Examining Whiteness

Reading Clarice Lispector Through Bessie Head and Toni Morrison

Lucia Villares

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351193894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Critics consider Clarice Lispector the leading female writer in the Brazilian literary canon. Her connections with the nation, however, seem to magically disappear as her work is analysed. This paradox is the starting point for this analysis of the works of an author who - despite being born in the Ukraine - grew up to be an irreplacable presence in Brazilian literature. Non-Brazilian authors, such as the South African Bessie Head and the North American Toni Morrison, provide triggering concepts to help tackle a blind-spot in Brazilian culture: the issue of racial difference. From this new perspective, overlooked black characters in Lispector's work become crucial and relevant, and whiteness emerges as an unexamined set of norms."

PART I

CHAPTER 1
A Question of Power: Unspeakable Miscegenation

Pathology is the place where history talks its loudest, most grating voice.

JACQUELINE ROSE, 1998: 109

As explained in the introduction my aim is to investigate the unspeakable in Lispector’s fiction, arguing that mentioning racial difference was taboo in Brazil at the time when she was writing. Lispector’s work touches on this taboo area, developing the tensions arising from instances where racial difference interferes with subject formation. The obsession with the question ‘who am I?’ and the consequences that this has for the protagonist’s agency and development of the plot is partly due to the fact that the subject confronts whiteness, and this confrontation contradicts and invalidates the common-sense notion of a mestizo race, according to which racial difference should be irrelevant. In this confrontation the subject loses her sense of belonging to a national community: hence the crisis and the need to reconsider who she is. In this chapter I will develop several notions that have emerged from my reading of the novel A Question of Power by the South African writer Bessie Head, which have helped me explore the question of racial difference in Lispector’s texts. I will also refer to Head’s short-story ‘Life’, first published in the anthology The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (1977).

A Question of Power takes us straight into the space of pathology that we will investigate in relation to Lispector. This novel depicts the psychological fragmentation of a self as a result of a radical situation of exclusion. The ban on miscegenation, an important element for the maintenance of the South African regime of racial segregation based on white supremacy, is at the core of this situation.

The novel is also important because of Head’s insistence on integrating the protagonist’s experience into a rational argument. As I will go on to explain in more detail, Head does not romanticize the pathological experience but insists on explaining it in rational terms, inserting the pathology into an historical context. Another element that is highlighted in this narrative is the importance of belonging to a community in order to develop a sense of being a subject. The idea that individuals need to belong in order to be is therefore crucial.

A Question of Power is Head’s attempt to narrate her own experience of mental breakdown. The novel shows how vectors of power, as described previously, work together and reinforce each other, maintaining a hierarchical power structure through which a particular racial, gender and social stratification is preserved. This status quo is maintained through discursive practices that determine what is understood as human and normal, excluding what does not conform to this notion.

The extreme position of exclusion in the case of Bessie Head’s A Question of Power illuminates the ways in which unspeakability works. The book shows how social stratification operates to maintain a specific status quo identified with a certain vision of the nation and reveals the articulations and processes described above. Using the metaphor of Machado de Assis’s mirror, where the baroque frame, together with the army uniform, gave the protagonist the parameters through which he could understand himself and his surrounding world, A Question of Power illuminates what lies behind the mirror, showing articulations that must remain invisible in order that the framework and the mirror can continue to work. When these articulations are exposed the framework collapses, and some of the ‘magical’ power of the mirror is revealed. The mirror becomes a social artefact with a function that goes far beyond the physical process of reflecting a visual reality. As a social artefact it relies heavily on social constructions. It does more than reveal appearances to a subject, appearances which, if it were not for the mirror itself, would be visible only to another. The mirror embodies a function that is cultural and political as well as social; it confirms (or denies) to the subject his/her acceptable human condition.

Bessie Head was born in 1937, at a time when miscegenation was illegal in South Africa. Her white mother, Bessie Amelia Birch, became sexually involved with a black man working on her family’s farm and became pregnant. Her family put her in a mental hospital, where she gave birth to Bessie, who was then given to a foster family. Bessie’s mother never left the mental institution and died when her daughter was six years old. Bessie Head grew up believing that her foster mother was her biological mother. When she was thirteen, social workers removed her to a missionary school. She was then told about her biological mother and her ‘mental illness’. This knowledge came as a shock to Head, especially because it was presented as a foregone conclusion that Head herself was bound to become mad. Later on in her life, soon after leaving South Africa in 1964 on a one-way exit permit to work as a teacher in Botswana, Head experienced two episodes of mental breakdown. At that time she was a single mother refugee living with a young son. She lived under this precarious refugee status for almost fifteen years, being granted citizenship of Botswana only in 1979, during which time she had written and published three novels and a collection of short stories. She died in 1986, aged 49.

A situation of total exclusion or exile is the point of departure of Bessie Head’s writing in A Question of Power. The word ‘exile’ here has at least three connotations. First, ‘exile’ in the physical, geographical sense of the individual who leaves her country of origin. Second, ‘exile’ in the more drastic sense of the individual who, as Franz Fanon puts it, has no ‘ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man’ (Fanon, 1986: 110); who, in other words, has been deprived of the right to belong to the human category. Thirdly, the book deals with exile in the psychological sense of having lost the ability to communicate, to confer meaning on expression; that is, being exiled from what is considered normality, not simply in terms of behaviour but in terms of language. The result is a book that challenges the reader enormously, as it seems to contradict, from the start, the assumption that literature should facilitate communication and ‘welcome’ the reader. Here, communication between author and reader is not taken for granted. The reader is summoned to participate in an imaginary space where communication itself is at stake.

Judith Butler’s notion of the subject as constructed by exclusion is central to my reading of Head’s novel. According to Butler, subjectivity is constructed by rejecting and expelling what is considered not-human: creating a ‘constitutive outside’ in opposition to which one builds one’s own subjectivity. Butler’s claims that ‘sexual differences are indissociable from discursive demarcations’ and that ‘sex not only functions as a norm but is part of the regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs’ (Butler, 1993: 1) are important for an understanding of Head’s novel in that they explain the main character’s internalized sense of rejection and her disempowered position in relation to the plot.

As Desiree Lewis puts it, the novel rejects the position of a ‘sovereign writing subject and makes visible and powerful its muted other’ (Lewis, 1996: 74). A ‘sovereign writing subject’ occupies a space of enunciation, a right to speak, and relies on a ‘muted other’: a ‘constitutive outside’ in Butler’s terms. Head’s novel is written from the point of view of the constitutive outside. The purpose of the text is to give voice to (and create a discursive space for) something that seemingly had no place, no voice, no ontological resistance within the discursive space of whiteness.

Part of the internal subjective drama that Head exposes in A Question of Power is the struggle experienced by a mixed-race female outcast as she builds up a sense of her self-worth and a form of belonging to a social community. At the core of the novel’s argument is the idea that it is impossible to have a personal identity without having a sense of belonging to a social group. Under white supremacist regimes, the notion of an autonomous, independent, ‘free’ individual — as Toni Morrison makes clear in relation to the US — is a white construction that relies on having many outcast, expelled ‘constitutive outsiders’, who are often black. Robert Nixon points out how Head’s writing — in particular the books based on her research into oral history in Botswana, such as Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981), The Collector of Treasures (1977), and Tales of Tenderness and Power (1990) — helped her create a sense of origin and belonging: ‘The act of writing both fiction and an oral history of her adopted village helped this denationalized orphan improvise a genealogy.’ (Nixon, 1995: 159) Developing Nixon’s idea of Head’s need to ‘improvise a genealogy’, I would add that — despite A Question of Power being a radically different kind of literary work from those which Nixon selects as her major books — this novel represents a crucial step within Head’s work towards her creating a genealogy for herself in a new environment.

In A Question of Power, Elizabeth, the protagonist, interacts in a similar manner with ‘real people’ (such as her son Shorty, an American charity worker named Tom, an African woman named Kenosi, the authoritarian charity coordinator Camilla, and the doctor), and with her internal ghosts or ‘soul personalities’, such as Dan and Sello or Medusa. The narrative interweaves scenes in which Elizabeth confronts her ghosts and others in which she tries to carry on a normal life, undertaking productive activities, either as a teacher or as a worker in a community agricultural project. The reader gets a very concrete picture of the hellish experience of trying to develop a sense of self-worth, while having to deal with destructive internal figures such as Dan and Medusa. The relative internal peace that the protagonist achieves at the end of the novel — after being sent to a mental hospital twice — is due to the presence of positive ‘real’ figures such as Tom and Kenosi, who support and accept Elizabeth as she is — and the positive internal figure of Sello, who manages to neutralize the destructive effect of Dan. Despite Elizabeth’s brutal internal fragmentation, which incarcerated her in solitude and isolation, she is constantly involved with the practical world around her: trying to work, to feed her child, to get on with her domestic chores. This allows her to build up positive social connections and to develop a measure of agency and empowerment. As the novel ends, it is clear that Elizabeth has finally managed to create for herself a sense of belonging: ‘As [Elizabeth] fell asleep, she placed one soft hand over her land. It was a gesture of belonging’ (Head, 1974: 206).

The novel depicts a situation where outside and inside have equal weight in terms of the narrative. The narrator does not draw a safe border between these two zones. Elizabeth’s internal struggles do not take place in a separate narrative domain, as if they were dreams, hallucinations, or simply thoughts. Consequently, the reader is forced to confront concepts such as ‘normality’, ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’. Many questions surface: What distinguishes reality and fantasy? What exactly is normality? Is it a body of normative notions of identity which shape individuals so that they conform to a status quo, or is it a necessary common ground for human co-existence? The novel oscillates between these two points without dismissing either: ‘One might propose an argument then, with the barriers of the normal, conventional and sane all broken down, like a swimmer taking a rough journey on wild seas’ (Head, 1974: 15; my emphasis).

This is the narrator’s invitation to the reader, which is also a warning about the dangers of embarking on a reading journey in which the borders separating interior reality (fantasy) and exterior reality (reality) have been punctured. Head’s use here of the word ‘argument’, qualifying the narrative as a logical, rational, conscious process, is very important. Despite being a novel that deals with unconscious processes, A Question of Power is not surrealist nor does it incorporate literary devices such as ‘stream of consciousness’ which might have provided an established literary space for such elements. Why did Head not make use of such a literary device, which is, after all, part of the modernist tradition? Through ‘stream of consciousness’, a narrator can incorporate unconscious elements into the narration, without deeply touching the narrative action. Action — and therefore the character’s agency — is preserved; the narrator allows elements of the unconscious to penetrate the narrative without fully disturbing the plot, as they remain somehow encircled and contained inside the character’s or the narrator’s voice. It is intriguing that Head — attempting to write about her own experience of mental breakdown — so fully managed to avoid this literary device. This appears to be a preventive measure, reinforcing her strategy of creating a novel that is an argument. Head is not satisfied with drawing an aesthetic space where unconscious elements can simply interact with the logic of an action that remains estranged or distanced from these elements. The project here is a more radical and painful one. Head is trying to incorporate what is illogical — seen as outside language and not making sense — into the logic of consciousness. Stream of consciousness allows for an idealization of the unconscious. Head, however, does not linger in the unconscious as a provisional suspension of consciousness. The unconscious thus plays a more effective role in the plot than would be allowed by the use of stream of consciousness. The ‘soul figures’ appear as ghost-characters who almost take control of and drive the narrative, while the narrator retains a position of reserve — albeit always holding on to consciousness. The narrator in A Question of Power never gives up her attempt to understand, to think and explain.

But who exactly is this narrator? We are dealing here with an autobiography. This restricts the narrator to telling the biographical ‘truth’, necessarily limiting her freedom to expand into fiction. The narrator cannot divest herself of who she is and what she has experienced. But the question of who the narrator is remains. It seems that one of the purposes of the novel is to answer this almost impossible question. We can perhaps be more certain about who this narrator is not. We could argue that the narrator is not Elizabeth, because Elizabeth is a character to whom the narrator refers. However, because it is a well-known fact that this book is autobiographical,¹ Elizabeth being the character that Head created to represent herself, it follows that the narrator is necessarily mixed up with Elizabeth herself. One could say that this is a narrative complexity typical of any autobiographical narrator. However, here we are dealing with ghosts depicted as characters operating in the narrative at the same level as the other ‘real’ characters. These ghosts are not placed in a space of dream, fantasy, or the super-natural. In fact, from a certain point of view these invading entities are not ghosts, because they play a role too important in a plot that aspires to be an argument and therefore a plot that needs to be seen as logical, almost scientific.

These ‘soul personalities’ are based on real people Elizabeth encountered in the village of Motabeng. When the novel ends, we as readers can imagine that they continue to live their lives there. Sello and Dan (and to a certain extent Medu...