The Devil Gets His Due, page 10
What, then, do all these books have in common? As boys’ books we should expect them shyly, guiltlessly as it were, to proffer a chaste male love as the ultimate emotional experience and this is spectacularly the case. In Dana, it is the narrator’s melancholy love for the kanaka, Hope; in Cooper, the lifelong affection of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook; in Melville, Ishmael’s love for Queequeg; in Twain, Huck’s feelings for Nigger Jim. At the focus of emotion, where we are accustomed to find in the world’s great novels some heterosexual passion, be it “platonic” love or adultery, seduction, rape or long-drawn-out flirtation, we come instead on the fugitive slave and the no-accent boy lying side by side on a raft borne by the endless river toward an impossible escape, or the pariah sailor waking in the tattooed arms of the brown harpooner on the verge of their impossible quest. “Aloha, aikane, aloha nui,” Hope cries to the lover who prefers him to all his fellow-whites; and Ishmael in utter frankness tells us: “I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife . . . he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain . . . Thus, then, in our heart’s honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair . . . he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me around the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.”
In Melville, the ambiguous relationship is most explicitly rendered; almost, indeed, openly explained. Not by a chance phrase of camouflaged symbol (the dressing of Jim in a woman’s gown in Huckleberry Finn, for instance, which can mean anything or nothing at all), but in a step-by-step exposition, the Pure Marriage of Ishmael and Queequeg is set before us: the initial going to bed together and the first shyness overcome, that great hot tomahawk-pipe accepted in a familiarity that dispels fear; next, the wedding ceremony itself (for in this marriage like so many others the ceremonial follows the deflowering), with the ritual of touching foreheads; then, the queasiness and guilt the morning after the official First Night, the suspicion that one has joined himself irrevocably to his own worst nightmare; finally, a symbolic portrayal of the continuing state of marriage through the image of the “monkey rope” which binds the lovers fast waist to waist (for the sake of this symbolism, Melville changes a fact of whaling practice—the only time in the book), a permanent alliance that provides mutual protection but also threatens mutual death.
Physical it all is, certainly, yet somehow ultimately innocent. There lies between the lovers no naked sword but a childlike ignorance, as if the possibility of a fall to the carnal had not yet been discovered. Even in the Vita Nuova of Dante, there is no vision of love less offensively, more unremittingly chaste; that it is not adult seems beside the point. Ishmael’s sensations as he wakes under the pressure of Queequeg’s arm, the tenderness of Huck’s repeated loss and refinding of Jim, the role of almost Edenic helpmate played for Bumppo by the Indian—these shape us from childhood: we have no sense of first discovering them or of having been once without them.
Of the infantile, the homoerotic aspects of these stories we are, though vaguely, aware; but it is only with an effort that we can wake to a consciousness of how, among us who at the level of adulthood find a difference in color sufficient provocation for distrust and hatred, they celebrate, all of them, the mutual love of a white man and a colored. So buried at the level of acceptance which does not touch reason, so desperately repressed from overt recognition, so contrary to what is usually thought of as our ultimate level of taboo the sense of that love can survive only in the obliquity of a symbol, persistent, obsessive, in short, an archetype: the boy’s homoerotic crush, the love of the black fused at this level into a single thing.
I hope I have been using here a hopefully abused word with some precision; by “archetype” I mean a coherent pattern of beliefs and feelings so widely shared at a level beneath consciousness that there exists no abstract vocabulary for representing it, and so “sacred” that unexamined, irrational restraints inhibit any explicit analysis. Such a complex finds a formula or pattern story, which serves both to embody it, and, at first at least, to conceal its full implications. Later, the secret may be revealed, the archetype “analyzed” or “allegorically” interpreted according to the language of the day.
I find the complex we have been examining genuinely mythic; certainly it has the invisible character of the true archetype, eluding the wary pounce of Howells or Mrs. Twain, who excised from Huckleberry Finn the cussing as unfit for children, but who left, unperceived, a conventionally abhorrent doctrine of ideal love. Even the writers in whom we find it attained it, in a sense, dreaming. The felt difference between Huckleberry Finn and Twain’s other books must lie in part in the release from conscious restraint inherent in the author’s assumption of the character of Huck; the passage in and out of darkness and river mist, the constant confusion of identities (Huck’s ten or twelve names; the question of who is the real uncle, who the true Tom), the sudden intrusions into alien violences without past or future, give the whole work, for all its carefully observed detail, the texture of a dream. For Moby Dick such a point need scarcely be made. Even Cooper, despite his insufferable gentlemanliness, his tedium, cannot conceal from the kids who continue to read him the secret behind his overconscious prose: the childish, impossible dream. D. H. Lawrence saw in him clearly the boy’s Utopia: the absolute wilderness in which the stuffiness of home yields to the wigwam, and “My Wife” to Chingachgook.
I do not recall ever having seen in the commentaries of the social anthropologist or psychologist an awareness of the role of this profound child’s dream of love in our relation to the Negro. (I say Negro, though the beloved in the books I have mentioned is variously Indian and Polynesian, because the Negro has become more and more exclusively for us the colored man, the colored man par excellence.) Trapped in what have by now become shackling clichés—the concept of the white man’s sexual envy of the Negro male, the ambivalent horror of miscegenation—they do not sufficiently note the complementary factor of physical attraction, the archetypal love of white male and black. But either the horror or the attraction is meaningless alone; only together do they make sense. Just as the pure love of man and man is in general set off against the ignoble passion of man and woman, so more specifically (and more vividly) the dark desire which leads to the miscegenation is contrasted with the ennobling love of a white man and a colored one. James Fenimore Cooper is our first poet of this ambivalence; indeed, miscegenation is the secret theme of the Leatherstocking novels, especially of The Last of the Mohicans. Natty Bumppo, the man who boasts always of having “no cross” in his blood, flees by nature from the defilement of all women, but never with so absolute a revulsion as he displays toward the squaw with whom at one point he seems at the point of being forced to cohabit; and the threat of the dark-skinned rapist sends pale woman after pale woman skittering through Cooper’s imagined wilderness. Even poor Cora, who already has a fatal drop of alien blood that cuts her off from any marriage with a white man, in so far as she is white cannot be mated with Uncas, the noblest of redmen. Only in death can they be joined in an embrace as chaste as that of males. There’s no good woman but a dead woman! Yet Chingachgook and the Deerslayer are permitted to sit night after night over their campfire in the purest domestic bliss. So long as there is no mingling of blood, soul may couple with soul in God’s undefiled forest.
Nature undefiled—this is the inevitable setting of the Sacred Marriage of males. Ishmael and Queequeg, arm in arm, about to ship out, Huck and Jim swimming beside the raft in the peaceful flux of the Mississippi—here it is the motion of water which completes the syndrome, the American dream of isolation afloat. The notion of the Negro as the unblemished bride blends with the myth of running away to sea, of running the great river down to the sea. The immensity of water defines a loneliness that demands love; its strangeness symbolizes the disavowal of the conventional that makes possible all versions of love. In Two Years Before the Mast, in Moby Dick, in Huckleberry Finn the water is there, is the very texture of the novel; the Leatherstocking Tales propose another symbol for the same meaning: the virgin forest. Notice the adjectives—the virgin forest and the forever inviolable sea. It is well to remember, too, what surely must be more than a coincidence, that Cooper, who could dream this myth, also invented for us the novel of the sea, wrote for the first time in history the sea story proper.
The rude pederasty of the forecastle and the captain’s cabin, celebrated in a thousand jokes, is the profanation of a dream; yet Melville, who must have known such blasphemies, refers to them only once and indirectly, for it was his dream that they threatened. And still the dream survives; in a recent book by Gore Vidal, an incipient homosexual, not yet aware of the implications of his feelings, indulges in the reverie of running off to sea with his dearest friend. The buggery of sailors is taken for granted everywhere, yet is thought of usually as an inversion forced on men by their isolation from women; though the opposite case may well be true: the isolation sought more or less consciously as an occasion for male encounters. At any rate, there is a context in which the legend of the sea as escape and solace, the fixated sexuality of boys, the myth of the dark beloved, are one. In Melville and Twain at the center of our tradition, in lesser writers at the periphery, the archetype is at once formalized and perpetuated. Nigger Jim and Queequeg make concrete for us what was without them a vague pressure on the threshold of our consciousness; the proper existence of the archetype is in the realized character, who waits, as it were, only to be asked his secret. Think of Oedipus biding in silence from Sophocles to Freud!
Unwittingly, we are possessed in childhood by these characters and their undiscriminated meaning, and it is difficult for us to dissociate them without a sense of disbelief. What—these household figures clues to our subtlest passions! The foreigner finds it easier to perceive the significances too deep within us to be brought into focus. D. H. Lawrence discovered in our classics a linked mythos of escape and immaculate male love; Lorca in The Poet in New York grasped instinctively (he could not even read English) the kinship of Harlem and Walt Whitman, the fairy as bard. But of course we do not have to be conscious of what possesses us; in every generation of our own writers the archetype reappears, refracted, half-understood, but there. In the gothic reverie of Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, both elements of the syndrome are presented, though disjunctively: the boy moving between the love of a Negro maidservant and his inverted cousin. In Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding, another variant is invented: a female heterosexual romance between the boy-girl Frankie and a Negro cook. This time the Father-Slave-Beloved is converted into the figure of a Mother-Sweetheart-Servant, but remains still, of course, satisfactorily black. It is not strange, after all, to find this archetypal complex in latter-day writers of a frankly homosexual sensibility; but it recurs, too, in such resolutely masculine writers as Faulkner, who evokes the myth in the persons of the Negro and the boy of Intruder in the Dust.
In the myth, one notes finally, it is typically in the role of outcast, ragged woodsman, or despised sailor (“Call me Ishmael!”), or unregenerate boy (Huck before the prospect of being “sivilized” cries out, “I been there before!”) that we turn to the love of a colored man. But how, we cannot help asking, does the vision of the white American as a pariah correspond with our long-held public status: the world’s beloved, the success? It is perhaps only the artist’s portrayal of himself, the notoriously alienated writer in America, at home with such images, child of the town drunk, the hapless survivor. But no, Ishmael is in all of us, our unconfessed universal fear objectified in the writer’s status as in the outcast sailor’s: that compelling anxiety, which every foreigner notes, that we may not be loved, that we are loved for our possessions and not our selves, that we are really—alone. It is that underlying terror which explains our incredulity in the face of adulation or favor, what is called (once more the happy adjective) our “boyish modesty.”
Our dark-skinned beloved will take us in, we assure ourselves, when we have been cut off, or have cut ourselves off, from all others, without rancor or the insult of forgiveness. He will fold us in his arms saying, “Honey” or “Aikane”; he will comfort us, as if our offense against him were long ago remitted, were never truly real. And yet we cannot ever really forget our guilt; the stories that embody the myth dramatize as if compulsively the role of the colored man as the victim. Dana’s Hope is shown dying of the white man’s syphilis; Queequeg is portrayed as racked by fever, a pointless episode except in the light of this necessity; Crane’s Negro is disfigured to the point of monstrosity; Cooper’s Indian smolders to a hopeless old age conscious of the imminent disappearance of his race; Jim is shown loaded down with chains, weakened by the hundred torments dreamed up by Tom in the name of bulliness. The immense gulf of guilt must not be mitigated any more than the disparity of color (Queequeg is not merely brown but monstrously tattooed; Chingachgook is horrid with paint; Jim is portrayed as the sick A-rab dyed blue), so that the final reconciliation may seem more unbelievable and tender. The archetype makes no attempt to deny our outrage as fact; it portrays it as if meaningless in the face of love.
There would be something insufferable, I think, in that final version of remission if it were not for the presence of a motivating anxiety, the sense always of a last chance. Behind the white American’s nightmare that someday, no longer tourist, inheritor or liberator, he will be rejected, refused, he dreams of his acceptance at the breast he has most utterly offended. It is a dream so sentimental, so outrageous, so desperate, that it redeems our concept of boyhood from nostalgia to tragedy.
In each generation we play out the impossible mythos, and we live to see our children play it: the white boy and the black we can discover wrestling affectionately on any American sidewalk, along which they will walk in adulthood, eyes averted from each other, unwilling to touch even by accident. The dream recedes; the immaculate passion and the astonishing reconciliation become a memory, and less, a regret, at last the unrecognized motifs of a child’s book. “It’s too good to be true, Honey,” Jim says to Huck. “It’s too good to be true.”
New England and the Invention of the South
On a bare northern summit
A pine-tree stands alone.
He slumbers; and around him
The icy snows are blown.
His dreams are of a palm-tree
Who in far lands of morn
Amid the blazing desert
Grieves silent and forlorn.
Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
HEINRICH HEINE
Everyone knows that the image of American slavery and the antebellum South was created not by slow accretion, but all at once, overnight, as it were, by a single mid-nineteenth-century book, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Translated from language to language and medium to medium (first to the stage, then the movies, comic books, TV) it created not just certain mythological Black characters, Uncle Tom, Eliza, Topsy, but the mythic landscape through which they still move in the dream of America dreamed by native Americans as well as by Europeans, Africans, and Asians of all ages and all degrees of sophistication.
Mrs. Stowe was not the first American author to have created Negro characters. They had appeared earlier in novels and stories by such eminent writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville; but somehow they had remained archetypally inert, refusing to leap from the printed page to the public domain. And though the long-lived Minstrel Show (which still survives on British TV) had begun to invent its pervasive stereotypes of plantation life before Mrs. Stowe ever set pen to paper, they, too, failed to kindle the imagination of the world. To be sure, Mrs. Stowe herself was influenced by them; so that before we learn the real name of George and Eliza Harris’ small son, Harry, we hear him hailed as “Jim Crow.” Many of the minor darkies who surround her serious protagonists are modeled on the clowns in blackface who cracked jokes with a White Interlocutor.
But clearly images of Black Americans could not stir an emotional response adequate to the horrors of slavery so long as they remained merely comic. Small wonder then that Mr. Bones retreated to the wings once Eliza had fled the bloodhounds on the ice (only in the dramatic version, to be sure) and Uncle Tom had been beaten to death in full view of a weeping house. Nor is it surprising that the figure of the martyred Black slave under the lash, too old to be a sexual threat, too pious to evoke fears of violent revenge, captured the deep fantasy of a White world, haunted (since the Haitian revolt at least) with nightmares of Black Insurrection, and needing, therefore, to be assured that tears rather than blood would be sufficient to erase their guilt.
What is puzzling (though somehow few critics have paused long enough to puzzle it out) is that Uncle Tom was the creation not of some son of the South, a literate Black runaway slave, perhaps, or a tormented Byronic White Planter, like Mrs. Stowe’s Augustine St. Clare, but of a daughter of New England, who seemed fated by nature and nurture to become the laureate of that region rather than of a Southland she scarcely knew. It was, indeed, as a New England local-colorist that she began and ended her literary career. Her first published story and her first published book were set in that icy and rockbound world, and her final works were genre studies, evoking scenes of her own Connecticut childhood and that of her husband, who had grown up in Maine. Yet no matter how hard hightone critics, who distrust the sentimentality and egregious melodrama of her most popular novel, may tout them, ordinary readers do not remember her for The Minister’s Wooing or Old Town Folks.
