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Article Excerpt
Lost totality, or totality accomplished in the lie of the individual: there is no way out of this circle of disenchantment.
--Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (38)
In The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that the possibility of the individual is necessarily predicated upon the possibility of a stable community, a pre-existing totality that encompasses and defines the individual as a coherent "I." In stating that "I am white" or "I am a man," I assume that my individuality adheres to certain fixed categories of being. In short, my individuality is determined by the community of being to which I ostensibly belong. Obviously, then, to say "I am white" or "I am a man" is to say that I have an essential link to both a community of "whites" and a community of "males." By implication, and quite paradoxically, I am a singular and coherent entity only insofar as I am (in one way or another) indistinguishable from a certain communal whole, or plurality. As a result, if my identity as an individual is ambiguous or unfixed--if I do not clearly belong anywhere--then I disrupt the stability of the communities to which I only seem to belong. For this reason, the issue of "passing" (racially or otherwise) in twentieth-century American literature is inextricably linked to the issue of community and the possibility of communal stability. Characters who refuse to align or identify themselves with the communities to which their lineage (and/or gender, class, sexuality, etc.) assigns them deny their origins and, by implication, the communal stability upon which their coherence as individuals is based. They challenge the possibility of communal totalities and, thus, the possibility of a stable and coherent individual. It is hardly surprising, then, that characters like Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) have been identified as lamentable, failed, or simply disturbing. (1) This reading has been prevalent both in the texts in which such passing characters are presented and in some of the early criticism of those texts. (2) After all, by refusing, or being unable, to acknowledge the authenticity of the communities to which she is socially obligated, Clare disrupts and challenges the possibility of an essential social bond, or common "nature," upon which communal ties are legitimated.
In focusing on Clare's disruptive and subversive nature, I am taking as my point of departure an already well-established field of criticism. However, I am not interested in simply reiterating the fact that racially and sexually ambiguous characters like Clare frustrate essentialist notions of identity while forcing us to accept the impossibility of interpretive and/or narrative closure; this has been clearly demonstrated already, in one way or another, by Judith Butler, Martha J. Cutter, and Elaine K. Ginsberg (to name a few). (3) Rather, I am concerned with how the act of passing (especially in Passing) confuses and, in turn, exposes our virtually default assumptions about community and individuality. What follows, then, is as much a reading of Passing as it is a consideration of critical responses to both Passing as a text and passing as a behavior. Read alongside critical discussions of the novel and the act, Passing suggests that racially and sexually ambiguous characters who embrace the flail implications of their marginal status threaten the possibility of totalized or totalizing communities because they frustrate the validity of the assumptions upon which their failure as individuals are necessarily predicated. Clare's "passing" (non)presence disrupts the illusory possibility that any community can be rigorously defined by an essential--or, as Nancy would have it, "immanent"--bond. In other words, and if we employ the work of Slavoj Zizek alongside the work of Nancy, we might say that Clare functions as a "symptom" of the Lacanian Real--that is, the impossible "Real" of essential bonds, or categories of identity. Clare's passing state is a response to, or effect of, society's compulsion to organize itself according to certain absolute and fixed categories, or communities, of being. Clare passes, in this sense, because these categories of being are insufficient, impractical, illusory; they simply allow us to deny the impossibility of fixed identifies, the impossibility that Clare's passing state ultimately signals. And, because we cannot regain any past sense of social health and stability unless we eliminate or "cure" the signs and symptoms that speak to the impossibility of authentic categories of being, the presence of characters like Clare tends to disturb and disrupt; it threatens us with uncertainty, the dissolution of tradition, and the destruction of social order. In refusing to align herself with any one of the communities through (or within) which she moves, Clare exposes, as Nancy puts it, "the un-working and therefore, the incessant incompletion of community" (38), which is also and necessarily the "incessant incompletion" of self. Clare, in other words, "deauthenticates" the communities through which she passes. In doing so, she provokes hysterical and violent reactions, reactions that speak to our pervasive (and potentially dangerous) need to maintain the illusion of authentic communities and stable identities.
Paranoid Readings and the Impossible Real
The motivating theme and title of Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, "passing" typically refers to a "black" person's successful attempt to pass as "white." Because of the assumptions surrounding the racial categories of "black" and "white" in America--particularly the persistent influence of the "one drop" rule--a person is passing, and therefore authentically black, even if that person's lineage is more "white" (or anything else) than "black." For this reason, characters of mixed race, as well as the critics who analyze those characters, almost always privilege the black portion of their lineage as authentic. (4) When passing, though, and as critics like Cutter, Ginsberg, and Wendy Doniger have demonstrated, a character of mixed race frustrates this virtually unconscious deferral to black. Passing is thus a powerful subversion of the basic assumptions that perpetuate mythologies of race (and the very possibility of authentic identity). As it is predicated upon the fact that race is performance, the act of passing suggests that all racial categories are arbitrary and ultimately untenable. As Ginsberg suggests, "both the process and the discourse of passing challenge the essentialism that is often the foundation of identity politics [and] discloses the truth that identities are not singularly true or false but multiple and contingent" (4). (5) This "truth" is, moreover, suggested in the very etymology of the term. Derived from the Latin passus ("to step or pace"), "passing" connotes transience, the sense of being between places, of being neither inside nor outside (yet both inside and outside) a particular space or grouping. Passing is not to have been already let "passed"; it is not to be before the pass, nor is it to be safely on the other side of the pass. Simply, passing suggests a mode of becoming rather than a mode of being. As regards a text that is significantly rifled Passing, this is an important distinction. Although it is obviously interested in the issue of race, and racial ambiguity, Larsen's text--like the concept of passing itself--evokes a more general ontological threat of transience and instability.
On the surface, Larsen's novel is primarily interested in the phenomenon of racial passing. However, as the critical debate surrounding Passing suggests, the thematics of the text (as well as the implications of the fide) are not necessarily limited to the problematics of racial transgression. Many critics, in fact, have suggested that the novel's focus on race is a deflection of other much more troubling (or "unspeakable") issues. Typically, critics tend to suggest that these issues are encoded in the surface tensions of the text, tensions that we must "decode" if we are to access the "true" implications of the text. For this reason, some critics have shifted the focus from race to class, (6) while others have read Passing as a coded exploration of homosexual desire. Ultimately, these critics force us to consider the possibility that "passing" (as an act and as the...
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