Enculturation: Monique Rooney on Larsen's *Passing*

"Recoil" or "Seize"?: Passing, Ekphrasis and "Exact Expression" in Nella Larsen's Passing

Monique Rooney

continued . . .

The scene of letter opening that inaugurates Passing introduces Clare through ekphrasis. The description is not directly of Clare but of the letter she has sent expressing her wish to see Irene. The opening of the novel via the scene of letter opening tropes on doubling, central to the novel's theorisation of passing, as a process of deferral, division and dilation: the letter represents and dissembles the body of the passer, while the passer is represented as a body that cannot completely efface itself in writing.

Irene's narration (writing) of Clare is explicitly inaugurated through reading Clare, as the theme of passing stresses the reciprocity of reading and writing practices. The letter (which delineates both the space of writing and the passer's representation of herself) is tropologically aligned with the body of the passer. The figure of the letter represents the passer as an opaque, out-of-reach, object:

It was the last letter in Irene Redfield's little pile of morning mail. After her other ordinary and clearly directed letters the long envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place and alien. (143)

Through Irene's discernment of the letter's ostentation and its concealment of a hidden, unclear intent, Larsen discloses the defining mark of the passer. The letter, like the passer, is deliberately enigmatic, willfully privileging style over content. The passer attempts to objectify herself as an abstract sign but discerned through the eyes of another passer, Irene, cannot completely detach from her origins. For instance, the letter's apparent duplicity (it "bore no return address to betray the sender") also makes the letter "immediately" readable to Irene (as an occasional passer herself Irene is a practised reader of passing). Irene sets about uncovering the passer's attributes by reading the letter's appearance: "furtive" but also "flaunting" and written in "purple ink" on "foreign paper" of "extraordinary" size. The purple ink is a metonym for the passer's foreignness; it relays the internal and authenticated status of blood as the non-apparent property which, inevitably, categorises the passer as a racialised, non-white subject despite her outward appearance. Ironically, Clare's invisibility is present through the misprision of hyper-visibility that serves ultimately to erase her existence. As illustrated by the ostentatious prose style, the act of passing discloses and presents hindrances to the importance of reading. Passing is an act that is inseparable from and necessary to the persistence and reproduction, or writing, of the self.

Clare's letter writes her white life as empty of meaning and life: "You can't know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of" (145). Like Clare's colorful text and decorative body, which cannot hide her true racial identity, the black past is written as being more vibrant than the present, which pales in comparison. This depiction of an exotic racial past attests to the passer's freedom in relation to her racialised reader, Irene. However, Passing also traces Irene's desire for mobility, firstly through her reading of Clare's letter, which operates via tourism as a kind of walking/seeing, and then through her memory of literally walking through Chicago: the city in which Clare lives. Irene slowly anatomises the ordinary act of opening a letter and effectively delays the act of reading:

Irene brought her thoughts back to the present, to the letter from Clare Kendry that she still held unopened in her hand. With a little feeling of apprehension, she very slowly cut the envelope, drew out the folded sheets, spread them, and began to read. (145)

The envelope, as Deborah McDowell observes, is a "metaphoric vagina" which Irene, fearing its content, "hesitates to open" (xxvi). This scene pictures reading through the figure of dilation, opening occurs both mentally and physically. The sight of the letter, "still held, unopened," sparks involuntary memories of Clare. This apprehensive preface to the sender's narrative also prefigures and stalls the story with a foreboding that suggests that it may be, in part, already read. Brought "back to the present," Irene's retrospection is figured as a conscious act that competes with the import of the letter: circuitously, the distinctive appearance of the letter is what brings back a flood of memories concerning its sender and moves Irene from the present to the past and back to the present again. This is sexualised by Irene's cutting of the letter and her spreading of the sheets as the letter becomes a metonym for Clare's passing body. The "hand," writes Leo Bersani, is the principle "agent of masturbation" in Freudian narrative as the tool for "manipulating the environment" but is also the part that is "indissociable from a certain form of surrender—from, ultimately, a loss of control" (28). Irene's desire to discipline Clare through her editing of the letter is almost overruled by her handling of it.

Irene takes pleasure in letter reading as a singular, private act: she blushes when she reads Clare's "wild desire" to see her again. Following the discovery of hidden racialised blood is the description of Irene's receptivity to Clare's flamboyant sexuality, which shows itself involuntarily in her "warm olive cheeks" (145). Like the narrative that follows, the letter is already playing its part as a detour redirecting the reader other than where she intends to go. The letter teases her and leads her on:

She ran through the letter, puzzling out, as best she could, the carelessly formed words or making instinctive guesses at them. (145)

Clare's words, reflecting her history as a runaway from a broken family in Chicago, are restless but also enigmatic. The significance of "unopened" or non-displayed thematic content introduces the importance of "outward appearance" in relation to the figure of the passer as a disingenuous author of self who has a strong investment in both concealment and display. [8] The depiction of both bodily and rhetorical writing as external sign that can elude thematic content is earlier evidenced in Passing by the fact that Irene relays very little about what the letter says but elaborates instead on its appearance: the florid style, the ostentatious handwriting and the apparent dissimulation. Like the body of the passer, the letter is reliable and destructive at once. The passer is the site at which representation begins and ends.

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