The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,78

Then, after informing the reader of his “hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek,” he tries to nail it. To provide the key to the “hidden cause.” His struggle to do so is gigantic. He cannot. Nor can we. But in nonfigurative language, he identifies the imaginative tools needed to solve the problem: “Subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls.” And his final observation reverberates with personal trauma. “This visible [colored] world seems formed in love, the invisible [white] spheres were formed in fright.” The necessity for whiteness as privileged “natural” state, the invention of it, was indeed formed in fright.

“Slavery,” writes Rogin, “confirmed Melville’s isolation, decisively established in Moby-Dick, from the dominant consciousness of his time.” I differ on this point and submit that Melville’s hostility to and repugnance for slavery would have found company. There were many white Americans of his acquaintance who felt repelled by slavery, wrote journalism about it, spoke about it, legislated on it, and were active in abolishing it. His attitude to slavery alone would not have condemned him to the almost autistic separation visited upon him. And if he felt convinced that blacks were worthy of being treated like whites, or that capitalism was dangerous—he had company or could have found it. But to question the very notion of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority, of whiteness as privileged place in the evolutionary ladder of humankind, and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority, to “pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges,” to drag the “judge himself to the bar”—that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now. To be “only a patriot to heaven” is no mean aspiration in young America for a writer—or the captain of a whaling ship.

A complex, heaving, disorderly, profound text is Moby-Dick, and among its several meanings it seems to me this “unspeakable” one has remained the “hidden cause,” the “Truth to the face of Falsehood.” To this day no novelist has so wrestled with his subject. To this day literary analyses of canonical texts have shied away from that perspective: the informing and determining Afro-American presence in traditional American literature. The chapters I have made reference to are only a fraction of the instances where the text surrenders such insights, and points a helpful finger toward the ways in which the ghost drives the machine.

Melville is not the only author whose works double their fascination and their power when scoured for this presence and the writerly strategies taken to address or deny it. Edgar Allan Poe will sustain such a reading. So will Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain, and in the twentieth century, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner, to name a few. Canonical American literature is begging for such attention.

It seems to me a more than fruitful project to produce some cogent analysis showing instances where early American literature identifies itself, risks itself, to assert its antithesis to blackness. How its linguistic gestures prove the intimate relationship to what is being nulled by implying a full descriptive apparatus (identity) to a presence-that-is-assumed-not-to-exist. Afro-American critical inquiry can do this work.

I mentioned earlier that finding or imposing Western influences in/on Afro-American literature had value provided the valued process does not become self-anointing. There is an adjacent project to be undertaken—the third focus in my list: the examination of contemporary literature (both the sacred and the profane) for the impact Afro-American presence has had on the structure of the work, the linguistic practice, and fictional enterprise in which it is engaged. Like focus two, this critical process must also eschew the pernicious goal of equating the fact of that presence with the achievement of the work. A work does not get better because it is responsive to another culture, nor does it become automatically flawed because of that responsiveness. The point is to clarify, not to enlist. And it does not “go without saying” that a work written by an Afro-American is automatically subsumed by an enforcing Afro-American presence. There is a clear flight from blackness in a great deal of Afro-American literature. In others there is the duel with blackness, and in some cases, as they say, “You’d never know.”

III

It is on this area, the impact of Afro-American culture on contemporary American literature, that I now wish to comment.