Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture / Edition 2

by Hortense J. Spillers

Overview

Black, White, and in Color offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past twenty years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project.

Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226769806
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/28/2003
Edition description:	1
Pages:	570
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Hortense J. Spillers is the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of English at Cornell University. She is the editor of Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text and coeditor of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition.

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Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture

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By Hortense J. Spillers

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2003 Hortense J. Spillers
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226769801

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1 - Ellison's "Usable Past": Toward a Theory of Myth
The occasion that invites this piece recalls for me certain decisive memories. Professor Elizabeth Phillips, my first instructor in American literature at the University of Memphis, returned one of my student themes one afternoon with this comment: "Why be content with the lightning bug when you can have the lightning?" I have no idea what I had written--lame, I suppose, in any case--but I saved the comment, might have even stored it in my dreams, and now, over three decades later, I know precisely what she meant. These notes on an American theme are written with Professor Phillips and the lightning in mind.
One of the critical strategies of that first course was to determine to what extent the American idiom had been driven toward precision since Sister Carrie. That nearly half a century separates Dreiser's first novel and Invisible Man is not so impressive an observation, except that between Dreiser and Ellison a radically new literary reality asserts itself, basically combative toward the past. Gass's notes on Borges's prose--its leanness, excision, lack of ornamental dress--define in part the canon of taste that stamps modernist practice with the persistence of dogma. Accompanying these profound changes in aesthetic surface was the broader implication of shifts of angle in the very vision of art, or more precisely, the philosophical bases for a technology of text (perhaps most eloquently expressed in Borges's fictions of intangibility) conduced toward another kind of artistic performance which Ortega y Gasset locates in the theme of alienation:

Analyzing the new style, one finds in it certain closely connected tendencies: it tends toward the dehumanization of art; to an avoidance of living forms ensuring that a work of art should be nothing but a work of art; to considering art simply as play and nothing else: to an essential irony; to an avoidance of all falsehood; and finally, towards an art which makes no spiritual or transcendental claims whatsoever.

We have no exact name yet for "dehumanization" as a systematic mode of expression; perhaps "modernism" is the best we can do, but for sure, this deviant attitude toward the human problematic--this flight from it that Ortega determines as the goal of modernism--pursues a structural reality, even anticipates it, that consigns language itself to an area of the phenomenal, unprivileged among other things. If language is an act of concealment, condemned to obfuscation, then we should not be surprised, even if disappointed, that it talks to itself, about itself, imprisoned in an appropriate logological status.
Ellison apparently saw what was coming at the end of the forties, when he completed Invisible Man, and responded in his acceptance speech of the National Book Award with characteristic rebellion. Wishing to avoid the "hard-boiled" idiomatic understatement of Hemingway--its "clipped, monosyllabic prose"--he found that, when compared to the rich babble of idiomatic expression around [him], a language full of imagery, gesture, and rhetorical canniness, it was embarrassingly austere. His decision, then, to cast the grammar of the text in a mode contrastive to understatement is complemented by his refusal of the naturalist disposition:

Thus to see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom, I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many triumphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction. (NNA, 198)

In repudiating the doctrine of naturalism, Ellison turned away from the influence of Richard Wright, the dominating presence of his apprenticeship (NNA, 198), and Dreiser, who had fathered the naturalist tradition among U.S. writers.
While Ellison would be the last to deny that his own literary procedure has been influenced by the dogmatizers of European modernism, he would also insist that his American experience, his Negroness, has mandated a literary form virtually unique in its portrayal of pluralistic issues. In order to capture the multiplicity of American experience, Ellison turned to the nineteenth century, toward Melville and Twain's "imaginative economy," where "the Negro symbolized both the man lowest down and the mysterious, underground aspect of human personality" (NNA, 201). This turning, which we view with unrelieved interest, is a remarkable decision because it reinforces a notion of the dialectical at a time when it is all but being driven out by theories of artistic objectivity. But Ellison feels too keenly, one imagines, the requirements of his own imposed alienation to raise it to an act of form and chooses, instead, the "ancestral imperative" as the eminent domain of his own creative concern. The upshot is Invisible Man that remains, to my mind, one of the most influential American novels of the twentieth century. I can say with confidence that it would constitute a "first" on my own list of teachable subjects for reasons which, though obvious, may bear repeating: (1) Following a line of American fictions that had rendered "black" an item of sociological data or the subject of exotic assumptions, or yet, the gagline of white mischief, at best, its ambiguous "bi-play," Invisible Man addresses the issue as an exposition of modern consciousness. (2) Frustrating the tendency to perceive a coterminous relationship between the symbolic boundaries of black and the physical, genetic manifestation named black, Invisible Man recalls Moby Dick that stands Manichean orientation on its head. (3) Insisting that black American experience is vulnerable to mythic dilation, Ellison constructs a coherent system of signs that brings into play the entire repertory of American cultural traits. In order to do this, Ellison places the unnamed "agonist" on an historical line that reaches back through the generations and extends forward into the frontiers of the future. Thus, (4) the work withdraws from the modernist inclination to isolate issues of craft from ethical considerations. For Ellison, language does speak, and it clarifies selective experience under the auspices of certain figures-of-thought, unexpectedly applied to received opinions. My primary concern in these notes is to try to trace propositions three and four to some tentative conclusions.
Northrop Frye defined myth as "the union of ritual and dream in a form of verbal communication." The term, however, has achieved such flexibility that it is menaced by meaning everything and nothing in particular, though Frye traces its origins and inflections from biblical and classical sources through the modern period (131-223). Any contemporary usage is haunted by the echo of specific mythic structures and Roland Barthes's caricature of contemporary mythologies in a dazzling display of linguistic de-mystification. But Barthes's definition of myth as a "type of speech" releases us, at least for the moment, from certain inherited or monolithic notions of mythic form:

Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no "substantial" ones. (109)

Myth, then, is a form of selective discourse since its life and death are governed by human history: "Ancient, or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the 'nature' of things" (110). Not confined to oral speech, myth can be constituted of other modes of signification, including written discourse, photography, cinema, reporting, sports, shows, publicity. Myth as form does not only denote the sacred object or event, but may also be viewed as the wider application of a certain linguistic status to a hierarchy of motives and mediations. Pursuing Saussure's well-known paradigm of signification (115), Barthes differentiates the semiological and ideological boundaries of myth in a way that can only be suggestive for our immediate purposes, for I am primarily concerned with Invisible Man as a literary countermyth of good intentions. Though from my own point of view, any countermyth is preferable to prevailing myth and is, therefore, good, I still emphasize the word to denote the particular difficulty there is in accepting Barthes's definition of myth as a type of speech, expressed by its intentions. Inevitably, some intentions are "more good" than others to the group wishing to appropriate them, and as Barthes's orientation leads into the ideological category of myth as an impoverishment of history, its nullification at the hands of the bourgeoisie, I would have to agree with him. Recognizing, then, the high danger of applying a term laden, a priori, with valuation that justifies it on the one hand and condemns it on the other, I can only proceed with caution.
What I find most suggestive in Barthes's argument is the distinction he enforces between the form of myth and the concept it borrows from particular historical order. We could say, following his lead, that mythic form is a kind of conceptual code, relying on the accretions of association that cling to the concept--"a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions" (117). A French army general, pinning a medal on a one-armed Senegalese, is not my idea of a joke, nor is it Barthes's, for that matter, and he uses it to illustrate an act of attenuation wherein the subject has become an item in the "store of mythical signifiers." In short, the visual image becomes a code of French imperial procedure and the biographical/historical implications of its subjects. It is a mode of shorthand in that the mythical signifier conceals as much as it reveals. In fact, in Barthes's example, the signifier cheats, for it tells far less than it shows. This spontaneous equation of form and concept occurs also in the literary myth whose extension, like the oral myth, is linear and successive. Barthes describes the process of identification:

The elements of the form . . . are related as to place and proximity: the mode of presence of the form is spatial. The concept, on the contrary, appears in global fashion, it is a kind of nebula, the condensation, more or less hazy, of a certain knowledge. Its elements are linked by associative relations: it is supported not by an extension but by a depth (although this metaphor is perhaps still too spatial): its mode of presence is memorial. (122)

It is this integrative paradigm of form and concept that is most interesting for specific application.
Returning to an initial metaphor which I used in one of my four propositions--Invisible Man standing on an historical line reaching back and forth--I think we can establish the central reason why the novel qualifies as myth. In Ellison's case, I would suggest that myth becomes a tactic for explanation and that the novel may be considered a discourse on the biographical uses of history. The preeminent element of form, Invisible Man's narrative unfolds through a complicated scheme of conceptual images that refer to particular historical order, but the order itself localizes in the meta-physical/personal issues of the narrative, which is then empowered to reveal both the envisioned structure of history and its fluid continuity. It seems to me that the themes of diachrony and synchrony properly apply here in that Invisible Man embodies the diachronous, spatial, continuing subject of particular historical depth or memory. In history, the individual is the key to both procedures, for he can arrest time, as the form of the novel does, and examine its related details in leisurely detachment, but he cannot escape it, either personally or historically, and is, therefore, detached only in a kind of suspended, temporary judgment. In short, through his activities, he is an image of man talking, furiously, unto death, lifting the weight of his aging flesh by the power of his tongue. Invisible Man confesses:

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare? Why should I be dedicated and set aside--yes, if not to at least tell a few people about it? There seems to be no escape. Here I've set out to throw my anger into the world's face, but now that I've tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns, and I'm drawn upward again. So that even before I finish I've failed (maybe my anger is too heavy, perhaps being a talker, I've used too many words). But I've failed. . . . I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain. . . . And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love.

Moving out of an infant inevitability toward a final one, Invisible Man embraces history as an act of consciousness. Paradoxically, history is both given to him and constructed by him, the emphatic identification of contemplative and active modes, and his refusal of the historical commitment, to remember and go forward, is certain death. Invisible Man charts the adventures of a black personality in the recovery of his own historical burden. This restorative act, to get well and remember and reconstruct simultaneously, is the dominating motif of the novel, and its various typological features support this central decision.
As the subject of recovery, Invisible Man must assume all, must take upon himself the haunted, questioning, troubled, even self- subversive, stance of one who insists on telling others. This telling fulfills a bardic task, an oracular chore, and one would do well to refuse either, but pain compels Invisible Man to talk. He calls it "nightmare" and essentially speaks to us out of his own sustained bardic trance, while as an ignorant youth, he spoke from the nightmare of others. We shall see shortly how these layers or phases of speech work. In addition, Invisible Man is "on" to something else in the quoted passages. The questions that he poses function on more than one level: Rhetorically, they hustle on the ploys and motions of argument just as the interrogative formulation has done throughout the novel. Then dramatically, the questions situate particular trouble. Uttered or held back, they are often a symptom of pride and confusion, and Invisible Man has had his share of both, but syntactically, the questions complement a principle of iteration that distinguishes both the Prologue and the Epilogue, encircling the structure. This principle of iteration, if we look closely, ratifies a decisive ambiguity beneath the surface symmetry of the text. From the Epilogue, this passage excerpted in the initial quotation is suggestive:

The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness. So it is that now I denounce and defend, or feel prepared to defend. I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt . . . to the point of invisibility. (IM, 437)

Each time a word or phrase is repeated, it comes back with a new twist of meaning, an enhancement and echo, pursuing its ambiguity with passion. This repetitive activity is one of "destructing," a flight from certainty toward systematic skepticism, in order to reconstruct the terrible complexity of decision. But enhancement is an enrichment, even though it borders on the tedious. Caring almost overmuch for linguistic entanglement, Invisible Man threatens a vision of nausea and the love of detail as neurotic indulgence, but he recalls what he has said earlier about the "possibility of action" and determines to come out of his hole:

Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out. I must emerge. (IM, 438)

I think we can take him at his literal word, though he is eloquently slippery, or conceptually athletic, with formulations in this passage. He must emerge: Spatially underground, he will come up into the light of day again with his dark-skinned self, a little more noble and fierce than when he entered. Sharp on punning, which has been called an "overpopulated phonetic space," Ellison recreates the illusion of a mind ordering its space, determining its motions, and this is the domain of invisibility.
The involvements of mind, its complicated calibrations in the heat of experience, point to the deeper structures of the text and, characteristically, pursue a pattern of interlocking image-clusters which emanate from the centrality of the underground. I would also impute to Ellison a circularity of influence that I think is at work in the depths of the text. The privileged geometrical version of modernist writers, circles have wrought miracles. There are rivers still flowing and young homeless boys still thumbing rides on the open road. What startles even more is that critics are still startled by these clever workings as though the repeat performance had imagined the thing on its own. Ellison, however, is not as enamored of his structures as his critics. As I recall, he doesn't mention circles or depths in interviews about the book, confining himself to articulating its broad objectives, but Invisible Man cannily suggests how he wants his narrative read; reconciled to the chaos against which his "plan of living" has been conceived, he acquires a new sense of time:

Under the spell of the reefer I discovered a new analytical way of listening to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed in itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but space as well. I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths. And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it and looked around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flamenco. (IM, 7)

The italicized passage is unquestionably explicit about direction, and in the event that anybody misses it the first time, Dante signalizes the pit as a return to traditional configurations of the underground, but the mental location of this geography of descent places these images out of public view and restores them to their initial status of private madness.


Continues...

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Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction- Peter's Pans: Eating in the Diaspora
1. Ellison's "Usable Past": Toward a Theory of Myth
2. Formalism Comes to Harlem
3. A Hateful Passion, A Lost Love: Three Women's Fiction
4. Gwendolyn the Terrible: Propositions on Eleven Poems
5. "An Order of Constancy": Notes on Brooks and the Feminine
6. Interstices: A Small Drama of Words
7. Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed
8. Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book
9. "The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight": In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers
10. Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon
11. Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading
12. Notes on an Alternative Model—Neither/Nor
13. Who Cuts the Border? Some Readings on America
14. Faulkner Adds Up: Reading Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury
15. "All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife was Your Mother": Psychoanalysis and Race
16. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date
Notes
Index

Recipe

Black, White, and in Color offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past twenty years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project.


Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.