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"Recoil" or "Seize"?: Passing, Ekphrasis and "Exact Expression" in Nella Larsen's Passing Monique Rooney continued . . .  | |
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Part Two: Reading and Writing the Passer The passer is thus an enigma, a subject who is marked through his/her indeterminacy and whose attempt to escape categorisation is made visible in the passing narrative. This tension is explored in Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), [2] a novella which thematises both the racial and sexual passer (201). Passing is the story of two women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, who are reunited after a long separation. Irene who occasionally passes for white tells Clare's, the permanent passer's, story. Irene lives in Harlem with her husband and her two sons where she does conscientious "race work" for the black community. Once childhood friends in their hometown Chicago, Irene and Clare are accidentally reunited while Irene is holidaying in Chicago and visiting her father. It is on this occasion that Irene discovers that Clare is passing for white and married to a racist white financier, John Bellew. Disturbed at finding Clare is passing for white, Irene discourages Clare's desire for renewed friendship even though Irene can, and occasionally does, pass for white herself. Irene's passing position is to some extent faceless (as narrator Irene evades self-description) whilst Clare's passing body is obsessively and erotically pictured. In Passing, the permanent passer is spectacularised through the gaze of the casual passer who already partly knows what he/she looks for. As Edelman writes: "the fact of our ability to catch a glimpse of it [the faceless face of the homosexual] here bespeaks the possibility that we might not have done so had we not been prepared to identify what otherwise has the ability to 'pass'" (219). Irene's evasion is, typically, unsustainable: Clare eventually follows Irene back to Harlem where she becomes dangerously involved with Irene, her family and the "black" community. It is there that Clare's hidden racial identity is eventually outed to her white husband. This outing, or what Butler refers to as a "killing judgment" (175), threatens Irene's exposure and climaxes in her murder of Clare. The reduction of the body to a narratable, overdetermined part informs the structure of Larsen's Passing, an allegory, as Kate Lilley writes, of passing as "the prospect of 'outing'" which "is accompanied by a will to closure and simplification" (87). A politics of "outing," concerned with race, gender and sexuality, has also surrounded the critical reception of Passing, as the text's problematisation of categorisation proliferates through its production and reception. Critics of Passing have been centrally concerned with the relation between reading, writing and identity politics. For instance, the theme of homosexual passing in Passing has recently been seen as at least as important as the theme of racial passing. [3] A lesbian subplot first elucidated by Deborah McDowell has received recent critical attention from Barbara Johnson, Judith Butler, Ann DuCille and Valerie Smith. [4] Often seen as a less effective text than Larsen's earlier novel, Quicksand (1928), about one woman's desire for escape from her racial origins, Passing is read as a multilayered, secretive text worthy of closer analysis. [5] This critical practice, which seeks and finds added authenticity in the hidden meaning, implies that the immediately visible is both unreliable and a site for discovery. McDowell argues that passing is both theme and structure in Larsen's complex text, as the drama of racial passing covers a second passing theme: the more "dangerous subplot" of Irene Redfield's homoerotic desire for Clare Kendry, the racial passer (xxx). For McDowell, Irene's murder of Clare is a subterfuge for the homoerotic subtext which hides within the "safe and familiar" theme of racial passing. Homosexual passing, it is implied, is more dangerous and more "radical" because it is hidden (xxx). In this formulation Clare becomes important to the plot of racial passing, whilst Irene is seen to be the agent of desire in the homoerotic subplot. The privileging of Irene as narrator, as speaking subject, and subsequently as the producer of the text's central homosexual themes not only overlooks the insistence in the novella on Irene's role as a reading and a read subject, who often finds herself the object of Clare's gaze, but also does not account for the specific structure of the passing novel which revalues the meaning of the spectacle. [6] The tendency to conflate the spectacle with lack of meaning is cognate with the reading of passing as an ultimately deathly rather than life-affirming narrative. McDowell's reading of Irene as narrator/spectator and Clare as spectacle also informs her view that the novella's concluding murder is a symbolic burial, a form of social and literary repression. In my reading, Irene's narration of Clare's story ostensibly posits Irene as the controlling subject and Clare as the passive object of a melodramatic plot. The theme of passing, as already argued, not only oscillates between fixed categories but between spectator and spectacle. This plays havoc with the authentication of the narrating subject as the sole producer of the narrative. Passing is the narrative's textual strategy, a form which depends on a body that can only be incompletely defined. As Edelman writes, the passer stands for the "making face" of facelessness that is necessary to narration. As the most obvious passer, Clare Kendry (who passes for white) is positioned as a threat to stability. [7] In particular she is a figure of sexual and racial ambiguity and readability. Irene first encounters Clare in the Drayton Hotel where she herself is passing. At first not recognising her childhood friend, Irene assumes that the woman who stares at her detects that she is passing. Irene launches into a vivid description of this strangely familiar face, which is defined by its textual elusiveness. Through her obsessive descriptions of Clare's eyes and mouth, Irene crosses the sensory modes of sight and touch. Clare's eyes are able to still her viewer—they are "arresting," "slow and mesmeric": "Into those eyes there came a smile and over Irene the sense of being petted and caressed" (161). The face is then contradictorily described through its intangibility ("withdrawn and secret"), which engenders in Irene a state of instability, "a fog of uneasiness" (161). She is gripped by a desire to name Clare's attributes but they are "too vague to define," "too remote to seize" (151). The impulse "to seize" that which is remote and inaccessible is later counterbalanced by the description of her resistance: late in the novella, Irene finds herself "recoiling" from the attempt to define Clare. The tactile verbs, "seize" and "recoil," articulate the provocation and thwarted desire Irene experiences on watching the passing woman who is unable to control her racial status and flaunts her ability to cross from black to white and back again. This partial mobility is seen by Irene to pervade every aspect of Clare's life and she begins to fear Clare as a figure of uncontainability. Like the blood that rushes to Irene's "warm olive cheeks" when she receives a letter from Clare and momentarily recognises her desire, Irene's will to pass, when faced with the letter's ekphrastic image of the passer, comes out through a confusion of sight and touch. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next Node | 6 | 7 | Notes | Works Cited
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