 |
|
"Recoil" or "Seize"?: Passing, Ekphrasis and "Exact Expression" in Nella Larsen's Passing Monique Rooney continued . . .  | |
|
Paglia's, Stewart's and Edelman's descriptions of the face evoke the subject through a fragmented bodily surface that remains elusive, that is partial and limited to reading and being read. Likewise, the passer depends on superficial parts and on circulation in a scopic economy. Part subject/part object, reliant on both looking and being looked at, the passer problematises the meaning of subjectivity and particularly challenges such individualistic concepts as purity, wholeness and singularity. Thus, although the passer depends on passing to become a proper subject, the act of passing troubles subjectivity itself. Passing is a retreat from an over-objectified (black, queer, etc.) position and is a desire for less visibility (and hence less bodily restriction). But since passing privileges the value attached to categories such as whiteness and heterosexuality, which are un-spectacular or un-remarkable, it also draws attention to those subject positions that have historically evaded definition. Both black and white/queer and straight are thus fetishised and objectified. Although passing is a desire for freedom through abstraction, the over-reliance on the surface and the fragment that accompanies this crossing renders the passer an unstable subject. The process of crossing from black to white and from queer to straight suggests that neither the body nor the gaze can be stabilised or definitively categorized. The passer's failure to maintain a stable subject position is also an attribute of passing narratives. In most passing narratives, the passer fails to sustain the new-found identity, as passing narratives almost always end in the death of the passer or else in his/her capitulation to social and cultural norms. In passing-for-white novels, for instance, the passer's "black identity is generally outed and the passer is either annihilated or returned to the "black" community/identity from which he/she has escaped. Temporary empowerment through escape from the past thus ends in surrender or death. The passer's unsustainable desire for mastery is ultimately relinquished since it has been based on, and has utilised parts of, a body that will not be subordinated. The death of the passing body in the passin-for-white novel suggests that the body cannot ultimately be reduced to an essentialised identity, as the false totalisation of self (white skin=white identity) that accompanies passing cannot be sustained. In passing stories, the passer's overempowered, solipsistic disregard for both a multivalent body and social and cultural categorisations must lead to exposure, the passer cannot be represented and pass at the same time. The representation of passing thus engenders exposure but without this exposure the passer could not have been represented. The narrated passer is, through storytelling, fatally reduced to the visual limits of the external body. As a result of this reduction, passing is often deemed a deathly act. Although the passer is often read as a traitor who has fled his/her imprisoning identity, the passer is also a failure for not maintaining this position. This focus on death is also a product of the process of reading itself: readers of passing often judge passing's efficacy by focussing on the ending, that is whether or not the pass is wholly and successfully maintained, rather than on process. Categorisation is fatally outed, often condemned, in passing narratives to be simplifying and non-meaningful and this judgement forgets that access to representation was never based on totality. The condemnation of the passer's "fake," divided, identity annihilates the context, the multiple parts, that produced the passer in the first place. Like Paglia's representation of the Mona Lisa, the passing narrative acknowledges that bodily surface and textual detail plays a pivotal role in reading and writing. Passing relies on narrative as a detour, the fetishised body part (such as whiteness) remains a fabrication through the structure of the passing narrative, which returns the passer to his/her proper place. However, without this fabrication—the passer's raison d'etre—the passer could not have been represented in the first place. In passing stories, description makes the passer, it brings the passer to life. This description, which outlines those fixed, partial categories the passer is wanting to escape, is also analogous to Paglia's ekphrasis of the "Mona Lisa" in that it portends the loss of the reader's and the writer's complete power. Like the judgmental reader, the passer is a subject who momentarily desires total identity but is punished for this desire. Destructively reliable, the body is discovered to be an incomplete
locus of identification, engendering both the death and the life of passing. 1 | 2 | 3 | Next Node | 5 | 6 | 7 | Notes | Works Cited
|
