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
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 w
e 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.
“Racism and Fascism”: The Nation, May 29, 1995. Excerpt from Charter Day Speech, “The First Solution”: Howard University, Washington, DC, March 3, 1995.
“Home”: Convocation, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, April 23, 2009.
“Wartalk”: Oxford University, Oxford, England, June 15, 2002.
“The War on Error”: Amnesty International Lecture, Edinburgh, Scotland, August 29, 2004.
“A Race in Mind”: Newspaper Association of America Conference, San Francisco, California, April 27, 1994.
“Moral Inhabitants”: Response to “In Search of a Basis for Mutual Understanding and Racial Harmony” by James Baldwin, The Nature of a Humane Society: A Symposium on the Bicentennial of the United States of America, Lutheran Church of America, Pennsylvania Southeast Synod, University of Pennsylvania, October 29–30, 1976.
“The Price of Wealth, the Cost of Care”: Nichols-Chancellor’s Award, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, May 9, 2013.
“The Habit of Art”: Introduction to Toby Devan Lewis, the ArtTable Award, New York, New York, April 16, 2010.
“The Individual Artist”: National Council on the Arts, Washington, DC, February 14, 1981.
“Arts Advocacy”: Author’s personal archive.
“Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address”: Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, May 27, 1988.
“The Slavebody and the Blackbody”: America’s Black Holocaust Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 25, 2000.
“Harlem on My Mind”: Louvre Museum, Paris, France, November 15, 2006.
“Women, Race, and Memory”: Queens College, Queens, New York, May 8, 1989.
“Literature and Public Life”: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, November 17, 1998.
“The Nobel Lecture in Literature”: Nobel Prize Lecture, Stockholm, Sweden, December 7, 1993.
“Cinderella’s Stepsisters”: Barnard College Commencement Address, New York, New York, May 13, 1979.
“The Future of Time”: The Twenty-Fifth Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, Washington, DC, March 25, 1996.
“Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.”: Time Magazine Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Gala, New York, New York, March 3, 1998.
“Race Matters”: Race Matters Conference keynote address, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, April 28, 1994.
“Black Matter(s)”: Grand Street 40 (1991): 204–25. Clark Lectures, 1990. Massey Lectures, 1990.
“Unspeakable Things Unspoken”: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 7, 1988.
“Academic Whispers”: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, March 10, 2004.
“Gertrude Stein and the Difference She Makes”: Studies in American Africanism, Charter Lecture, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, November 14, 1990.
“Hard, True, and Lasting”: Robert and Judi Prokop Newman Lecture, University of Miami, Miami, Florida, August 30, 2005.
“James Baldwin Eulogy”: Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, New York, December 8, 1987.
“The Site of Memory”: Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
“God’s Language”: Moody Lecture, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, May 10, 1996.
“Grendel and His Mother”: Alexander Lecture Series, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 28, 2002.
“The Writer Before the Page”: Generoso Pope Writers’ Conference, Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York, June 25, 1983.
“The Trouble with Paradise”: Moffitt Lecture, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, April 23, 1998.
“On Beloved”: Author’s personal archive.
“Chinua Achebe”: Africa America Institute Award, New York, New York, September 22, 2000.
“Introduction of Peter Sellars”: Belknap Lecture, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, March 14, 1996.
“Tribute to Romare Bearden”: The World of Romare Bearden Symposium, Columbia University, New York, New York, October 16, 2004.
“Faulkner and Women”: Faulkner and Women, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie, Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi, 1986.
“The Source of Self-Regard”: Portland Arts: Lecture Series, Portland, Oregon, March 19, 1992.
“Rememory”: Author’s personal archive.
“Memory, Creation, and Fiction”: Gannon Lecture, Fordham University, Bronx, New York, March 31, 1982.
“Goodbye to All That”: Radcliffe Inaugural Lecture Series, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 3, 2001.
“Invisible Ink”: Wilson College Signature Lecture Series, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, March 1, 2011.
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Arts Advocacy
1 Or should as much attention be given to why as to how much and how long?
Unspeakable Things Unspoken
1 Author’s note: Older America is not always distinguishable from its infancy. We may pardon Edgar Allan Poe in 1843 but it should have occurred to Kenneth Lynn in 1986 that some young Native American might read his Hemingway biography and see herself described as a “squaw” by this respected scholar, and that some young men might shudder reading the words “buck” and “half-breed” so casually included in his scholarly speculations.
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