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Article Excerpt
"FOR Carl Van Vechten AND Fania Marinoff"
A Prologue:
Scholars committed to articulating the audaciously sweeping and shockingly intimate ways that narrative and "race" are entangled in U.S. culture have been reluctant to avail themselves of the tools that psychoanalysis affords. (1) As Nell Irvin Painter has written,
As a historian of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I recognize that my interest in psychology and other social sciences inspires a certain wariness among my colleagues. Some doubt the applicability of a field invented in turn-of-the-century Vienna by an upper-middle-class-Jew to poor Southern black people. They wonder whether "white" psychology works on "black" people. My psychologist sister-in-law reminded me that you "can't psychoanalyze the dead." A kindly editor reminded me to let readers know quite clearly that I recognize the difference time-bound culture makes. (4-5)
In other words, the critical question regarding using psychoanalysis to explore the intersections of narrative and "race" has been one of permission, a form of "Father, may I?" Ann Anlin Cheng, however, has suggested another critical question, one that asks "not we why can use psychoanalysis but why we already do" (28). I would add just this to Cheng's question: if we already Lave been using psychoanalysis, we have been doing it for quite a long time, a fact emblematized vividly by the durable friendship between Carl Van Vechten and Nella Larsen. These two 1920s writers negotiated an interracial friendship via a form of fetishism transacted by the paratext, a term encompassing the set of seemingly marginal bookish elements (e.g., dedications, prologues, appendices) that are nevertheless central to getting the book in question read properly. Exploring the paratextual fetishes exchanged between the "white" Van Vechten and the "black" Larsen illuminates the ways in which not only have writers already used psychoanalysis to negotiate racialized terrain, but also how and why they have long used the paratext in that endeavor.
A Zone of Transaction
Narratologist Gerard Genette defines a text as a "more or less long sequence of verbal statements that are more or less endowed with significance" (1). For literary studies, both the ambiguity of such a definition and the ineffability of that which the definition seeks to outline virtually necessitate the articulation of a something else that gives a text both a conceptual and a physical presence. For Genette, that something else is manifested through what he calls the "paratext," a continuum of "liminal devices and conventions" that "enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public" (Macksey xviii; Genette 1). The elements falling under the category paratext are, of course, myriad, and thus Genette divides them into two categories. The peritext (despite its prefix) comprises elements largely within a book's material confines and includes such things as forewords, chapter headings, and notes, while the epitext circulates materially and/or conceptually outside the book and includes (but is not limited to) utterances by and/or about the author or publisher as well as letters, diaries, and "oral confidences" (Macksey xviii).
Given the coverage afforded by both peritext and epitext, the paratext might be said to provide a book an endoskeleton, an internal frame or armature supporting the text from within (e.g., typography, chapter division, etc.); an exoskeleton, a book's outer limits (e.g., binding, dust jacket, etc.); and, finally, what might be called a meta-skeleton, a more intangible circulation of ideas, attitudes, and utterances that functionally hail a certain text as a book (e.g., book reviews, advertisements, etc.). As the paratext both encompasses these three frames simultaneously and "constitutes a zone between text and off-text," Genette emphasizes that it is somewhat "[m]ore than a boundary or a sealed border" and is instead a "zone not only of transition but also of transaction" that works as a "threshold [seuil] ... a 'vestibule' that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back" (1-2). Articulated in this way, the paratext can be said to represent multiple sites of and opportunities for ambivalence.
In using the term "ambivalence," I am thinking through E. L. McCallum, whose work on Freud and fetishism provides me--in Toni Morrison's words--"the words to say it," the "it" in this case being a relationship to which Genette does not attend, one potentially linking the paratext, epistemological desire, and "race." McCallum notes that Freud's writing on fetishism affords an interpretive ambivalence most evident in the "tension between Freud's radical interrogation of certain categories and unquestioning reliance upon the context in which those categories are constructed" (3). The conceptual framework that such ambivalence sketches, McCallum observes, recommends a return to the concept of fetishism "both representable as publicly available knowledge that certain objects may contain a private and titillating significance, and unrepresentable insofar as the public never knows precisely for whom, and for which items, that significance exists" (3). Thus bearing striking resemblance to Genette's epistemology of the fetish suggests that any given fetish's relationship to a subject's desire for knowledge might be rendered as that of a mediating threshold. Assuming this is the case, then, the paratext can be understood as a sort of fetish, one certainly "commonly known and available for interpretation" by anyone who has ever recognized a book as a book.
It is this fetishistic ambivalence that, decades earlier, Carl Van Vechten apparently exploited throughout the lengthy, complicated catalog of his lifetime activities. Rarely at rest, Van Vechten materially and intellectually transgressed generic, racialized, and sexualized territories with a frequency and to a degree defying easy sociological notions of binary in-groups and out-groups and necessitating critical methodologies able to account for work always and never about the center, always and never about the margins. Recently, much critical energy has been devoted to the visual aspects of Van Vechten's work; more work, however, remains to be done regarding an equally important site of Van Vechtenian desire: books as objects in and of themselves. (2) Van Vechten appeared to take a particular joy in goading his readers via his books' centers (e.g., infuriating lists interrupting his plots); he also seemed at least as interested in their paratexts, the covers and other elements of bookdom by which children, ostensibly, learn not to judge. Such an interest might suggest a simplistic investment on Van Vechten's part in things marginal, an interpretation all too easy when dealing with the man David Levering Lewis has called "dilettante extraordinaire" (114). Yet given the conceptualization of the paratext as a threshold, Van Vechten's affinity for the paratext might also be read as affording him another way to disavow the insufficient-yet-powerful binaries constructed to map human difference (e.g, white/black, straight/gay) while desiring at the same time to imagine a world that transcended or at least flouted those binaries. In this way, the paratext can be said to have functioned for Van Vechten quite consciously--despite his declaration of Freud as one of the three "dullest" authors (the others being Joyce and Lawrence)--as a fetish (176).
For the most part, the pleasure that Van Vechten sought to derive from the paratext remains a relatively private matter for him and a minor, if sometimes annoying, public mystery for his readers and critics--except, perhaps, for one notorious instance. For when the paratext of Nigger Heaven, his fifth novel, engaged the material inequities suffusing the social fact of racialized difference, Van Vechten's apparent desire to maintain his fetish as private pleasure and public cipher became untenable, especially in the eyes of the black people about whom he, a white man, claimed to be writing. For they seemed to see what the book's apologists do not see: that Heaven's paratext was as much the point as the text itself. What might be read as a particularly discerning expression of this realization...
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