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ANNE ANLIN CHENG
THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE
If somethingis to stay in the memory,it must be burnedin: only that
which neverceases to hurt stays in the memory.
NIETZSCHE,
On the Genealogy of Morals
In grief the worldbecomespoor and empty;in melancholiait is the ego
itself.
FREUD,
s
"Mourningand Melancholia"
there any getting over race?
The answerwould seem to be negativein lightof the increasingfrequency
with which the "racecard"gets played.As the recent0. J. Simpsontrial and
its accompanyingrhetoricsuggest,racialrivalryis hardlyover. Indeed,it has
acquiredthe peculiarstatusof a game wherewhat constitutesa winninghand
has become identicalwith the handicap.Reappearingwith the vagrancyof a
joker, the race cardbringswith it a host of hauntingquestionsaboutthe value
and perceptionof race and racialmattersin America.What does it mean that
the deep woundof race in this countryhas come to be euphemizedas a card,
a metaphorwhich acknowledgesthe rhetoricas such and yet simultaneously
materializesraceinto a finiteobjectthatcan be dealtout, withheld,or trumped?
Why the singularityof a card?Who gets to play? And what would constitute
a "full deck"?
Holding a "full deck" may imply some idealized version of multisubjectivity(i.e., the potentialto play the racecardandthe gendercardandthe
immigrantcard,etc.), but it also impliesa stateof mentalhealthandcompletion
that renderssuch playing unnecessaryin the first place. After all, one would
"play"a cardonly becauseone is alreadyoutsidethe largergame, for to play a
49
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50
THE KENYON REVIEW
card is to exercise the value of one's disadvantage,the liabilitythat is asset.
The paradoxdoubles:the one who plays with a full deck not only need not
play at all, but indeedhas no such "card"to play. Only thoseplayingwith less
than a full deck need apply.
Not only is liabilitytransmuted
to assetandreformedyet againas liability,
but the vocabularyof the card also reveals a conceptualizationof health and
pathologywhich underliesour very perceptionsof race and its abnormalities.
In Maxine Hong Kingston'sThe WomanWarrior,the narrator,after a vexed
childhoodfull of racialand gendertraumas,tells her mother,"I've foundsome
places in this countrythat are ghost-free. . . where I don't catch colds or use
my hospitalizationinsurance.Here I am sick so often, I can barely work."1
In other words,I am most at home and fully myself when I am not at home
andnot myself.The denigratedbody gives rise to a hypochondriacal
body, and
the way for that body to imaginehealthis displacement,unheimlich.Yet the
narrator'sfinal deliverancecan only play out its very impossibility.Her claim
for such a ghost-freeand thrivingAmerica can only, within the context of
her "bookof grievance,"revealitself as endlessly haunted."Gettingover"the
pathologiesof her childhoodand origin means,in a sense, never getting over
those memories,so that health and idealizationturn out to be nothingmore
thancontinualescape, and nothingless than the denial and pathologizationof
what one is.
Meditatingon grief and the recollection of the dead, Freud posits
a firm distinctionbetween mourningand melancholia.His 1917 essay on
"Mourningand Melancholia"proposesmelancholiaas a pathologicalversion
of mourning-pathological because,unlike the successful and finite work of
mourning,the melancholiccannot "get over" loss; rather,loss is denied as
loss and incorporatedas partof the ego.2 In other words, the melancholicis
so persistentand excessive in the remembranceof loss thatthat remembrance
becomespartof the self. Thusthe melancholicconditionproducesa peculiarly
ghostlyformof ego formation.Moreover,thatincorporation
of loss still retains
the statusof the originallost objectas loss; consequently,as Freudremindsus,
andidentifyingwith the ghost of the lost one, the melancholic
by incorporating
takes on the emptinessof thatghostlypresenceand in this way participatesin
his/her own self-denigration.
As a model of ego-formation(the incorporationas self of an excluded
other),melancholiaprovidesa provocativemetaphorfor how race in America,
or more specificallyhow the act of racialization,works. While the formation
of American culture may be said to be a history of legalized exclusions
(Native Americans,African-Americans,
Jews, Chinese-Americans,JapaneseAmericans. . . ), it is, however,also a historyof misremembering
those denials.
Becausethe Americanhistoryof exclusions,imperialism,andcolonizationruns
so diametricallyopposedto the equallyandparticularlyAmericannarrativeof
liberty and individualism,culturalmemory in Americaposes a continuously
vexing problem:how to rememberthose transgressionswithoutimpedingthe
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ANNE ANLIN CHENG
51
ethosof progress?How to burythe remnantsof denigrationanddisgustcreated
in the name of progressand the formationof an "Americanidentity"?
Those subjectedto abjectionhoveron the edges of the dominantprogressive narrativeas objects at once ungrievedand unrelinquished.The invisible
but corporealbody of Ralph Ellison's protagonistin InvisibleMan offers an
excellent dramatization
of the minorityas the object of white melancholia.In
the openingscene, his is the invisiblebody thatthe whiteman literally"bumps
into,"a forgottenghost who refusesforgetting,a lack-of-presencethatchokes
the white man.3One might say the latterran into the bodily remnantof that
which he has killed. We recall the novel's figureof progress,Mr. Norton, a
white patronof the southernNegro college, who forgetsthe presenceof the
InvisibleMan next to him in orderto monumentalizehim, who cannotsee the
youngblackmandrivinghim but sees in the other'sface his own "destiny."As
a sponsorof Negro education,Mr. Nortonbuilds a monumentto the "progress
of historyas a mountingsaga of triumphs"4on the ghostly bodies of young
black men. With exampleslike this it is not difficultto conceive of dominant
white identityin Americaas melancholic.In addition,ToniMorrisonhas, with
a differentvocabulary,suggested that the Americanliterarycanon itself is
a melancholiccorpus,proposing"an examinationand reinterpretation
of the
Americancanon, the foundingnineteenth-century
works,for the 'unspeakable
things unspoken';for the ways in which the presenceof Afro-Americanshas
shaped the choices, the language, the structure-the meaning of so much
Americanliterature.'5 The canon is a melancholiccorpusbecause of what it
excludesbut cannotforget.The Afro-Americanpresence,Morrisonconcludes,
is "the ghost in the machine"(11).
But what aboutthe minority?Can they be melancholictoo? If so, who
and what are they forgettingin orderto remember?If we were to exhume,as
Morrisonsuggests, the buriedbody in the heartof Americanliterature,what
exactly is the natureof the "presence"that would be uncovered?Whatwould
be the morphologyof ghostliness?
Figuringthe minorityhas its difficulties.We understandthat reparative
and redemptivetendencies underlie much of the intellectual and material
interests in "the minority."Yet as both the "race card" and the Kingston
examples made clear, there is more than a little irony, if not downright
in the effort to relabel as healthy a condition that has
counterproductivity,
been diagnosed,and kept, as sickly and aberrant.Melancholiacan be quite
contagious. After all, it designates a condition of identity disorder where
subjectandobjectbecomeindistinguishable
fromone another.The melancholic
object,madeneitherdeadnor fully alive, must experienceits own subjectivity
as suspension, as excess and denigration-and in this way, replicate the
melancholicsubject. With Kingston's narrator,we see the "good" cultural
melancholicpar excellence:one who longs aftera visionof herselfthatexcludes
herself. This pathologicaleuphoria,however, merely assents to the dreamof
multiculturalism:
a utopianno-placewherethe pathologiesof race and gender
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52
THE KENYON REVIEW
miraculouslyheal themselves. The very idea of the melting pot serves to
celebrateassimilationwhile continuallyremarkingdifference.It is startling
how often in ethnic and immigrantnarrativeswe find overidealizationand
euphoriain place of injury.
In Flower Drum Song, a classically bad Hollywood representationof
ethnic conditions, we actually get to see the minority, and specificallythe
immigrant,celebratedas illegality,thatwhichcame in but cannotbe admitted.
Producedin the wake of the repealof the ChineseExclusionAct in 1943, this
movie (as well as its Broadwaypredecessor)aims to promoteassimilationand
reflecta new, positive image of ChinatownacrossAmerica.6But whatexactly
is the face of this new citizenship?In the opening sequence,we find the two
main characters,the young woman Mei Li and her father,stowed away on a
boat that docks in San Francisco.When Mei Li offers to sing a "traditional
Chinese song" (that Rodgersand Hammersteincreation"A HundredMillion
Miracles")on the streetsof San Franciscofor money, the fatherworriesabout
the proprietyof such performanceand warns, "It is unlucky to start in a
new countryby breakingthe law." The irony-that the old man is anxious
aboutbreakingcivic law when he has alreadyflagrantlybrokenthe largerlaw
to
of immigration-highlights a deeperdouble bind within "naturalization":
survive, the strangerwho has violated the law must also be an ideal citizen,
one who embodiesthe law. As he sails throughSan Francisco'sGoldenGate,
the fathersimultaneouslybecomesboththe illegalalienandthe modelminority.
illegal statusturnsout to be the very solutionto this national
Furthermore,
moralityplay. In the finale, afterdespairand frustration,Mei Li finally lights
upon a solutionto free herself(andher real objectof affection)fromthe binds
of an arrangedmarriage.Onthe thresholdof thatundesiredmarriageceremony,
she announcesto her newfoundAmericanfriends:"I must confess... my back
is wet!" She declares her own abject status with barely suppressedjoy. In
other words, only by exposing herself as an object of prohibitioncan she
achieve the particularlyAmericandreamof the freedomof marryingfor love;
only by assentingto illegality can she hope to acquireideal citizenship.Her
public confession and self-indictmentanticipatesthe naturalizationprocess,
where one acquirescitizenship in a rhetoricof rebirthpredicatedon selfrenunciation("Do you swear to give up..."). In fact, the one characterwho
may be said to be an instanceof "good"assimilationin the movie-Helen the
seamstress,who seems to weave effortlesslytogetherbothherChineseheritage
andAmericanstyle-is also the classic odd womanout, whose "just-rightness"
no one chooses. The choices of the "right"kind of love, the "right"kind of
beauty,and the "right"kindof girl in this movie turnout to be a lesson about
the rightkindof citizenship.And those who finallyattainthis nationalideal are
preciselythose markedas prohibitedby law. More thana hauntingconceptin
America,the "minoritysubject"presentsa hauntedsubject.Minorityidentity
reveals an inscriptionmarkingthe remembranceof absence. Denigrationhas
conditionedits formationandresuscitation.Not merelythe objectof dominant
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ANNE ANLIN CHENG
53
melancholia,the minority(in this case, literallyan impossiblesubject,the illegal
alien) is also a melancholicsubject,except thatwhat she renouncesis herself.
In the landscapeof grief, the boundarybetween subjectand object, the
loser and the thing lost, poses a constantproblem.Even Freud's idea of a
propermourningbeginsto sufferfrommelancholiccontamination.In orderfor
propermourningto take place, one wouldhave to be already,somehow,"over
it." For Freud,mourningentails,curiouslyenough,a forgetting:"...profound
mourning.. does not recall the dead one."7Upon a closer look, the kind of
healthy"lettinggo" Freuddelineatesgoes beyondmere forgettingto complete
eradication.The successfulworkof mourningdoes not only forget,it reinstates
the death sentence:
Just as the work of grief, by declaring the object dead and offering the ego the benefit
of continuing to live, impels the ego to give up the object, so each single conflict of
ambivalence,by disparaging the object, denigratingit, even as it were by slaying it, loosens
the fixation of the libido to it. (emphasis added)8
Mourning implies the second killing off of the lost object. The denigration
and murder of the beloved object fortifies the ego. Not only do we note that
"health"here means rekilling a loss already lost, but we have to ask also how
different is this in aim from the melancholic who hangs onto the lost object as
part of the ego in order to live? That is to say, although different in method
and technology (the mourner kills while the melancholic cannibalizes), the
production of denigration and rejection, however re-introjected is concomittant
with the production and survival of "self." The good mourner turns out to be
none other than an ultrasophisticated, and more lethal, melancholic.
In the landscape of racialization, such boundary confusion occurs on
multiple levels: physical, sexual, ontological, terminological. In Carolivia
Herron's disturbing novel ThereafterJohnnie, incest as a trauma of boundary is
offered as a curse of slavery; in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's experimental novel
Dicte6e,the body of the narratoroften literally merges into the geography of
division that is modern Korea, while the voice of the autobiographical subject
remains indistinguishable from various forms of cultural dictation; in her wellknown essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston collapses
the question of race into the question of specularity (who is watching; who
is playing for whom). As James Clifford says, the question of boundary is
the ethnic predicament. The point here is not to repathologize the minority,
but to confront the more difficult question of what is a minority without
his/her injury. Contemporary political activities and rhetoric designed to set
matters right cannot really be effective, cannot escape relabeling those it aims
to liberate,until we recognizethatour very conceptionsof culturalhealthand
integrityarethemselvespreconditionedby whathavebeen deemedabnormalor
broken. In the way of Freudian logic, pathology defines health. Racial identity,
as a moment of active self-perception, is almost always simultaneous with the
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54
THE KENYON REVIEW
racializationof another,an instanceof othering.When Hurstonwrites,"I feel
most coloredwhen I am thrownagainsta sharpwhite background,"she refers
not only to the constitutionof blackness,butof whitenessas well, each defining
the other'spathology.9Or, as Nella Larsen'snarratorin Passing knows all too
well, race is the companythat you keep.
It shouldbe clear by now that race itself lives in Americaas a melancholic presence.Morespecifically,racialization-as an act of self-constitution
throughdenying and re-assimilatingthe Other-must be conceived of as a
wholly melancholicactivity. The rhetoricof compensation,which attempts
to reverse discriminationthroughinversion,neglects the organizationof the
activity that went into producingdiscrimination,nor can it accommodatethe
physical effects of those wounds. There is a possibilitythat we may not be
able to retrievean unmarked,unscathedsubject underthe dirty bandageof
racism. As we saw with Flower DrumSong, Mei Li's presence was always
markedas transgression,and re-markedas such in her final acquisitionof a
new homeland.Similarly,we are all too painfullyfamiliarwith popularracial
fantasiesthatcirculatewithinourpublicsphere,butratherthanidentifyingthose
stereotypesyet againor simplydenyingthose clearlytroublesomeimages("We
aren'tlike that!"),it seems more fruitfuland importantto go on to the more
complex question of how melancholicracializationworks. To propose that
the minoritymay have been profoundlyaffectedby racial fantasiesis not to
lock him/herback into the stereotypes,but to performthe more importanttask
of unravelingthe deeperidentificatoryoperations-and seductions-produced
by those projections.
If the melancholicminorityis busy forgettingherself, with what is she
identifying?We have all heardthe wisdom that women and minoritieshave
internalizeddominantcultural demands,but do we really know what that
means?Wheredoes desirecome into this equation?It is a dangerousquestion
to ask whatdoes a minoritywant.Whenit comes to politicalcritique,it seems
as if desire itself may be what the minorityhas been enjoined to forget. In
David HenryHwang'saward-winningplay M. Butterfly,the storyof a French
diplomat(Gallimard)who after ten years discoversthat his Chinese mistress
(SongLiling)was notonly a spy butalso a man,whatremainsglaringlymissing
from the play is an entertainmentof Song's desires.By now M. Butterflyhas
becomean almost-classictext of how racialfantasiesfacilitatesexualfantasies;
centralto muchcriticalattentionhas been the play's exposureof the consistent
emasculationof Asian males in white society. Indeed,the play's fundamental
assumptionis that Song's sexual deceptionsucceededbecauseof Gallimard's
racialstereotypesabout"theEast."Yetas an exposeof sexualintrigueandracial
fantasy,M. Butterflybegs the question:aside fromhis professionalobjectiveto
seduce Gallimard,does Song have a personalinvestmentin his disguise?And
what would it meanfor the politicalagendaof the play if he did? In the three
momentsof the play whenwe mighthavehintsof Song's own privatefantasies,
we aregreetedwith silencesanddeferrals:whenComradeChin asks why Song
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ANNE ANLIN CHENG
55
remainsin disguise when alone; when the judge questionsSong's incredible
acting ability;and when GallimardquestionsSong's motivation.In all three
brief instances,Song's answer comes in the form of ellipses and pauses, as
thoughhis desire can only be pronouncedas unutterability.Significantly,the
play can see Song only as the object of Gallimard'sdesire or as the critic of
that desire. It is as though to articulateSong's desire would renderhim less
"cool"or jeopardizehis positionas a propercritic of Westernracialfantasies.
In otherwords,Song must not want.His inauthenticperformancemustremain
inauthenticin orderto guaranteethe authenticityof his critique.
The notion that cultural assimilationalways requires certain acts of
personal relinquishmentand even disguise is a common one, easily and
conventionallyunderstoodas the priceof "fittingin."Think,for example,of the
long literaryalignmentof "passing"with deception.PostcolonialtheoristHomi
Bhabhaoffers us some insights into the connectionbetween assimilationand
falsehood.He identifies"mimicry"as a colonial, disciplinaryinjunctionand
device, one thatis nonethelessdoomedto fail. He explains,"colonialmimicry
is the desire for a reformed,recognizableOther,as a subjectof a difference
that is almost the same, but not quite." 10 By this account, the colonized finds
him/herselfin the positionof melancholicallyechoingthe master,incorporating
both the master and his own denigration.What we have been calling the
"internalizationof the other,"Bhabhaattributesto authoritativeinjunction.
Such injunctionto mime the dominantcan be seen from images such as the
Indianservantdressed as the Englishmanto the colonial institutionalization
of languageitself. We see here sophisticatedversionsof the "priceof fitting
in." To put it crudely,Bhabhahas located the social injunctionto assimilate
and thatinjunction'sbuilt-infailure.The colonizedsubjectmust be disguised,
mimed,as almostthe same, but not quite.His/herincompleteimitationin turn
serves as a sign of assimilativefailure,the failureof authenticity.
The concept of melancholicracialization,however, implies that assimilation may be more intimatelylinked to identitythan a mere consequenceof
the dominantdemandfor sameness.In melancholia,assimilation("actingliko
an internalizedother")is a fait accompli, part and parcel of ego formation
for the dominantand the minority,except that with the latter,such doubling
is seen as somethingfalse ("actinglike someone you're not").The notion of
racial authenticityis thus finally a culturaljudgmentwhich itself disguises
the identificatoryassimilation that has already taken place in melancholic
racialization:"I am constitutedby an otherwho finallymust, and mustnot, be
me." The story of M. Butterflysuggeststhat deceptionmight be more deeply
affective than merely facilitatingassimilation;rather,"passing"may share a
profoundlysimilarlogic with the activityof identityitself. Nearthe end of the
play Song seems to have forgottenthe terms of his own game. We see him
proteststartlinglyand tellingly, "So-you [Gillimard]never really loved me?
Only when I was playing a part?""lThe blindness of that questionreveals
Song as havingbeen seducedby his own mise-en-scene.The failureof Song's
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56
THE KENYON REVIEW
deceptioncomes from this plunge into the realityof that deception.And that
failureof authenticityhas the very specificeffect of creatinga sense of "thereal
self": Song cries, "I'm your butterfly... it was always me."12 The seduction
of authenticityturnsout to promisenothingless thanthe possibilityof a pure
self: ".. . it was always me."
In his introductionto Abrahamand Torok'sThe WolfMan'sMagic Word
(itself a responseto Freudon melancholia),JacquesDerridasimilarlyimplies
that the disguise may be fundamentalto an act of identification:
The first hypothesis of The Magic Word... supposes a redefinitionof the Self (the systems
of introjections) and of the fantasy of incorporation....
The more the self keeps the foreign element as a foreigner inside itself, the more it
excludes it. The self mimesintrojection.But this mimicry with its redoubtablelogic depends
on clandestinity. Incorporationoperates clandestinely with a prohibitionit neither accepts
nor transgresses. (underliningadded)'3
The "foreignerinside"lives as the "self."To raciallyassimilate(in the senses
of blendingin and takingin) implies an act of public and subjectivedisguise:
not only the disguiseof the self in the traditionalsense of "takingit," but also
in the deepersense of remakingthe self throughthe other,a profoundlyselfconstitutingact. WhatI called the pureself thatSong in M. Butterfy assertsis
figuredafterthe master.Song does not come to power in the end nor assume
the success of his politicalcritiqueby acquiringsome authenticChinesemale
identity.On the contrary,he does so by donningan Armanisuit and adopting
the colonial voice: "Youthink I could've pulled this off if I wasn't full of
pride?. . . It took arrogance,really-to believe you can will . . . the destiny of
another."14One might say Song has not only learnedhow to be with a white
man, but also how to be the white man. The difficultlesson of M. Butterfly
thereforeis not the existenceof fantasystereotypesas the playwrighthimself
assertsin the Afterword,but the more disturbingidea thatfantasystereotypes
may be the very ways in whichwe come to know and love someone..., come
to know and love ourselves.
Melancholiahas thus seeped into every cornerof our landscape.Is there
any getting over it? First it seems more importantthan ever to recognize
that identity built on loss is symptomaticof both the dominant and the
marginalized.Second,at the risk of speakinglike a true melancholic,perhaps
minoritydiscoursemight prove to be most powerful when it resides within
the consciousness of melancholiaitself, when it can maintaina "negative
capability"betweenneitherdismissing,nor sentimentalizingthe minority.Let
us returnto the hauntingsof InvisibleMan. Ellison's politicalcritiquein that
of a self-reflexivemelancholia,a man
novel seems preciselythe dramatization
whose invisibilityaffects the marginas well as the center:
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ANNE ANLIN CHENG
57
I am invisible.... Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as
though I have been surroundedby mirrorsof hard,distortingglass. When they approachme
they see only my surroundings,themselves, or figments of their imagination.... 15
In thathall of mirrors,who distortswhom?As muchas racialblindnessrenders
the narratorinvisible, his invisibility also reflects emptiness back on those
gazers as well. If he has been assimilatedonly throughhis invisibility,then
he also rendersdissimilarand strangethe status of their visibility. Here we
have the potentialfor a kind of subversiveassimilation,a kind of mimetic
dissimulationinherentin, thoughdifferentlyinflectedby, Bhabha's"discourse
of mimicry."The phantasmof the narrator'sinvisibilityimitatesthe phantasm
that is mainstreamsociety.
The characterwho embodiesthis strategyof imitationis of course the
phantasmaticfigure of Rinehart.Literallythe real invisible man in the text,
Rinehartnever appears-except as pure appearance:Rinehartthe runner,
Rine the gambler,Rine the briber,Rine the lover, pimp, and reverend.He
stands as the figure of a figure. To try to locate Rinehart's"true"identity
would be to miss the lesson of Rinehart:who you are depends on whom
you are talking to, which community you are in, and who is watching
your performance.Embodyingdissimulativepotentials,glaringly visible in
his invisibility,Rinehartoperatesand structuresa networkof connectionsin
Harlemfromreligionto prostitutionto the law. A mandefinedby costumesand
props,he is at once the ultimate"outsider"and "insider,"makingvisible the
contingencyof identityandpervertingthe lines of power-or at least,exposing
poweras positionality.As a parablefor plurality,as a continuallyre-signifiable
sign, Rinehartcritiques the mainstreamideal of an uncompromisingindividuality.
Rinehartas an event of visual performancedemonstratesfirstthatthe act
of identificationis dependenton representation,and thus drawsour attention
to the power dynamics of viewer and spectatorship;second, that the act
of representationinvolves simultaneously,on a deeper level, an act of disidentification.To impersonateRinehartis to becomeRinehart:"Somethingwas
and profoundly... being mistakenfor him.., my
workingon me [the narrator],
entirebody startedto itch, as thoughI had just been removedfrom a plaster
cast ... you could actuallymake yourself anew."16 Yet even as the narrator
celebratesa rebirththroughhis disguise, he suffers from a kind of identity
aphasia,askingrepeatedly,"Whoactuallywas who?"Becominga re-signable
sign pays a priceof its own. "It"is notjust a costume,as Song in M. Butterfly
has foundout. The site of identificationis presentedas difficultand ambivalent
preciselybecause thereis a cost in every identitystaging.
This liberation is thus provisional, if not downright shattering.By
impersonatingRinehart,the narratorarrivesnot at an identity,but the phantasm
that is the mode of identification.To follow Rinehartismis to plunge into the
very heart of racial melancholia:
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58
THE KENYON REVIEW
So I'd accept it, I'd explore it, rine and heart. I'd plunge into it with both feet and they'd
gag. Oh, but wouldn't they gag.... Yes, and I'd let them swoller me until they vomited or
burst wide open. Let them gag on what they refuse to see.'7
"Gagging"literalizesthe melancholicconditionof race in America:we gag on
what we refuseto see. Americancultureis continuallyconfrontedby ghosts
it can neither spit out nor swallow. Rinehart,the "SpiritualTechnologist,"
recommends a remedy for that social malady: "Behold the Invisible,"18
suggesting that only by recognizinginvisibilitycan we begin to understand
the conditionsof visibility.EarlierI askedwhatis the statusof the "presence"
which Toni Morrisonwants us to uncover.Is she referringto "real"Africanpresence?I propose
Americanpresenceor the phantasmof African-American
thatthe answercan only be the latter.The racializationand phantomizationof
exist to produce"American"presence.The always ghostly
African-Americans
presenceof African-Americansin Americanliteratureimplies that the entire
process of racialization,of configuringvisibility (who is white, who is black;
who is visible, who is not), must be consideredas itself melancholic.The
act of delineatingabsence preconditionspresence.Race in America is thus
"stuck"withinthe Moebius stripof inclusionand exclusion:an identification
predicatedon dis-identity.It is a fear of contaminationthatworksitself out by
contamination,a rememberingof a forgettingthat cannotbe remembered.
And nothingis moredisturbingthanbeingmadeto witnessthe simultaneity of thatduality.This, to sidetrackfor a moment,is perhapswhy the theaterof
AnnaDeveareSmithholds suchresonance.Eachcharacteris constituted,made
real for us, by his/hercounterdefinition
to another,andthe tablekeeps turning.
Anyone who has partakenof Smith'sperformancesunderstandsthe discomfort
of being made to watch the fine line between speakingfor, speakingas, and
speaking against. In Smith's theaterof incorporation,one sees on a single
stage the agon, the multifaceted,conflictualviews betweenracializedpeoples
(even withinindividuals),andthe inconsolabilityof eachof theirpositions.One
gets a feeling too that there will never be enoughjustice, enough reparation,
enoughguilt, pain, or angerto make up for the racialwoundscleaved into the
Americanpsyche-remembered by boththe dominantandthe marginalizedas
itself. With Smith'speculiarbrandof impersonation,it is
incommensurability
as if only in imitation,in the bodilyoccupationof the other,thatwe come to see
Thatis, representation
paradoxicallyan alternativeto the trapsof representation.
has frequentlyand rightly been criticized for its colonizing potentials.But
Smith's art suggests that representation,mimicryeven, may be employed as
a form of performativecounteroccupation,
wherebythe act of placingoneself
in the other'splace exposes one's vulnerabilityto thatperformedother.More
profoundly,her paradoxicalpolyphonicmonologuedramatizesthe psychical
truththat to speak is to speak the other.
InvisibleMan hints thatthe firstsolutionto thatmelancholicconditionis
not to recovera presencethatnever was, but to recognizethe disembodiment
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ANNE ANLIN CHENG
59
that is both the masterand the slave. Rinehart'smetaphoricdisembodiment
becomesliteralizedin the narrator'sown epiphanichallucination,the scene of
castration.In a state of neitherdreamingnor waking,he confrontsthe groups
that he has encounteredand their particularbrandsof incorporativehistories
and ideologies:
... I lay the prisonerof a group consisting of Jack and Emerson and Bledsoe and Norton
and Ras and the school superintendent.... they were demandingthat I return to them and
were annoyed with my refusal.
"No," I said. "I am through with all your illusions and lies..."
But now they came forwardwith a knife... and I felt the brightred pain as they took the
two bloody blobs and cast them over the bridge, and out of my anguish I saw them curve
up and catch beneath the apex of the curving arch of the bridge, to hang there, dripping
down throughthe sunlight into the dark red water.
"Now you're free of illusions," Jack said, pointing to my seed wasting upon the air.
"How does it feel to be free of one's illusions?"
And now I answered, "Painfuland empty... But look... there's your universe, and that
drip-dropupon the water you hear is all the history you've made, all you're going to
make...."
19
The narrator'sdismemberment, his scattered, castrated ego becomes the resis-
tanceagainstgroupconsolidationsandsignifyingprocesses.By tryingto recruit
the narratoras a mirrorimage of themselves,by castratinghim to do so, the
various social organizationsincorporatethe very loss that they instigate. If
historyenactsdenigration,then historywill be structuredby thatbrutalization.
This scene demonstratesthat "to be free of illusions and lies" is viscerally
brutalizing,but it also imagines that freedommight occur in the very place
of that rupture.
This scene speculatesthatfreedomcomesnot fromhistoricalor social liberation,but specificallyfrom the renouncementof individualidentity("painful
and empty"),because the vocabularyof freedomitself can be deployed by
the rhetoricof enslavement(as illustratedby the rhetoricof the Brotherhood).
"Tobe free of illusions"paradoxicallyand cruciallymeans to be free of the
hasbeen searching
ideologiesof authenticity.Throughoutthe book,the narrator
The only vision
as
well
as
communal
identification.
for visibility,individualism,
of individualism,however, comes from the state of disappearance,of pain
and emptiness-a shatteredratherthanreconstitutedsubject.In that scene of
castrationand relinquishment,invisibilityhas been theorizedas a condition
of disembodimentand abstraction,as an escape from "illusions."Ellison
locates identity,not in uncompromisingindividualism,but in intrasubjective
and violently.
negotiations-negotiationsthatareexperiencedintersubjectively
The resolutionof InvisibleMan remainsfar fromcertain.Whatis the "socially
responsiblerole" that the narratorwill play by the end of the novel? The
narrativehas offeredus more questionsthanany final affirmationor particular
course of action. The narratorinforms us: "So it is now I denounce and
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6o
THE KENYON REVIEW
defend... I condemnand affirm,say no and say yes, say yes and say no.... So
I approachit throughdivision."20Ellison's politics in this work offer us
descriptionratherthan prescription.
"Community"embodies its inverse: exclusion. InvisibleMan remains
wary of the very groupideologies that "create"and isolate African-American
communitiesin the firstplace. As the enclave that protectsbut also marginalizes, Harlemis not free from that"soul-sickness."The narratortells us thathe
has been "as invisibleto Mary [the nurturing'mother'in the heartof Harlem]
2' When he asks of Clifton's death,
as [he] had been to the Brotherhood."
"Whydid he choose to plungeinto nothingness,into the void of faceless faces,
of soundlessvoices, laying outside history,"22he anticipateshis own falling
underground,significantlyon the edge betweenHarlemand the mainstayof
the city. InvisibleMan collapses the literalquestionof "whereyou stand"into
the metaphoricand political questionof "whereyou stand,"and exposes its
positionality.The discourseof identityfostersdivisionand dis-identification
as
well. Consequently,Ellison's political thesis has always seemed to me more
radical than minoritypolitics find comfortable.It is radical in its profound
underminingof group ideology and of communalpossibilities.The political
platformof InvisibleMan,contraryto the appealof the representative
novel and
its ethnicbildung,relies not on identity-because the protagonistneverarrives
at one-but on the nonexistenceof identity,on invisibilitywith its assimilative
and dissimulativepossibilities.Yet this place of political discomfortprovides
the most intenseexaminationof what it meansto adopta political stance.
Wordsfrom the invisible man remainto hauntus: "You carrypart of
your sickness with you" (575). You carry the foreigner inside. This malady
of doubleness,I argue,is the melancholyof race, a dis-ease of location and
memory,a persistentfantasyof identificationthat cleaves and cleaves to the
marginalizedand the master.
NOTES
'Maxine Hong Kingston, The WomanWarrior:Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New
York: Vintage, 1979) 108.
2Sigmund Freud, "Mourningand Melancholia,"Collected Papers: Vol.IV (London: Hogarth,
1953).
3Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1990) 4.
4Ellison 36.
5Toni Morrison, "UnspeakableThings Unspoken: The Afro-AmericanPresence in American
Literature,"Michigan QuarterlyReview 28 (Winter 1989): 11.
6Althoughthe Chinese Exclusion Act was repealedin 1943, it was not until the ImmigrationAct
of 1965 that the national-quotasystem on Chinese immigrantswas finally lifted. Thus Flower Drum
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ANNE ANLIN CHENG
6I
Song was produced, significantly, at a time when Chinese immigrationpatterns to the U.S. were on
the brink of great changes.
7Freud 153.
'Freud 169.
9Zora Neale Hurston, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive (New York: The Feminist Press,
1979) 154.
l0Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October 28
(Spring 1984): 126.
"David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly(New York:Penguin Books, 1986) 89.
12Hwang 89.
13Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word:A Cryptonymy,trans.
Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), xv, xvii.
14Hwang 85.
15Ellison 3.
16Ellison 498-99.
17Ellison 508.
18Ellison 495.
19Ellison 569-70.
20Ellison 580.
21Ellison 57 1.
22Ellison 441.
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