In spite of the very real difference in the level of literary accomplishment, Mitchell’s mammy is like Dinesen’s Kikuyu in important ways. Similes chosen to bring each into view are from the animal kingdom; both black women are speechless with grief when departure is imminent; the severance in both instances is seen as trauma, a devastating deprivation to the black woman and in Mitchell, to the white woman as well. The “not one word spoken” by the Kenyan woman becomes the garbled babble of a black woman (who in sixty years of dialogue with her mistress had never learned to pronounce the word “white”) and a quiet begrudging while her young mistress weeps.
These early and classic relationships between women of different races, frequently maternal, friendly, loving, are echoed in Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl in a mesmerizing deathbed scene with another surrogate, a woman named Jezebel with whom the mistress had a close and mutually satisfying friendship. The dialogue is revelatory.
“You must eat to keep up your strength.”
“Don’t want nothin’, Missy.”
“Can’t you think of anything that would taste good to you? Now think a minute, and tell me. Isn’t there something?”
The old woman gave a sly chuckle; one paper eyelid winked, and her eyes gave out a flash of grim humour. “No’m, I cain’t think of nothin’ I could relish, lessen maybe it was a li’l pickaninny’s hand.”
She turned back again to the bed, took up Jezebel’s cold grey claw, and patted it. “Good-bye til another time, Auntie. Now you must turn over and have a nap.”
Evocative as this scene is, rampant with pleasant memories and a shared view of the world, its serenity explodes with flashes of the serviceable but sinister language of racial antagonism. The hint of cannibalism (understood to be “natural” to Africans) and not the patting of a hand, the patting of “a cold grey claw.”
But something else begins to take place in fiction: changes that are usually attributed to social climate; the signs of the times. In any case, speech permissible in the nineteenth and early twentieth century is crude in the late twentieth. But that may not be the whole story. Surely the entrance of post–Harlem Renaissance minority voices into the political and literary landscape has had a share in this alteration. Perhaps a readership and a critical community that is intolerant of the easy dismissal of others. In any case there are fewer instances of unreflective dismissals; deeper probes into these relationships; more exacting observations of these exits and disruptions in the relationships. In 1946 Carson McCullers published The Member of the Wedding.” Before that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
In both novels black women exit the life of the protagonist. The scene between Berenice and Frankie in The Member of the Wedding is one of struggle for control in which we witness the jealousy of the surrogate mother at the flight of the child. Then there is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, where it is clear Lee is working away from certain assumptions of unknowableness. Although Calpurnia has self-revealing conversations only with other blacks and children—never white adults—the grapple for language to deal with these complicated matters is apparent. There are no leave-taking moments in the novel, nor in Lillian Hellman’s autobiographical work that has several recollections of her servant, Caroline Ducky. Yet the point is sustained by the reach of these authors for a seriousness not shown in earlier writers. There seems to be a blossoming suspicion among these white women writers that complex thought, ambiguity, nuance are actually possible in their black characters, and that their speech does not require the strange, creative spellings that no other character’s speech needs.
Lucille Clifton opens her own lovely memoir, Generations, in 1976, with a conversation between strangers of each race—a conversation that rings with the sayable and the unsaid.
But two years before that Diane Johnson fills in those gaps that lie about in Clifton’s memoir and in other works. Her 1974 The Shadow Knows digs deeply into these relationships. The narrator has two domestics critical to her life: one disruptive, vengeful, grotesque; another benevolent, supportive, cheerful. The reflective quality of the prose is worth quoting.
“But I’m trying to confess that I don’t think I experience Osella as a human, not really.” “And she had seemed dead on arrival, delivered lonely and bereaved and far from home to our zoo, like some insignificant common animal barely noticeable to the keeper, me, who was more preoccupied with the misery of the delicate gazelle—me.” Here the animal characteristics are equally distributed and the more lyric “gazelle” is delivered with irony. Later she muses, “I notice that whenever I describe Osella or think of her, it is in metaphors of things not people, or of fat animals. It is as if I did not consider her human, this fellow woman with whom I shared my children and my home and many hours….There was nothing in her that wouldn’t sit down sisterly and share a recipe but there was something in me.” This is no casual, lazy (Margaret Mitchell) language: Osella is impossibly if understandably lunatic. While the death of Ev, who follows Osella, is a subject of the narrator’s deep personal mourning.
Language ricochets in these race-inflected farewell scenes. In Beloved also there is a leave-taking between a white girl and a black one. The scene moves toward the parting that must take place between them, yes, but the scene is also meant to enact a goodbye to the impediments of race right in the middle of highly racialized dialogue. Each one begins by speaking in the language of the period. The power relationships are manifest in the casually racist remarks of Amy and the deceitful acquiescence of Sethe. Following their joint venture in the birth of Denver, they speak, finally, not of farewell, but of memory; how to fix the memory of one in the mind of the other—or, as with Sethe, how to immortalize the encounter beyond her own temporal life. While the action is separation, the parting of ways, the language is meant to displace it, is meant to invite meditation on its necessity. Washing up on the bank of the Ohio River is our knowing that if both women had been of the same race (both white or both black) they could have, might have, would have stayed together and shared their fortune. Neither one felt she belonged anywhere. Both are traveling through unknown, strange territory looking for a home. So the language is designed to imply the solitude of their farewell is somehow shaming.
In the later decades of the twentieth century the dissolution of the restrictions imposed by race consciousness on expressive language begins to erode, as in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. Instead of suppressing, ignoring the possibilities in these relationships, instead of the comfort of stereotype and the safety of an indolent imagination, one begins to hear not Dinesen’s silence or Mitchell’s gabble, but verbal fencing; not the unmitigated devotion or disobedience of servants, but the wrestle over the meaning of home; the probing of subtle jealousies, complicated forms of resistance, hatred, love, anger; the learned and earned exchange of mutual perception.
I think I know why African American women writers ignored the temptation to widen the racial divide rather than understand it. I am not sure why white women writers felt compelled to do likewise. It could not have been a simple choice between aestheticizing politics or politicizing aesthetics. Nor could it have been a juvenile yearning to deserve the terms “humanitarian” and “universal.” Those terms, so tainted with the erasure of race, are no longer adequate. I leave it to others to name the equipoise that now resides in literature, especially of/by women, if not in the public discourse that seeks to comprehend it.
There already exists the material from which a new paradigm for reading and writing about literature can arise. Writers have already said farewell to the old one. To the racial anchor that weighed down the language and its imaginative possibilities. How novel it would be if, in this case, life imitated art. If I could have had that television interview reflecting my life’s real work. If, in fact, I was not a (raced) foreigner but a home girl, who already belonged to the human race.
Invisible Ink
&n
bsp; Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading
I ONCE WROTE an article for a popular magazine that had a small irregular “arts” section. They wanted something laudatory about the value or perhaps just the pleasure of reading. This last noun, “pleasure,” annoyed me because it is routinely associated with emotion: delight accompanied by suspense. Reading is fundamental—emphasis on the “fun.” At the least, of course, it is understood, in popular discourse, to be uplifting, instructive; at its best encouraging deep thought.
Thoughts about the practice of reading engaged me early on as a writer/imaginer as well as an absorbent reader.
I began reading when I was three years old, but it was always difficult for me. Not difficult as in hard to do, but difficult in the sense of having a hard time looking for meaning in and beyond the words. The first grade primer sentence “Run, Jip, run” led me to the question, Why is he running? Is that a command? If so, where to? Is the dog being chased? Or is it chasing someone? Later on when I tackled “Hansel and Gretel” more serious questions flooded. As they did with nursery rhymes and games: “ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies.” It was some time before I understood that the rhyme, the game was about death during the bubonic plague.
So I chose for this magazine an attempt to distinguish reading as a skill and reading as an art.
This is some of what I wrote:
“Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards—the color of silver—and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Head’s trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant.”
In those opening sentences by Flannery O’Connor, she chose to direct her readers to Mr. Head’s fantasy, his hopes. The ticking on a pillow, minus a pillow slip, is like brocade, rich, elaborate. Moonlight turns a wooden floor to silver and “casts a dignifying light” everywhere. His chair is “stiff and attentive” and seems to await an order from him. Even his trousers hanging on the chair’s back had “a noble air,” like the garment some great man has flung to his servant. So, Mr. Head has strong, perhaps unmanageable dreams of majesty, of controlling servants to do his bidding, of rightful authority. Even the moon in his shaving mirror pauses “as if it were waiting for his permission to enter.” We don’t really have to wait (a few sentences on) to see his alarm clock sitting on an overturned bucket or to wonder why his shaving mirror is five feet away from his bed, to know a great deal about him—his pretension, his insecurity, his pathetic yearnings—and to anticipate his behavior as the story unfolds.
In my essay, I was trying to identify characteristics of flawless writing that made it possible to read fiction again and again, to step into its world confident that attentiveness will always yield wonder. How to make the work work while it makes me do the same.
I thought my illustration was fine as far as it went, but what I could not clearly articulate was the way in which a reader participates in the text—not how she interprets it, but how she helps to write it. (Very like singing: there are the lyrics, the score, and then the performance—which is the individual’s contribution to the piece.)
Invisible ink is what lies under, between, outside the lines, hidden until the right reader discovers it. By “right” reader, I am suggesting that certain books are obviously not for every reader. It’s possible to admire but not become emotionally or intellectually involved in Proust. Even a reader who loves the book may not be the best or right lover. The reader who is “made for” the book is the one attuned to the invisible ink.
The usual dyad in literary criticism is the stable text versus the actualized reader. The reader and his readings can change, but the text does not. It is stable. As the text cannot change, it follows that a successful relationship between text and reader can only come about through changes in the reader’s projections. It seems to me that the question becomes whether those dormant projections are products of the reader or the writer. What I want to suggest is that may not always be so. While the responsibility of interpretation is understood to be transferred to the reader, the text is not always a quiet patient the reader brings to life. I want to introduce a third party into the equation—the author.
Some writers of fiction design their texts to disturb—not merely with suspenseful plots, provocative themes, interesting characters, or even mayhem. They design their fiction to disturb, rattle, and engage the entire environment of the reading experience.
Withdrawing metaphor and simile is just as important as choosing them. Leading sentences can be written to contain buried information that completes, invades, or manipulates the reading. The unwritten is as significant as the written. And the gaps that are deliberate, and deliberately seductive, when filled by the “right” reader, produce the text in its entirety and attest to its living life.
Think of “Benito Cereno” in this regard, where the author chooses the narrator’s point of view to deliberately manipulate the reading experience.
There are certain assumptions about categories that are regularly employed to arouse this disturbance. I would like to see a book written where the gender of the narrator is unspecified, unmentioned. Gender, like race, carries with it a panoply of certainties—all deployed by the writer to elicit certain responses and, perhaps, to defy others.
Race, as the O’Connor, Coetzee, and Melville examples show, contains and produces more certainties. I have written elsewhere about the metaphorical uses to which racial codes are put—sometimes to clarify, sometimes to solidify assumptions readers may hold. Virginia Woolf with her gaps, Faulkner with his delays both control the reader and lead her to operate within the text. But is it true that the text does not formulate expectations or their modification. Or that such formulation is the province of the reader, enabling the text to be translated and transferred to his own mind?
I admit to this deliberate deployment in almost all of my own books. Overt demands that the reader not just participate in the narrative, but specifically to help write it. Sometimes with a question. Who dies at the end of Song of Solomon and does it matter? Sometimes with a calculated withholding of gender. Who is the opening speaker in Love? Is it a woman or a man who says “Women spread their legs wide open and I hum”? Or in Jazz is it a man or woman who declares “I love this city”? For the not right reader such strategies are annoying, like a withholding of butter from toast. For others it is a gate partially open and begging for entrance.
I am not alone in focusing on race as a non-signifier. John Coetzee has done this rather expertly in Life & Times of Michael K. In that book we make instant assumptions based on the facts that the place is South Africa, the character is a poor laborer and sometimes itinerant; that people tend to shy away from him. But he has a severe harelip that may be the reason for his bad luck. Nowhere in the book is Michael’s race mentioned. As readers we make the assumption or we don’t. What if we read the invisible ink in the book and found it to be otherwise—as the trials of a poor white South African (of which there are legion)?
Clearly, the opening sentence of Paradise is a blatant example of invisible ink. “They shot the white girl first, and took their time with the rest.”
How much will the reader’s imagination be occupied with sorting out who is the white girl? When will the reader believe she has spotted her? When will it be clear that while having that information is vital to the town vigilantes, does it really matter to the reader? If so, whatever the choice made it is the reader I force into helping to write the book; it is the reader whom I summon in invisible ink, destabilizing the text and reorienting the
reader.
From “Are you afraid?” the opening sentence of A Mercy, calming the reader, swearing to do no harm, to the penultimate chapter’s “Are you afraid? You should be.”
Writing the reading involves seduction—luring the reader into environments outside the pages. Disqualifying the notion of a stable text for one that is dependent on an active and activated reader who is writing the reading—in invisible ink.
Let me close with some words from a book that I believe is a further example.
“They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood.”
Sources
“Peril”: Remarks upon receipt of the 2008 PEN/Borders Literary Service Award. New York, New York, April 28, 2008.
“The Dead of September 11”: Memorial Service. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, September 13, 2001.
“The Foreigner’s Home”: Alexander Lecture Series, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 27, 2002.
The Source of Self-Regard Page 38