender Trouble 134–49). Werner Sollors has followed the history of the American use of the words, ethnicity and race in several of his writings, most recently in an article published in the spring issue of American Literary History (2003): “The word ethnicity, which had been obsolete since the eighteenth century, was self-consciously revitalized by the anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner in 1941, at a time at which race had


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assumed too many charged connotations by its fascist use; this usage ‘took’ only after the 1960s” (“Ethnic Modernism” 74). Ethnic modernist texts question the assumed authenticity of national, cultural, ethnic or racial, gendered, and classstratified bodies within the bureaucratized and segregated units of political organizations. Their characters “perform” and resignify identities that are produced and “interpellated” that is, hailed into subjectivity, as Louis Althusser defines the term by specific communities that defy the stereotypical5 naming, signifying, and inclusionary or exclusionary authority of political institutions. For these purposes, to subvert the racial and ethnic status quo in literature as well as in public discourse, Mourning Dove appropriates the popular genre of the western romance but in an ethnic modernist critical context. Judith Butler uses the two terms mentioned previously, “subversive repetition” and “discursive resignification,” to define how “gender trouble,” the “performativity” of gender, disrupts hegemonic structures within the heterosexual matrix. Her example for discursive disruption is the performativity of gender in drag (see Gender Trouble 137–38). Butler defines “performativity” as a discursive resignification, which works through the bodily mechanisms of subversive repetition. To defy, that is to resignify and subvert the “structuring structures” of gendered or racially determined binaries, Butler suggests that gender is a performative entity. Performativity destabilizes the binary oppositional categories of gender and race, more specifically, those of male versus female or white versus nonwhite. A performative approach to gender and race then allows for a pluralistic and more fluid envisioning of sexuality and cultural as well as racial belonging. Thus, Butler calls for subversive action in the present; that is for “gender trouble,” which would mobilize, confuse, and result in the proliferation of genders as well as of racial, ethnic, and cultural identities by way of extension from gender to other differences. To extend her argument concerning the perfomativity of gender to issues of race, culture, and ethnicity, I suggest that we also include the strategies of passing and what Louis Owens calls “mixedblood” identity. In Gender Trouble and in the later Bodies That Matter Judith Butler treats gender as “performative.” While Butler almost exclusively uses the notion of performativity to destabilize essentialist and binary notions about gender she considers troubling in contemporary feminist discourse; indirectly by virtue of association she extends her category to also include the performativity of racial identity. For example, in Bodies That Matter Butler’s follow-up to and elaboration of her previous argument in Gender Trouble she dedicates a chapter to Nella Larsen’s novel, Passing. In that chapter, titled “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge,” Butler connects the performativity of gender to the performativity of racial identity when she associates queering with passing. In Butler’s view queering is an expression of homoerotic desire that


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presupposes sexual and gender ambiguity, while passing involves heterosexual desire that implicitly mandates the prerequisite of racial passing. However, in her argument concerning the parallels between queering and passing, Butler downplays the racial aspects of homoerotic desire between the two female characters of Larsen’s novel. Thus, in Butler’s analysis the racial passing of the two women is actually the foil for homoerotic desire. According to that logic, both queering and passing crack open illicit spaces for greater freedom and social mobility for women of color within the matrix of compulsive heterosexuality and white hegemony. Even though the issue of racism is still submerged under the weight of heterosexism, Butler’s interpretation of Larsen’s novel leaves the door open for making the leap from the performativity of gender to the performativity and ambiguity of racial identity. In the following argument I borrow Butler’s notion of performativity in order to examine under what circumstances it is or it is not possible to extend her category of performativity from gender to racial identity. While Butler views the performativity of gender and, possibly, of racial identity as a universally available tool for subverting sexually and, to a lesser degree, racially confining social institutions, I examine some of the instances when racial passing is not uniformly available to everyone regardless of class status and racial, cultural, or ethnic belonging as Butler’s category of performativity might suggest. Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood is the story of an educated young mixed-blood Salish Okanogan and white woman, Cogewea, who returns to her home after being sent away to Carlisle, the flagship east-coast boarding school for Native American youth. She tries to readjust to life on a cattle ranch that is surrounded by tribal allotments and by the lands of white settlers on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. She reconnects with her traditional grandmother, the Stemeemä, and also tries to fit into the world of the surrounding white settlers. Her dilemma is that she is between two worlds, caught between the desire to be like her traditional grandmother and younger sister and the desire to fit into a modernizing and encroaching white society with whose ways she is also familiar. Her dilemma is allegorized in the central scene of the novel the two “races” (using both meanings of the word) in which she participates and wins: the horse race set up by the white settlers (the “Ladies” race) and the other for full-blood Indians of the Kootenai and Pend d’Oreille tribes (the “Squaw” race). (Significantly the races are held during the Fourth of July celebrations.) Even though Cogewea wins both, she cannot claim her victory and prize in either, because she is of mixed-blood origin. But most of the story is taken up with the melodrama of Cogewea being courted simultaneously by a white stranger, the easterner Alfred Densmore, who later turns out to be a ruthless confidence man who masquerades as Cogewea’s suitor but in reality is only interested in her assumed riches in land allotments; and by the mixed-


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blood Jim LaGrinder, the ranch’s foreman, who not only ends up marrying her, but unexpectedly comes into the large sum of money that Cogewea inherits from her white father who had searched for gold in Alaska. The novel ends with the marriage between the two mixed-blood characters who are both “corralled” in marriage and also by the United States government on reservations. Written during the heyday of high modernism, Mourning Dove recycled the traditional genre of the western romance and used it to rephrase the narrative of historical tragedy as a melodramatic farce and to reimagine modernist urban centers in the peripheries of the cattle ranches in Montana. 6 But her main concern is with mixed-blood identity at a time of widespread and intense anxiety over American national identity by of American-born and white nativist, groups. 7 Mourning Dove, the pen name of Christine Quintasket, is an English translation from the Okanogan (also called Salish) language of the name Hum-ishuma. She grew up among the Okanogans of the Colville Confederated Tribes of eastern Washington State and later moved to the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Mourning Dove was only the second Native American woman to publish a novel. 8 She wrote Cogewea, The Half-Blood around 1912, but it was not published until 1927. As the novel’s subtitle suggests, the text focuses on the problematic predicament of the métis, mestizo, mulatto, or in particular, mixedblood Indian identity. She both engages with and questions the clichéd figure of the tragic mulatto popular in American fiction. She also argues against the sentimental and biased depictions of Native Americans by white ethnographers whose narratives proliferated during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Mourning Dove, like several other ethnic modernist writers, engages with the modernist practice of textual borrowing as well as with the narrative strategies of discursive resignification and subversive repetition. She ironically rewrites an earlier text, Therese Broderick’s The Brand, a Tale of the Flathead Reservation (1909), 9 which dramatized the early-twentieth-century literary and popular cliché of the “Vanishing American.” Mourning Dove revises this cliché through the trope of the legendary rounding-up and corralling in 1908 of the last freeranging buffalo herd, which belonged to Michel Pablo: “It was a grand and never to be forgotten sight,” replied Cogewea sadly. “But it was pitiful to see the animals fight so desperately for freedom. Although I participated in a way, it brought a dimness to my eyes. They seemed to realize that they were leaving their native haunts for all time. To the Indian, they were the last link connecting him with the past, and when one of the animals burst through the car, falling to the tracks and breaking its neck, I saw some of the older people shedding silent tears. But what else could the owner do than sell them? The reservation had been thrown open to settlement and the range


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all taken by homesteaders. Pablo had to make some kind of disposition, so he sold his herd to the Canadian Government. The few too wild to corral, were killed. They were considered too dangerous for the white settlers, but we never found them dangerous when we were here alone. (Cogewea 148)

Mourning Dove tells this story not once but twice. While Therese Broderick’s The Brand reiterates the notion that Native Americans are a vanishing race, Mourning Dove’s novel rejects the white ethnographer’s melodramatic reading of Native American culture. Thus, in Cogewea the author subverts the stereotypes of Indians by retelling the story of the vanishing buffalo herd as a farce: Cogewea then told of an amusing incident in that connection. The irrepressible camera man was there and he thought to obtain a rare picture of a band of stampeding buffaloes, bearing directly down upon him. He secured his negative alright, but with lowered horns the animals charged and he had scant time to spring into the branches of a nearby tree, where he hung thus narrowly escaping with his life. A noted “Cowboy Artist” was in close proximity and he drew a sketch of the discomfited man swinging to the tree with the rushing buffaloes passing under him. It was, perhaps, a more interesting picture than the camera could have secured. (149)

The image of the cowboy artist drawing the portrait of a photographer who is taking a picture of the last authentic buffalo roundup (moreover, it is retold by Cogewea), is a highly ironic commentary on the general modernist dilemma of authenticity and the originality of artistic representation. The simulacrum of the last authentic free-ranging buffalo that Broderick associates with the figure of the Vanishing American is, then, the original sign eternally deferred in Mourning Dove’s novel. She subverts the clichéd association of the buffalo with the Indian by making tragedy into its own farce what Judith Butler calls the narrative strategy of “discursive resignification” carried out by the technique of “subversive repetition.” Similarly, Mourning Dove defers the essentializing notion of authentic Indian identity, and instead, she foregrounds culturally hybrid or mixed-blood characters. Much work has been done on the issue of mixed-blood identity by both Native American and non-Native American critics. For example, Louis Owens dedicates two of his books, Other Destinies and Mixedblood Messages, to examining mixed-blood characters and identity in American Indian literature. Arnold Krupat discusses the development of racial discourse concerning mixed-descent identity from the early decades of the twentieth century until the present. 10 Both Owens and Krupat read Mourning Dove’s novel as a bittersweet celebration of mixed-blood identity that leaves the issue of racial belonging in a limbo and the narrative in a stasis. Krupat quotes Owens: “the novel concludes ambiguously with the prospect of a wealthy Cogewea and Jim living happily


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ever after, a matched pair of mixedbloods in the lap of luxury” (Owens, Other Destinies 47). Krupat agrees with Owens that Cogewea leaves the dilemma of mixed descent unsolved. I suggest that while Mourning Dove’s novel leaves the dilemma of mixed-blood racial identity open to ironic and sometimes tragic interpretations and appropriations, ultimately, her narrative does support a less ambiguous Indian cultural identification. At the level of the plot the main device for exegesis for both Owens and Krupat who exemplify the crucial scene of the two horse races during the Fourth of July celebrations the heroine does remain in a “cataleptic stasis” between white Anglo and traditional Indian worlds without hope for a resolution. But following the ethnographic thread of the novel represented by the repeated tellings of the roundup of the last free-ranging buffalo herd and the interpolated story of the white female ethnographer’s visit to the H-B ranch that produces the much reviled book, The Brand it is clear that Cogewea’s identification is not with the white outsiders but with the culture of her grandmother or Stemteemä. Moreover, Cogewea strives to become an “authoress” in order to record and preserve her tribal culture instead of leaving the task to white ethnographers. In that sense, Mourning Dove’s novel is a subversive fictionalized critique of white anthropology and favors leaving the task of preserving traditional cultures to their own members. Thus, Cogewea should write the story of the Flathead and Okanogan tribes as opposed to Therese Broderick. Mourning Dove suggests a new strategy actually, a new theoretical framework for recording culture, a strategy not widely accepted till the postmodern turn in the field of anthropology during the 1970s: she already demands, decades ahead of her time, that ethnic or racial groups should record their own culture instead of letting outsiders and academics “salvage” and interpret their lives and customs. 11 Similarly, Mourning Dove’s contemporaries, the Yankton Sioux Ella Cara Deloria and the African American Zora Neale Hurston (both of whom studied with Franz Boas), subversively reworked the “facts” of ethnographic “science” into what Arnold Krupat calls “ethnographic fiction” (see Ethnocriticism). Mourning Dove’s novel specifically responds to Therese Broderick’s The Brand, a Tale of the Flathead Reservation. In Cogewea, she turns Broderick herself into a ridiculous character: she is the white ethnographer who tries to collect authentic information about the buffalo roundup but only gets misinformation. Cogewea paraphrases The Brand as follows: With a frown, she picked up the book and began perusing it again. The story, interesting to the whites, was worm-wood to her Indian spleen. However, she determined to see how much of an ape the author had made of her breed-hero. By adroit sketching, she had, in a short time the gist of the plot. The scene opened on the Flathead, where a half-blood “brave” is in love with a white


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girl; the heroine of the story. He dares not make a declaration of his affection, because of his Indian blood. He curses his own mother for this heritage, hates his American parent for the sake of the girl of his heart. He deems himself beneath her; not good enough for her. But to cap the absurdity of the story, he weds the white “princess” and slaves for her the rest of his life. (91)

Cogewea is a subversive reversal of Broderick’s melodramatic text: the mixedblood heroine rejects her white (and deceitful) suitor, Alfred Densmore, who only seeks her inheritance; instead, she marries her mixed-descent (and honest) fellow “cowpuncher,” Jim LaGrinder, at the end of the novel. In the last chapter, Cogewea finds out that she has inherited a large sum of money from her estranged white father who went to Alaska in search of gold because of a clerical error in the will. Thus, she becomes a woman of substantial means who can afford to have a room or ranch of her own and pursue her dream of becoming an authoress. Nonetheless, according to the narrative conventions of the romance genre, she marries Jim at the end of the story: “The curse of the Shoyahpee [white man] seems to go with every thing that he touches. We despised breeds are in a zone of our own and when we break from the corral erected about us, we meet up with trouble. I only wish that the fence could not be scaled by the soulless creatures who have ever preyed upon us” (283). Native Americans and the free-roaming buffaloes are corralled into reservations and reserves, and women must give up their dreams of independence and hopes for a career in writing and settle for personal fulfillment in marriage, even though it is a marriage to a fellow “half-blood.” Jim’s response to Cogewea’s desperate words about native peoples being corralled and forced into reservations by whites is a marriage offer being corralled together: “S’pose we remain together in that there corral you spoke of as bein’ built ’round us by the Shoyahpee? I ain’t never had no ropes on no gal but you” (283). Susan K. Bernardin suggests that Cogewea’s situation of being in-between white and Indian worlds, being a “half-breed,” mirrors the condition of Native Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century. She says, “Despite the semblance of freedom, the H-B ranch is confined within the Flathead Reservation, which is hemmed in by surrounding Anglo settlements. Moreover, as an Okanogan whose land allotment is located in Washington, Cogewea is geographically displaced” (497). Historically, Mourning Dove’s novel is a fictional response to the so-called assimilation period of the 1880s through 1934 when the U.S. government forced Indians to sell their allotments of reservation land to white settlers. 12 If we read the novel as a western romance, then its plot culminates with Cogewea’s marriage to Jim with the playing out of the patriarchal paradigm of compulsory heterosexuality that should always culminate in marriage. But, if


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we move our examination of the novel’s ending away from reading it exclusively within the gendered paradigm of a color-blind patriarchy to a more racially as well as culturally sensitive reading, then the union between the two mixedblood characters is an affirmation of Cogewea’s choice to stay close to her tribal heritage. By rejecting her white suitor who physically abuses and financially tries to exploit her, she finally comes to appreciate not only the kindness in Jim but also his assurance that she could maintain her Okanogan heritage within their marriage. Mourning Dove affirms Cogewea’s resolution of the dilemma of the “half-breed” by her acceptance and claiming of her “Indianness” as opposed to the culture of her white father. Therefore, she is not suspended in a “cataleptic stasis” between two cultures as Owens and Krupat have suggested. And again, for the second time, the author resolves the dilemma of cultural though not of racial ambiguity, when she juxtaposes the white ethnographer’s approach to recording the language and culture of the Flatheads with Cogewea’s own intentions to preserve her tribal heritage. After summing up the plot of The Brand Cogewea, who nurtures ambitions of becoming an author herself, delivers a critique of Broderick’s novel at the level of its genre and melodramatic plot: Cogewea leaned back in her chair with a sigh. “Bosh!” she mused half aloud. “Show me the Red ‘buck’ who would slave for the most exclusive white ‘princess’ that lives. Such hash may go with the whites, but the Indian, both full bloods and the despised breeds know differently. And, that a ‘hero’ should be depicted as hating his own mother for the flesh and heart that she gave his miserable frame. What a figure to be held up for laudation by either novelist or historian! No man, whether First American, Caucasian or of any other race, could be so beastly inhuman in real life; so low and ungratefully base as to want to hide his own mother. The lower animals respond to this instinct, and can people suppose that the Indian, who is of the heroic, has not the manhood accredited to even the most commercialized of nations? The truth is, he has more love of the undying type than his ‘superior’ brother ever possessed.” (91)

Thus, Cogewea’s critical reading of Broderick’s novel is reiterated through Mourning Dove’s own plot, which both mirrors and subverts Broderick’s story by concluding with Cogewea’s choice to marry a fellow mixed-blood cowboy and not her white suitor. Arnold Krupat reads the romantic union between Cogewea and Jim less as a resolution than as a suspended ambiguity between white and traditional tribal cultures: “Cogewea, as Mrs. James LaGrinder and, like her sister, Mrs. John Carter, will probably preside as the homespun hostess of a great ranch. Unlike her sister, she will probably not allow her assimilated life to be purchased at the cost of a wholesale ‘blotting out’ of her Indian culture. But she most certainly will not follow Stemteemä back to the reservation, to live in a teepee, or, as the condemnatory phrase for Carlisle backsliders had it, return


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‘to the blanket’ ” (“From ‘Half-blood’ to ‘Mixedblood’ ” 132). But to read Indian identity within the binaries of either being assimilated or returning “to the blanket” reiterates the very stereotypes of Indian identity that Mourning Dove’s narrative critiques so clearly. Rather, I suggest that Judith Butler’s notion of identity being performative solves the dilemma of conclusive binaries because it leaves space for ambiguous identities that do not reinscribe the exclusionary categories of gender or racial identity. It is possible to take a stand on the side of Indian culture and identity without having to return “to the blanket.” Here the discourse of race as the pseudoscience of “one drop of blood” diverges from the discourse of cultural identification: Cogewea will never become a full-blood Okanogan but she can still identify with her tribal heritage. Besides reworking the romance plot, Mourning Dove’s novel also rewrites the white ethnographer’s story from an insider’s perspective. Cogewea rejects the option of assimilating into white culture, and she also rejects the mistreatment of Native Americans in this case of the Okanogans within the Flathead tribe by the pen of white anthropology. In a memorable scene, in chapter 10 titled “Lo! The Poor ‘Breed’, ” Jim LaGrinder recalls the actual event of Therese Broderick conducting field research the hallmark of modernist anthropology: I was there when the boys was a stuffin’ one poor woman. It was at the first buffalo roundup when lots of people come to see the sight. A bunch of us riders was together when this here lady come up and begins askin’ questions ’bout the buffaloes; and Injun names of flyin’, walkin’, and swimmin’ things and a lot of bunk. Well, you know how the boys are. They sure locoed that there gal to a finish; and while she was dashin’ the information down in her little tablet, we was a thinkin’ up more lies to tell her. We didn’t savey she was writin’ a real book, or maybe we would a been more careful. Yes, maybe! Why, then there writin’ folks is dead easy pickin’ for the cowpunchers. (93–94)

Jim LaGrinder is a trickster figure who teases and dupes the unsuspecting outsider, the white ethnographer who indeed published her book in 1909. Jim and the rest of the cowboys make up words and give misinformation about Flathead culture on cues of the white ethnographer’s expectations. They tell her what she wants to hear and feed back to her the very misinformation that sounds authentic, based on her clichéd expectations. Mourning Dove fixes and rewrites Broderick’s mistranslation of Okanogan words and customs in her own book when she comments on an outsider’s efforts to give an authentic account of tribal life: There you have it! But that is only a glimpse of the real situation; of what the tribesmen give would-be writers. You now understand why I contend that the whites can not authentically chronicle our habits and customs. They can hardly get at the truth. A


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promulgator of the law of requital good and bad he [a tribesman] is aware of how he has ever been deceived and taken advantage of, and he has no scruples in returning, as he thinks, some of the coin. Of course he does not understand the true situation; and when the ridiculous “facts” which he narrates are once in print, he has the worst of it. I have heard the Indian boast of the absurdities told to the white “investigator”. It is practically impossible for the alien to get at our correct legendary lore. (94)

Mourning Dove’s narrator suggests that even though natives, and mixed-bloods who identify culturally with their tribes as well, have the upper hand in feeding white ethnographers lies, but because of the structure of white hegemony, the initially “subversive repetition” of their words comes back to haunt them in the form of Broderick’s novel, which spreads more misinformation about Indians. The solution, then, is to give Native Americans control over their stories. In Mourning Dove’s novel Cogewea listens to and records the stories of her Stemteemä. Mourning Dove the author identifies with her fictional main character: Cogewea’s wants to get Broderick’s story right, and Dove publishes the novel, Cogewea. Mourning Dove records the stories of her own community: she writes down her own insider’s and supposedly authentic version. Cogewea is the result of collaboration between Mourning Dove and her white male mentor-editor. Because of her limited knowledge of English and her desire to have her manuscript published, Mourning Dove welcomed the assistance of Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, whom she met in 1914 at a Walla Walla, Washington, frontier days celebration. McWhorter was an amateur ethnographer with a commitment to Indian affairs. The collaboration between Mourning Dove and McWhorter resulted in a book that bears the weight of his anthropological intervention in Mourning Dove’s romantic story. When she received the final product from the publisher, she wrote to McWhorter: I have just got through going over the book Cogewea, and am surprised at the changes that you made. I think they are fine, and you made a tasty dressing like a cook would do with a fine meal. I sure was interested in the book, and hubby read it over and also all the rest of the family neglected their housework till they read it cover to cover. I felt like it was some one elses [sic] book and not mine at all. In fact the finishing touches are put there by you, and I have never seen it. (Fisher xv)

The story of the novel’s editorial revision and of its publication and the collaboration between Mourning Dove and her white editor have been already well documented (see Dearborn and Fisher). Cogewea and Mourning Dove give voice to the Okanogan members of the Flathead tribe who were merely exotic objects, the icons of the “Vanishing American,” of ethnographic scrutiny in Broderick’s text. Mourning Dove turns the table on the ethnographer and makes Therese Broderick into an object


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of scrutiny. 13 A contemporary of Mourning Dove, the anthropologist Franz Boas, developed the modern ethnographic methodology of “participant observation.” Indirectly, Mourning Dove criticizes that methodology usually deployed by white ethnographers. A similar sentiment can be observed in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, who was one of Boas’s students at Barnard College. In her introduction to Mules and Men (1935), Hurston comments on her experiences of going back to Eatonville, Florida, as one of Boas’s ethnographers: Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually under-privileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the souls live by. And the Negro in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laugher and pleasantries. The theory behind our tactics: “The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song. (2–3)

Because the role of the participant cannot be easily separated from the role of the observer, Hurston subverts the scientific methodology of ethnography and creates a new hybrid literary genre, that of ethnographic fiction which provides the “feather-bed resistance” to the probing by white ethnographers. 14 Thus, ethnic writers appropriate and then transpose the discourse of ethnography from the realm of science into the world of fiction, while they also delegate the role of the cultural informant to members of the observed group. Nostalgia for traditional or vanished cultures is one of the founding pillars of ethnography. Such cultures are always deferred to the safe distance of a mythic past preserved in oral culture that allows them to take on such unquestioned attributes as those of the “authentic,” the “primitive,” or the “communal.” James Clifford suggests that “salvage” ethnography has historically worked under the assumptions that “the other is lost, in dissipating time and space, but saved in the text” (“On Ethnographic Allegory” 112). Therefore, the recording and cataloging of vanishing cultures is not only justified but necessary. He states, “Ethnography’s disappearing object is, then, in significant degree, a rhetorical construct legitimating a representational practice: ‘salvage’ ethnography in its widest sense” (112). Thus, Clifford questions [T]he assumption that with rapid change something essential (“culture”), a coherent


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differential identity, vanishes. And I [Clifford] question too, the mode of scientific and moral authority associated with salvage, or redemptive, ethnography. It is assumed that the other society is weak and “needs” to be represented by an outsider (and that what matters in its life is its past, not present or future). The recorder and interpreter of fragile custom is custodian of an essence, unimpeachable witness to an authenticity. (Moreover, since the “true” culture has always vanished, the salvaged version cannot be easily refuted.) (113)

The ethnographic process of “inscription” as opposed to the more desirable processes of “transcription” or “dialogue” creates an allegorical ethnographic structure that is marked by the essentialist language of binary oppositions such as civilized versus primitive or written versus oral (113). In Clifford’s definition of ethnographic allegory, “culture [is] described from a specific temporal distance with a presumption of [its] transience” (114). That is, ethnographic allegory is the result of “historical worlds salvaged as textual fabrications disconnected from ongoing lived milieux and suitable for moral, allegorical appropriation by individual readers” (114). Clifford concludes, “the cultures studied by anthropologists are always already writing themselves” (118). Since the transcribing of culture is a collaborative effort between informants and researchers, the writing of culture is always a process of “re-writing,” because the field of ethnography is “already filled with texts” what Clifford calls the “intertextual predicament” of culture (116–17). Besides the epistemological explanation of culture as always already intertextual, elsewhere Clifford describes culture at the juxtapositions of actual physical encounters, of “traveling cultures”: “My own attempt to multiply the hands and discourses involved in ‘writing culture’ is not to assert a naïve democracy of plural authorship, but to loosen at least somewhat the monological control of the executive writer/anthropologist and to open for discussion ethnography’s hierarchy and negotiation of discourses in power-changed, unequal situations” (“Traveling Cultures” 100). Clifford views the genre of the ethnographic narrative as an historical construct and as a product of hegemonic discourses. No culture is in permanent stasis or isolation; rather, cultures, especially under the conditions of modernization, colonization, and globalization, are constantly in the process of transformation. For that reason Clifford associates culture with travel with “ways of looking at culture (along with tradition and identity) in terms of travel relations” (“Traveling Cultures” 101). Clifford emphasizes the hybrid qualities and global influences in each of these categories: in culture, in tradition, and in cultural identity. He suggests that we rethink culture in terms of travel, allowing for the possibility that “[c]onstructed and disputed historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction, come more sharply into view” (101). Thus, Clifford rejects the neocolonial assumption that a cul-


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ture can be transcribed by outsiders: “If the ethnographer reads culture over the native’s shoulder, the native also reads over the ethnographer’s shoulder as he or she writes each cultural description” (“On Ethnographic Allegory” 119). Ethnographic narratives exist in a palimpsest of competing interpretations and within the discursive web of the Foucauldian “power/knowledge” paradigm. Mourning Dove’s critique of Broderick’s book, contained and challenged by Cogewea’s ambition to become an “authoress,” is an affective example of Okanogan culture writing itself while being observed. The representation of Cogewea’s character reconciles two cultural identities: both white and Indian. The heroine must also contend with two opposing purposes: she is one of the cowpunchers on the H-B ranch who marries a fellow cowboy at the end of the story, but she is also a well-educated and literary woman of means, through inheritance, who wants to write, transcribe and create a dialogue with, her own culture. Cogewea’s two sisters, Mary and Julia, represent in terms of cultural identification two possibilities for women of mixed descent. Mary marries a white man, while Julia, who is the more traditional of the sisters, lives with their grandmother: This younger sister [Mary], like Julia, had imbibed more of the primitive Indian nature, absorbed from the centuries-old legends as told them by the Stemteemä. Recognizing the new order of things, Cogewea realized that these threads in the woof of her people’s philosophy, must be irretrievably lost unless speedily placed on record. . . . “I [Cogewea] was contemplating the possibilities of becoming an authoress, of writing a book. I have the theme all right and there is plenty of material yet available.” (33)

Although Cogewea’s speech fluctuates between the literary and the colloquial, between the speech of an inspiring authoress and the speech of a cowpuncher, her world-view ties her to the Stemteemä’s traditional world throughout the novel. As a challenge to Broderick’s ethnographic account, Mourning Dove transcribes traditional Okanogan stories, such as “The Story of Green-Blanket Feet” in chapter 19, which was originally told to Cogewea by her grandmother. The narrative functions as a counter-discourse to the outsider’s rendition of the “tragic mulatto” theme, the clichéd and allegorized story of miscegenation. Thus, the text simultaneously performs “culture writing itself ” and the critique of white outsider ethnographic practices that merely inscribe and exoticize cultures. Mourning Dove puts the two practices into a dialogue thereby the Okanogan culture maintains agency and control over its transcription instead of passively yielding itself to salvage. Cogewea’s character poses a challenge to Broderick’s position as a cultural outsider. Cogewea takes over the role of the ethnographer, but instead of freezing her culture in a timeless and ahistorical ethnographic allegory, she depicts the parallel processes of recovery and


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cultural change and of insider authenticity as well as of cultural encounter with others. Cogewea rewrites the traditional stories of the Okanogans, but she also infuses them with other stories of cultural change, travel, and encounter. Mourning Dove does not merely salvage her culture from a mythical past, she also transcribes her tribal customs and traditions as being alive and in transition. Thereby, in her transcription Okanogan culture becomes a dialogic narrative that is influenced by encounters with other tribes such as the Flathead (Kootenai) and with white settlers. Okanogan culture is both traditional and modern, both authentic and in transition. By incorporating full-blood and mixed-blood characters, traditional narratives and outsider accounts, and past and present events the novel depicts a culture that is very much alive and is in constant transition: it is a rich text of past traditions, the present, and future changes. Therefore, the author reinserts Broderick’s ahistorical ethnographic allegory into a specific geographical and intercultural context and into the flow of history. Besides reinserting actual living Native Americans into the continuous flow of history, Mourning Dove also takes on the early-twentieth-century ethnographic trope of the “Vanishing American.” 15 The Ladies and the Squaw races of the Independence Day celebrations demonstrate her subversive narrative gesture in the novel: “I’m going over to the Kootenais and rent a buckskin dress. I have no native costume and this garb would be a dead give away; for they may kick on me riding this race.” Then mounting, Cogewea cantered to the Kootenai camp, where she had but little difficulty in securing a complete tribal dress. Very soon she came from the tepee in full regalia, her face artistically decorated with varied paints. The Indian children saw and giggled among themselves. Remounting, she doubled the bright shawl over her knees, lapping it securely. When she rode back to the track, the “H-B” boys recognized her only by the horse. (64–65)

Cogewea wins both races, even though she is an intruder in both. As a mixedblood character she challenges the suspicions and tribal exclusiveness of the full-blood Kootenai by participating in the Squaw race since she is an Okanogan with some white ancestry on Flathead territory; and she insults the racially pure status quo of white America by participating in the Ladies race. By focusing on the in-between status of cultural hybridity, Mourning Dove poses a double challenge: first, she challenges the supposed “authenticity” and “purity” of Native American culture and identity in her critique of the Kootenai for claiming superiority over a mixed-decent Okanogan and, second, she challenges the white community for its racism. Indirectly, Mourning Dove also critiques the outsider and hegemonic stance of white ethnography, which claims entitlement to recording and salvaging “primitive” cultures.


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Mourning Dove writes against a long line of nostalgic textual renditions of Native Americans by white authors and ethnographers. In such a context, her narrative choice of mixed-blood characters and the invention of a mixed-blood persona for herself function as modern critiques of the white ethnographers’ construct of the authentic “aborigine.” 16 Therefore, her interpretation Native American identity is performative and dynamic and not a fixed salvaged entity. Indians have been written up, painted, and photographed so much that there is only the “aura” of a “collective perception” left that we have all “agreed to be part of,” to use Don DeLillo’s protopostmodern words (12). With the thick layers of already-there textual and visual images of Native Americans, the “ab/original” becomes invisible, leaving only commodified images behind for collective consumption. In the Fourth of July horse races (chapters 6 and 7) Cogewea subverts the rigid terms of race relations. By donning an appropriate costume for each race, she participates in both races, winning both but upsetting both whites and the Kootenais in the process. In the end, she is denied any prize. Cogewea’s character upsets the carefully guarded boundaries of racial and cultural belonging:

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A riding habit of blue corduroy fitted her slender form admirably. Red, white and blue ribbons fastened her hair, which streaming to the racer’s back, lent a picturesque wilderness to her figure. Securing the stirrups, she requested Jim to tighten her spur-straps, as they seemed a trifle loose, adding: “We just must win this race from the whites. See!” . . . “Why is this squaw permitted to ride? This is a ladies race!” (62–63)

During the Squaw race her reception by the full-blood Kootenais is not much more favorable: “One of the Kootenai girls turned to her and spoke sharply in good English: ‘You have no right to be here! You are half-white! This race is for Indians and not for breeds!’ ” (66). However, in the end Cogewea triumphs over both groups by carving out an existence for herself between cultures. She reconnects with her Okanogan roots, rejects her deceitful white suitor, and marries another mixed-blood. Furthermore, she becomes a woman of means who can assert and sustain herself, even though she is surrounded by not always sympathetic ethnic and white groups. Indirectly, she also triumphs over the white ethnographer’s attempt to record a vanishing culture since Cogewea’s story overwhelms and deconstructs Broderick’s ethnographic narrative. Mourning Dove favors hybridity over white cultural domination or full-blood cultural or racial resentment. Thus, the novel avoids the nostalgic tones of the ideology of the Vanishing American, and it also evades the traps of trying to fix Native American culture in the past through the essentializing binaries of full-bloods or whites. Mourning Dove transcribes the narrative conventions of homogeneous racial and cultural nostalgia and the monologic language of the patriarchal


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structure of mandatory marriage through a modern and melancholic rendition of displaced lives and missed opportunities. Mourning Dove’s novel celebrates tolerance, hybridity, as well as racial ambiguity, even though the text commits itself clearly to the cause of the Indian as opposed to the white community culturally. As Judith Butler destabilizes the discourse of gender (as well as of race) through the more fluid category of perfomativity, or as James Clifford critiques the fixing of a culture in the past through salvage ethnography and ethnographic allegory, in Cogewea Mourning Dove suggests that we should rethink our monologic notions of racial identity and cultural authenticity through the hybrid and modern genre of ethnographic fiction.

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D’Arcy McNickle

Both D’Arcy McNickle and Mourning Dove record the tragic consequences of the opening up of the Flathead Reservation to white settlers. While Mourning Dove appropriates the genre of the nineteenth-century race melodrama, McNickle mourns the emasculation and hopelessness of life under white hegemony in a realist narrative that often borders on naturalism. In her novel Mourning Dove parallels the corralling of the last free-ranging buffalo with the corralling of Indian communities onto reservations surrounded by white settlers with the corralling of women into marriage (especially of Indian women who are prey to both white and Indian or mixed-blood suitors). McNickle also centers his story on the condition of being corralled, on being “surrounded” with no possibility of escape. The Surrounded (1936) is D’Arcy McNickle’s first novel. It centers on a twoyear period in the life of Archilde Leon, whose mother is a full-blood Salish Indian, and his father is a white rancher of Spanish descent. The story opens with Archilde’s return to his father’s ranch in Montana after being away for nearly a year in Portland, Oregon, where in Archilde’s description: “I played my fiddle in a show house” (2). His parents have been estranged, even though they have been married for forty years and had eleven children: his mother, Catharine Le Loup (Chief Running Wolf ’s daughter) lives with her people in a small hut, while his father, Max Leon, lives in the big house on his ranch. Upon his return, Archilde learns that his brother has stolen some horses and is now hiding in the mountains. Life in the Salish community of Sniél-emen (Mountains of the Surrounded) has gradually gotten worse: “The fur trade was gone when he [the merchant George Moser] arrived and the Salish Indians were a starving lot, once their game was killed off. The only money they had was what the Government advanced them, and somebody else got that” (29). Things got even worse with the Dawes Act when the government was “throwing open


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the Reservation to white settlement” (30). The new century brought with it a new kind of economy forced upon the community: “each Indian was given a separate piece of land, a ‘garden plot,’ of eighty acres, and the remaining area was opened for white settlement. There was a theory behind all that; he had heard it expounded but he couldn’t have repeated it now. It had something to do with civilizing the Indians” (30). The novel takes place a decade after “the Reservation was thrown open” (31). In a story parallel to Archilde’s homecoming, the mission’s Jesuit priest, Father Grepilloux, has been writing the history of the Sniél-emen valley since the founding of the town’s Mission in 1854. Max Leon is one of the closest friend’s of the priest, often visiting the mission for solace and conversation. On the occasion of her son’s return, Archilde’s mother holds a feast with the help of Old Modeste, the blind chief and medicine man of the community. During the celebration Modest tells three healing traditional stories about the “old times” when the Salish were still a “mighty race” and a “strong nation” (70). His retelling the first encounter between the Salish and the black robes is quite different from the one Father Grepilloux narrates in his historical journals, according to which the arrival of the white people in the valley brought faith, order, and civilization to a childlike people. Modeste’s story tells of the arrival and the forced spread of Christianity; it was “clear that something had gone wrong, the people had lost their power” and become dependent upon handouts from whites (73). Archilde immerses himself in his mother’s traditional culture and decides to stay longer than initially planned. At Catharine’s request he even participates in a last hunting trip with her. In a rapid sequence of events, they come upon his brother Louis and go on hunting together. Louis shoots a doe at a time when there is a restriction on hunting. Unexpectedly the game warden of the area comes upon the hunting party and wants to arrest Louis but instead kills him (127). The shocking events proceed further, and “[t]here was no accounting for what happened next” (127). In a moment of revenge, Catharine hits the game warden in the head with a hatchet and kills him. The mother and her surviving son then bury both bodies and leave the mountains. Upon his return home, suspicion falls on Archilde even though there is no evidence that he is responsible for the disappearance of the Game Warden and the Indian Agent locks him up for his protection for a while (149). In his despair, Max tries to convince his best and most promising son unsuccessfully to “make a new beginning” by going away to Spain and studying music (159). In the meantime, Father Grepilloux passes away, and soon after, his best friend Max Leon dies of pneumonia. As a token of belated reconciliation within the family and between two cultures, Catharine moves into the big house and Archilde takes over his father’s legacy and takes charge of the ranch.


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The following summer Archilde participates in and gets drunk during a dance. There he meets Old Modeste’s granddaughter, Elise La Rose, who was away and returns from the Indian School in Oregon. She does not follow Old Modeste’s traditional ways and has a corrupting influence on Archilde. When the town’s sheriff finds the game warden’s saddle in the mountains close to where Catharine and her sons set up camp during their illegal hunt, both the Indian agent’s and police’s suspicions refocus on Archilde (whose mother had died by then). On Elise’s suggestion, she and Archilde run for the mountains, away from the sheriff ’s enclosing grip on him (284). Sheriff Quigly follows the fugitives, and when he comes upon them, Elise shoots him to death (294). There is nowhere else to run, and Archilde numbly extends his “hands to be shackled” by the police at the end of the story, thereby sealing his fate and the fate of Indians in general under white rule (297). Such an ending suggests that McNickle does not believe Archilde would ever be able to leave the valley or change the fate of Indians during the early decades of the twentieth century when the trope of the Vanishing American had made itself the manifest destiny for Indians. The novel is a series of tragic events that lock the main character into an unavoidable fate that at the time the story is set seemed true for the Indian community, which was at an all-time low in population, around half a million. McNickle uses the metaphor of the fate of the buffalo, just like Mourning Dove before him, to allegorize life in Indian country during the first few decades of the twentieth century that promised liberation, peace, progress, and advancement to most the white Anglo population of America at its onset. The rounding up of the last free-ranging buffalo herds is already a thing of the past in McNickle’s text. For the young protagonist, Archilde, the event has already lost any resemblance to reality as has the elders of the tribe and their traditional feasts: Actually, in the way he was learning the world, neither Modeste nor his mother was important. They were not real people. Buffaloes were not real to him either, yet he could go and look at the buffaloes every day if he wished, behind the wire enclosure of the Biological Survey reserve. He knew that buffaloes had been real things to his mother, and to the old people who had come to eat with her tonight. To him they were just fenced up animals that couldn’t be shot, though you could take photographs of them. (62)

In the context of mass commodification and modernization, the buffalo becomes a mere spectacle for tourists; a way of life has turned a into a photo opportunity, into a simulacrum. While the buffalo was traditionally hunted as food and its skin used for many purposes in everyday life, now it is only a fetish object. Walter Benjamin’s notion of the loss of the “aura” in the “age of mechanical reproduction” is a somewhat nostalgic longing for authenticity and


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originality (Illuminations 223). Benjamin’s article, written the same year that The Surrounded was published, 1936, is a commentary on Marx’s predictions of “what could be expected of capitalism in the future” (Illuminations 217). With the encroaching of fascism and mass culture, Benjamin laments that the changes in the mode of production, which were already predictable during Marx’s time, are finally manifest in the superstructure. Benjamin specifically points to the loss of aura in the mechanical reproduction of images in photography and film. But his argument reaches beyond the plastic arts to a more general and widespread phenomenon, that of the elimination of temporality and historicity under the modern conditions of mass production and mass commodification: This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situations, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. (Illuminations 221)

Benjamin specifically responds to the use and abuse of mass-produced art with a mass appeal in fascist Germany in the 1930s. 17 But his argument can be also applied to the auratic object of the buffalo for Native Americans at a time when American colonialism has all but wiped out that central trope and ritualistic figure of traditional ways of life for a large group of Native Americans. While Nazi Germany became the case study on how a society can be affected politically and in its ideology by the mass production of goods and ideas, the United States became the model republic of mass-commodification, which accompanied the economic boom and bust of the 1920s and 1930s. McNickle examines the effects not on white Anglo society but on the surviving pockets of Native American communities. The novels of John Steinbeck, especially Cannery Row (1945), look at the same effects on the underclass of Monterey, California. But Benjamin’s insights concerning the decontextualization and dehistoricization of life in general under the conditions of mass-market capitalism in an oppressive state are quite relevant for making sense of Native American affairs in the United States during the first part of the twentieth century. The U.S. government’s aggressive assimilationist policies were aimed at territorial expansion and the physical extermination of native peoples. Besides committing blatant acts of genocide, the imperialist and industrializing capitalist state had also put into place its “repressive ideological apparatuses” (Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” 141–48). The U.S. government encouraged prose-


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lytizing and the founding of missions on tribal lands, set up boarding schools far away from Indian communities, and systematically supplanted tribal traditions and ritualized justice systems with a biased penal code and a bureaucratic legal system. In his analysis, Benjamin explains the epistemology of the work of art as imbedded in its ritualistic and magical use (Illuminations 223–24).18 The change that marks modern art under the conditions of mass reproducibility is that “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” (224). Such a change in the epistemology of art under the conditions of modernity eliminates any possibility for claims of authenticity. Thus,“[i]nstead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice politics” (Illuminations 224). In other words, by eliminating the epistemological categories of authenticity and originality in mass societies, objects and signs are also detached from their communal contexts and are free for endless appropriation and reappropriation. While such a freedom of the (aesthetic) sign is democratic because it allows access by the masses, it also threatens with a generalized erasure of historical, cultural, and traditional contexts. For the assimilated Archilde, returning home to his reservation is an unreal, almost surreal, experience stripped from any kind of auric significance. The stories told at the feast are meaningless and their characters unreal since they lack any kind of recognizable context or signification for him. He understands the importance of the stories his mother and old Modeste tell and the importance of the role the buffalo had in traditional tribal life only when he is able to extricate himself from the economic, legal, and political system of the American nation. For him and his brothers and nephews this is only possible by becoming an outlaw. According to Flathead (and most Plains Indian) traditions, the buffalo bears special significance and functions as a complex sign within Native American cosmology. It has both ritualistic and use values; it represents a way of life. Once the herd is corralled and cannot be hunted, a whole way of life perishes. By putting the buffalo into a fenced Biological Survey reserve (as in The Surrounded) or turning it into a tourist attraction and a photo opportunity (as in Cogewea), the animal and fetish object lose their ritualistic aura and become “unreal,” as Archilde Leon laments (62). The buffalo and the elders of his tribe, including his mother, have lost significance for the assimilated and alienated Archilde. The buffalo has become just one among many spectacles for outsiders; and his people on the reservation, especially the elders, have become anachronistic misfits and curiosities. When invited to a feast in his honor, Archilde responds, “You gorged yourself on meat until you felt sick, and a lot of old people


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told tiresome stories” (4). The ancient stories that were passed down through generations have lost their ritualistic power and become inconsequential if not ridiculous within the modernizing and commodified world that is ruled by the Western value of “possessive individualism” (MacPherson 263–77). When Archilde’s mother finally convinces her youngest son to go with her on one last hunting trip, the ritualistic aura of the hunt turns into an ultimately fatal adventure: This was how it would have seemed years ago, crossing the mountains to hunt buffalo. Nothing would have been much different. He would have kept his eyes open; there might have been game and there might have been Blackfeet. He would have felt the same sway of his horse; the sun would have given no less warmth; there would have been the same aspect of tree and rock and mountain. But it was different. The mountains were empty of life, that was the difference. This ride with his mother was no more than a pleasure trip; that was the difference. If they returned without fresh meat, no one would worry; at home there were canned peas, potatoes in the cellar, and meat could be had at the butcher’s; that was the difference. (115–16)

The hunt does not produce any game; instead, two people are killed: the game warden and Louis. Indirectly, this incident leads to the death of a third person. When Archilde himself is on the run in the mountains for being suspiciously involved in the disappearance of the game warden, his companion, Elise La Rose, shoots the suspecting sheriff. Instead of the anticipated ritualistic hunt, the misfired adventure entangles both Archilde and his mother with the law. Hunting for doe in the fall is illegal, so is killing a man. As McNickle puts it: “The woods seemed to be full of guardians of the peace” (124). The incident leads “Faithful Catharine” to relinquish her legendary faith in Christianity and the Church. With it her obedience to white law also dissipates. Following the deaths of her son and of the game warden, she seeks repentance for her sin from the Jesuit priest. After her confession she has a recurring dream in which she goes to the white man’s heaven with no fellow Indians there and no animals to hunt. But since she is baptized, she cannot enter the Indian heaven for which she longs. The dream leads her back to her old ways; not only to the old rituals but also to the old justice system of her tribe “of holding court and using the whip” (206). At a secret meeting of traditional members of the tribe who have kept the old rituals, the blind chief old Modeste comments on the outlawed tribal system of punishment: Years ago they told us that we would get into trouble if we whipped people. Myself, I don’t think they should have said that. We know our affairs. But it was said, and since that time we have not used the whip. Yes, I think it is bad. In the old days it was a good thing because it kept the people straight. We knew our guilt and we told it; or, if we tried


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to forget, somebody would speak up and then it came out. When we were told to give this up, they said they would give us new laws. Well, they gave us those new laws and nobody is straight. Nobody will confess and nobody will go to the white judge and say ‘My nephew has broken the law,’ or ‘my relative over there on Crow Creek whipped his woman and ought to go to jail.’ That’s the way it goes now; the old law is not used and nobody cares about the new. (206–7)

The loss of the old justice system and the ineffectiveness of the imposed white system parallels the effects that the Church and government schooling have had on the tribe. The repressive ideological state apparatuses of the law, the church, and the school leave the tribe culturally and monetarily bankrupt. Allegories of violation and being trapped are at the center of Mourning Dove’s and D’Arcy McNickle’s novels. The authors examine the same historical events the corralling of the buffalo, the opening up of reservation lands to white settlers, and the double colonization of Indians by the church and by the U.S. government but from the perspective of different genders. While Cogewea escapes sexual violation by the white con man, Alfred Densmore, she is finally and ultimately corralled by marriage. Education, desire for adventure, becoming an authoress, and even her financial independence cannot save her from the imposed weights of colonialism and patriarchy. McNickle’s protagonist, Archilde Leon, is an expendable entity in the path of American continental expansion allegorized by the “priest or agent or devil” (286). 19 Archilde is doomed from the moment he returns to his home on the Flathead Reservation. According to McNickle’s epigraph: “The Surrounded they called that place Sniél-emen (Mountains of the Surrounded) because there they had been set upon and destroyed.” Archilde’s yearlong stay in the valley of Sniél-emen ends with his silent submission to an unavoidable fate: “Archilde, saying nothing, extended his hands to be shackled” (297). Archilde moves through the narrative in a dreamlike state, never really aware of his surroundings, never quite understanding what happens to him. As Louis Owens has commented, the key theme of the novel is “fatal misunderstanding” (Other Destinies 65). Misinterpretation and miscommunication overdetermine the narrative. McNickle suggests on many occasions that Archilde does not stand a chance against the colonial patriarchal trinity of the devil, the clergy, and the U.S. government: “But something had gone wrong, uselessly, without reason. The end had come almost before a beginning had been made. He would wind up like every other reservation boy in prison, or hiding in the mountains” (150). The Flathead Reservation being “thrown open” to white settlers created a situation where “[e]verybody went slightly crazy” and where there was a “touch of insanity” that no one could avoid (31). The confidence game of selling off


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the reservation created a situation similar to the one Melville describes in The Confidence-Man. The April Fool’s Day atmosphere on the Fidèle, the ship of fools allegorizing the conflicted rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the Model Republic, is mirrored by the inflated rhetoric surrounding the partitioning of the reservations. According to the General Allotment Act of 1887, in theory, everyone would benefit. As George Moser, a former Indian trader now merchant, an easterner with a hypochondriac wife, puts it in The Surrounded: “But at the time the step was taken he believed with everybody else that the benefits which the Indians would secure would offset the wrong done them. If some white man also benefited, the Indian ought not to object; it was a fifty-fifty proposition. That was the talk” (30–31). The Indian-hater in Melville’s novel is not responsible for his violent actions against Indians since it is his nature, thus eliminating the relevance of his victims’ perspective altogether (Dimock 178– 85). Similarly, the policy justifying the opening of reservation lands for white settlement also excludes accountability for damages done to the victim from the rhetoric. Wai-chee Dimock’s reading of Melville’s novel is a case study of the “absolute congruence” between the “imperialist structure of selfhood in Manifest Destiny” and the “capitalist structure of selfhood in individual accountability” (201). Both justify the “discounting” and elimination of the victims’ perspectives. According to Dimock, the “self-victimizing savage of Manifest Destiny” and the “self-consuming victim of the marketplace” (which she also calls the “figure of the autonomous self ”) in the ideology of individualism are “identical twins”: they are common to both the logic of the “marketplace” and to the logic of “nationhood in America” (201). Melville’s novel exposes the psychic and economic mechanisms at work under the violent conditions of market capitalism from the perpetrator’s perspective. His “social allegory” for the ideology of individualism and for the “Empire for Liberty” (Dimock 26, 201) is a narrative of confidence games performed by the elusive and protean confidence man: in his constant shape-shifting he personifies the mentality behind the national discourse of discrediting the victim who is often not male and not Anglo-Saxon. McNickle turns such logic on its head and sets the rigid determinism of the victims’ narrative opposite to the slippery and shape-shifting identity of the confidence man. Ironically, both texts work under the assumption that there is something inherently predetermined about people’s lives, but as Dimock has demonstrated, the logic of the marketplace and of industrial capitalism and the imperialistic ideology of Manifest Destiny are truly at work with their twin rhetoric of individualism and imperialism. The Surrounded exposes the confidence game of America during the assimilation period when reservation land was opened up for white settlement. According to the Albuquerque Morning Journal, the opening up of reservation


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lands was an entertaining event, complete with a lottery and general merrymaking: For two hours in the heat of a midday sun the three little girls pranced over the pile of yellow envelopes, plucking fortunes for some out of the pile of applications. . . . National colors in the center of which floated a huge American flag, gave the platform a martial setting. . . . To keep the crowd, now standing in the broiling sun of noon in good humor, Judge Whitten stopped the drawing at intervals long enough to joke with the women who drew claims and to tell stories of his past experiences in the land drawings of government reservations. (August 10, 1909)

There were about 290,000 applicants for “land thrown open to entry and settlement.” As the paper reports: “For the Coeur d’Alene reservation 1,500 applications will be drawn, for the Flathead 6,000, and for the Spokane about 250: in each case about twice the number of available homesteads” (August 9, 1909). Based on the reported numbers, the Flathead Reservation experienced a dramatic increase in white settlement. The lottery of tribal land on the Flathead Reservation is a given circumstance and is pushed to the background in Mourning Dove’s novel. McNickle’s central allegory of being surrounded geographically and politically is told in a claustrophobic narrative. His story carries a sense of predetermination and inevitability, a sense of doom and unavoidable failure, similar to the conventions of the naturalist novel. As opposed to the early-twentieth-century white American version of the naturalist novel, the “primitive” or the “brute” (or, what Susan Mizruchi called the “self-destructive sphere of social difference”) is not viewed voyeuristically with an outsider’s hostility as in the novels of Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser (Mizruchi, “Fiction and the Science of Society” 202). McNickle’s determinism is historically situated through parallel retellings of the same events. The social allegory of the Dawes Act is told several times. The first time, in the outsider George Moser’s telling of the story, it is an event tainted by ideology and fantastic images: Everybody had expected that great benefit would result from throwing open the Reservation to white settlement. Even the Indians would gain by it, people said. At bottom, if you looked closely, there was a question of justice to the Indians. Years before, in the middle of the last century, as Mr. Moser understood it, the Indians had agreed to give up their hereditary claims to all of western Montana and northern Idaho in return for a fixed reserve which was to be set apart for their exclusive use and additional compensation of money. The money disappeared into quicksand there was lots of quicksand in the government service and the reserve proved of little value to them as soon as the game vanished. That didn’t take long. And finally, at the opening of the


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new century, each Indian was given a separate piece of land, a “garden plot,” of eighty acres, and the remaining area was opened for white settlement. There was a theory behind all that; he had heard it expounded but he couldn’t have repeated it now. It had something to do with civilizing the Indians. . . . There was great activity, much coming and going, forming of land companies, distributing of handbooks with photographs of oats-six-feet-tall-without-irrigation and baskets of melon-size potatoes, and much talk, just before the Reservation was thrown open. Everybody went slightly crazy. (30–31)

By partitioning the reservation into privately owned parcels, the state apparatus pressed its individualistic notions of land and ownership on the tribes. Besides the blatant confidence game of dividing the land into smaller and smaller portions and swindling the tribes out of the promised financial compensation, the parallel rhetoric of “justice to” and “civilizing the Indians” matched the propagandistic descriptions of the handbooks advertising a paradise on earth. Even the entrepreneur George Moser becomes victim to the government’s land speculations. McNickle’s narrative repeats the victims’ point of view of the events over and over. Ultimately, not only the members of the Flathead Reservation but anyone else involved with the forced assimilation project becomes a victim, such as the Spanish rancher Max Leon (Archilde’s father), the missionary Jesuit priest Father Grepilloux, and the law-enforcement officers (the game warden and the sheriff who bears an uncanny resemblance to Melville’s Indian-hater). The Spaniard Max Leon, seeking adventure in the American west, is smitten by the land of the Salish people and settles down as a rancher. He marries chief Running Woolf ’s daughter, Catharine. He is forever an outsider among Catharine’s people, even though he becomes one of the most prominent men of the community after the death of the founder of the Jesuit mission, Father Grepilloux. His house is the biggest, and it is furnished with the auctioned belongings of a bankrupt rancher: “The rancher had brought the furniture with him from the East and stocked his land with thoroughbred stock. The cattle poisoned themselves on loco weed, his wife died in childbirth, and he ended his venture by bringing his baby to the Sisters of Providence one winter night, pushing it inside the door and ringing the bell, then disappearing” (165). Max Leon’s own melancholic story repeats the bankrupt rancher’s. His marriage to Catharine is loveless and estranged: they live in separate houses (she in her tepee and Max in the big house). Most of their eleven children are alienated from their parents and have become criminals or outlaws. In McNickle’s narrative world there is only one perspective, that of the victim. There are no winners as opposed to the newspaper article’s land lottery story. McNickle’s naturalist determinism is born from the recognition that the colonial imperialist and individualistic ideology of the expanding nation-state cannot discount its victims. Max’s plans for reconciliation with his wife and with Archilde come too late:


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he dies of pneumonia before he can accomplish them. 20 The sense that“[t]here was no time for anything,” permeates the novel (166). Max misses his chance for reconciliation, there is hardly any game left in the mountains to live on, and Archilde cannot leave the valley. By ending the novel with the image of Archilde being shackled and thus trapped in the valley, McNickle freezes the moment into eternity. Moreover, not only has time run out for escape, but also Archilde’s silence and the repeated references to the characters’ lack of understanding why things happen to them all reinforce the naturalist novel’s trajectory of inescapable determinism. Intentions turn out differently than planned, and both white and Indian characters drift through life without comprehending why. All characters become victims in this narrative regardless of their social position or racial origin. In chapter 26, which contains one of the novel’s most disturbing scenes, McNickle describes “the summer of misfortunes” when drought, swarms of grasshoppers, and fire destroy the wheat crop: Archilde heard the complaints of the white ranchers as he passed groups of them in conversation on the streets of St. Xavier, but he felt no sympathy. It made one smile to hear them talk about their troubles. If they wanted to see misery and hopelessness let them look around, as he was doing these days (he did not know why, but he couldn’t help himself). If they would walk through Indian town that part of St. Xavier given over to crumbling log cabins and dogs and Indians, with the high brick church overtowering all they would see that one summer was like another. In years of abundance no less than in lean years, the Indians sat in their dark doorways with no expectations, looking out upon a world of meaningless coming and going. (232)

In true naturalist narrative manner, McNickle piles on one gruesome detail after another. Later in the same chapter, Archilde is described as driving by the slaughterhouse and seeing “women carrying off pots of blood-smeared entrails.” He is especially struck by the sight of an old woman pushing a cart full of revolting contents “on which flies were swarming” (233–34): Presumably she had not chosen such a life. . . . He realized then that she was deaf. Her eyes were inflamed and watery and she was probably almost blind. Failing senses were only part of the desolation into which she had wandered in her old days. She had to live without decency, like an animal, with nothing to live for, except perhaps an old man who was no better off. He stood before her and could do nothing. She could not even understand that he wished to help. The notion was foreign to her, whether she heard or not. He offered money, held it out to her, even pressed it into her hands; but her fingers were nerveless for lack of recognition. She stood motionless for a long time after he had gone, gazing at the money note in her hand. What did it mean? (234–35)


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Archilde feels helpless and ultimately trapped by his world. In the next chapter he rides out to the Badlands,“the open range . . . wild and barren . . . uncrossed by a fence” (236), now only inhabited by “hopelessly old and crippled” horses (237). In his attempt to save one of them he actually hastens the old mare’s death. McNickle’s authorial stance on Indian affairs coincides with the alienation Archilde experiences. Archilde can only watch with compassion, but he cannot actually help his family or people. He is as much of an outsider there as he was in Portland before returning home. In a self-referential passage, McNickle connects his own sense of alienation to that of Archilde’s: “Whatever he did, he felt that he remained on the outside of their problems. He had grown away from them, and even when he succeeded in approaching them in sympathy, he remained an outsider only a little better than a professor come to study their curious ways of life. He saw no way of changing it”(193). McNickle’s use of naturalist narrative conventions is an acknowledgement of his academic distance from the subject matter. But his compassionate and intimate knowledge of the inhabitants of the Sniél-emen valley redefine and redirect the voyeurism and alienated stance of the naturalist novel. While some of his descriptions are still somewhat voyeuristic, such as the scene in front of the slaughter house, others are intimate, like the description of his mother getting Narcisse, Archilde’s nephew, ready for the Fourth of July Celebration: “Archilde could see that for his mother this was a real thing, and he had felt the same way a moment before in Modeste’s lodge. For these old people it was real, almost real enough to make it seem like a spirit come from the grave. Watching his mother’s experienced hands, he could guess how she had lived, what she had thought about in her childhood. . . . For a moment, almost, he was not an outsider, so close did he feel to those ministering hands” (215–16). Such instances of intimacy are short-lived though. As soon as he leaves his mother’s lodgings and approaches the dancing ground, he feels that “nothing was real”: the scene turns into a “spectacle, a kind of low-class circus where people came to buy peanuts and look at freaks” (216):“Archilde had wedged himself into the front line of spectators, but when he got there he was sorry. It was a sad spectacle to watch. It was like looking on while crude jokes were played on an old grandmother, who was too blind to see that the chair had been pulled away just before she went to sit down. He felt the hurt which the old men suffered unknowingly” (217). The authentic and intimate instances are uncomfortably close to the grotesque and the tasteless. 21 This scene is also uncannily similar to the one in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, where Helga Crane goes to the circus and watches the African American entertainers cavort and dance on the stage in Denmark. She feels uncomfortable, alienated, repulsed, but also strangely akin to her fellow countrymen on the stage: like a “curio” or a strange “peacock.” Just like in the slaughterhouse scene where compassion


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and repulsion are closely linked, the intimate and the grotesque are only slightly distanced from each other at the Fourth of July celebration. In her description of a Fourth of July celebration, in “The Fourth of July” and “The ‘Ladies’ and the ‘Squaw’ Races” chapters of Cogewea, Mourning Dove turns the celebrations into a confidence game of identity. Costumes mask or make one’s identity, which is only as fixed as a change of clothes, on this American stage of racial confidence games. In McNickle’s narrative the celebration turns into a grotesque masked ball:“This dance which was being held on the Fourth of July was a survival of the old midsummer dance. It was no longer an endurance test and there was not much exultation expressed by it, but the Indians enjoyed themselves because it brought many of them together and for a while they could forget how bad it was at home” (205). The social allegory of Independence Day is a grotesque repetition and ideological subversion of the traditional midsummer dance. By prohibiting the scalps and the marriage dances, the U.S. government banned the public displays of violence, warrior pride, and courtship rituals in the tribe (204). The puritan colonial mentality has allowed only for the traditional midsummer dance: Before life changed for the Salish people they would not have begun a ceremony like the midsummer dance without first having met and cleansed themselves. All old scores would have been settled, the pipe would have been smoked between men who had quarreled, and restitution would have been made of any damages which had been inflicted upon another. And finally the lash would have been laid on anyone who was guilty of wrongdoing. (No one could now remember exactly what was punishable with the lash in those days, because after the Fathers came many new “crimes” were added, such as creating a disturbance at church or prayers.) The “whip covered the fault.” Whipping, like the scalp and marriage dance, was now a thing of the past. (205–6)

The midsummer dance is emptied of its meaning. The event is now infused with the ideologically loaded signification of American independence from the British crown. The neocolonist government has added another prohibition to its control over Indian identity, especially Indian masculinity: the prohibition of local control and judgment over matters of right and wrong, over punishment and restitution. McNickle’s combining of naturalist descriptions with Salish storytelling redefines the naturalist genre and makes his subject position open to accommodating both insider and outsider perspectives. The most intimate and historically situated instances of the text occur when McNickle depicts the secret meeting and holding of court by the elders (206–7), Catharine’s dream of separate white and Indian heavens (208–9), and old Modeste’s story of his Somesh or guardian spirit (211). While the present in general is represented as incomprehensible and opaque, the past recalled by the elders is associated with


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rare moments of intimacy, clarity, and authenticity. McNickle’s text reinserts the historicized agency of the victim into the national narrative of territorial expansion and “possessive individualism.” The world in the novel is represented as incomprehensible and chaotic. The characters do not understand what happens to them or why, they do not have an access to a master code to decipher the world around them. It is not just a problem of miscommunication between characters and between whites and Indians (as Owens tends to read the novel) but also a problem of a fundamental opacity of a world that has lost its historical consciousness under colonial conditions. According to the novel’s plot, the determining factor in the world becoming unintelligible is the arrival of white intruders. But the indecipherability of the world does not only affect the Salish people. The novel’s white characters (Max Leon, Father Grepilloux, George Moser, the Indian agent, the game warden, and the sheriff) are themselves often puzzled by the turn of events in the Sniél-emen valley. The first Black Robes to reach the valley marked their entry with an ominous cross and by baptizing the Salish people. In Catharine’s memory, the missionaries’ arrival marks the downfall of her tribe: From that day to this she had been “Faithful Catharine,” and now in old age she looked upon a chaotic world so many things dead, so many words for which she knew no meaning; her sons developing into creatures such as had never lived in her childhood (a son might steal horses but a mother was respected); the fires of hell slashing the gloom of a summer evening. She had borne eleven children, seven sons to this man who now lived alone in the big house and held her in contempt, and she could not understand the ruin that had overtaken her. What had come about since that day of the planting of the cross? How was it that when one day was like another there should be, at the end of many days, a world of confusion and dread and emptiness? (22)

The only legacy the Mission’s founder, Father Grepilloux, leaves behind after his death is his journal history that is discredited by both old Modeste’s and Catharine’s narratives. Even Max Leon discredits the priest’s achievements when trying to piece together the old Jesuit’s legacy in Sniél-emen. Catharine renounces Catholicism on her deathbed, and Modeste’s story contradicts the father’s recollection of why the Salish welcomed, and even sought out the Jesuits. In chapter 4 Father Grepilloux is back in the mission town of St. Xavier, which he founded, to write his memoirs, “a history of his work.” According to his memory, the local Indians were eager to embrace Christianity as the only true path to one God: “The Mission was his creation. He had reared it up in the wilderness and then, years ago, had gone on to other duties like a soldier whose course is plotted for him by his superiors. A year ago, after he had passed his


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eightieth birthday and could no longer keep up with younger workers, he had come back to write a history of his work and sink peacefully into oblivion” (36). The novel cites some of the entries from the Father’s old journal and daybook. In chapter 5 is the first excerpt, dated the fall of 1854 when a company of Jesuits appeared in the valley of Sniél-emen for the first time. According to the record: As we had been invited by these Indians to come here and instruct them, we counted on some sort of welcome, yet nothing like what we received. A large Company was there, with their tents pitched on the Plain. . . . We were led at once to the Great Chief, a Patriarchal man, with a most open and friendly face. In his hand he carried the Wing of an Eagle, and afterward I learned that this symbol of his Office was never absent from his hand. I looked about me at the waiting men, at the women who kept off some distance, and at the solemn children, and I was struck by the air of expectancy. I thought they understood perfectly what this moment meant to them, and in their hearts, they were praising the Author of their Beings. This impression was heightened, later, when Chief Running Wolf spoke to father Lamberti. His words were translated by the faithful Ignace, who had met us at the Green River Rendezvous, and conducted us to this place. In effect, the Chief said: “We have been worshiping False Gods, and we want you to teach us the True God.” (46–47)

The father views the events from the perspective of his own expectations, never questioning the truth of his interpretations. He reads the above passage to Max Leon who, upon reviewing his own memories, finds the story not completely true and very puzzling: “He knew in a vague way that the Salish people had a reputation for having met the white men with open friendliness; but now to say that they had stood ready to be Christianized, and even sought out the priests that was bewildering. It made him feel all at once that he was ignorant of these people, which was somewhat like being told that he knew nothing about the back of his neck, after he had lived with it all his life” (48–49). The priest’s recollections are compassionate “these people have lost a way of life, and with it their pride, their dignity, their strength” (59)but also biased and misguided. Max Leon himself admits that he is ignorant of the Salish tribe’s ways, even though he has spent a lifetime among them, married the chief ’s daughter Catharine, and had eleven children with her. At the same time Max Leon visits with Father Grepilloux in St. Xavier, Catharine holds a feast for Archilde. Modeste, the old blind chief, tells three stories at the feast: the story of Flint which makes everyone laugh (64–66), the story of the iron axe which is “full of meaning” (68–69), and a story that goes “far back into the past” (70–74). The last story is about the white man’s first arrival to the Salish in the mountains. According to Modeste’s story, before the white man came the Salish were a strong nation, respected even by their enemies, the Blackfeet and the Crows of “buffalo country” on the Missouri (71). The


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turning point in the tribe’s life was marked by the Blackfeet being supplied with guns: “No other Indians got these guns, only the Blackfeet. That was when our trouble began” (70): It went on that way a long time, and then the white men came to us in the mountains. There were foolish ones in our councils who said that we ought to just kill every white man that came along because they had given the guns to the Blackfeet. These foolish ones were not listened to either. We made peace with the first ones that came and helped them to find their way through the mountains, and we kept that peace with all of them. Today we can say that we never had the blood of any white man on our hands. It was not that we feared them, but we had to have their guns. And we could not stop being friendly once we had got some guns, as the foolish ones wished, because we had to have more guns. It was a different world from that time. In the old days of our wars a few men would be killed and fighting was a thing you could enjoy, like hunting. But now it became a bitter thing. Old scores of blood revenge could never be settled because too many were killed. (71)

Modeste’s story contradicts the father’s memories in several ways. Father Grepilloux’s story depicts Chief Running Wolf and his people as “children,” eager for the Jesuits “to minister to their Spiritual Health” (47). According to Modeste’s story the tribe sought out the Jesuits for practical reasons only: to get their own guns from them against the already armed Blackfeet. Father Grepilloux also tells the story of Big Paul whose father was killed by a white man (52–59). The ensuing feud between Big Paul’s family and the Irvings leads to endless massacre and revenge. In a confusing chain of events Big Paul is accused of betraying his brother who by his own carelessness falls prey to the Irving family. Thus, when Paul is alone during a shootout in a bar, he escapes alive only to be stabbed to death by his own people: Big Paul staggered toward them through the snow, and without stopping to ask a single question, they [Slem-Hak-Kah’s, Paul’s youngest brother’s, party] fell upon him and stabbed him to death. It is said that every man in the party drove a knife into his wounded body. Without molesting the miners, the Indians turned about and rode home over the mountains. The feud ended at that. (58)

Father Grepilloux’s journal entries retell the same story, according to which the childlike Salish have sought guidance from the Jesuits. He records “the lost life of a primitive world” (59). To him, Big Paul’s story proves allegorically the unavoidable fate of a race, of the Vanishing American a trope that held strong even in academic circles, especially within departments of anthropology during the first half of the century. 22


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The priest’s story about Big Paul is set against Modeste’s story of how guns had turned the previous system of justice into an endless “blood revenge” (71). By juxtaposing the father’s entries in his old daybook with Modeste’s stories, McNickle exposes the Father’s assumption that Indians are doomed for extinction in North America. Just as the endless feuds allegorize “blood revenge” where the urgency of revenge obscures what had started the feud; the image of the childlike Salish eager to be baptized shrouds the actual events that had originated the conflict: “Maybe this year it was your son, next year it would be your father, then your brother, then your wife, and each time your heart grew heavier. You cut off your hair so many times that men forgot how they had lived before all this happened. The old ones could say it had not always been this, but the young ones thought they talked in dreams. For them the world had always been bitter” (71–72). McNickle tells the story twice, once as Manifest Destiny (Father Grepilloux’s journal entries) and once as tribal history (Modeste’s stories). Indirectly, he tells a story on the dangers of forgetting and the loss of historical memory. The competing stories of the Jesuits’ arrival illustrate the novel’s double structure: a story is told the second time as an allegory (white version) and then again as a story within its actual historical context (Salishan oral tradition). The amnesia of the allegory is countered by the Salishan oral version that reinserts the specific historical dimensions and cultural contexts into the telling of past events. In Modeste’s version of the history the Jesuits’ arrival is closely connected to the introduction of guns into intertribal conflicts, thus leading to endless feuds and violence and finally to a spiritual crisis that opened the door for Christian proselytizing in the valley (73). Such general crisis forces the tribe to send for the Black Robes. Modeste aims his story at Archilde who then experiences a brief moment of connection with his people: “For the first time he had really seen it happen. First the great numbers and the power, then the falling away, the battles and starvation in the snow, the new hopes and the slow facing of disappointment, and then no hope at all, just this living in the past. He had heard the story many times, but he had not listened. It had tired him. Now he saw that it had happened and it left him feeling weak. It destroyed his stiffness toward the old people” (74). This piece of the past is the missing part of the puzzle. Archilde does not understand his people until Modeste provides the historical dimension to the ideologically loaded and stereotypical tales he learns in school and at church. Stereotypes leave personal biography and history out of their purely synchronic system of signification. To Father Grepilloux’s question about what his impressions of the Indians of the Sniél-emen valley were like upon arrival, Max Leon responds:


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It was not laziness, and it was not romanticism. He never thought the Indians were “noble” or children of a lost paradise. While it was true that the old life was much cleaner than the present existence, it was still hard for a white man to stomach. They were like any other people in this respect that individuals varied exceedingly; some you admired and some you detested on sight. People were always asking him what he thought of the Indians, what were their chief characteristics, and it was nonsense. He didn’t know. You could say that jack-rabbits had long legs and were swift runners, hoppers rather, but there was no single trait he knew of to describe all Indians. Even the first thing you thought of, color, had almost as many variations as there were single Indians. The one thing he had never seen was a red Indian. There were all shades of brown, some almost black ones, and a good many were as olive-skinned as a Spaniard. (42–43)

As skin color or any one characteristic do not represent all Indians, the father’s allegoric journal entries offer only an individual perspective as opposed to a rich palimpsest of multiple historical narratives. From the dehistoricizing allegoric perspective of the Jesuits the Salish were eager children to take on Catholicism. From Modeste’s stories it is clear that it could only happen as a result of the coincidence of several historical events that is, not “naturally” or because of the Salish’s desire for the arrival of Christianity. Both Catharine and Archilde eventually renounce their Christian faith and education: on her deathbed Catharine commands “No priest!” (259); and even though Archilde returns to the mission for music lessons, he finds the church “unreal,” with no “Presence” in the altar light, and even the paintings, which seem impressive and awe-inspiring from a distance, are disappointingly “flat” from up close (104–5). While both high modernism and ethnic modernism share the experience of disenchantment both spiritually and in the world, ethnic modernist authors, Native American authors in particular, add the dimension of culture to the experience of the generalized rationalization and demystification of the world under modern conditions. In this chapter, so far, I have discussed how Native American novelists in the 1920s and 1930s contributed to the modernist discourse concerning issues of ethnicity and authenticity in representation through the genre of the western romance or the naturalist novel. Both D’Arcy McNickle and Mourning Dove comment on the specific conditions Indians faced at the beginning of the century. Their accounts add historical dimensions and competing perspectives missing from texts about Native Americans written from a dominant narrative position. Their novels locate the modern experience of alienation within the colonial condition of reservation Indians. Modernists fought the phantoms of romanticism and realism as well as naturalism aesthetically and the rationalization and bureaucratization of the world politically. In addition, Native


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American ethnic modernist novelists responded to a long tradition of textual abuse and stereotyping of Indians. High modernists aimed to subvert the romantic or mimetic representations by previous generations through restless innovation of form and expression. Native American authors often reached back to anachronistic forms such as the dime novel or the naturalist novel which may be viewed as a form of hyperrealism in order to reuse and subvert the very genres that have historically cast Indians in stereotypical roles and images. McNickle and Mourning Dove use those genres to critique both their form and message. By reappropriating previously popular genres, they are able to create a dialogue with the very texts they critique. Their novels seem formally conservative and out of place in the modernist literary scene of compulsive innovation. By not just reusing earlier and popular genres in the context of a sometimes esoteric and elitist modernist milieu but also filling those forms with new content, the two authors challenge assumptions about the genres they use and about modernism itself. They reappropriate the romance, to critique the institutions of patriarchy and white anthropological authority, and the naturalist novel, in order to subvert the genre’s voyeuristic and outsider’s perspective directed at native others.

John Joseph Mathews


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He wasn’t sure why he had bowed, because he intended to say simply,“thank you,” and remember to smile. He hoped that Clarence had not seen it, but he guessed perhaps it was all right to bow a little. He was feeling a little better when he was suddenly aware that he had given them a limp hand, with just the three middle fingers touching their palms in a salute; Indian fashion. He grew hot all over again. Why couldn’t he remember to grasp other people’s hands with conscious pressure? He had had his hand hurt enough since his arrival at the University to have remembered this. John Joseph Mathews, Sundown We can safely suggest that the new sense of time introduced into Indian life produced a sense of alienation which made Indians strangers in a land that was becoming increasingly strange as whites changed it to suit themselves and that the old ceremonies might have provided an emotional bulwark against this alienation, but their prohibition only increased the feeling of exile among the people of the tribe. . . . Forced adaptation to secular, mathematically measured time has produced a fundamental sense of alienation. Vine Deloria Jr., “Out of Chaos”


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Being Indian isn’t in looks, in features of color. Indian is inside you. John Joseph Mathews, Sundown “Indianness” has been defined by whites for many years. . . . “Indianness” never existed except in the mind of the beholder. Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins

John Joseph Matthew’s Sundown (1934) like the novels of Mourning Dove and D’Arcy McNickle is concerned with the particularly American modernist themes of authenticity and ethnic identity, but within the cultural context of the Osage tribe in eastern Oklahoma. According to his daughter’s Virginia H. Mathews’s 1988 introduction to Sundown, Mathews became an instant success when his Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road, became a Bookof-the-Month Club selection in 1932 (v–xiv). 23 It was the first university press book chosen for popular distribution, selling close to fifty thousand copies in its first year of publication during a period of general economic collapse. Sundown also became an aesthetic and cultural model for the modern American Indian novel (Owens, Other Destinies 49, 77). After the publication of his first two books (even though Sundown did not gain critical appraisal initially), Mathews went on to write in a variety of genres: he published Talking to the Moon (1945), a lyrical and autobiographical reflection on living alone on the Osage prairie; a biography, Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E. W. Marland (1951), and the cultural history of his tribe, The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961). Two of his works still remain unpublished: an autobiography, “Twenty Thousand Mornings,” and a second novel, “Within Your Dream” (Warrior 25). In Louis Owens’s description, Mathews’s Sundown had set up the literary model for Native American authors who would follow in his footsteps: he created an archetypal plot in opposition to and critical of the cultural stereotype of the Vanishing American perpetuated by contemporary Anglo literary and pseudoscientific discourses that focuses on the process of acculturation; that is on a “mixedblood living both in and out of his tribal culture” (Other Destinies 49). In his survey of the American Indian novel, Owens connects the concerns of early Native American novels with those of contemporary high modernist texts, such as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which he describes as “another novel of deracination and despair” (49). Not only did Mathews set the standards for the emerging genre of the American Indian novel, he also left his subversive mark on the canon of American literary high modernism. In his writings he localizes and specifies the modernists’ often vague and fatalistic sense of alienation and being an outsider in the modern world. In Sundown Mathews locates the cause of his protagonist’s, Chal Windzer’s, estrangement within the context of the oil boom of the Osage Reservation. Elsewhere, Owens describes this time period


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as “marked by a dizzyingly rapid and frequently violent erasure of traditional Osage culture. The discovery of oil on Osage lands at the turn of the century brought economic sufficiency and wealth to many Osage families, a boom that culminated in the 1920s in a time Mathews refers to in The Osages as the ‘great frenzy’ ” (“ ‘Disturbed by Something Deeper’ ” 164). 24 Like Chal Windzer, Mathews was of mixed Indian and white descent attended the University of Oklahoma, played football, and joined a fraternity. Mathews graduated from the university in 1920 with a degree in geology. After graduation he went to Oxford to study the natural sciences at Merton College. He received his degree in 1923. Besides traveling in the English countryside, he also toured Europe and North Africa on a motorcycle; and he worked as a reporter for an American newspaper. Before returning to the Osage hills in Oklahoma in 1929, he lived briefly in Geneva, Switzerland, and in California. He disliked the drifting and greedy world of the Jazz Age, and in Sundown he tells the story how his Osage protagonist gets caught up in that world of purposeless self-destruction in an effort to try to fit in (see V. H. Mathews ix–xi). Chal’s story is an Indian’s take on the alienation and escapism of the Lost Generation that hoped for meaning and community by leaving the urban areas of the United States for the bohemian colonies that settled the West Bank in Paris. After a period of searching elsewhere, mostly outside of the United States, Mathews returned home in search of healing and meaning. Unlike the isolated monads of Anglo culture who find no solutions to their self-doubt, alienation, and general cultural malaise in the bars of western Europe, but like his protagonist, Mathews returned home in order to reconnect with his family and tradition. As his daughter says, “Having found his identity at his roots, he knew that his purpose lay in preserving the tradition of his Osage culture and history what he called ‘Osage culture rescue’ ” (xii). As an Osage cultural insider but also one who could make use of his training and perspective, Mathews created a cultural document that reflects on the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the modern world and on its impact on the fastly modernizing community of the Osages during and after the reservation period. He took on the role of the cultural translator by banking on his status as a well-educated and traveled mixed-blood who could build a bridge of understanding and insight between two cultures. Thus, his novel is a curious mixture of Osage ethnography and modernist fiction. Mathews was the founder of the Osage Tribal Museum, which opened in 1938 and was the first tribally owned and operated museum. Moreover, the opening of the tribal museum took place in an intellectual climate and when the academic discipline of anthropology turned its gaze toward the “local exotic” in order to record and preserve fast-disappearing Native American cultures in the United States and when white both dilettante and universitytrained anthropologists considered themselves to be the experts entitled to


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salvage the remnants of the Vanishing American cultures Indians within the homeland of already closed frontiers. Sundown is a complex mixture of traditional Euro-American literary genres and their innovative rewriting within the ethnic modernist context of the Osage in the 1920s. The plot follows the life of Chal or Challenge Windzer from birth to young adulthood, from naive innocence to his possible integration into Osage and Anglo cultures, quite similar to the traditions of the Bildungsroman. 25 But instead of the simple dichotomies of innocence versus knowledge, the “idiocy” of the countryside versus the sophistication of the city and instead of the final integration of a young man into the social and class status quo of bourgeois society, Mathews’s main character must also find his place not only within mainstream Anglo-American values and hierarchies but also within a changing traditional Osage culture. Therefore, the text deals with the related issues of colonization, industrialization, and forced acculturation. As Vine Deloria Jr. puts it succinctly, “the only alternative that white society had to offer was a chaotic and extreme individualism” to the young Indian male in the early part of the twentieth century (“Out of Chaos” 20). Moreover, industrialization brought with it environmental and cultural denigration, a consequence particularly important to Indian tribes and cultures dependent upon and formed by their natural environments. As Mathews observes in Sundown: “Slowly from the east the black oil derricks crept toward the west, rising above the blackjacks, like some unnatural growth from the diseased tissues of the earth” (62). Later on he comments on “that oil-polluted pool of water” to which Chal returns from time to time in search of solace and reconnection with the natural elements. The once pristine pool used to be his favorite place for escape and daydreaming: “the unhappiness which that spot, so dear to his boyhood memories, had caused him” (251). Instead of accepting the pollution of the environment as the necessary consequence of and the price for progress, Mathews only sees the loss and the unfairness of the exchange: “Chal did not know the reason for this ugliness; this ugliness which white men seemed to produce. He did not know that these buildings were expressions of a race still influenced by an environment thousands of miles across the ocean, and that these foreign expressions were due to the fact that the race was not yet in adjustment with the new environment. He simply felt that these things were not beautiful” (90). Here Mathews expresses a radical and surprisingly forward-looking sentiment: the English settlers of the New World were aliens to the American land, thus their notions of progress and civilization did not match the spatial spirit of the continent they colonized. Therefore, Mathews suggests a new hierarchy of values: instead of the Anglo standards and world-views to be passed onto the Indians, rather, the locals should teach the intruders how to live on their land. This is a lesson painfully learned in our contemporary world


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of global warming, growing numbers of epa superfund sites, and the increase of disease in the midst of modern medicine and scientific progress. The issues of modernization and ethnicity are intimately and consistently connected in Mathews’s works where the latter, the preserving of cultural authenticity and ethnic identity, is used to critique the former; that is, the celebration of progress, industrialization, rationalization, and westernization. Sundown is set within the “postcolonial scenario” of dislocation, cultural denigration, and the erosion of the self that calls for a plot that has “pervasive concern with identity and authenticity” (Owens, Other Destinies 50). The novel opens with Chal’s birth and the legacy of his naming by his mixed-blood father, John Windzer, on the Osage Reservation of the 1890s: “He shall be a challenge to the disinheritors of his people. We’ll call him Challenge” (4). Chal’s childhood and young adulthood are influenced by several events: the white fortune seekers’ invasion of Osage lands in hope of a quick buck, his education at the University of Oklahoma, and the events of World War I. By the time Chal returns home from the university after having served as an airplane pilot in Europe, the Osage Reservation had been thrown open to white settlers and entrepreneurs by the General Allotment Act of 1887. What made the Osage a unique case study of forced modernization and industrialization is that their land had enormous underground thus not easily and automatically acquired by white settlers resources of oil and natural gas that the tribe was able to hold onto after the allotment in 1906. Ironically, the Osages were wealthy as a group but not as individuals (for a detailed discussion and overview of the history of the Osage, see Warrior, Tribal Secrets 17). Chal’s maturation and personal quest for integration into a new political, cultural, and economic situation upon his return home as a young adult coincides with the communal history of the Osage being gradually overtaken by outside con men and white fortune seekers who were attracted to the mineral wealth of the tribe. Often, these men attempted to gain Osage headrights to the resources and to the oil money through marriage, miscegenation, and even murder. During the “Osage Reign of Terror,” “a white man married an Osage woman and systematically conspired to inherit several shares of the Osage oil wealth through murdering members of her family over a number of years”(Warrior 18).26 Mathews resets his plot of violence, corruption, and cultural bankruptcy in Osage country during the modernist Jazz Age. Chal is born at the crucial moment when the Osage mixed-blood faction, which is in favor of letting the federal government turn the tribe’s natural resources into profit, gains control over the full-bloods who want to retain communal and tribal ownership of their mineral rights (Warrior 46). Chal is unaware of these internal tensions while growing up: “One might have said that Chal’s early childhood was contemplative rather than one of action. Yet this would not be true; it was both a life of contemplation and action. Con-


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templation, mostly in the form of dreams wherein he played the role of hero, whether in the form of man or animal” (9). Chal’s genealogy personalizes the emerging communal tensions between the two factions: his father is a mixedblood, whose hero is William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) the American lawyer and three-time Democratic presidential candidate, and his mother is a traditional full-blood member of the Osage tribe. His childhood fantasies also split along those diverging cultural lines. When he imagines himself as a hero, he is influenced by the books his father reads to him and by the private school he attends: “Oddly enough, he was forever leading charges against England. Sometimes he led gaily painted warriors; Osages and Sioux against the mythical tyranny of an England who was taking Indian land, but most of the time he led an army of picture book soldiers, who were of course inevitably victorious. This was the influence of the stories which his father read to him from American history books, which gave to the American every virtue and to the Englishman every vice” (10–11). When he imagines himself as an animal, he is more influenced by his full-blood Osage mother’s traditional culture: “He was not a little Indian boy even then, but a coyote, that had just outrun his uncle’s greyhounds by tricking them. . . . Often, his role was suddenly changed by a grasshopper climbing slowly up a grass stem, with the purposelessness of all grasshoppers. Or a cicada breaking into monotonous song just above him” (11). The ambivalence of running away from civilization in order to find solace in nature and in the company of animals and then returning to embrace western values again is a constant theme in the novel. From early on, Chal is well positioned to follow through with his father’s plan that would set him on the course of western individualism, which is most often fictionalized in the form of the Bildungsroman and through the aesthetic values of realism, naturalism, romanticism, or modernism. This mindset would turn him into a lone hero who should take on, in Chal’s father’s words, a “world that had ignored him and taken special trouble to persecute him” (3). John Windzer, himself a lone romantic hero, finds solace in imitating the sentiments usually expressed in romantic poetry: “And now I’m in the world alone / Upon the wide wide sea; / But why should I for others groan / When none will sigh for me?” (2). When John Windzer thinks about his role in the world, especially the role he should play within the Osage tribe, he invariably imagines himself as a “great orator,” a “hero,” or a “conqueror, not only by his sword but by ringing words” (3). But he does not stop at the aestheticism of the romantic hero. He is also a practical businessman and an ambitious politician who finds his role model in his contemporary William Jennings Bryan, whose voice and tone he often imitates (3). Chal inherits not one, but two legacies: when his father names his newborn son Challenge, he bequeaths him the legacy of western individualism, but he is


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also the inheritor of his full-blood Osage mother’s tribal communal legacy. She sees him as a warrior surrounded by other Osages and with the companionship of a good Osage woman: And that son. There was fire in his eyes, and his face was the right kind of a face for an Osage to have, and he was straight and tall and walked like a little warrior. Some day she would put paint on his face and arrange his clothes and set the feathers in his scalplock as they should be set; she would put the symbols of her family on him, and comb his hair as he looked at himself in a hand mirror. She could see him as a young warrior walk toward the Roundhouse, where the drums were already throbbing and the caller was calling the dancers in a high voice that sometimes sounded like the wolf talking to the moon. She could see him as he walked proudly, as an Osage should walk, with many bells on his leggings, tinkling. The singing in her heart almost stopped and she though of a young woman decorating her son for the dance. She must be a good woman. She would decorate her son until she could find a good woman for him. (32)

Most of the novel’s plot focuses on Chal’s first legacy, his acculturation into western civilization through education. But when he returns home from the university and from serving in the war in Europe, he makes an attempt to integrate into his Osage culture. But because he comes back home to a bankrupt culture corrupted by white speculation and environmental degradation and pollution, his second legacy from his mother’s side cannot be immediately realized, thus the ambivalent ending upon which almost all critics of the novel comment. At the end of the novel, Chal’s father is dead, killed by the consequences of the very individualism he so much worshipped (234–37). He experiences a series of failed attempts to reconcile his two legacies: he loses the money he inherits from his father through speculation and the self-destructive pattern of drunken bouts, reckless behavior with white women and fast cars and finds experiences of taking part in the traditional dances or experimenting with peyote unfulfilling. However, Chal finally reconnects with his mother and integrates the two legacies into one that is more fitting to the changed circumstances in Osage land. In a scene of great emotional ambivalence, mother and son are together after years of uncomfortable distance and cultural alienation. Chal is physically exhausted, financially broke, and culturally and intellectually empty: “As he sat by the table this hot summer morning in the shade of the old oak, he felt lazily indifferent to everything” (309). At this moment of emptiness and indifference, a mother robin catches his eye. She is “feeding her young,” and when she leaves the nest a sparrow hops in and steals “one of the nestlings” and lets “the little bird fall. Chal heard it spatter as it hit the earth” (309). In a way, Chal was also stolen from his home and put through an alien and hostile white education system; and when he finally returns, his community is already robbed of its


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resources and corrupted by white speculators and government agents. He also watched his childhood friend and university schoolmate, Running Elk, succumb to alcoholism and die in a rehabilitation facility. In the final chapters of the novel he is at the crossroads: he will either becomes a victim like many of the Osage, among them his father and his friend Running Elk, or he will survive but only if he avoids the path of self-destructive western individualism, the legacy left to him by his father. The allegory of the mother robin and her nestlings and the ending of the novel suggest that physical and cultural survival must be facilitated by the legacy of Chal’s full-blood Osage mother. In an instance of foreshadowing, after the death of her young one “the mother robin appeared, and with much scolding, chased the sparrow away. When she came back she had a worm dangling from her bill and began to feed the remaining nestlings. She failed to realize that anything had happened to the fourth” (309). Simultaneous with the mother robin’s return, Chal’s mother reenters in the final scene of the novel: “The door slammed and Chal’s mother came out with some coffee, and sat down in the other chair by the table” (309). Even though Chal feels hostile to and alienated from his mother after her comment about the “lost generation” of American men who became pilots in WWI, or ambulance drivers like Hemingway: “Many white men are flying across the sea now” (310). Chal’s immediate response is anger and dismissal, but he also wants to prove himself to her: It was only an observation, but Chal saw behind it into the Indian soul of his mother. He became very angry and almost hated her for a moment. An intense urge flooded him; an urge to vindicate himself before this woman. This woman sitting there was more than his mother she was an Indian woman and she was questioning a man’s courage. Suddenly he realized why he had almost hated her recently. She had been looking into his heart, as she had always looked into his heart. (310)

Thus, instead of the empty rationality of western individualism, she offers an alternative path through intuition and the heart. Even when Chal was a young boy, just about to start his education in the white schools, instead of fearing that she would lose her son to white culture, she is able to see with her heart and see him as a future Indian warrior. Before young Chal leaves for the white private school, his parents silently struggle over the opposing legacies they each have for their first-born son: Her great lord who had some of the blood of the white man in his veins and in his heart, didn’t know all she knew about their son. She knew he was no coward, and she wasn’t worried about him at this guv’mint school. It was only that she didn’t like white men’s ways. She knew that she had heard him; the lone wolf that had howled from Cedarvale Hill. Even above the distant yapping of the coyotes she had heard him. And at that moment


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she had given her son secretly to the wolf; the wolf had wanted him and she had given her son. There had been no evil to mar that propitious night, because she had listened; there had been no voice of evil; no screech owl had quaveringly disturbed the stillness. (32–33)

By framing the sustaining force of Chal’s maternal legacy within the larger, nonlinear and nonrational, context of the natural world and Osage culture, Mathews seems to suggest that Chal would eventually become a warrior and a defender of his tribe the leader of the wolf pack. Even though Chal’s childhood education follows his paternal legacy, little by little he becomes disillusioned by the supposed superiority of western civilization. For example, his father’s white cousin, Ellen, who gives him a set of “pictures about the Christ child and the crucifixion” (18), teaches him about Christianity. When he grasps the cruelty and violence in the story of the crucifixion, he burst into tears, and “he took a stub pencil and began furiously to mark out all the soldiers in the picture” (19). Chal’s response to the barbarity of the crucifixion is a perfectly natural condemnation of the founding myth of western civilization, which he calls “A queer world” (20). Cousin Ellen only sees the destruction of her pretty pictures thereby, the representation is more valuable than the actual event and calls him a “Little savage!” (20). In a similar instance, of turning the seemingly stable values of the western world upside down, Mathews offers his own interpretation of the Fourth of July celebrations as did Mourning Dove and D’Arcy McNickle depicting the national holiday as a hateful reminder to U.S. Indian policies. In Sundown, the small child Chal has a horrifying encounter with a white woman on the Fourth of July: Then a towering, disheveled figure came toward him; a mad woman with her iron grey hair flying, cursing as she strode toward him. Her face was distorted and ugly, and her eyes were gleaming. As she reached him she swung her great arm and knocked him sprawling. He did not remember being picked up, but the har’d gurl in charge of him must have come immediately to his rescue. But burnt forever in his memory was the intense emotion of the moment; so intense and so searing that it affected his whole nervous system, and the picture of that wild white woman with iron gray hair and eyes flaming with hate and madness, had ever the vividness of a white scar. (14)

The young Chal views school, another manifestation of hostile governmental policies towards Indians, as an oppressive space: the children are like “animals in a cage” (22), where even the well-meaning Miss Hoover, a descendent of the Pilgrims (25), a Quaker, and student of the Anglo sentimentalism of Longfellow and Cooper (26), cannot help but give into “what others told her about the stupidity of Indians” (27).


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Chal’s unconscious response to and defense against the institutional influences of forced assimilation and the cultural narrative violence of the U.S. government is an almost automatic, immediate, and constant escape into the world of fantasy (see 10, 153), dreaming (“like a protest from Nature who had fallen into a soothing somnolence” [12]; “into another dream world” [145]; “[s]uddenly he was dreaming” [31]), daydreams, revelry, sleep (“he would pass into sleep” [15]), and the realm of the night; he would yield to his predilection for contemplation as opposed to action (9). In the context of Chal’s education within white institutions and the pressures of his conflicting legacies, the final scene of the novel dissolves action into contemplation and an important decision into an afternoon’s revelry takes on a much more positive and proactive stance than usually viewed by critics. In his response to his mother’s challenge to become a pilot again, he responds: “Ah,” he said, “there isn’t anything to flyin’. Flyin’ across the sea doesn’t mean anything any more these days. It’s not hard. We didn’t have these parachutes and things. It was really dangerous when I was flyin’.” He hesitated, then a definitive, glorious feeling came over him as he stood there. “I’m goin’ to Harvard law school, and take law I’m gonna be a great orator.” The thought that had so recently occurred to him for the first time, occurred to him the moment before, suffused him with glory, and he experienced an assurance and a courage that he hadn’t felt for years, and he ended up with, “There isn’t anything to flyin’ any more.” (311)

In this Joycean modernist moment of epiphany, the protagonist finally wakes up and morphs into an integrated self that can survive in a dangerous and greatly changed world. Chal makes an educated decision about how he can live as an Osage in a world of government subsidized corruption and within the circumstances of modernization and environmental degradation by learning how to become a modern warrior, one without the romanticism and helplessness of his father’s tragic heroism. When he becomes an orator and a lawyer, he can tackle the lawless situation aggravated by white fortune seekers on Osage land. His decision is also an integration of both paternal and maternal legacies in a productive manner: “As his mother looked at him standing there, she didn’t see a swaggering young man. She saw a little boy in breech clout and moccasins, holding up a cock sparrow for her approval. She could see again the marks of his fingers on his dirty face, and the little line of dirt in the crease of his neck. As he held the bird up to her he had frowned like a little warrior” (311). Upon having made up his mind what to do with himself, Chal is “filled with calm pleasure. There was nothing definite except that hum of glory in his heart, subdued by the heat and the lazy tempo of life in the heated yard” (311). Instead of a frenzied sequence of actions, he falls back on his well-practiced


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pattern of escaping into sleep before going to battle, the Osage warrior’s preparation to take on the U.S. government effectively and defeat it on its own terms. While he is asleep, the mother robin returns to the yard, “flapping and splashing . . . as she bathed in the pan under the hydrant” (312),thus closing the novel, which possibly anticipates a new era of activism and radicalism, the Red Power movement decades later. In conclusion, all three authors, Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews, respond to the condition of modernity with regard to the particular political circumstances of Native Americans during the early decades of the twentieth century. Each of the authors works within the historical, political, and economic parameters of mass commodification and westward colonial expansion within the American nation state. Their narratives are keenly aware of what kinds of effects those historical processes may have on the particularly modern issue of authenticity, whether it concerns authentic Indian identity or the aura of ritualistic objects. Their narratives question and subvert the dehistoricizing and amnesiac effects expressed through high modernist representations. The three novels I discussed in this section are all concerned with Native American identity and authorship under the conditions of modernity, thereby placing them each within American modernism’s usually marginalized subcategory of ethnic modernism.

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An Epilogue Ellison’s Invisible Man

“You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?” Herman Melville,“Benito Cereno” Ralph Ellison, Epigraph, Invisible Man The joke, of course, is that I don’t live in Harlem but in a border area. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

I

t seems fitting to end this book with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), a late ethnic modernist novel. Ellison self-consciously draws on the literary traditions of Melville and T. S. Eliot, both of whom he quotes in his epigraph. While the quote from Eliot’s play, written after his return to the United States after an extended absence, draws on the theme of inherited guilt and the main character’s subsequent spiritual self-discovery, the quote from Melville moves beyond the scope of the nuclear family or individual genealogy and specifically addresses the issue of white guilt and the national and historical legacy of slavery. In Melville’s “Benito Cereno” after the “fortunate” conclusion of the mutiny on the slave ship, the San Dominick, the American captain turns to the slave ship’s owner in surprise, seeing Benito Cereno’s still lingering discomfort. The “shadow” Captain Delano still sees cast upon Benito Cereno is the shadow of his captor and servant, Babo, that is the shadow of “The Negro” (“Benito Cereno” 222). Benito Cereno never recovers from the frightening experience of having spent several months under the mutinous rule of the black slaves his ship carries. The San Dominick, poignantly, bears the slogan, seguid vuestro jefe (“follow your leader”). Shortly after the court hearings and Babo’s public execution, Benito Cereno falls gravely ill and dies: “three months after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did indeed, follow his leader” (223). As Babo’s ominous shadow is cast upon his white master, so is Melville’s shadow cast over Ellison’s novel. The two apocalyptic writers can be placed at opposite ends of a peculiar ethnic version

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of American modernism, ethnic modernism, since they both comment on the heavy shadow cast by slavery upon the American subconscious. 1 While Melville tells his story from the perspective of the naive and well-meaning American liberator, Ellison animates Babo’s ominous shadow and gives him a modern consciousness in the character of the Invisible Man. As Thomas A. Vogler comments on the epigraphs in his article, “Invisible Man: Somebody’s Protest Novel”: “Ellison uses two quotations as epigraphs at the beginning of Invisible Man. One, from Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” suggests the nature of the change the invisible man undergoes in the novel. The other, from Eliot, suggests the discovery of his invisibility which is an essential part of the change” (65). In Vogler’s reading the two epigraphs not only connect the novel to the themes of invisibility and of change, they also place the text as a conduit between literary generations and eras: “The kind of synthesis and evaluation of experience that we expect in a good novel cannot be contemporary with the experience itself. . . . Ellison has roots in the 19th century that are at least as important as those in the 20th; what he writes is as much influenced by what he has read as it is by what he has seen and lived through” (65). As the invisible man crosses over from a specific historical situation to an absurd existence that seems to be outside of historical linearity and of social hierarchy or spatial congruity, he literally enters a no man’s land. For example, early on in the novel, Ellison’s hibernating protagonist makes a comment about the nature of historical time and progress: My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer’s dream night. But that is taking advantage of you. Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I’ve heard) which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet ready.) I know; I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness. And I love light. Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form. (6)

The vision of history as a boomerang that threatens injury confirms the violent implications of history in Ellison’s novel. In the introduction (written in 1981) the author takes on the critic’s role and comments on the meanings and sources of invisibility that inspired the text. According to Ellison, Invisible Man “erupted out of what had been conceived as a war novel” (vii). Its inspiration was the fresh memory of World War II:

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[The original idea of the novel would have] focused upon the experiences of a captured American pilot who found himself in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp in which he was the officer of highest rank and thus by a convention of war the designated spokesman for his fellow prisoners. Predictably, the dramatic conflict arose from the fact that he was the only Negro among the Americans, and the resulting racial tension was exploited by the German camp commander for his own amusement. Having to choose between his passionate rejection of both native and foreign racisms while upholding those democratic values which he held in common with his white countrymen, my pilot was forced to find support for his morale in his sense of individual dignity and his newly awakened awareness of human loneliness. (xi–xii)

[164], (3 The modern stranger finds himself outside of the support of democratic ideals where cosmopolitan agency and equality cease to exist once they are tainted by racial conflict. Therefore, Ellison’s existentialist stance of “human loneliness” Lines: 60 becomes racially specific. ——— In the final version, his protagonist steps outside of the historical specifics of * 19.5pt wartime black experience. Even the nostalgic backward look to the Harlem Re——— naissance becomes distanced as his identity fades into whitewashed invisibility. Normal P His surroundings turn foreign, more fitting for the apocalyptic visions of the * PgEnds: E postmodern genre of science or speculative fiction (as Samuel R. Delany uses the term). The invisible man steps out of historical time and space and thus freed, he taps into the “political unconscious” of American race relations and [164], (3 exposes democracy to be a hoax of color-coded confidence games. The narrative draws on different genres: it moves between the narrative conventions of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, Harlem Renaissance roman à clef, the protest novel of the thirties, the experimental form of the modernist novel, the case-study form of the existentialist novel, and the speculative fiction genre of the late twentieth century. Ellison is like Melville’s protean confidence man or Rinehart’s character in his own novel. He appropriates mimetic genres such as the Bildungsroman or the protest novel and juxtaposes them with the depiction of absurd situations pushed to their extremes in speculative fiction or with the narrative technique of stream of consciousness in modernist fiction. Ellison, like his invisible protagonist, constantly changes and keeps his authorial identity unstable as he moves between literary eras and modes of narrative representation. Ellison’s novel is a border text, not only politically and linguistically like Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village, but also aesthetically. If we think of modernism as a period concept, then Invisible Man is a “residual” text in the modernist literary production, already carrying the “emergent” characteristics of a new postmodern era. The invisible man is the modern stranger on his way to

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a postmodern hyperreality underground and invisible, possibly dangerous and bordering the inhuman. Commenting on the existential impasse of his original war story’s pilot protagonist, Ellison himself writes: “But while Hemingway’s hero managed to put the war behind him and opt for love, for my pilot there was neither escape nor a loved one waiting. Therefore he had either to affirm the transcendent ideals of democracy and his own dignity by aiding those who despised him, or accept his situation as hopelessly devoid of meaning; a choice tantamount to rejecting his own humanity” (xii). Here Ellison expresses a break with the romanticism of Hemingway’s modernity that leads to escapism in the forms of love and aestheticism. His narrative world is the stark alternative for the subject of postmodern radical alterity. Since romantic heroism is not a feasible political possibility for the African American protagonist, he rejects the white bourgeois individualism of the “hero” and, instead, chooses invisibility and an apocalyptic loneliness that would permeate speculative film and fiction in the coming decades. The authors I have discussed in detail in the previous chapters write their own counterdiscourses to the ideology of modernism and of the nation and empire, carving out new definitions for each. Ethnic modernism addresses the condition of modernity from a particularly American and peripheral subject position. Melville’s Confidence-Man: His Masquerade paints an apocalyptic vision of the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Union is allegorized as the Ship of Fools of America with its maddening and conflicted rhetoric of colonial expansion and liberty, imperialism and democracy. Ellison’s Invisible Man is another apocalyptic text. While its theme points back to the New Negro movement and the 1920s and 1930s, its unnamed hero could be viewed as a hibernating survivor of the Holocaust or a nuclear disaster. His underground shelter is an ominous foreshadowing of Cold War survival techniques. Instead of the white middle-class family’s fallout shelter attached to a suburban home, the invisible man defiantly siphons electricity illegally to the underground space he “fell into.” Both Melville’s Confidence-Man and Ellison’s novel are “border” texts between literary eras and expressions of the shifts in discourse and consciousness. The invisible man’s response to the ghastly existence forced upon him is to tap into the power grid itself and exploit the system through the 1,369 light bulbs he burns in his underground hole of hibernation, ironically literalizing the underworld of American race relations and turning the system of Monopolated Light & Power against itself. In closing, while high modernists experimented with narrative form out of a historical fatigue that required new aesthetic articulations, Ellison originates his fatigue and disillusionment from the emptied-out category of democracy that did not offer the double promise of freedom and equality to those not white.

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Therefore, while high modernism responded to a generalized condition of disillusionment, ethnic modernism addressed a culturally and racially specific political situation by borrowing and subverting previous forms and genres to the end of instigating radical social change: an end to racism and discrimination and a call for affirming and legitimizing diversity in both the base and the super structure: Undramatized, all this might sound a bit extreme, yet historically most of this nation’s conflicts of arms have been at least for Afro-Americans wars-within-wars. Such was true of the Civil War, the last of the Indian Wars, of the Spanish American War, and of World Wars I and II. All in order for the Negro to fulfill his duty as a citizen it was often necessary to fight for his self-affirmed right to fight. Accordingly, my pilot was prepared to make the ultimate wartime sacrifice that most governments demand of their ablebodied citizens, but his was one that regarded his life as of lesser value than the lives of whites making the same sacrifice. The reality made for an existential torture, which was given a further twist of the screw by his awareness that once the peace was signed, the German camp commander could immigrate to the United States and immediately take advantage of freedoms that were denied the most heroic of Negro servicemen. Thus democratic ideals and military valor alike were rendered absurd by the prevailing mystique of race and color. (xii–xiii)

Ellison adapts his novel’s narrative form in order to match the absurdity of reality. But he does not stop at a mimetic gesture, he also affirms his commitment to and his demand for a true democracy, one that can account for and embrace diversity. Thereby, his art becomes the means for political change. His invisible protagonist stays underground to learn the workings of an unfair society, but this artistic and contemplative distance is only temporary, only a preparation for pending political action: Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they’ll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It’s “winner take nothing” that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many This is not prophesy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he’s going. (577) 2 And, as I said before, a decision has been made. I’m shaking off the old skin and I’ll

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leave it here in the hole. I’m coming out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless. And I suppose it’s damn well time. Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that is my greatest social crime, I’ve overstayed my hibernation, since there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play. (581)

With Ellison’s novel the hibernation of ethnic modernism has given way to the more overt political commitments of the Civil Rights era and to a new literary era of postwar and postmodern fiction that reflects a much more diverse chorus of voices and a contested literary canon dominated by writers of color.

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Notes

[First Page] Introduction 1. Werner Sollors suggests that we use the conceptual tool of “ethnic modernism” as a period concept as well. He marks the temporal boundaries as between 1910 and 1950 (see “Ethnic Modernism, 1910–1950” 70–77). Another critic, Thomas J. Ferraro, also quotes Sollors, though somewhat differently, when explaining his inspiration for exploring the connections “between ethnicity and modernism” (“Avant-Garde Ethnics” 1). 2. When I use the term “ethnic,” I mean non Anglo-Saxon and non Anglo-centric texts and identities, which often also name “racialized” or nonwhite texts and identities. I am aware of the slippage between “race” and “ethnicity” here, but my goal is to make visible the pseudo-science of early-twentieth-century race theory so often called upon during the modernist era. By using the terms of race, culture, and ethnicity interchangeably, I wish to retain the signification of “otherness” or “difference” involved in all three terms. 3. For example, for an overview of the use of modernism and modernity in the field of history, see the review by Robert Wohl, “Heart of Darkness: Modernism and Its Historians.” 4. According to the Census Bureau’s “Census 2000” survey: California, Hawaii, and New Mexico have no racial majorities, thus making the demographic as well as economic, political, and/or social terms of racial “majority” or “minority” highly problematic (see Ritter, “California Racial Data Shifts”). 5. In his article Hassan gives a working definition in order to distinguish postmodernism from postmodernity: “For the moment, let me simply say that I mean postmodernism to refer to the cultural sphere, especially literature, philosophy, and the various arts, including architecture, while postmodernity refers to the geopolitical scheme, less order than disorder, which has emerged in the last decades. The latter, sometimes called postcolonialism, features globalization and localization, conjoined in erratic, often lethal, ways” (3). For a more detailed description of the terms, see the rest of Hassan’s article. 6. Jameson’s latest book on the subject, A Singular Modernity, comes to a conclusion about postmodernism’s persistent dependence on “what remain essentially modernist

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categories of the new” (5) and about the unshakable hold of modernism (and for that matter, capitalism) as an ideology upon our present. 7. In response to Hugh Kenner’s desire to center Ezra Pound in the modernist canon (see Kenner, The Pound Era), Marjorie Perloff addresses the question of legacies in her article (see “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?”). 8. In another article, Marjorie Perloff voices a similar concern in her response to Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America. When discussing Michaels’s choice of “modernists” she faults him for the nonliterary criteria directing his agenda to equate modernism with racist homegrown “nativism”:“No matter that no one outside the American Studies classroom would so much as read the many minor ethnic novels that provide Michaels with his exempla” (“Modernism without the Modernists” 102). She then goes on to call Michaels an “anti-aestheticist” (103) whose

[170], (2 brand of cultural studies would like to save literature, to preserve it as a field of study. But it will not do. For why do we need to study literature in order to learn about the identity politics of the 1920s? Surely there are more informative and efficient ways than to read dozens of what are largely undistinguished novels. What, in other words, can “literature” teach us that the study of American history, culture, and politics can’t? Indeed, I would posit that if literature has no other function than to be the privileged “carrier of cultural heritage,” its study will soon be anachronism. If we can offer our students nothing better than the moral imperative to read the novels of Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer and Willa Cather because they will teach us about the “cultural heritage” that they “carry,” the response is likely to be a collective and extended yawn. What nineteen-year-old will be impelled to read lesser novels written seventy years ago on that argument?” (104) I have quoted Perloff ’s argument extensively in order to demonstrate the kind of elitism and aesthetic bias that has been long part of the modernist canon formation. Besides her obvious discontent with a cultural studies or American studies approach to literary texts, it is also clear that the institution of the university in this case Stanford University is committed to the sustaining of the critical discourse of high modernism: my book’s very object of critique. 9. Raymond Williams uses the terms “emergent” and “residual” to view modernism both as a genealogical concept and as a diachronic as well as synchronic phenomenon (Problems in Materialism and Culture 40–41). 10. Literary periodization has been a highly contested concern in the field, especially in the field of modernist studies. Periodization tends to ignore tendencies that interfere with the project of establishing “family resemblances” for the sake of order and uniformity. Fredric Jameson suggests a more fluid approach to periodization that concerns an alternative to rigidly and clearly defined demarcations of beginnings and endings (of modernism and postmodernism) a gesture similar to Raymond Williams’s notion of

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historicity that allows for overlapping residual and emergent tendencies within the same movement. As Jameson puts it: One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that they tend to obliterate difference, and to project an ideal of the historical period as massive homogeneity. . . . This is precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp “postmodernism” not as a style, but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features. (Postmodernism 3–4) 11. Cyraina E. Johnson-Roullier uses the term “spatiotemporal perspective” when offering her revision of “Euro-American modernism” from a comparative literary and “culture studies” perspective (see Reading on the Edge 47). Johnson-Roullier uses the trope of “exile” in order to bring issues of modernism and racial as well as sexual difference together in her critique of traditional Euro-American modernism. Her goal is to give voice to previously silenced subject positions of “hybridity, heterogeneity, and multiplicity” (39). While her goal is quite far-reaching, to rethink the ideological investments of the exclusionary white and male Euro-American modernist literary canon established within the academic institutions, her scope is rather narrow: the monograph exclusively focuses on two traditionally canonical white male authors, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and only on one black author, James Baldwin, whose exile in France was more sexually than racially motivated according to Johnson-Roullier’s argument. 12. There is a glaring lack of mention of Asian American writers in my book on ethnic modernism. I am very much aware of this, and I would like to express my concern about this here. The most obvious reason for this oversight is the issue of length. But more importantly, I felt that Asian American immigrants faced somewhat different circumstances once in the United States. To address their concerns and preoccupations, I would need a much more detailed and elaborate discussion than a chapter would provide to do justice to this subject. The Chinese American, Japanese American, and Korean American writers of the early twentieth century such as Pearl Buck, Sui Sin Far, Jade Snow Wong, Louis Chu (of Chinese descent); Toshio Mori, John Okada, Mine Okubo, Hisaye Yamamoto (of Japanese descent); Younghill Kang (of Korean descent); and Carlos Bulosan (of Filipino descent) produced a body of work that deserves a much more extensive study within ethnic modernism, even though I often make comparisons between the experiences and writings of European and Asian immigrants in chapter 3. For an overview of and introduction to Asian American literature see Baker, Three American Literatures. 13. A contemporary of Herman Melville, George Washington Cable, also employs the trope of the masked ball or the carnivalesque milieu when he opens his race melodrama set during the time of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, The Grandissimes (1880), with a chapter called “Masked Batteries” a masked ball where the racially and culturally mixed citizens of New Orleans can safely meet.

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1. A Prologue to Ethnic Modernism 1. A London reviewer called it “a morality enacted by masqued players” in the April 11, 1857, issue of the Athenaeum (Confidence-Man, Northwestern University Press, 324). All quotes and references are from the Northwestern University Press edition of Melville’s novel, except when noted otherwise. 2. See a review of early readings of the novel in the “Historical Note” section of the Northwestern University edition of the novel (324–49). 3. In chapter 45 of Confidence-Man the cosmopolitan and the elderly country gentleman discuss the Bible and the question of confidence in general. The cosmopolitan tries to find the source of a disturbing quote in the Bible. The gentleman points him to the apocrypha, and a mysterious voice interrupts their conversation several times: “Who’s that describing the confidence man?” and later, “What’s that about the Apocalypse?” (242–43). 4. Raymond Williams, in Problems, uses the terms “residual” and “emergent” to describe alternative and oppositional forms of culture: By“residual”I mean that some experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue cultural as well as social of some previous social formation. . . . By “emergent” I mean, first, that new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences, are continually being created. But there is then a much earlier attempt to incorporate them, just because they are part and yet not a defined part of effective contemporary practice. Indeed it is significant in our own period how very early this attempt is, how alert the dominant culture now is to anything that can be seen as emergent. (40–41) 5. For a summary of different approaches and interpretations of the novel, see Bryant’s A Companion to Melville Studies. 6. It is important to note that Melville also took pains to have the novel published on April 1. 7. History puts Manco Capac’s founding the city of Cuzco around 1,100 ad. In her book on the representations of the sacred at Lake Titicaca, Veronica Salles-Reese mentions that there are many variants of the myth of origins of the Inca dynasty, and at least forty-one of those were compiled between 1552 and 1653. She offers a “master narrative” according to which the sun summoned the Incas and adopted them as his children on the Island of Titicaca: Since humankind was living in a state of barbarism, the Sun conferred a civilizing mission upon the Incas . . . a brother and a sister or four brothers and four sisters. . . . One brother, Manco Capac, also carried a golden rod that would sink into the ground at the exact place where, according to the wishes of the Sun, they

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should settle. The rod was thrust into the ground at either Pacaritambo or Cuzco. Three of the original four brothers were turned into huacas [guaca: tombs or funeral mounds; buried treasure]. The remaining brother, Manco Capac, had a son with one of his sisters, thus becoming the progenitor of the Inca dynasty. (93) The Valley of Cuzco was already inhabited by “barbarians” who recognized the strangers as two deities. The “savage” natives accepted the laws and concepts of justice the siblings introduced. So goes the story of the founding of the Inca Empire. 8. Note the incestuous relationship between brother and sister in Melville’s Pierre. 9. According to historical texts, by 1460 after years of absorbing neighboring tribes, the Inca empire extended from the Amazon forests to the Pacific Ocean, from the borders of Ecuador, deep into Chile. The end of this thriving civilization came when the Spanish adventurer Francisco Pizarro seized the Incan ruler, Atahualpa, and had him put to death in spite of the large ransom of gold and silver that was paid him. With their leader gone, the Incas were forced into submission (see Henretta et al. 19). The original founding of the Inca empire is already a colonial move repeated by the Spaniards three hundred years later. 10. See quote: As among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters, and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatsmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and oldfashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, and Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrims species, man. As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these varieties of mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide. (Confidence-Man 9)

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11. Michael Rogin likens the “custom-house” to a ruined monument of republican political authority (237). 12. The United States-Mexican War of 1846–48, the first international conflict, brought the Model Republic together as one nation. An initial cause was fabricated to justify retaliation by expansionist American interests: the nation imagined itself as unified under the cause of defending its national boundaries. Ironically, half of the small army of four thousand dispatched was composed of recent immigrants. Once the initially obscure border dispute in Texas became widely disseminated and President Polk declared war on Mexico, a strong stream of volunteers rushed to defend the nation and the integrity of the American border. In this context, Michael Paul Rogin reads Melville’s whale-hunt in Moby-Dick as a national allegory, as Captain Ahab’s attempt to bring the ship’s crew together under a shared cause (130–40). 13. According to records, Melville read several fictional accounts of the Narrenschiff (see Bryant 327). 14. See “Historical Note” in the Northwestern University Press edition of Melville’s novel (285). 15. The three metanarrative chapters, chapters 14, 33, and 44, focus on fiction and its connection to “real life.” In chapter 14, Melville discredits the boundaries between reality and fiction and the reader’s ability to distinguish between the two (69). Richard Terdiman, in Present Past, calls this phenomenon of blurring the boundaries between life and fiction a “memory crisis” (5). Through cultural practices the present is invested by unconscious contents from the past. In Terdiman’s description, modernity is characterized by a “crisis of representation” (8). 16. In the second metanarrative chapter, chapter 33, Melville returns to the problematic relationship between fiction and reality. Before the cosmopolitan tells the story of the gentleman-madman Charlemont in the next chapter, Melville pauses the narrative and adds his commentary on the implausibility of his own story and characters (182). He compares the effect the cosmopolitan has on the novel’s readers with a harlequin’s performance and finds that they “can never appear in a coat too parti-colored, or cut capers too fantastic” (183). In his self-proclaimed “comedy of thought” or “comedy of action” he explains the need for fiction to exaggerate life and thus make it more real (183). 17. For a discussion on Simmel as the “first sociologist of modernity,” see Frisby, George Simmel vol. 2. 18. In chapter 1 the signs the deaf-mute confidence man holds on board of the Fidèle quote from Corinthians about “charity” (4–5). 19. See reference to the “Philosophical Intelligence Office,” which makes use of phrenological charts in chapter 22. 20. The nation as masquerade functions within a generalized atmosphere of distrust. Melville’s characters do not have stable racial or ethnic identities. For instance, in the interpolated tale of Thomas Frye (“Happy Tom”), Happy Tom plays the role of “some


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battered hero from the Mexican battle-fields” to the herb-doctor/confidence man and the other passengers while begging for charity. In reality, he is the victim of a brawl at a New York City political meeting. He ends up in jail because no one is willing to post the bail (96–97). His downfall is caused by isolation and estrangement in the metropolis: strangers do not bail out strangers. Similarly, the interpolated tale of the Prodigal Son Charlemont is an enigma of identity. In chapter 34 the cosmopolitan tells the story of the gentleman-madman Charlemont who “turned from affable to morose” then “himself again” (184). Upon overhearing the story another passenger, “a stranger . . . a blue-eyed man, sandy-haired, and Saxon-looking . . . of a Puritan sort” (189) concludes: “Nobody knows who anybody is” (193). The different incarnations of the confidence man try to explain and perform “charity,” “trust,” and “favor” in an era when such deeds cannot be properly named: “I hold to the metempsychosis; and whoever I may be now, I feel that I was once the stoic Arrian, and have inklings of having been equally puzzled by a word in the current language of that former time, very probably answering to your word favor” (194). 2. Harlem Renaissance Masquerades 1. The case of the Scottsboro Boys brought renewed attention to the problem of racial inequality. In 1931 “nine black youths [were] accused of raping two white girls and convicted on flimsy evidence by all-white juries” (Zinn 389). 2. See Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity on the etymology of “nostalgia” and its gendered relationship to the condition of modern homelessness: “An idealized image of the feminine has historically functioned as a significant site of [such] nostalgic longing for home on the part of both men and women” (60). 3. The standard or “culture” (that Williams defines as the whole way of life) could be viewed as an organic community, a particular class vision of the proper social standards of behavior, the imaginative creativity of the romantic individual or artist, or a body of intellectual and imaginative work privileged as the “the best” that has been thought and said.(See Williams, Keywords 91; and Pinkney, “Introduction” in Williams, The Politics of Modernism 8.) 4. See Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic Depressive States” (1935) and “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940). 5.For a more elaborate explanation of the modernist strategies of linguistic mimicry and racial masquerade, see Sánchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive 348–49. 6. The following books and articles try to connect the Harlem Renaissance with modernism: Walter Benn Michaels’s controversial Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995) takes up the debates over multiculturalism and identity politics, calling postwar literature a particular brand of “nativism”; that is, a commitment to the notion that one’s identity is defined by racial difference; the connection between Harlem Renaissance and modernist writing is taken up through the issue of borrowing from black dialect by Michael North inDialect of Modernism: Race Language, and Twentieth-


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Century Literature (1994). Houston A. Baker Jr.,Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987) points to the prevalence of black musical forms in popular culture. Later Baker expanded his argument to establish a separate “black aesthetic,” a specifically African American form of modernism in Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (1988). The “modern versus primitive” debate is reconsidered by Arnold Rampersad, “Langston Hughes and Approaches to Modernism in the Harlem Renaissance” in The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations(1989). Marianna Torgovnick focuses on the role of the primitive in modernist art in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellect, Modern Lives (1990). Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (1989) recovers black, feminist, communist, and socialist poets, among others, who have been repressed from cultural memory; he turns to the “little magazines” published between the world wars. Paul Gilroy considers the transcontinental exchange of the“Black Atlantic” to be the counterculture to modernism (see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 1993). Robert B. Stepto uses the terms “modernism” and “modernity,” referring to Paul de Man’s definition of the concepts, to study a later stage of African American literature, “After Modernism, After Hibernation: Michael Harper, Robert Hayden, and Jay Wright” in Chants of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (1979). Also see Charles R. Larson, “Three Harlem Novels of the Jazz Age” (1969). 7. Walter Benn Michaels makes a similar argument when he discusses the “nativist” or “Americanist” modernist literary production of early-twentieth-century authors who reject multiculturalism in defense of white supremacy in his Our America. 8. On a linguistic level, Michael North makes an argument for a parallel reading of white modernist and African American early-twentieth-century texts based on their shared language of black dialect. North connects the two modernisms through “linguistic imitation and racial masquerade” both important to transatlantic modernism because they allow the writer “to play at self-fashioning” (11). North argues for the joint examination of the two modernisms based on their shared interest in linguistic and conceptual experimentation. While Anglo modernism moved in the direction of breaking the conventions of traditional narrative modes and genres, Harlem Renaissance authors often applied classical forms of expression to new subject matter. For example, in a revolutionary move, Zora Neale Hurston appropriated fictional forms for the use of the modernist discipline of ethnography, producing a new genre, ethnographic fiction. 9. The phrase “talented tenth” first appeared in Du Bois’s The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day (New York, 1903). Du Bois emphasized the need for higher education to develop the leadership capacity among the most able 10 percent of African Americans, “not too many college-bred men, but enough to leaven the lump, to inspire the masses” (“The Talented Tenth” 8). 10. Paul Gilroy perhaps alludes to the concept of the Black Star Line when he develops the image of ships acting as “culture-bearers” within the “Black Atlantic.” Garvey had two plans for blacks of the world: “first, propaganda, preaching the doctrine of a


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return to Africa; second, a commercial enterprise, a triangular steamship company, that should ply between the United States, the West Indies, and Africa”(Ovington 30). Gilroy’s Black Atlantic is an historical conjunction of black and European cultures brought about by cultural exchange between European, African, and African American artists. Gilroy sets up a geographical triangle with ships crisscrossing the Atlantic between Europe, America, Africa, via the Caribbean much like Garvey’s triangular steamship route. Through their mixing and borrowing, the travelers and culture bearers would create a “counterculture of modernity”: the “ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean” would illustrate a mutual cultural discourse (Gilroy 4). Thus, Gilroy establishes an internationally and racially inclusive notion of cultural modernism a multicultural rewriting of Melville’s Ship of Fools of America that excluded racial or ethnic others. 11. Racial discourse in the colonial setting relies on the discursive production of stereotyping. Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture explores the political and psychic dynamics of the colonial situation, though his analysis can be extended to racialist and discriminatory discourses in general. His notion of the stereotype is a combination of discursive and psychoanalytic strategies that involve both subjects of the colonial situation, the colonizer and the colonized. According to his argument, stereotypical discourse produces subjects that are simultaneously “inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power” the two forms of making and splitting of the subject (67). Colonial, racialist, and discriminatory discourses produce imaginary social realities that are narrated in realistic forms and through entirely knowable and visible images but without reference to their temporal and political immediacy. Bhabha’s psychoanalytic analysis of the colonial context of power and domination also explains the power dynamics that produced the Harlem Renaissance. 12. Susan Gillman’s recent book Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003) expands upon her article on the late-nineteenth-century race melodrama. She regards the genre to be an explicitly historiographic narrative mode. 13. Similarly, the all-black (cast and director) “race movies” that were produced between 1910 and 1950 often relied upon the genre of the race melodrama. Specifically, Oscar Micheaux, the first African American filmmaker, almost exclusively addressed his subject matter of racial uplift through racial melodramas or through the so-called “onedrop-of-blood” love stories. His Within Our Gates (1920) was a direct response to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1919), while The Scar of Shame (1926) explored the destructive effects of the rigid class and “colorist” system within the black community through a romance narrative. 14. All quotes by Countee Cullen are from the collection My Soul’s High Song, edited by Gerald Early. 15. Langston Hughes was one of those angered by Countee Cullen’s words. He even starts his manifesto of black aesthetics,“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” with


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a reference to Cullen: “one of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, ‘I want to be a poet not a Negro poet,’ meaning, I believe, ‘want to write like a white poet’; meaning subconsciously, ‘I would like to be a white poet’; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white’ ” (Hughes in Lewis, Portable Harlem Reader 91). 16. Arthur P. Davis reads the poem as a threat and revenge that are repudiated in the mystical faith and the apocalyptic hope of the oppressed (395). 17. Another obvious connection is with Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1856) where Don Benito and Babo act out a masquerade of servitude and attachment that Melville will take to its most alarming extreme in the negative romance “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1856). 18. For critical assessments of Cullen’s novel, see Houston A. Baker Jr., Robert A. Bone, Blanche E. Ferguson, Margaret Perry, Esther Sánchez-Pardo (Gonzalez), Charles Scruggs, and Alan Shucard among others. 19. Thomas Mann’s modernist “confidence man” in Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence-Man (1954) Mann’s last work of fiction is another obvious addition to Melville and Cullen’s con man figures. 20. Here I rely on Susan Gillman’s article on the genre of the “American race melodrama.” See Gillman, “The Mulatto, Tragic or Triumphant? The Nineteenth-Century American Race Melodrama.” 21. Clearly, this is also Cullen’s vitriolic critique of Marcus Garvey’s “Africa for Africans” program, at least of its Harlem version of haughty class and cultural superiority over African natives against which Garvey himself had argued before: In America and the West Indies, we have Negroes who believe themselves so much above their fellows as to cause them to think that any readjustment in the affairs of the race should be placed in their hands for them to exercise a kind of an autocratic and despotic control as others have done to us for centuries. Again I say, it would be advisable for such Negroes to take their hands and minds off the now popular idea of colonizing Africa in the interest of the Negro race, because their being identified with this new program will not in any way help us because of the existing feeling among Negroes everywhere not to tolerate the infliction of race or class superiority upon them, as is the desire of the self-appointed and selfcreated race leadership that we have been having for the last fifty years. (Garvey in Lewis, Portable Harlem Reader 20) 22. For a more elaborate discussion on “the specific relationship between the subject’s melancholia and what we may call the melancholia of the race,” see Sánchez-Pardo’s chapter on Cullen in Cultures of the Death Drive, which I consulted when formulating my interpretation of the novel. While Sánchez-Pardo’s interpretation focuses on Melanie Klein’s theory of melancholia and its relationship to modernism, I use Sánchez-Pardo’s psychoanalytic framework but rather focus on the sociocritical aspects of One Way to Heaven (343–85, 384). 23. While there are many figures in One Way to Heaven who suggest real life, the novel


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is only partly of interest as a roman à clef. Cullen warns his readers that only “some of the characters in this book are fictitious.” A few others are recognizable public figures such as white novelist and Harlem Renaissance promoter Carl Van Vechten, black minstrel Sam Lucas, race theorist Lothrop Stoddard, black nationalist Marcus Garvey, party giver A’Lelia Walker, and poet Langston Hughes among others(see Sánchez-Pardo, Cultures 379). There are several Harlem novels that do function as romans à clef such as Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), and Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932) among others. 24. For an overview of African American “trickster” discourse, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey. 25. See Barbara Christian on Nella Larsen’s career in Black Women Novelists (47–56). 26. Biographical data and the quotes from both Du Bois and Locke’s reviews are from Thadious M. Davis’s entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 51,“AfroAmerican Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940.” 27. Also see reference to “white peacock” in Morrison’s Song of Solomon (178–79). 28. Donna Haraway uses Louis Althusser’s notion of “interpellation,” which functions through interruption, when formulating her “cyborg subject position.” In her footnote to her article (“Promises”) she defines hybrid female subjectivity as becoming a “cyborg” through the signifying process of interpellation: Interpellate: I play on Althusser’s account of the call which constitutes the production of the subject in ideology. Althusser is, of course, playing on Lacan, not to mention on God’s interruption that calls Man, his servant, into being. Do we have a vocation to be cyborgs? Interpellate: Interpellatus, past participle for “interrupted in speaking” effecting transformations like Saul into Paul. Interpellation is a special kind of interruption, to say the least. Its key meaning concerns a procedure in a parliament for asking a speaker who is a member of the government to provide an explanation of an act or policy, usually leading to a vote of confidence. The following ads interrupt us. They insist on an explanation in a confidence game; they force recognition of how transfers of competencies are made (333). 29. As Butler explains: To the extent that Irene desires Clare, she desires the trespass that Clare performs [passing], and hates her for the disloyalty that that trespass entails. To the extent that Irene herself eroticizes Clare’s racial trespass and Clare’s clear lack of loyalty for family and its institution of monogamy, Irene herself is in a double bind: caught between the prospect of becoming free from an ideology of “race” uncritical of its own masculinism and classism, on the one hand, and the violations of white racism that attend the deprivatization of black women’s sexuality, on the other. Irene’s psychic ambivalence toward Clare, then, needs to be situated in this historical double bind. At the same time, we can see mapped within Larsen’s text


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the incipient possibility of a solidarity among black women. The identification between Clare and Irene might be read as the unlived political promise of a solidarity yet to come. (“Passing, Queering” 276) 30. In Borders, “Zora Neale Hurston: Hidden Woman.” 31. Hurston’s popularity has reached new heights in recent years. For example, there is a new biography by Valerie Boyd, and Carla Kaplan published a volume of Hurston’s collected letters. 32. According to Hurston’s critics, her fiction rather appealed to white bourgeois reading tastes. See Langston Hughes’s satire of Hurston in his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940) or Wallace Thurman’s biting representation of her in Infants of the Spring (1932) and Richard Wright’s critical response to Their Eyes, accusing her of manipulating white stereotypes of black people to attract white readers. 33. For a detailed account of Hurston’s contemporary critics and on the issues of patronage, see Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters (62–70). 34. According to Marian Smith Holmes, Hurston was not in favor of desegregation: In the 1950s Hurston’s racial conservatism stood out starkly as segregation barriers began to erode. She supported Republican candidates, including right-wing Robert Taft, she publicly endorsed a segregationist senator, and in a letter to a Florida newspaper she attacked the Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling. It insulted blacks and their institutions, Hurston said, by implying that black children could learn only of sitting next to whites. She bristled at the image of the victimized black, repudiating what she called the ‘tragedy of color’ philosophy. (107–8) 35. Mary Helen Washington refers to some of the critical texts in her introduction to the novel: In a recent essay on Their Eyes and the question of voice, Michael Awkward argues that Janie’s voice at the end of the novel is a communal one, that when she tells Pheoby to tell her story (“You can tell ’em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat’s just de same as me ’cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf ”) she is choosing a collective rather than an individual voice, demonstrating her closeness to the collective spirit of the African-American oral tradition. . . . [Thadious] Davis says that Janie’s experimental life may not allow her to effect changes beyond what she causes in Pheoby’s life; but Pheoby, standing within the traditional role of women, is the one most suited to take the message back to the community. (xii) In my reading, Hurston’s depiction of the black community’s harsh judgment of Janie for shooting Tea Cake also functions as an accurate assessment and social critique: the white community has much less trouble with Janie’s crime than the black community, since the crime “only” involves black-on-black violence and no immediate threat to whites.


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Therefore, Hurston is aware of the unbalanced and unfair nature of the white justice system, which punishes harshly only when a crime affects its own community. 36. Mary Helen Washington faults Hurston for the absence of Janie’s voice in the courtroom scene where she is accused of manslaughter for shooting Tea Cake. In that section of the story the first-person narration switches into an authorial retelling of the events. For Washington Janie’s “silence reflects Hurston’s discomfort with the model of the male hero who asserts himself through his powerful voice” (xii). 37. The practice of the dozens is the age-old black ritual of “graceful insult” and of the “talking game” on the porch. 3. Modernism with an Accent 1. I use the terms “writerly” and readerly” the way Roland Barthes understands them in S/Z (3–16). 2. For an overview of the history of the critical assessment of modernist studies (and especially, for the problem of how to place Hugh Kenner in the field) see Marjorie Perloff, “Modernist Studies.” Susan Stanford Friedman situates H.D. between Ezra Pound’s expatriatism and William Carlos Williams’s nationalism, calling her modernism “exile in the American grain” or “modernism of marginality” (“Exile in the American Grain” 90, 93). 3. Many Chinese men came to California in the 1850s; they tried their luck in the search for gold, but they mainly left their mark on the West Coast by laying tracks for the Transcontinental Railroad. To restrict their numbers on U.S. land, the government instated its first of several bans on Chinese immigration, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was in effect till 1943. 4. Julia Kristeva herself is an expatriate Bulgarian living in France. She describes her arrival from Bulgaria and her initiation into the pantheon of French intellectuals in her autobiographical novel, The Samurai (1992). 5. For biographical information about Anzia Yezierska I relied on Charlotte Goodman’s entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 28. 6. Rachel Blau DuPlessis suggests, that twentieth-century women writers interrogate and delegitimize “cultural conventions about male and female, romance and quest, hero and heroine, public and private, individual and collective,” and most importantly, the “conventions of romance as a trope for the sex-gender system” (ix). DuPlessis calls the attempt by women writers to question the conventions of narrative forms especially, the strategy to delegitimate romance plots that either end in marriage or in the death of the heroine “writing beyond the ending” (x–xi). 7. In Civilization and Its Discontents Sigmund Freud equates the markers of civilization and being civilized, that is, “cleanliness and order,” with bourgeois values and the resulting consequences of unhappiness and neuroses. As Freud explains: “But this [the value of beauty] is far from exhausting our demands on civilization. We expect besides to see the signs of cleanliness and order. . . . Indeed, we are not surprised by the idea

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of setting up the use of soap as an actual yardstick of civilization. The same is true of order. . . . Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat” (45–46). The immigrant experience repeats that archetypal move from barbarian to civilized not only at the level of phylogeny but also at the levels of class mobility, acculturation, and national belonging. 8. Dearborn mainly focuses on the myth of Pocahontas (marriage and miscegenation) in her book, Pocahontas’s Daughters. In contrast to Yezierska’s (and Mourning Dove’s) “early” ethnic female writing Dearborn points to and favors the “later” version of ethnic women’s writing where the ideology of America is questioned. She lists Zora Neale Hurston and Gertrude Stein in that group. In the later writings by ethnic women authority-authorship and the use of language are less compromised, and thus for Dearborn they perform a necessary critique and subversion of the ideological features of American myth and discourse. Such distinctions between Hurston and Yezierska that Dearborn suggests are not entirely sustainable: in my reading both authors perform a radical and harsh critique of American individualism and of modern estrangement. 9. Magdalena J. Zaborowska differentiates between male and female immigrant narratives. She suggests that the “male story of acculturation, often modeled after Andrew Carnegie’s and Edward Bok’s texts, include Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, Michael Gold’s Jews without Money, Ole Edvart Rölvaag’s Peder Victorious, M. E. Ravage’s An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant, and many others. Slightly less typical texts are Elizabeth Stern’s This Ecstasy (a male story written by a woman) and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep” (303 n49). 10. Leslie Fiedler, one of the forgotten novel’s rediscoverers, called it a “specifically Jewish book, the best single book by a Jew about Jewishness written by an American, certainly through the thirties and perhaps ever” (96). 11. In Anzia Yezierska’s description of the Smolinsky family’s arrival on Ellis Island, the objects they bring along already signal what kind of expectations they have about the New World: When we came to America, instead of taking along feather beds, and the samovar, and the brass pots and pans, like other people, Father made us carry his books. When Mother begged only to take along her pot for gefülte fish, and the two feather beds that were handed down to her from her grandmother for her wedding presents, Father wouldn’t let her. “Woman!” Father said, laughing into her eyes. “What for will you need old feather beds? Don’t you know it’s always summer in America? And in the new golden country, where milk and honey flows free in the streets, you’ll have new golden dishes to cook in, and not weigh yourself down with your old pots and pans. But my books, my holy books always were, and always will be, the light of the world. You’ll see how all America will come to my feet to learn. (Bread Givers 8–9) 12. Four volumes of the Mercy of a Rude Stream cycle have been published between


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1994 and 1998. Roth called that part of the manuscript “Batch One.” The so-called “Batch Two” promises two more volumes to be published in the future. 13. For a similar theme see the recent documentary film by Andrew Jarecki, Capturing the Friedmans (2003). 14. Thirty years later Thomas Pynchon would suggest that America’s legacy is as loaded with guilt and violence as the Old World’s: in his The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) Pierce Inverarity, the California real-estate mogul, leaves a legacy behind that disinherits the majority of America. The industrial and military complex’s mail/male system leaves out those who live “under” the freeways, the homeless, the old and infirm, the outcast, blacks and other “minorities,” women, and the past in general. Cemeteries are paved over for freeways and overpasses, the bones of previous generations and of Native Americans are turned into charcoal cigarette filters or into ink (further poisoning the new generations’ bodies and minds), thus leaving the Founding Fathers’ original legacy and promise of diversity unfulfilled hence Oedipa Maas’s role as an “executrix” to mend the sorry affairs of the waning of American identity in the midst of uniformity and loss of self. It is also interesting to note that Albert Schearl’s temporary and situational paranoia, once in America, is here to stay permanently in the near future, fitting Pychon’s assessment of an emerging postmodern multinational American un/reality. 15. There has been much written about Roth’s own ambivalence about his Jewish identity and of his opinion about Jewish identity in America in general (see Fiedler, Freedman, Gordon, and Lyons among others). Much has been said, but mainly in the context of Henry Roth’s fascinating and puzzling biography: his initial nominal observance of his faith, then a stint with communism, and his open hostility to Judaism till Israel’s Six-Day War in 1967, turning him toward Zionism and back to Judaism. 16. In Victoria Aarons’s account, American-born Jews are seemingly free from the baggage of the ghetto, but, all the same, are haunted by the past that existed in the memory of their parents and grandparents, a past they themselves never knew. The early experiences of Jewish immigrants, as depicted in such works as Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, and I. B. Singer’s short stories, “The Son from America” and “The Little Shoemaker,” demonstrate a cultural vacuum: they are neither acculturated by an American Jewish ethos, nor have they brought with them a securely settled Old World traditional Judaism: “In the early immigrant literature, the marginalized Jewish protagonist is the ‘outsider’ attempting to make his way in America, a process that often drew attention to the character’s abandonment of Jewish values, traditions, and religious practices” (13). 17. Hillel Halkin has suggested that Roth’s Call It Sleep and his subsequent six-decade long “writer’s block” has covered up David’s and Henry Roth’s own secrets, besides those of David’s parents (a relationship with a gentile and a patricide). According to Halkin, the real secret is Roth’s shame of some youthful encounter that may have been homosexual. While the Oedipal attachment to the mother (which turns more explicitly incestuous in the later sequel, Mercy of a Rude Stream. Vol. 1: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park,


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1994) is obviously present in the first novel (and possibly in Roth’s life), homosexuality is left unarticulated and keeps haunting the author till his death in 1995. Halkin refers to several instances that point to possible homosexual encounters in Roth’s youth, though he leaves the question open and unresolved. He bases his argument on an interview with Jonathan Rosen in Vanity Fair where Roth relates his life during writing Call It Sleep: “I had become degenerate in my eyes. In my eyes homosexuality is degenerate” (qtd. in Halkin 44–47) and by pointing to some textual references in the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream to explain Roth’s inability to continue on with David Schearl’s story for so long. With the publication of later volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream, more and more sordid details surface about the protagonist, Ira Stigman (the new name Roth chooses for his main character, who picks up the story where the last scene of Call It Sleep ends). The second and third volumes, A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995) and From Bondage (1996) also reveal an incestuous relationship between Ira and his sister Minnie and between Ira and his young cousin Stella. There is also mention of the same cousin being molested by Ira’s father and Ira’s own molestation by Uncle Moe, “Ira’s other ‘favorite’ uncle.” In the last published volume of Mercy, Vol. 4: Requiem for Harlem (1998), Ira confesses his shame-ridden relationships to Edith Welles, the Eda Lou Walton character to whom Call It Sleep is dedicated (132, 223). In that volume he also feels shame about the too close proximity between him and Edith’s other lovers. (Edith had simultaneous relationships with several of the young men in her literary circle.) Ira is shown more and more as a victimizer and perpetrator and not as a victim in the story spanning over five volumes (plus the two unpublished manuscripts of Batch Two). 18. Berman also suggests several reasons that the graphic scene of an incestuous encounter between Ira and his younger sister Minnie vanished from the published version of From Bondage (the third volume of Mercy): “The way in which From Bondage was cut suggests that somebody with power wanted to ‘protect’ Roth’s sister from him. But also to ‘protect’ the Jewish people from an incest story by one of its most beloved writers, where the girl is not a helpless victim of male lust (there’s always room for more women as victims) but an ‘acting, active, asserting’ individual who wants to do it herself ” (25– 30). In the published version Minnie’s desire is written out of the script. By connecting sex with incest, Berman suggests a typically modern theme, the tragedy of the bourgeois “family romance” (for a reference to Freud’s “Family Romances,” see Werner Sollors, “ ‘A World Somewhere’ ” 152): Henry Roth was inspired by the audacious, expansive, world-conquering spirit of twentieth-century Modernism. The world that was his to conquer was the claustrophobic world of the modern ghetto: the street, the block, the house, the apartment, the family. Roth, like many writers, saw the social forces that were pulling the modern family and the modern self apart. But as a Jew living through a Jewish family, he also saw something else: the family imploding, crashing in on

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itself, with a love so intimate it was incestuous, perishing from its very richness of being. He never freed himself from bondage to this tragic vision, except to fall into something even worse: the feel of not to feel it, a life in death. Roth wandered in a desert of paralysis for 40 years. But then he came back, to wrestle with his angel, to try to make a home in the bonds of love. I think all of us are caught up in his struggle: This is what the words “modern life” mean. But there are people with power who want to paper it over. We need to watch out for them and the desert they have prepared for us all. (30) Besides his obvious annoyance over the editor’s decision to censor the incest scene from the final version of the novel, Berman points to the modernity of the themes of the novel: the critique of the institution of the bourgeois family whose psychic situation is aggravated by relocation and ensuing isolation; and the representation of female desire, even if it is in the context of incest. Maybe, female desire is illicit because it can only be expressed within the family, through incest: Minnie’s desire is juxtaposed with Edith’s frigidity due to her own family’s emotional dysfunction depicted in the fourth volume, Requiem for Harlem (236). 19. Frank Kermode finds an explanation for Henry Roth’s fictional alter egos’ enormous sense of guilt and the need for cleansing in the second novel, A Diving Rock on the Hudson: Indeed this huge second novel has a strong confessional aspect (and there are significant allusions to St. Augustine). The aged Ira brings himself with difficulty to the point of explaining the sense of guilt that partly ruined his life and was a cause of his block: his early incest with an under-age sister, and the sexual exploitation of a young cousin. His encounters with these girls are described with a sort of unrelenting, gritted-teeth dedication to the recording of the deceits, delights and disgust they entail. They are blamed for Ira’s ignorance of “how to make a pass at someone refined” at a woman who didn’t belong to the family as well as for his long silence. (“ ‘Holistic Rendering of My Lamentable Past’ ” 6)


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20. Peter Novick’s recent The Holocaust in American Life argues that the Holocaust is the only common denominator of American Jewish identity in the late twentieth century and that it has been used to fill the need for a communal, consensual symbol. 21. “Entropy,” in thermodynamics and, especially, in communication is one of the key themes of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) another dystopic vision of modern/postmodern America. The lack of diversity, the inheritance of American consumer postindustrialist society, is the equivalent of incest (on the familial level) and of paranoia (at the psychological as well as political levels), while both are the prices paid for eliminating cultural diversity (and substituting it with variety in commerce and commodity) and for disinheriting ethnic and otherwise “othered” groups of Americans (such as the not heterosexual, white, male, and protestant elite).


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22. According to Wirth-Nesher, the reference to “a red cock crowin’ ” is an allusion to Emma Lazarus’s poem “The Crowing of the Red Cock,” which Wirth-Nesher describes as “a survey of the persecution of Jews throughout Western civilization” (New Essays 6). 23. Mexican Village was later adapted, with Norman Foster, into a rather melodramatic and musically “enhanced” movie titled Sombrero for Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (1953). 24. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism could also be read as a cultural and aesthetic theory of border-crossings. In “Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art,” Bakhtin inevitably addresses the political and aesthetic issue of borders and boundaries; see especially 274. For an extended discussion of Bakhtin’s text, see Schleifer. 25. Irish home rule seemed very near in 1913 and 1914, the time Webster and Ned Kelley leave San Antonio to join the fight for independence. 26. Raymond Williams uses the terms “residual” and “emergent” to describe alternative and oppositional forms of culture (Problems 40–41). 27. Because of his involvement in the Mexican Revolution as a colonel under Pancho Villa, Martín Luís Guzmán spent two decades in exile, first in the United States and then in Spain. Originally published in Spain, Guzmán’s novel went through several revisions and corrections before it was published in Mexico. Julio Brancho adapted Guzmán’s novel for the screen, but La sombra del caudillo (1960), the single most censored film in Mexican history, was not released until 1990.

4. Romantic Modernism, Modernist Realism 1. For a discussion on how Melville’s poetics of individualism mirrored the ideology of the “empire for liberty” in political discourse see Dimock 3–41. 2. Louis Owens defines the trickster narrative within the context of Ridge’s novel as follows: On one hand, as his publisher observes, John Rollin Ridge writes in language assimilated from the authoritative discourse of privileged “literary” America; on the other hand, the internally persuasive discourse of the oppressed and marginalized minority continually subverts the authority of the dominant discourse. As a result, like the traditional Native American trickster, the author of Joaquin Murieta gives ample evidence of being divided within and against himself; he embodies cultural fragmentation. (Other Destinies 34–35) 3. The editor of the Norton Critical Edition, Hershel Parker, of the novel includes footnotes that explain some of the references. In Parker’s description, the “footnotes identify the more obscure historical, literary, and Biblical allusions” (see the foreword in The Confidence-Man). The following explanations are based on Parker’s notes: “Moyamensing” refers to the Philadelphia County Prison of the same name; “Palmer” is Dr. William Palmer (1824–56), a notorious British poisoner who was arrested, tried, and


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finally hanged in 1856; George Jeffries (1648–89) is the brutal judge under Charles II and James II (127). 4. Louis Owens refers to the following texts: John Rollin Ridge’s Joaquin Murieta (1854), Simon Pokagon’s Queen of the Woods (1899), S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema (1891), Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1927), three novels by the Cherokee writer John Milton Oskion in the 1920s and 1930s, John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown (1934), and D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded (1936) and Runner in the Sun (1954), see Owens 24. 5. Sollors mentions in his article the usage of stereotype: “Walter Lippmann gave currency to the term stereotype in 1922, a word that assumed a more sinister meaning in the 1930s and 1940s” (“Ethnic Modernism” 74). 6. Historically Mourning Dove’s novel depicts the era and consequences of the General Allotment or Dawes Act of 1887. As Louis Owens explains:

[187], (19) The second historical catastrophe [the first one was the Indian removal Act of 1830] for the American Indian came with the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) of 1887, an act designed to end traditional ways of life for Indian tribes by breaking communal tribal land into individual allotments of 160 acres for each family head, 80 acres to single persons over eighteen and orphans under that age, and 40 acres to each tribal member under eighteen. Indians who accepted allotment or agreed to adopt “the habits of civilized life” were granted citizenship, something most native Americans would not enjoy until 1924. A key provision of the Dawes Act allowed the federal government to purchase ‘surplus’ Indian lands what was left over after all eligible individuals received their allotted shares. The major effect of allotment was to take land away from Indians so effectively that in the fortyfive years following the Dawes Act’s passage 90 million acres passed from Indian ownership. (Other Destinies 30) 7. In Our America, Walter Benn Michaels examines how the notion of American identity changed from its racialized meaning in the progressive era between the world wars to a culturally determined term during the literary period of “nativist modernism.” He suggests that in the 1920s American modernists were preoccupied with redefining American identity in response to a reshuffling of the racial and cultural make up of the nation. White Anglo-American hostility to strangers was brought to the surface by the simultaneous events of northward African American migration from the South and the Caribbean, legal restrictions on immigration put into law in 1924, and the decision to turn Native Americans into legal citizens in the same year. See also an earlier version of his argument in the founding issue of Modernism/Modernity (1993). 8. The first-known novel written by a Native American woman is S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema (1891). See Ruoff and Ward Jr. 9. For a discussion of Mourning Dove’s interpretation of Broderick’s text, see Beidler and Viehman. 10. Arnold Krupat “expands upon” Owens’s reading of Cogewea, and he also gives an



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overview of the history of the present-day proliferation of critical discussions on mixedblood identity in his article, “From ‘Half-blood’ to ‘Mixedblood.’ ” 11. For another example of when fiction writers surpass academics in their insights about recording culture, Gloria Naylor’s novel, Mama Day (1988) starts with such critique when commenting on the unique community of Willow Springs, a piece of land that lies between South Carolina and Georgia but belongs to neither: Look what happened when Reema’s boy the one with the pear-shaped head came hauling himself back from one of those fancy colleges mainside, dragging his notebooks and tape recorder and a funny way of curling up his lip and clicking his teeth, all excited and determined to put Willow Springs on the map. . . . And when he went around asking us about 18 & 23, there weren’t nothing to do but take pity on him as he rattled on about “ethnography,” “unique speech patterns,” “cultural preservation,” and whatever else he seemed to be getting so much pleasure out of while talking into his little gray machine. (7)

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0.0pt P But on second thought, someone who didn’t know how to ask wouldn’t know how to listen. (10) 12. During the assimilation period, mission schools and boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs violently propagated white values and culture to “eradicate Native tribal identities” (A. K. Brown 274). Native Americans did not gain American citizenship until 1924, which was a direct response to Indians’ growing enlistment in the military. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, also called the Indian New Deal, meant to reverse the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 by promoting more extensive self-government through tribal councils and constitutions. With the appointment of John Collier to direct the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1934, more humane federal Indian policies were enacted. 13. In his article, “From ‘Half-blood’ to ‘Mixedblood,’ ” Arnold Krupat critiques Cogewea’s erroneous reading of Broderick’s The Brand in Mourning Dove’s novel (133–34). 14. For a more detailed discussion on the convergence between ethnography and literature in general, see Arnold Krupat’s Ethnocriticism. 15. In another modernist text, Willa Cather reinscribes the trope of the “Vanishing American” in her novel, The Professor’s House (1925). In it the only Indians the characters come in contact with, the Cliff Dwellers of New Mexico (in reality, the longgone inhabitants of Mesa Verde in Colorado), have been safely deceased for hundreds of years. Thereby, they pose no threat to a mainstream white male society, as opposed to other ethnic or gender groups. In Cather’s novel the ethnic and female other is epitomized by the mummified body of Mother Eve the murdered body of a female cliff dweller moreover, the only woman on the mesa where Tom Outland “plays house” with his two male companions (see Cather 176).



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16. In her autobiography, the Okanogan (or Salish) Mourning Dove imagines herself to be a mixed-blood. In the posthumously published Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography she describes herself as of two worlds: Father’s mother was a Nicola Indian, with a strain of Okanagan [Canadian side of Okanogans] in her family. His father was a white man, a Scot named Andrew, who at one time was in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company. (4) My mother, Lucy Stui-kin (Sna’itckstw), was born a fullblood. She was born about 1868 at Kettle Falls, which we call Swah-netk-qhu, meaning Big Falls or Big Water, also our name for the Columbia River. (6) In his introduction to Mourning Dove’s autobiography Jay Miller points out that since Mourning Dove’s father was an orphan she could invent a Scottish white grandfather, even though “his other children and the census records deny this” (xvi). In her supposedly “factual” autobiography Mourning Dove reinvents herself as a “half-blood” character, much like Cogewea, her heroine in the novel with the same title. 17. It is also possible to read Benjamin’s sense of the loss of “aura” in a somewhat less nostalgic light. It may be that aura is a relic of old relations to “property” and possessive individualism that Benjamin, politically, would actually oppose. Thus his notion of the aura is complex and ambivalent. The loss of the aura then lends itself to both nostalgic interpretations and to a sigh of relief. 18. See Benjamin’s explanation of the “auratic” object:

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The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. . . . We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. (223–24) 19. Our contemporary, the American Indian thinker, philosopher, religious scholar, historian, and critic, Vine Deloria Jr., would add another modern group to McNickle’s list, the hordes of anthropologists who descend on tribes and reservations with the same ruthless and culturally insensitive manner (see “Anthropologists and Other Friends,” in Custer Died for Your Sins 78–100). 20. See the following quote from The Surrounded: How could such a thing be? They had just begun to make plans together, how could that be cut short? They had only now come to an understanding! But it was


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to be. Max had only one other interval, one flicker when he recognized Archilde. He whispered: “Too bad to leave you now. Have to learn many things yourself. Take the money, and keep it. If that goes, you’ll have it hard. Study work ” That was the end of the flicker. There was no time for anything. The reconciliation with the old lady, the plans for Archilde, the new beginning everything went with that flicker.” (166) 21. The circus atmosphere at the dance, the presence of “peanuts” and “freaks,” is in close proximity to the aesthetic signifiers of “kitsch,” “camp,” and “bad taste” produced by mass markets. For a more detailed discussion on the connections between “kitsch” and modernity, see Matei Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity (223–62). 22. For example, Oliver La Farge, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Laughing Boy (1929), a professional anthropologist, turned the “scientific” theory of the Vanishing American into fiction in his novel. 23. Wah’Kon-Tah is a fictionalized biography based on the journals of Maj. Laban J. Miles, government agent to the Osage from 1878–92 (see Schedler,“Formulating a Native American Modernism” 136; and Owens, “ ‘Disturbed by Something Deeper’ ” 163). 24. Owens goes on to explain the specifics of that situation as follows: “Along with the wealth, of course, came predation on an extraordinary scale, corruption, and violence as outsiders crowded into Osage country to pilfer and extort everything possible through any and every means, including murder, a disastrous period for the Osage people that Mathews would write about in his novel Sundown” (Owens, “ ‘Disturbed by Something Deeper’ ” 164). 25. Christopher Schedler has made a similar observation concerning Mathews’s use of the “form of a classic Western bildungsoman.” Schedler concludes that “the novel sets up the reader’s expectation for a structure of conflict, crisis, and resolution, only to continually frustrate those expectations” (“Formulating a Native American Modernism” 143). Schedler reads Mathews’s modification of the genre of the Bildungsroman as proof to the author’s modernist technique of turning an “external conflict” into an “internalized” one, the classic marker of high modernism. While I agree with most of Schedler’s comments concerning Mathews’s justified place in American modernism, and especially with his reading of Sundown in the context of Mathews’s later works, I find Schedler’s approach too squarely placed within the standards of high modernism. Owens had made a similar critical comment on Schedler’s work calling it “an interesting analysis of the Osage author’s work through a lens very familiar to old-school academics: that of modernism with its emphasis upon ‘irony, humor, and narrative experimentation’ ” (Owens,“ ‘Disturbed by Something Deeper’ ” 163). Schedler approaches Mathews’s novel from the taken-for-granted perspective of Anglo-European high modernist standards, although he also makes use of some of the critical tools provided by contemporary Native American critics, such as Paula Gunn Allen, Louis Owens, Gerald Vizenor, or Robert Allen Warrior. But ultimately, he accepts the critical standards of high modernist literary


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criticism, those practiced by Marjorie Perloff, Astradur Eysteinsson, or Peter Nicholls, without hesitation or much-needed skepticism and instead, he critiques the cultural insider and often separatist approaches of the Native American critics. In opposition to Schedler’s points of reference, I critique the taken-for-granted high modernist standards of American modernism, reread the canon from its ethnic peripheries, and suggest that modernism and ethnicity were intricately and intimately connected within the American version of modernism. 26. Linda Hogan’s novel, Mean Spirit (1990) deals with the same subject concerning the besieged Osage people (see a more detailed reference to her novel in Owens, “ ‘Disturbed by Something Deeper” 166). A recent novel by a contemporary Osage writer Charles H. Red Corn, A Pipe for February (2002), also focuses on the Osage experience of the 1920s, the period when the greed of government officials and opportunist businessmen went so far as to murder Osages for their oil and natural gas wealth. 5. An Epilogue 1. A recent critic of Ellison’s novel reads Invisible Man in terms of the Bakhtinian masquerade, which is also my own approach to both Melville’s and Ellison’s novels (see Shinn, “Masquerade, Magic, and Carnival in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man”). 2. A similar theme is the topic of an early African American speculative fiction, George S. Schuyler’s Black No More: A Novel (1931) that offers an absurd solution to America’s “race problem.” Another variation on the same theme is a comedy sketch by Dave Chappelle, from his first season of “Chappelle’s Show,” in which he speculates on the absurdity of what if “America’s most vicious blind white supremacist” was a black man (see Chappelle’s Show: Season One, dvd).


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Index

Aarons, Victoria, 93, 94; and American-born Jews, 183n16 abject bodies, 14, 15, 49; Helga Crane and, 43, 44; Sam Lucas and, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32 African Americans: female sexuality of, 41–42, 47, 58–59, 66; male sexuality of, 29; racial identity of, 30, 37–38; as spectacle, 39–40, 41; stereotypes of, 14–15, 18, 19, 28, 30, 32; as strangers, 33–34, 38–39, 42–44, 47, 56– 59. See also masquerade; miscegenation; racism; tragic mulatto African American writers, 16, 18–20, 49; and authenticity, 30, 51, 53–54; discursive practices of, 17, 31–32, 50, 60–61, 176n8. See also Harlem Renaissance; race melodrama; trickster narratives alienation, xii, 7, 15; of African Americans, 18; in Bread Givers, 81; and ethnicity, 88; Hurston’s critique of, 60; of immigrants, 66, 67, 92, 93; of Native Americans, 113, 150; in Requiem for Harlem, 89; in Sundown, 153, 157–58; in Surrounded, 144 Allen, Paula Gunn, 190–91n25 alterity, 4, 49, 78, 165 Althusser, Louis, 119, 136, 179n28 Anderson, Benedict, 7, 59 anthropology. See ethnography Antin, Mary, 78, 86–87 apocalyptic texts, 2, 24, 92, 162–63, 165 Asian American writers, 171n12 assimilation. See Bureau of Indian Affairs; immigrants; Native Americans back to Africa movement, 17, 27–28 Baker, Houston A., Jr.: and black aesthetic, 176n6; on Countee Cullen, 22, 24; and Harlem Renaissance, 17

Bakhtin, Mikhail: and dialogism, 186n24 Barthes, Roland: and writerly/readerly distinction, 181n1 Benjamin, Walter: and aura, 10, 135–37, 189nn17–18 Berman, Marshall: on Henry Roth, 91–92, 184–85n18 Bernardin, Susan K., 124 Bhabha, Homi K.: and mimicry, 34, 35, 59; on stereotypes, 177n11 Bildungsroman narrative: Bread Givers as, 71, 81; Sundown as, 154, 156, 190–91n25 black separatism, 17–18, 42 Boas, Franz, xix, 51, 52, 123, 128 Boelhower, William, 68 borderlands: and contact zones, 98, 99; defined, 98; industrialization in, 96, 97, 101, 104 borderlands romance, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 110–11 border writers, 99; texts of, 164–65; and translation, 99, 109 bourgeois, 6, 181–82n7; in Call it Sleep, 185n18; consumerism, 39, 43, 44, 48, 49; family structure, 92; institutions, 49, 59; in New Negro movement, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 54; in One Way to Heaven, 26; sexual morality, 41, 46, 47; as status quo, 154 Boyd, Valerie, 53 Boym, Svetlana, 7 Broderick, Therese, 123–26, 131, 187n9 Brown, Alanna Kathleen, 188n12 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 188n12 Butler, Judith: and discursive resignification, 118, 122; and passing, 35, 46–47, 48, 179– 80n29; and performativity, 119–20, 126, 132– 33

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Cable, George Washington, 171n13 Calinescu, Matei, 190n21 Cather, Willa, 39; and the Vanishing American, 188n15 Chappelle, Dave, 191n2 Christian, Barbara, 34, 179n25 Christianity, 4; and blacks, 22–23; and conversion in The Black Christ, 24–25; disillusionment with, 150, 159; feigned, 26, 28; redemption paradigm of, 84, 86, 92–93; as repressive ideology, 138–39, 146–49, 159 circular narratives, 55, 56, 78 Clifford, James, 128–30 commodity fetishism: of buffaloes, 135–36, 137; and masquerade, 10; of Mexico, 104–5 confidence man, 178n19; in The Black Christ, 25–27, 31; in Cogewea, 121; in The Confidence-Man, 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 14, 68–69, 140; in One Way to Heaven, 32 conjure tales. See trickster narratives consumption. See bourgeois cosmopolitanism, xvii, 11, 63, 69; as antiSemitic, 5; and expatriates, 63, 67; as sameness, 4, 5 Cullen, Countee, 17–20, 60; critiques of, 177– 78n15, 178n18; literary career of, 21–23 culture, xvi–xvii; oppositional forms of, xx, 170n9, 172n4, 175n3; Osage culture rescue, 153

double-consciousness, 18, 28, 40 Dove, Mourning. See Mourning Dove Du Bois, W. E. B., 17, 31, 37, 176n9. See also New Negro movement DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 72, 105, 107, 110, 181n6

Davis, Arthur P., 178n16 Davis, Thadious M., 60, 179n26 Dawes Act of 1887, 117, 133–34, 141–42, 155; as confidence game, 139–40; described, 187n6 Dearborn, Mary V.: and ethnic female authorship, 50, 52–53, 60, 81, 182n8; and immigration, 94–95; on Zora Neale Hurston, 180n33 Deleuze, Gilles, xiv, 42 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 154; and anthropologists, 189n19 De Man, Paul, 9 democracy, 8, 165–66; as confidence game, 164; conflicting rhetoric of, 84, 165; homogenizing tendencies of, 84 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 84 dialogism, 186n24. See also hybridity Dimcock, Wai-chee, 140, 186n1

fantasy: in Bread Givers, 75–76, 78, 80; in Call It Sleep, 94; fairy tales, 29, 71; in Invisible Man, 80; as modernist, 72 Felski, Rita: on nostalgia, 175n2 Ferguson, Blanche E., 22 Ferraro, Thomas J., xvii–xviii, 169n1 Fiedler, Leslie, 182n10 Foucault, Michel: and disciplinary space, 5; and power/knowledge paradigm, 130 free speech: in Constancia’s salon, 27, 29–30 Freud, Sigmund: and civilization, 181–82n7 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 67; on H.D., 181n2

220 index

Early, Gerald, 22 Eliot, T. S., 17, 63, 88, 162 Ellis Island, 83, 84, 87, 89, 99, 182n11. See also Statue of Liberty Ellison, Ralph, 2, 17; as postmodern, 165 entropy, 185n21 ethnicity, 150, 155; and immigration, 95; and mixedblood identity, 119; and modernism, xvii, 16, 113; preservation of, 155; and race, xvii, 65, 118, 169n2; restrictive bonds of, 35 ethnic modernism, 50, 61, 81, 87, 150, 166; defined, xi–xiii, 16, 17, 119; and modernism, 68; as period concept, 169n1; subverting previous genres, 166. See also hybridity ethnographic fiction, 51–52, 128, 130–33, 176n8 ethnography, 52–53, 126, 128–31; and Native Americans, 121, 122–23. See also Hurston, Zora Neale; Vanishing American exoticism: of Flathead tribe, 127; and Helga Crane, 39, 42; of Mexico, 104–5; and Native Americans, 153; of New Negro movement, 29, 54; in Passing, 46–47; folklore as, 54 Eysteinsson, Astradur, 190–91n25

Garvey, Marcus, 17–18, 42; and Black Star Line, 18, 176–77n10; Countee Cullen’s critique of, 178n21; and One Way to Heaven, 179n23 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 18, 179n24

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Gillman, Susan Kay, 19–20, 105–6, 107, 177n12; and race melodrama, 178n20 Gilroy, Paul, 35, 176n6 Golden, Marita, 33 Griffith, D. W., 177n13 Guattari, Felix, xiv, 42 Gyurko, Lanin A., 103 Halkin, Hillel: on Henry Roth, 183–84n17 Haraway, Donna, 44; and interpellation, 179n28 Harlem Renaissance: and black cultural sublime, 18, 29; bourgeois tone of, 34, 35, 46, 49; and criticism of folklore, 53–54; and modernism, 17, 175–76n6; and racial masquerade, 15; roman a` clef of, 30, 164, 179n23. See also New Negro movement Harrison, Beth, 52 Harvey, David, xiv Hassan, Ihab, xiv; and postmodernism, 169n5 H.D., 63, 67; as modernist, 181n2 Hegeman, Susan, xvi–xvii Hemenway, Robert, 53 Hemingway, Ernest, 39, 72, 152, 158, 165 heterosexuality, 46; as compulsory, 47, 125; and heterogeneity, 171n11; as political, 108; and racism, 120 Hicks, D. Emily, 99 high modernism: authors of, 17, 39, 52; and cosmopolitanism, 63, 68; elitism of, 170n8; and John Joseph Matthew, 152; qualities of, 39, 50, 150, 165–66; subverting previous genres, 151, 152. See also ethnic modernism; modernism Hogan, Linda: on Osage tribe, 191n26 Holmes, Marian Smith, 180n34 homogeneity: and Melville’s riverboat allegory, 6, 10, 84; as oppressive, 49 homosexuality: Henry Roth and, 183–84n17. See also queering Huggins, Nathan Irvin, 17 Hughes, Langston, 37, 51; and critique of Countee Cullen, 177–78n15; and satire of Zora Neale Hurston, 180n32 Hurston, Zora Neale, 182n8; circular narratives of, 55, 78; and ethnography, 99, 128, 176n8; literary career of, 51–54; in modernist canon, 52, 56, 61; outside of

New Negro movement, 17–20, 37; recent popularity of, 180n31; and white patronage, 180n33 hybridity: cultural, 98, 131–32; and Cyraina E. Johnson-Roullier, 171n11; and female subjectivity, 179n28; in Invisible Man, 164; linguistic, 20, 32; and modernism, 19–20; in Mules and Men, 54; in One Way to Heaven, 30–31, 49–50; racial, 20, 44; in Surrounded, 149–50; in Their Eyes Were Watching God, 20, 55–56

ideologeme, 71–72, 106 immigrants, 5, 74–75; ambiguous identities of, 86, 89; and assimilation, 73, 81, 84, 86– 87, 95; female sexuality of, 66; Old World of, 73, 83–84, 90–91, 92; as strangers, 66–67, 73, 79–80, 81, 88, 89, 93; as threat, 64–66. See also Ellis Island; masquerade; Statue of Liberty immigrant writers, 66–67, 69, 71–72; American Jews as, 94–95 immigration, xvii, 5, 64, 181–82n7; confidence games of, 77, 82 imperialism: and borderlands, 98; and cultural diversity, 8; and manifest destiny, 116, 135, 140, 149; in Mexican Village, 104; in Sundown, 154; and westward expansion, 5, 6, 136, 146; and white settlement, 140–41 incest, 173n8; in Call It Sleep, 93, 94; and founding of Inca empire, 3; and Henry Roth, 88, 89, 184–85n18; in the Mercy project, 95 Indian New Deal. See Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, 188n12 individualism, 72, 78–79; and marketplace, 140; and Native Americans, 154; as Western value, 138, 146, 156, 158 Invisible Man, 2, 56, 80, 86, 95, 163; as border text, 2, 164; inspiration for, 162, 163–64 ironic texts, 30–31, 87, 98

Jackson, Rosemary, 72 Jameson, Fredric, xiv–xv, xxii, 68, 103, 105, 169–70n6; and periodization, 170–71n10 Jewish orthodoxy, 73–74, 77, 87, 93; and

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Jewish orthodoxy cont. Hebrew scripture, 90–91; patriarchy within, 71, 78–79 Johnson, Barbara, 50 Johnson, Blyden, 28–29 Johnson-Roullier, Cyraina: and spatiotemporal perspective, 171n11 Joyce, James, 52, 56, 69, 72, 78, 88, 160 Kalaidjian, Walter, xviii–xix Kaplan, Amy, 98 Kaye-Smith, Sheila, 50 Kenner, Hugh, xvii, 63, 72, 170n7, 181n2 Kermode, Frank: on Henry Roth, 185n19 Klein, Melanie, 16, 175n4; and melancholia, 178n22 Kristeva, Julia, 14, 66, 82; as expatriate, 181n4. See also abject bodies Krupat, Arnold, 51–52, 122–23, 125, 187–88n10, 188nn13–14 Ku Klux Klan, 64–65 Lacan, Jacques, 28, 89 La Farge, Oliver, and the Vanishing American, 190n22 Larsen, Nella, 17–20, 37, 45, 60, 68; literary career of, 33–35, 50 Larson, Charles, 176n6 Locke, Alain, 37 Lukács, György, xii, xiv Mann, Thomas: and confidence man, 178n19 marriage: as claustrophobic, 42, 46–47, 55, 139; as hegemonic, 73, 78–79; plot, 75–79, 86; within race, 125; versus rape, 56, 58–59; and respectability, 35, 36–37, 43 Marx, Karl, 6, 10 masquerade, 10, 15; in antebellum America, 6; Bakhtinian, 191n1; and Black Guinea, 14; of blackness, 28; immigrant, 84, 86; literary, 114–16; nation as, 174–75n20; in One Way to Heaven, 33; racial, 16, 175n5, 176n8; of religious faith, 25–26, 29; and Ship of Fools allegory, 10; in The Wrong Man, 36. See also passing; queering Mathews, John Joseph, 117; literary career of, 152, 153 McDowell, Deborah E., 41

222 index

McKay, Claude: and romans a` clef, 179n23 McNickle, D’Arcy, 117, 150, 152 melodrama. See race melodrama Melville, Herman: alternative views of, 13; literary career of, 2 —Works: “Benito Cereno,” 162, 163, 178n17; Billy Budd, 1, 24. See also Ship of Fools metanarrative, 2, 3, 174nn15–16; in The Confidence Man, 2, 3, 10–11, 174nn15–16; in Their Eyes Were Watching God, 20 Mexican Revolution of 1910, 97, 99, 102–3, 104, 107 Mexican War of 1846–48, 174n12 Michaels, Walter Benn, 170n8, 176n7; and nativism, 175n6, 187n7 Micheaux, Oscar, 177n13 migration, xvii, 65, 98–99 mimicry: colonial, 34, 35; in ethnic modernism, 16; and Lacan, 28; linguistic, 175n5, 176n8; in Passing, 46; in Quicksand, 50; in Their Eyes Were Watching God, 59 miscegenation, 106, 130; in Cogewea, 130; in The Confidence-Man, 3; in contact zones, 98; fear of, 46, 65, 66, 101; in Mexican Village, 104; and mulattos, 42; as part of race melodrama, 19–20; as subversive, 47. See also tragic mulatto mixed-blood: in Cogewea, 132; identity, 188n10; John Joseph Mathews as, 153; Mourning Dove as, 189n16; in Sundown, 155, 156 modernism: and alienation, 88, 92, 113; American, 63, 66–68; cultural, xv–xvi; defined, xii, 15; elitism of, 19, 170n8; and epiphany, 160; and ethnicity, xviii, 88, 152, 169n1, 191n25; and ethnocentrism, xv; and fantasy, 72; as homemade world, xvii, 63; as literary-historical concept, xx; versus modernity, xii–xiv, 15–16, 169n3, 176n6; and nativism, 175n6, 187n7; and Nella Larsen, 49; and Zora Neale Hurston, 52. See also cosmopolitanism; ethnic modernism; high modernism; postmodernism modernity, 8, 9, 68; defined, 11–12, 15, 176n6 Momaday, N. Scott, 117 Mourning Dove (Hum-ishu-ma), 150, 152, 182n8; critique of The Brand, 121–22, 130, 131, 132; and dime novel romance, 116; as

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mixed-blood, 189n16; and translation, 99; as tribal insider, 127, 130–33 multiculturalism, 176n7 multiplicity, 171n11 Narrenschiff. See Ship of Fools nationalism: alternative to, 13; and ambiguity, 2; black, 40–41; and collective myths, 7, 43; discourses of, 47; and nativism, 175n6, 187n7. See also racism; xenophobia Native Americans: as aboriginal, 132; assimilation of, 65–66, 117–18, 124, 137–38, 145, 154, 159, 160; and authenticity, 155; buffalo as allegory for, 121–22, 135–36; and Fourth of July, 120, 131, 144–45, 159; and governmental policies, 159–60; hatred of, 116–17, 140; historicized, 149–50; identity of, 113, 119, 122–23, 131–32, 145; and modernization, 135, 153–55; as noble savages, 114, 116; relocation of, 114; as spectacle, 144; stereotypes of, 121, 122, 126, 149–50. See also Dawes Act; Vanishing American Native American writers, 113–16, 161; and reappropriation of previous genres, 150– 51; and transcription, 130–31; and use of allegories, 139 naturalism, 151; in Bread Givers, 75; and McNickle’s determinism, 141–46; in Surrounded, 133 Naylor, Gloria: on ethnography, 188n11 Nelson, Cary, 176n6 New Negro movement: bourgeois values in, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 54; class exclusion in, 26, 31, 43–44; Countee Cullen’s critique of, 22, 29; counterdiscourses to, 15; defined, 16; and Invisible Man, 165; and racial stereotypes, 30; as suffocating to writers, 17–18; and talented tenth, 17, 18, 31, 54, 176n9; and Zora Neale Hurston, 54, 61 Nicholls, Peter, 190–91n25 Niggli, Josephina: literary career of, 96–97 North, Michael, 175–76n6; and black dialect, 176n8 nostalgia, 175n2; Anzia Yezierska and, 94; in Call It Sleep, 87, 88; defined, 15–16, 175n2; and ethnography, 128; in Mexican Village, 96, 100 Novick, Peter, 185n20

origins: and American Jewish writers, 94– 95; in Call It Sleep, 86, 87; in One Way to Heaven, 30 Owens, Louis, 116, 122–23, 139, 152, 153, 187n4, 187n5; and contextual identity, 113, 117; critique of Christopher Schedler, 190–91n25; on Dawes Act of 1887, 187n6; and Osage tribe, 190nn23–24; and trickster narratives, 186n2 passing: associated with queering, 119–20; and class mobility, 48; defined, 34; and ethnic modernism, 16; and mulatto fiction, 19 periodization, 170–71n10 Perloff, Marjorie, 170nn7–8, 181n2, 190–91n25 postcolonialism: in Sundown, 155 postmodernism, xii, xiv, 2, 68, 165–66, 183n14; and entropy, 185n21; versus postmodernity, 169n5; reading modernism, xix Pound, Ezra, 63, 170n7 Pratt, Mary Louise, 98 Pynchon, Thomas: and entropy, 185n21; and Old World guilt, 183n14

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queering, 35, 46–47, 119–20 race: and authenticity, 30; and concept of minority, 169n4; and democracy, 164; and ethnicity, xvii, 65, 118, 169n2; melancholia of, 178n22. See also masquerade race melodrama, 19–20, 26, 32, 33–34, 101, 107, 133; defined, 177n12; and race movies, 177n13 racial uplift. See New Negro movement racism, 45–46, 48, 49, 57–58, 65, 110, 175n1; in Europe, 39; and heterosexuality, 120; hopeful end of, 166; as philanthropy, 4, 114; violence of, 21, 23–24, 25. See also Ku Klux Klan; nationalism; xenophobia Rampersad, Arnold, 176n6 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 24 readerly, 63, 181n1 realism, 77; in Bread Givers, 74–75, 77, 78, 80, 82; in Call It Sleep, 86; magical, 101, 108; and mimetic representation, 10, 72, 80, 113 Red Corn, Charles H.: on Osage tribe, 191n26 regionalism, 63, 68 Robbins, Bruce, 93 Rogin, Michael Paul, 6, 174n11

index

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

roman a` clef. See under Harlem Renaissance romance, 72, 100, 109–10; dime novel, 151; hero in, 156, 160, 165; as historicized, 105–6; national, 107–8; western, 116, 119, 121, 124. See also borderlands romance Roth, Henry, 88–89, 91–92; biography of, 183– 85nn17–18, 183n15, 185n19 Sald´ıvar, José David, 98, 99 Sùnchez-Pardo, Esther, 175n5, 178n22, 179n23 Schedler, Christopher: on Sundown, 190– 91n25 Schenck, Celeste M., 19 Schleifer, Ronald, xv–xvi, 186n24 Schuyler, George S., 191n2; and romans a` clef, 179n23 Scottsboro Boys, 175n1 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 35 segregation, 16; Zora Neale Hurston’s views on, 180n34 Shinn, Christopher: and Bakhtinian masquerade, 191n1 Ship of Fools, 174n13; as allegory of Union, 5–10, 12, 165; multicultural rewriting of, 177n10 Shucard, Alan, 22 Simmel, Georg: strangerness, xxii, 11–12, 43, 59, 81, 174n17 Sollors, Werner, xi, 61, 68, 87–88, 92, 118, 169n1; on stereotypes, 187n5 Sommer, Doris, 107, 108 Spillers, Hortense, 42, 43 Statue of Liberty, 86, 89–90, 95, 99. See also Ellis Island Stein, Gertrude: as ethnic woman writer, 182n8 Stepto, Robert B., 176n6 stereotypes: as colonialist discourse, 177n11; defined, 187n5. See also African Americans; masquerade; Native Americans strangers, 7, 11–12, 13, 43, 47–48, 89; in The Confidence-Man, 174–75n20. See also African Americans: as strangers; immigrants: as strangers; Native Americans Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 5 talented tenth. See under New Negro movement

224 index

Terdiman, Richard, 174n15 Thurman, Wallace: and critique of Zora Neale Hurston, 180n32; and romans a` clef, 179n23 Torgovnick, Marianna, 176n6 tragic mulatto: and Harlem Renaissance, 20; Helga Crane as, 41, 42–43; and Mourning Dove, 121, 130; and Zora Neale Hurston, 55 trickster narratives, 179n24; defined, 186n2 tricksters, 15, 29, 32–33, 54, 116, 126 Tuttleton, James W., 21–22 utopia, 11, 15, 60

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Vanishing American: and Oliver La Farge, 190n22; revised by John Joseph Matthew, 152–54; revised by Mourning Dove, 121–22, 131, 132; in Surrounded, 135, 148; and Willa Cather, 188n15 Van Vechten, Carl, 1, 45; and One Way to Heaven, 179n23 Vizenor, Gerald, 190–91n25

[224], (6

Walton, Eda Lou, 88, 184n17 Warner, W. Lloyd, 118–19 Warrior, Robert Allen, 190–91n25 Washington, Mary Helen, 60, 180–81nn35–36 white peacock, 179n27. See also exoticism Williams, Raymond, xiii–xiv; and forms of culture, 170n9, 172n4; and historicity, 170– 71n10; and oppositional forms of, 175n3 Williams, William Carlos, 63 Wintz, Cary D., 16 Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 87, 92, 186n22 Wohl, Robert, 169n3 Wright, Richard: and critique of Zora Neale Hurston, 180n32 writerly, 63, 181n1 xenophobia, 13, 40, 65–66, 69, 100. See also Ku Klux Klan; nationalism; racism Yezierska, Anzia, 66, 67–68, 94, 182n8; literary career of, 70–71 Young, James O., 22 Zaborowsda, Magdalena, 66, 182n9

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