Stranger America

A Narrative Ethics of Exclusion

Josh Toth

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813941103
• eBook ISBN: 9780813941127
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Contradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America's democratic state. We need look no further than Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and victory for proof that early twentieth-century anxieties about individualism, race, and the foreign or intrusive "other" persist today. In Stranger America, Josh Toth tracks and delineates these anxieties in America's aesthetic production, finally locating a potential narrative strategy for circumnavigating them.

Toth's central focus is, simply, strangeness—or those characters who adamantly resist being fixed in any given category of identity. As with the theorists employed (Nancy, Žižek, Derrida, Freud, Hegel), the subjects and literature considered are as encompassing as possible: from the work of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen to that of Philip K. Dick, Woody Allen, Larry David, and Bob Dylan; from the rise of nativism in the early twentieth century to object-oriented ontology and the twenty-first-century zombie craze; from ragtime and the introduction of sound in American cinema to the exhaustion of postmodern metafiction.

Toth argues that American literature, music, film, and television can show us the path toward a new ethic, one in which we organize identity around the stranger rather than resorting to tactics of pure exclusion or inclusion. Ultimately, he provides a new narrative approach to otherness that seeks to realize a truly democratic form of community.

PART I

BEING WITHDRAWN

You are the only one to understand why it really was necessary that I write exactly the opposite, as concerns axiomatics, of what I desire, what I know my desire to be, in other words you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the guard, etc. I have necessarily written upside down—and in order to surrender to Necessity.

—JACQUES DERRIDA, ENVOIS

1 /Melancholics and Specters: Between James Weldon Johnson and Alan Crosland

I’ll go along with the charade

Until I can think my way out

—JAMES T. KIRK BOB DYLAN, “TIGHT CONNECTION TO MY HEART (HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY LOVE)”

A Hippopotamus Is Not a Ghost

The American dream is a melancholic’s fantasy.¹ Unwilling to forgo the promise of ontological immanence (in the form of solipsistic self-creation), America’s melancholic nevertheless dreams of democratic egalitarianism, assimilation, and communal wholeness. Such a dreamer denies the impossibility of reconciling his or her paradoxical desires. Instead of mourning for its loss, the melancholic sustains the possibility of an impossible object of desire. The moment exclusion is required to buttress a sense of selfhood (as defined by communal membership), we are witness to claims and promises of inclusivity and wholeness. These melancholic fantasies reify the abject otherness of the excluded subject/group while simultaneously maintaining the myth of pure inclusion—and thus, through a somewhat bewildering inversion, the myth of the autonomous (or finally immanent) self. The self, after all, is only ever revealed in relation. I am who and what I am because I am a member of one group and not a member of another. Yet my relation to the same necessarily entails difference, just as my relation to the different necessarily entails sameness. The melancholic (as national) idealist denies the impossibility of escaping the supplementary and corruptive nature of relation, the fact that (as Jean-Luc Nancy insists) “presence is impossible except as copresence” (“Being Singular” 62). I necessarily find myself in the whole, but that whole (like the individual) is defined by and determined through relation—inclusion and exclusion. I am never fully included, and the other is never fully excluded. I am, for instance, white because I am not black. However, my whiteness is never the same as another’s whiteness, and blackness is never exclusive of features with which I might otherwise identify.² In this sense, we cannot have inclusion without its opposite, and the self never appears anterior to the communal relations that never fully define it. The purity of the self is always corrupted by the very thing that makes it possible. Relation is always (in Derrida’s terms) a supplement, a pharmakon,³ a corruptive necessity. There are no clean cuts. Appeals to selfhood and autonomy are undermined by the self’s dependence upon group identification, and a group is only ever the tenuous delineation of what it refuses. The nationalist (or racist, or sexist) melancholic refuses this paradox, insisting instead upon the possibility of the immanent self and pure communal inclusivity. In the national idealist’s dream, there is no exclusion because whatever is left out is beyond or anterior to relation (e.g., the slave as wholly other). The myth of the immanent self thus demands a concurrent and equally impossible myth: the myth of the immanent or wholly Other.⁴ In her efforts to uncover the melancholic nature “of American national idealism” (10), Anne Anlin Cheng largely overlooks this fact. Consequently, in The Melancholy of Race, Cheng fails to explore the paradoxical manner in which appeals to pure inclusivity make possible while utterly frustrating appeals to pure individuality. Defined by its inclusion, the individual must risk falling victim to the purity of the group. In this sense, an appeal to pure inclusivity is only nominally opposed to an appeal to pure individualism: either the self is abandoned to the entropy of the group, or the group is solipsistically swallowed up by the conceit of the self. At either pole there is no possibility of difference.

Nevertheless, Cheng is certainly correct to suggest that the consequences of American national idealism manifest most obviously in (or rather as) America’s race relations. An instructive point of reference in this regard (given, especially, its overtly infantile nature) is Sandra Boynton’s 1982 “board book” for toddlers, But Not the Hippopotamus. The book functions as a simplistic allegory of America’s exclusionary race politics and the melancholia such politics entail. On each page of the book we are given both a description and an illustration of animals frolicking about. On the first page, for instance (and along with a corresponding illustration), we are told that “a hog and a frog cavort in the bog.” On this and every other page, we are also witness to an obviously excluded hippopotamus. In the opening illustration, the hippopotamus lurks behind a tree. And so “a hog and a frog cavort in the bog. But not the hippopotamus.” This formula repeats throughout: “A cat and two rats are trying on hats”; “A moose and a goose together have juice”; and so on. But not, but never, the hippopotamus. Until, of course, the penultimate page. At this point, all the animals previously described and illustrated come together to play, and (as if—we are surely lead to imagine—an afterthought) they finally turn and ask the hippopotamus to join. The hippopotamus quickly considers the invitation, and (when we turn the page) we get the victory line: “But YES the hippopotamus!” The message of inclusion seems for a moment quite clear, but this is not the final page of the book. On the final page, which sits opposite the hippopotamus’s victory, we are given an illustration of a solitary and clearly depressed armadillo. Beneath this illustration the celebratory line concludes: “But YES the hippopotamus! But not the armadillo.” Given Cheng’s discussion of American racial politics, we might very well (if too easily) identify the armadillo’s depressed state (and not the manifest dream that precedes it) as an expression of American melancholia.

Cheng’s conception of (racial) melancholia is further justified by the fact that the penultimate moment of inclusion and communal wholeness is followed (or better, made possible) by a moment of exclusion. As Cheng puts it, “Racilization in America may be said to operate through the institutional process of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others” (10). “American national idealism,” Cheng goes on to note, “has always been caught in this melancholic bind between incorporation and rejection” (10). Cheng thus stresses the manner in which the acts of exclusion necessary to establish and maintain an American dominant necessarily negate the ideal of democracy and egalitarianism to which such a dominant ostensibly subscribes (and which subsequently provides the central grounding for its formation as an identity category in the first place). Cheng, though, concludes that this seemingly inevitable process of “exclusion-yet-retention” creates a type of spectral figure, a ghostly “other” who is neither included nor excluded, present or absent. And so the resulting melancholia Cheng identifies is always twofold. On the one hand, the dominant’s melancholia is an expression of its desire but inability to wholly accept (or include) that which it cannot wholly abandon (or deny). On the other, the racialized other experiences a melancholic desire to belong to that which the marks of “race” bar access—that is, to be what one is not.

So, while Boynton’s dominant animals—or rather, the other animals who have been previously and successfully interpellated as dominant—may be having a grand old time outwardly, their fun is certainly marred by the presence of the hippopotamus. For surely, like the reader, they cannot avoid what is in plain sight, always present (if abandoned necessarily as absent other)? And even once this tension is seemingly resolved (and democracy, we might say, properly asserted) the armadillo arrives on the scene—quite necessarily, we should note. The hippopotamus, after all, cannot be “accepted” unless there exists a predefined group that can do the accepting. And, as in all such cases, this particular group is defined by what it is not: inclusive of armadillos. (We should note that the animals that make up the group—hogs, frogs, cats, rats, moose, hippopotami, etc.—are certainly no more like each other than they are different from armadillos.) Used, though, to make sense of Cheng’s specific conception of American melancholia, Boyton’s book begs a significant if simple question: Where is the ghost? Where is the melancholic specter, the subject who is never entirely present or absent? Everything (in infantile, or cartoon, fashion) is defined, almost to the extreme. Ontological stability abounds: “A hog and a frog cavort in the bog. But not the hippopotamus.” The racial/speciesist differences, and thus the grounds for inclusion or exclusion, are stressed at every turn. Never are we witness to “a group of hogs cavorting in a bog while what might be another hog may or may not be sitting alone on a log.” The hippopotamus (like, later, the armadillo) is certainly just as present as everyone else; she or he is just present as marginalized other, as (therefore, and in the dream that sustains the sense of community enjoyed by the other animals) wholly Other. In this way, the book reminds us that melancholia (racial or otherwise) is, as Cheng herself notes (following Freud), an effort to sustain or conserve the ego. While it is often associated (by Freud and others) with expressions of self-loathing or guilt, melancholia ultimately functions to resist or deny the ego’s potential dissolution. Melancholia functions to resist, in other words, the possibility of ghosts.⁵

National or racial melancholia therefore entails an effort to sustain the possibility of radical exclusion as the possibility of pure inclusion. The racial other, as confirmed and fixed other (or excluded outsider), is hardly terrifying on an ontological level. It is, we might say, the most comforting thing there can be. It is (Other); and so it functions to define and reify (safely and quite comfortably) what it is not. The group maintains its purity so long as the ambiguity of a necessary and necessarily corruptive relation is denied. This is, as I suggest above, the paradoxical and melancholic dream of pure inclusion. There is simply no confusion about who is—or who should be—included and who shouldn’t. At one point the hippopotamus is overtly Other; at another, unquestionably the Same. Or rather, a clearly defined and clearly present hippopotamus or armadillo can exist outside the inclusive community or, if and when we change our mind about what race or species is the same as “us,” brought in and assimilated as a member. The myth of immanence—of a self-contained community (and thus self)—is sustained. In this sense, American melancholia can be understood as less a state of depression effected by acts of “exclusion-yetretention” than the effort to remain blind to the corruptive ambiguity of relation in the face of its ontological necessity, for “the pure outside, like the pure inside, renders all sorts of togetherness impossible” (Nancy, “Being Singular” 60). Identity as being is only possible in relation, but relation (with) makes impossible its immanence, its finality, its cartoonish solidity. What is truly terrifying, what cannot be tolerated (not if this whole system of illusory identity formation—or, rather, inclusionary/exclusionary politics—is to be sustained) is the specter, that which refuses (as Derrida would say) all categorical definition.⁶ The specter disrupts a specifically nationalistic and racist brand of melancholia as the insistence upon the hallucinatory possibility of inclusion or exclusion. Without accounting for this threat of the truly spectral (or relation as ontological cross contamination), Cheng’s conception of American melancholia as a type of pervasive and virtually unavoidable social disease can hardly account for the violence that is almost predictably tied to racial politics in America. For what the nationalist melancholic ultimately and violently refuses to accept (and therefore mourn) is the impossibility of the self in its purity, or without the burden of existential freedom. The symptom of self-loathing Freud identifies as characteristic of more traditional states of melancholia—effected, typically, by an effort to sustain an idealized yet failed relationship—is thus likely to manifest (on a national or racial level) as guilt, shame, or pity: the desire to be the other is shameful because it is a categorical impossibility just as the other as Other simply and quite unfortunately can’t be included. This is the oddly comforting shame of the slave as well as the self-satisfying pity, or guilt, of the slaveholder. Faith, after all, in the melancholia-inducing possibility of pure inclusivity as pure exclusivity must be understood as faith in the possibility of a fixed identity or “libidinal position”—and, as Freud assures us, “People never willingly abandon a libidinal position” (“Mourning” 244). Moreover, the ensuing “opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis” (244) ensues. And we certainly see such “turning away” on both sides of inclusion/exclusion boundaries. To interrupt it is, almost invariably, to provoke hostility.

The Lynch Conjurative

The American response to racial instability, and by extension to the experience of communal and ontological instability, is almost predictably violent. Given the above, this violence can be understood as a concerted effort to prolong a state of melancholia—as, that is, a refusal to mourn the impossibility of the self’s (racial or national) immanence. The problem of lynching is thus particularly germane to any discussion of racial politics in America. Indeed, one of the most noteworthy scenes in James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man—one of the first and most influential “passing” narratives in American literature⁷—is a lynching. While we are left to assume that the man the mixed-race narrator describes (in shocking detail) burning alive is unambiguously “black,” we simply cannot be certain—not at first, anyway. The narrator refuses, for one reason or another, to specify the race of the man being lynched, even though meticulous descriptions of skin color can be found on almost every other page of The Autobiography. However, the fact that we can safely assume that the man being lynched is black speaks to the very function of a lynching. That the man is lynched suggests that he must be black. The lynching makes the man black in the same way that the fire that ultimately consumes his living flesh leaves nothing but “blackened bones” (128). And, of course, shortly after describing the lynching, the unnamed narrator validates our likely unconscious assumption, stating that he felt utter “shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals” (129; my emphasis). As a process of blackening the body, the function of the lynching transcends the physically violent act of burning a human alive. Such a scene suggests, therefore, that the concept of “a lynching” (with all its horrific and shock-inspiring connotations in tow) is appropriate for connoting any process of racial “fixing.” One is lynched, we might say, whenever one is brought to the belief that his or her allegiance to a racial group, or community, is defined by an essential and intransgressible bond. Or, as Nancy suggests, the desire to fix the other as Other is always “a desire for murder” (“Being Singular” 20). Obviously, the horror and violence of a physical lynching is hardly comparable to the ubiquitous function of interpellation in day-to-day living, and we surely cannot ignore the fact that (in America) the victim of a physical lynching is almost invariably black—or made to be black. At the same time, we should not overlook the ways in which the impulse to lynch transcends the physical act; it is implicit in any effort to defend against infectious boundary crossings or states of ambiguity. The result is always a form of mortification, an ossification of exclusionary boundaries. While the consequences of such ossification varies (empowering some and marginalizing others),⁸ its function is always the same—to stabilize a sense of self. It is hardly surprising that in America (where appeals to a “native” whiteness are persistently frustrated), the impulse toward self/communal stability manifests overtly in an outrageously brutal act perpetrated against, and so as to maintain, blackness. In this act we see the focused eruption of an overwhelming yet unutterable ontological anxiety—the fear that the other has begun to contaminate and destabilize the self.

Indeed, the impulse to “fix” the black body as Black is presented by Johnson as a direct response to a necessarily tenuous fantasy, a fantasy that reaches its apotheosis in the abjectly exclusionary act of a physical lynching. A lynching is, in short, a type of cure, a harsh but effective form of social chemotherapy. Whether it be ostentatiously violent or inconspicuously ideological, a lynching works to cure what Derrida calls in Politics of Friendship the “pathology of the community,” the threat of an internal disease eating away at the stability of communal and therefore individual identity, the sickening impossibility of “a solid friendship founded on homogeneity, on homophilia, on a solid and firm affinity . . . stemming from birth, from native community” (92). The most obvious symptom of this “pathology”—this disease that requires an endless series of curative lynchings—is that person who resists (because of ambiguous skin tone, or whatever) being fixed as Other or Same. Such a person is nothing but a ghost, an intrusive (because perpetually strange) stranger. By extension, the finally lynched Other (in its confirmed binary opposition to the self) is wholly antithetical to all things spectral. Derrida puts it like this: “Where the principal enemy, the ‘structuring’ enemy, seems nowhere to be found, where it ceases to be identifiable an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Both Members of This Club
• Part I. Being Withdrawn
• Part II. Being Eaten
• Part III. Being Given
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index