A number of African American novels set in urban spaces focus on the motif of claustrophobia to convey the effects of racism. Richard Wright’s Native Son, for instance, opens with a rat trapped an killed in the apartment of a black family. The trapped rat serves as an allegory for the novel’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, who is as trapped in the South Side of Chicago as the rat is in his apartment. Bigger frequently laments the feeling of claustrophobia, of having his mobility–both physical and socio-economic–severely restricted by white people. Bigger can only live in certain slums and occupy certain jobs. He is trapped in the ghetto and it enrages him. Similarly, Lutie Johnson, the protagonist of Anne Petry’s somewhat less deterministic novel, The Street, also feels a sense of claustrophobia. She desperately wants to get an apartment on a better street, but she realizes that without substantially more money than she, a single mother, can earn, she will never be able to move to a cleaner, brighter neighborhood. Like Bigger, she also feels trapped, walled-in by inaccessible white people. Interestingly, Helga Crane, the biracial protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand expresses a sense of claustrophobia toward her fellow African Americans. Helga feels ambivalent toward blackness, both attracted to and repelled by it. Helga feels a sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped as a member of a race with which she feels no kinship.
Tag: 20th century
Re-Writing Dostoyevsky
Several African American writers were deeply influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, for instance, draws on Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Like the Underground Man, the Invisible Man has retreated from society to his underground refuge. Both figures respond to statements or objections by their imagined interlocutors. While Dostoyevsky’s protagonist is bitter, resentful, and self-sabotaging, Ellison’s reveals a deeper love for humanity, even if he has his share of bitterness at his racist society.
Richard Wright’s Native Son re-writes Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov kills the old pawn broker to test if he is a super-man, to see if he can take the life of a “worthless” woman and feel no compunction. He is obsessed with this idea that great men, like Napoleon, could kill with impunity because it would enable them to do good later. Raskolnikov becomes consumed with guilt, despite his desire to suppress it. In Native Son, a young black man, Bigger, kills the white daughter of his employer, Mary, by accident. Yet, after he has killed her, he embraces his identity as a murderer. In the racist and segregated landscape of Chicago, murder is the only act which gives Bigger’s life any meaning; violence is the only way for him to exercise agency. Although he kills Mary by accident, he subsequently wishes that he had planned it on purpose. He covers up his crime by burning her body with the same meticulousness as Raskolnikov takes. Like Raskolnikov, Bigger is afflicted by guilt which he often suppresses. While Raskolnikov never feels indifferent to the murder of the old pawnbroker, as he hoped he would, even though he can intellectually justify the act to himself, Bigger does feel empowered by his murder of Mary. Moreover, both characters commit a second murder that follows directly from the first. Raskolnikov’s planned murder of the pawn broker leads him to kill her sister when she witnesses him committing the crime. Similarly, Bigger kills he lover Bessie because he fears that she will give him away. Bigger feels that his crime is justified because of the racist actions of white people against him. Wright, thus, re-writes the plot of Dostoevysky’s novel in an American racial context.
Modernism and Nihilism
The following passages from modernist writers William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway bear interesting similarities. Each passage takes Christian language and re-casts it in nihilistic terms. Faulkner and Hemingway both suggest the insufficiency of religious faith in the face of modernity. They also uphold the power of art over the power of belief, or, perhaps, position art as a replacement for faith.
In The Sound and the Fury Quentin Compson ponders his father’s fatalistic philosophy: “Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not.” The image of people as sawdust dolls could hardly be more pessimistic or dismissive of human possibility. The final phrase evokes the wound in Christ’s side. After Jesus was crucified, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear to see if he was dead. According to John 19:34, “But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.” In Christian tradition, this blood and water represents the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. The image of the wound in Christ’s side is a synecdoche for the entire Christian view of atonement through Christ’s sacrificial death. Mr. Compson’s view reduces Christ’s sacrifice to meaninglessness. Quentin’s formulation–“the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not”–negates the salvific nature of Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus’ blood might as well have been sawdust, since it had no more power than anyone else’s blood.
Hemingway ends “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” with a nihilistic re-casting of the Lord’s Prayer. The original Lord’s Prayer reads: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Hemingway’s version replaces virtually every noun with “nada” the Spanish word for “nothing”: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada.” The repetitions of “nada” make the mock prayer sound like nonsense. Hemingway’s nihilistic creed ends with a similar adaptation of the opening of the Ave Maria. Instead of “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” Hemingway has “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” serves as an allegory of Hemingway’s theory of art. The old man’s beloved cafe is a place of refuge from the chaotic world. It is clean and well-lit. It is orderly, just as Hemingway believed art should be. It is art, not faith, that offers meaning.
Women and Nerves
Early twentieth century literature often portrays women as being nervous, sensitive, and vulnerable to hostile environments. Such characterizations reflect a residue of the Victorian concept of female hysteria and apply to black and white women alike.
In section two of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess,” an unnamed female speaker says, “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad.” The stress and commotion of urban life threatens to overwhelm her. She babbles disjointedly while her male companion ignores her.
Similarly, the protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Helga Crane, is frequently described in terms of her ever-shifting emotional states. She is sensitive and impulsive and subject to “frayed nerves.” Helga stumbles into a storefront church. Because “Her nerves were so torn, so aching, her body so wet, so cold” she is hypnotized by the charismatic service.
Newland Archer vs Jay Gatsby
Newland Archer and Jay Gatsby seem to have little in common. Archer is the product of rigidly conventional upper-class New York society, whereas Gatsby manufactures a persona out of his own imagination. Newland chafes against, but, ultimately, adheres to his family’s expectations, while Gatsby attempts to erase his past and replace it with a myth of luxury. Yet, Newland and Gatsby share an important trait: they both live within their own imaginations. Newland never acts decisively because “thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction that its realization.” He does not run off with Ellen not only because he lacks the self-knowledge to discern his love for her or because it would defy convention, but also because he enjoys imagining the thing to the thing itself. Similarly, Gatsby spends five years contemplating his reunion with Daisy, believing that she has remained in love with him the whole time. When Gatsby finally does reunite with Daisy, he fails to make her conform to how he imagined her–she is unwilling to leave Tom despite her feelings for Gatsby.
Double Consciousness vs. The Freemasonry of the Race
In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois famously described the African American psyche in terms of double consciousness–two warring ideals in one body, yoked together by violence alone. The African self and the American self always in conflict, but desiring to be merged into a single, higher self. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, DuBois’s colleague, James Weldon Johnson, offers a slightly different framework for black experience–the freemasonry of the race. Johnson’s concept implies that blackness consists of a set of secret signs, rituals, and common experiences, much like participation in a society of free masons. Johnson’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, the ex-colored man who narrates the novel, is fair-skinned enough that he eventually chooses to pass as white. This experience leads him sometimes to long for connection with other black people.
