How to Read African American Literature

Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation

Aida Levy-Hussen

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479838141
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with legacies of the slave past, Aida Levy-Hussen’s argument develops on two levels: as a textual analysis of black historical fiction, and as a critical examination of the reading practices that characterize the scholarship of our time.

Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and feminist and queer theory, Levy-Hussen examines how works by Toni Morrison, David Bradley, Octavia Butler, Charles Johnson, and others represent and mediate social injury and collective grief. In the criticism that surrounds these novels, she identifies two major interpretive approaches: “therapeutic reading” (premised on the assurance that literary confrontations with historical trauma will enable psychic healing in the present), and “prohibitive reading” (anchored in the belief that fictions of returning to the past are dangerous and to be avoided). Levy-Hussen argues that these norms have become overly restrictive, standing in the way of a more supple method of interpretation that recognizes and attends to the indirect, unexpected, inconsistent, and opaque workings of historical fantasy and desire. Moving beyond the question of whether literature must heal or abandon historical wounds, Levy-Hussen proposes new ways to read African American literature now.

1

Against Prohibitive Reading (On Trauma)

“Wasness”

Among the many responses summoned by Kenneth W. Warren’s controversial polemic, What Was African American Literature? is Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s critical review essay, “Wasness,” which appears within a printed symposium in the June 13, 2011, issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books. As the title of his essay suggests, Nielsen is wary of Warren’s proposed periodization schema, and in his response, he seeks to trouble the points of initiation and closure Warren delineates. Whereas Warren defines African American literature as a “postemancipation phenomenon that gained coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation,”1 Nielsen retorts, “Why would anyone be satisfied with such a procrustean definition of the field of African American literature?” (Nielsen’s italics).2 For Nielsen, the claim of “wasness” is arbitrary and ideologically motivated: Despite its capacity to inspire impassioned response, its ultimate aim is to narrow or foreclose the future of African Americanist literary inquiry. “Wasness,” Nielsen argues, works to re-tool a conservative literary establishment that once exerted its regulatory power through pejorative questions about “isness” (i.e., is there an African American literature?).

Nielsen captures some of my skepticism toward Warren’s periodizing hypothesis but stops short of examining what most interests me about the rhetorical uses of “wasness.” In what follows, I argue that “wasness” serves as Warren’s antidote to the object of his most virulent critique: a literary and critical rejection of linear, objectivist history in the years since the decline of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Taking particular umbrage at the post–Civil Rights vogue in historical fiction, Warren identifies and derides what he sees as the pervasive, misguided desire of African American writers and critics to dissolve the fact of historical distance. Such desire, he argues, gains traction from its promise to position “present-day” actors “in the role of potential hero, or even freedom fighter, on behalf of a past that almost magically becomes our contemporary in terms of what it needs or demands from us.”3 Warren’s claims against such aspirations to literary heroism are those of the pragmatist. Countering fantasies of trans-historical identification and agency with an appeal to epistemological metrics of discrete periodization (such as chronology, progress, and fact), he rests his case on the decisive claim of “wasness.”

What Was African American Literature? exemplifies a growing body of criticism that casts black studies’ powerful orientation toward the past as the new and misguided dominant of creative and intellectual culture. This criticism contends that proliferating representations of the past as a timeless, living, moralizing force offer a wrong account of history because they hinge on knowledge claims that deny temporal differentiation, “divesting history of movement and change.”4 No figure is more frequently invoked as the face of this perceived threat than Toni Morrison’s voracious, beloved ghost who speaks the famous words, “all of it is now it is always now.”5 And, the argument goes, the collapse of what was into our understanding of what is isn’t just wrong; it’s dangerous. Through this act of chronological defiance, history ceases to be about the facts of what happened and instead comes into view through the “radical expropriation” of subjectivity and meaning.6 The experiential authority of the past’s “true” victims is usurped by a contemporary discourse that presumes to speak in their place, on behalf of modern resentments and desires.

The principle of temporal collapse that so offends critics such as Warren, Stephen Best, Douglas Jones, Walter Benn Michaels, and Robert Reid-Pharr is the very principle that defines the reading strategy I call “therapeutic reading”—a hermeneutic premised on the reader’s capacity for psychic transformation, by way of powerful textual encounters with the traumatic past. Michaels, for example, recasts the promise of therapeutic reading as its danger when he writes, “Setting out to remember ‘the disremembered,’ [Beloved] redescribes something we have never known as something we have forgotten and thus makes the historical past a part of our own experience.”7 In his view, books like Beloved are historical fiction in that they are novels about the past, but they are an insidious something more because they work to indoctrinate contemporary readers through the ventriloquized call of a pained and unappeased racial past.

The idea of “wasness” asserts itself as an epistemological check on contemporary authors and critics like Morrison, who in the name of impossible reparative desires, would compromise the singularity and boundedness of the irrecoverable past. Yet, as Nielsen anticipates, the critical mobilization of “wasness” works less to illuminate than to invalidate and end literary and critical interest in fantasies of historical return. As we will see, the point, for Michaels, is not to read Beloved in another way but to establish Beloved’s complicity in a toxic cultural formation. To describe this emergent mode of reading that compels the zealous rejection of an unfinished, accessible, or demanding past, I coin the term “prohibitive reading.” Authored as a global rejection of therapeutic reading, prohibitive reading regards “narratives of historical continuity and temporal compression”8 as strategies of inauspicious political conversion. On this basis, it aims to decenter—and often, to discredit—black literary studies’ enduring preoccupation with the topics of racial memory and the history of slavery.

My critique of prohibitive reading is extensive but not unsympathetic; it is also distinct from an endorsement of therapeutic reading. In fact, I contend that both of these reading strategies are built on foundational misperceptions about how trauma manifests and circulates in literary discourse, and I turn to trauma theory to offer a third alternative. Trauma theory is informative not only because of the self-evident truth that slavery was traumatic but, more specifically, because it enjoins the psychic structure of trauma to an epistemological critique of conventional modes of historical representation. By describing historical catastrophe’s disorienting effects on how we give and receive accounts of the past, trauma theory offers unique insight into the motives that compel the structure and style of black historical fiction and its criticism.

Traumatic Time in Contemporary Black Novels

The fundamental effect of trauma, as it is theorized in contemporary, cross-disciplinary humanistic thought, is the profound disruption of the “narrative unity of life.”9 This conceptualization begins with the assumption that human life is made intelligible, and thus meaningful, through cohesive, temporally organized stories that we tell about ourselves and, through this process, master. One’s sense of self, and of her place in history and the world, is determined in some measure by her grasp of history—the degree to which she achieves a sense of narrative continuity in, and narrative authority over, her life. Traumatic events interrupt the stories we tell about history and identity by introducing to our imagined life trajectory cognitively inassimilable circumstances of grand-scale horror or loss. Confronted by the unimaginable within the domain of the real, the traumatized subject becomes unable to wield history in the service of self-story. She can no longer coherently narrate her life because the crisis event renders her life incoherent to her. Thus, as opposed to the normative pattern in which people appropriate and arrange historical facts to tell their stories, the trauma victim becomes, to borrow a word from Cathy Caruth, “possessed” by history, haunted and claimed by a past that not only breaks from existing narratives of self but, moreover, appears to foreclose the very terms of conventional narrativity, such as chronology, self-consistency, and causality.10

I define traumatic time as a structure of narrative temporality prevalent in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century African American literature that defies chronological mapping and instead takes shape through repeated, affectively charged references to an original traumatic event. Traumatic time is non-linear, dis-unified, and re-generated by the impossible desire for a redemptive return to the past. Contemporary black writers emplot these psychic and temporal characteristics through “formal disturbance[s]” or “narrative rupture[s],”11 as well as various figures, including but not limited to haunting, possession, time travel, fantasy, dreams, and flights of the imagination.

Nearly thirty years after its publication, Morrison’s Beloved (1987) remains the best-known example of an African American novel structured by traumatic time, its influence manifest in the degree to which the figure of the sacrificed child of slavery returning in ghostly form has become a familiar trope within a broadly conceived American cultural imaginary.12 In her foreword to the novel’s 2004 reissue, Morrison describes her intention to reproduce for the reader trauma’s core experience of unresolved shock: “I wanted the reader to be kidnapped,” she writes, “thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population.”13 Beloved, in other words, is not only a novel about the trauma of slavery; it is a text whose very structure reproduces trauma’s disruptive gesture. A brief review of the novel’s plot illustrates this point.

Although the historical premise from which the book derives is Margaret Garner’s act of infanticide in the panic of being pursued under the Fugitive Slave Law, the reader does not encounter this tragedy in real time. Rather, as is characteristic of most accounts of post-traumatic memory, the reader realizes the catastrophe belatedly, partially, and in fragments. We first encounter the protagonist, Sethe (whose past is modeled on Garner’s), in 1873, seventeen years after she fled a Kentucky plantation, slit her daughter’s throat, and bartered sex for a tombstone engraved with the word “Beloved.” Her experience of the present, metaphorized as the home she shares with her surviving daughter, Denver, is haunted first by an invisible, restless spirit and later by that spirit made flesh. In her human form, the ghost announces her claim to Sethe’s past when she gives her name as “Beloved.”

Insatiable, compulsive, and bound to a catastrophic past that defies comprehension, Beloved is the embodiment of Sethe’s traumatic memory. Beloved’s characterological core, and the core of Sethe’s trauma, consists in the failure of mother love against the assaults of slavery. Unable to assimilate this failure to a plausible narrative of logic or meaning, Beloved obsessively mines Sethe’s memory for a maternal response to a wish that has already been foreclosed—a wish for the saving grace of “enough” love. “She left me behind. By myself,” Beloved’s complaint goes. “She is the one I need” (89). Or again, “She don’t love me like I love her. I don’t love nobody but her” (137).

Much as trauma is said to operate through the “possession of the one who experiences it,”14 Beloved threatens to consume Sethe, to overwhelm Sethe’s day-to-day life with her impossible, too-late demand to be remembered, loved, saved in time. Through the incessant force of Beloved’s grievance, Sethe herself becomes obsessed with the task of satiating the ghost. Her psychic life comes to mirror Beloved’s singularity of focus, excluding the social and the possibility of a livable present as an act of fidelity to a past that refuses to be forsaken. “There is no world outside my door,” Sethe claims as Beloved’s hold on her approaches the absolute. “I only need to know one thing. How bad is the scar?” (217).

“The scar” is at once the daughter’s fatal wound and the aporetic core of maternal memory that the wound produces. Sethe cannot escape the gravitational pull of the horrific past, but neither can her memory articulate or fully confront the original traumatic event. Instead, she “circle[s] the subject,” “round and round, never changing direction” (189). The core of the “circle” that Sethe—and the text—asymptotically approach is, in Ann Snitow’s words, “the vacuum, the absence” of “a gap in history, a blank in consciousness.”15 Although Snitow does not explore this line of thought further, her reference to the commanding power of an absence resonates with Shoshana Felman’s influential description of post-traumatic consciousness as “a missed encounter with reality, an encounter whose elusiveness cannot be owned and yet whose impact can no longer be erased, in taking hold of the [witness’s] life which will henceforth unwittingly, compulsively strive toward an impossible completion of the missed experience.”16 Emplotting just such a patterned dance between fear and longing, re-experiencing and forgetting, Beloved reveals traumatic consciousness as its psychic and narrative infrastructure.

It is by now commonplace to say that Beloved is a book about traumatic memory—yet, in an apparent paradox, many critics also cite Beloved to claim that the term “trauma” is categorically inadequate to the cultural and historical specificity of African American affective life. This criticism adheres to a different logic than the case for “wasness,” which holds that traumatic time is inherently and problematically opposed to the “truth” of periodization. Rather, it points to the medical establishment’s traditions of misperception, exclusion, and abuse to question the applicability of psychopathological terminology for discussions of African American expressive culture. Barbara Christian, for example, proposes that Morrison’s “unique accomplishment” in Beloved consists in her recognition of an Afrocentric cosmology as the most appropriate prism through which to explore the phenomenon of intergenerational psychic damage in black communities.17 And indeed, Morrison’s own writing, in and beyond the oeuvre of her fiction, tends to disavow psychoanalytic language in favor of vernacular descriptions of black historical consciousness and mental distress. For example, her neologism “rememory,” coined in dialogue between Sethe and Denver, describes something very much like the psychoanalytic concept of trauma but also registers the importance of indigenous claims to naming and explaining psychic experience.

Such resistance to medicalizing discourses, including psychoanalysis, must be taken seriously, as an interpretive orientation grounded in protracted historical precedent. Indeed, “race” itself—a Western cultural trope that produces the otherness it purports to name—has frequently marshaled its authority through false assertions of medical “truths.”18 An example famous for its unabashed absurdity is the nineteenth-century diagnostic category of “drapetomania,” a psychiatric condition unique to enslaved African Americans, symptomatized by a pathological compulsion to run away! Finding ample evidence of such instances in which racial “sciences” of “psychic damage” are leveraged against the rights and freedoms of African Americans, the historian Daryl Michael Scott voices a popular view when he concludes, “Experts who study social groups . . . should place the inner lives of people off limits.”19

Indeed, even the modern discourse of trauma theory, though it carries no egregious history of anti-black use, has habitually neglected or tokenized African American experiences, thus inadvertently alienating a significant contingent of contemporary black writers and critics. As Michael Awkward observes, despite the growing scope and influence of trauma studies over the last twenty years, “The psychic upheavals resulting from slavery and Jim Crow [remain] parenthetical asides and afterthoughts” in the field’s most significant texts.20 For example, Caruth’s highly acclaimed and hugely influential two-volume special issue of American Imago, later consolidated as the edited collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), includes seven essays on post-Holocaust Jewish memory; one essay on women, rape culture, and sexual assault; one essay on the AIDS crisis; an essay about Hiroshima; and an essay about a community’s response to a catastrophic, underground gasoline leak. Its anthologized essays make no mention, even in passing or as a relevant intersectional coordinate, of African American psychic life.

The diagnostic category of post-traumatic stress disorder famously took shape through lobbies for veterans’ rights and sexual assault survivors, but trauma as a field of humanistic inquiry has most energetically emphasized the historically and culturally specific experiences of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. My point, of course, is not to diminish the horror or the widespread cultural effects of the Holocaust, nor is it to downplay the extraordinary intellectual and moral value of the prolific literature on trauma that has come out of Jewish studies. On the contrary, my ultimate position amounts to advocacy for e...