The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,64

World enterprise. His education was exceptionally cultivated and included the latest thoughts on theology and science—in an effort perhaps to make them mutually accountable, to make each support the other. He is a product not only of “the Scottish enlightenment” but also of “London’s sophistication.” He read Swift, discussed the Christian commandment to “love one another,” and is described as “strangely” insensitive to the suffering of his slaves. On July 12, 1776, he records with astonishment and hurt the slave rebellion on his plantation: “Judge my surprise. Of what avail is kindness & good usage when rewarded by such ingratitude.” “Constantly bewildered,” Bailyn goes on, “by his slaves’ behavior…[Dunbar] recovered two runaways and ‘condemned them to receive 500 lashes each at five dif[feren]t times, and to carry a chain & log fixt to the ancle.’ ” I take this to be a succinct portrait of the process by which the American as new, white, and male was constituted. It is a formation that has at least four desirable consequences, all of which are referred to in Bailyn’s summation of Dunbar’s character and located in how Dunbar feels “within himself.” Let me repeat: “feeling…a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half-savage world.” A power, a sense of freedom he had not known before. But what had he “known before”? Fine education, London sophistication, theological and scientific thought. None of these, one gathers, could provide him with the authority and autonomy Mississippi planter life did. His “sense” is a “force” that “flows”: not a willed domination, a thought-out, calculated choice, but rather a kind of natural resource, already present, a Niagara Falls waiting to spill over as soon as he is in a position to possess “absolute control over the lives of others.” And once he has moved into that position, he is resurrected as a new man, a distinctive man, a different man. Whatever his social status in London, in the New World he is a gentleman. More gentle; more man. Because the site of his transformation is within rawness. He is backgrounded by savagery.

Autonomy, newness, difference, authority, absolute power: these are the major themes and concerns of American literature, and each one is made possible, shaped, and activated by a complex awareness and use of a constituted Africanism that, deployed as rawness and savagery, provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of that quintessential American identity.

Autonomy—freedom—translates into the much championed and revered “individualism”; newness translates into “innocence”; distinctiveness becomes difference and strategies for maintaining it; authority becomes a romantic, conquering “heroism” and “virility” and raises the problematics of wielding absolute power over the lives of others. These four are made possible, finally, by the fifth: absolute power called forth and acted out against, upon, and within a natural and mental landscape conceived of as a “raw, half-savage world.”

Why “raw and half-savage”? Because it is peopled by a nonwhite indigenous population? Perhaps. But certainly because there is readily at hand a bound and unfree, rebellious but serviceable black population by which Dunbar and all white men are enabled to measure these privileging and privileged differences.

Eventually individualism will lead to a prototype of Americans as solitary, alienated malcontents. What, one wants to ask, are Americans alienated from? What are Americans always so insistently innocent of? Different from? And over whom is absolute power held, from whom withheld, to whom distributed?

Answers to these questions lie in the potent and ego-reinforcing presence of an Africanistic population. The new white male can now persuade himself that savagery is “out there”: that the lashes ordered (five hundred, applied five times: twenty-five hundred in total) are not one’s own savagery; that repeated and dangerous breaks for freedom are “puzzling” confirmations of black irrationality; that the combination of Dean Swift’s beatitudes and a life of regularized violence is civilized; that, if sensibilities are dulled enough, the rawness remains external.

These contradictions cut and slash their way through the pages of American literature. How could they not have? As Dominick LaCapra reminds us, “ ‘Classic’ novels, are not only worked over…by common contextual forces (such as ideologies) but also rework and at least partially work through those forces in critical and at times potentially transformative fashion.”

The imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American writers journey is in very large measure shaped and determined by