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"Recoil" or "Seize"?: Passing, Ekphrasis and "Exact Expression" in Nella Larsen's Passing Monique Rooney continued . . .  | |
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The constraints of narrative convention mirror the limitations of the passer's body whose exposure prefigures her death. Like Pamela Caughie, I see the end of Passing not, as McDowell argues (xxxi), as a failure to follow through the text's transgressive possibilities, but as a "narrative necessity" (787). The passing narrator's (Irene's) survival is enabled through the narrated's (Clare's) death. Although most critics see Irene as the central perspective, they then locate Clare as the point of the novel's closure and thus the location of passing's failure, ignoring the fact that Irene's survival signifies passing's continuation. Irene's narrative persistence is based on Clare's annihilation, an annihilation that is justified by Irene through the perception that Clare's fraudulence as a passer poses a serious danger to her livelihood. In order to assert this, Irene must disavow her own passing position. Irene uses passing as catachresis, a deliberate abuse of the body's literal meaning. Irene must repress her own transgressive desire to pass, a repression that tropes on passing as bodily misrecognition, an ironic forgetting of the self as a fractured identity. It is, after all, Clare's ostensible lack of awareness, particularly of the power that her body holds, that most torments Irene. In the following passage, it is Clare's "faint smile" that signifies the passer's solipsistic disregard for the other:
The secretive "faint smile" figures the enigma of a superficial depth. In her "queering" of Passing, Judith Butler focuses on the narrative's "muted speech" in order to trick out the way "the conflict of lesbian desire in the story can be read in what is almost spoken, in what is withheld from speech, but which always threatens to stop or disrupt speech" (175). In this passage, it is what is apparently withheld from the face as a misreadable image that provokes Irene's desire to control, and to rewrite it in her own image. This misreading is central to an epistemology of passing, as a way of knowing that incorporates contested desires. Irene's fear, which belongs to the canny fear of the passer, is that the "faint smile" will open onto nothing, that beyond the surface there is only emptiness that leads to Clare's death. Irene, as narrator/author of Clare's story, murders Clare out of a fear of telling an empty secret: Clare must add up to more than a "pretty picture." Contradictorily, Irene's distrust of Clare's body as an unsustainable image is followed by the proof of Irene's desire to possess it. As evidenced by the final push, the hand on "Clare's bare arm" gestures towards the very freeing of the body that Irene fervently disavows. Both a murderous and a desirous touch, Irene's hand on Clare's bare arm momentarily breaks away from the tyranny of bodily surface as a visual epistemology to open up another kind of knowing. The terror of this knowing, which involves a sexual pass, is one that is possibly too final, like Irene's erotically charged fear of seeing Clare's "glorious body mutilated," after she has fallen from the window (240). Faced with the unstable image of the passer, the passer can only move towards and then away from identification, she can only "seize" and then "recoil" from "exact expression." Afraid but driven to "give it outline," Irene's gaze and passing body is a reminder of Edelman's "making face": "the fictional face with which we dissimulate the contingency, the randomness, or the facelessness of experience" (225). In passing, this wilful misrecognition enacts a distancing from the body which also acknowledges the body's destructive reliability. The body is found to be an incomplete locus of identification, both the death and the life of passing. As survivor, Irene is able to write the passing body—a masochistic activity that cannot finally escape the tragic mulatto's fate. The passer continues to write herself through bodily surface, an ephemeral and uncontainable site, which ironically contains and seals her destination. —Monique Rooney 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Notes | Works Cited
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