Natty Bumppo, most likely telling the young Mohican Indian Uncas how to be a better Indian. Image found here.

Note: Over at my other blog, I have two brief posts on Mohicans, here and here; this one comes out of that context, but it’s not crucial to have read them before you read this one.

The frustrating (and fascinating) thing about reading The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is that, for all its insufferable didaticism it can be difficult to know whether and to what extent certain of its more intriguing textual moments are intentional. This difficulty, I would assume, is owing to what Richard Poirier succinctly describes (77) as Cooper’s lack of stylistic defensiveness. One quick example is Cooper’s rendering of Natty Bumppo’s speaking the word nature as “natur”: Apart from seeking to signify how his character is pronouncing the word, might Cooper also intend something of a more metaphysical or existential quality as regards his protagonist’s nature? I don’t know, and there is likely no way to know for sure. I mention all this because some conclusions that follow will be more speculative than interpretive; to that end, I’ll also make reference to another book, ostensibly very different from Mohicans, to provide a little support for those speculations.

Mohicans is here because of its influence on 19th-century Latin American writers who saw themselves (and their people) in the years after independence with much the same task ahead of them that Cooper’s characters face: the establishing of a new nation, and the extent to which people will shape the land, or the land them. But Mohicans is interesting to me as well because of the presence of Cora Munro, the older of Colonel Munro’s two daughters. The colonel tells Major Duncan Heyward of Cora’s origins–significantly, after the colonel assumes Heyward is interested in marrying Cora and Heyward rather awkwardly says he is not, that his interests lie with Alice, Cora’s younger, fairer, half-sister:

[Munro says, "In the West Indies,] it was my lot to form a connexion with one who in time became my wife, and the mother of Cora. She was the daughter of a gentleman of those isles, by a lady, whose misfortune it was, if you will,” said the old man, proudly, “to be descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class, who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people! Ay, sir, that is a curse entailed on Scotland, by her unnatural union with a foreign and trading people. But could I find a man among them, who would dare to reflect on my child, he should feel the weight of a father’s anger! Ha! Major Heyward, you are yourself born at the south, where the unfortunate beings are considered of a race inferior to your own. . . . [a]nd you cast it on my child as a reproach! You scorn to mingle the blood of the Heywards, with one so degraded–lovely and virtuous though she be?” fiercely demanded the jealous parent.

“Heaven protect me from a prejudice so unworthy of my reason!” returned Duncan, at the same time conscious of such a feeling, and that as deeply rooted as if it had been engrafted in his nature. “The sweetness, the beauty, the witchery of your younger daughter, Colonel Munro, might explain my motives, without imputing to me this injustice.” (151)

Heyward thus smooths things over with his future father-in-law, though not without a twinge of conscience as he feels compelled to lie to him even as he confronts a truth about himself. To his credit, up to this point in the novel he had been partial to Alice before being told of Cora’s ancestry; but now, as we see above, he has information that legitimizes to himself his not choosing Cora, even as he denies that his thinking tends in the same direction as that of the South. Heyward also provides here in miniature one of the novel’s chief themes: the tension between Reason and Nature as the deciding factor in determining our attitudes regarding race. As Heyward makes explicit in the passage above, the then-PC thing to say is that racism is antithetical to reason; yet the impulse toward racist (and racialist) attitudes seems “engrafted in . . . nature.” (Just as an aside, Thomas Dixon, in his novel The Sins of the Father (1912), will have his hero Dan Norton argue just the opposite: that racialism is a completely rational notion, and his adulterous affair with the mulatto woman Cleo is the result of his succumbing to what he characterizes as a failure of reason to control his baser impulses.)

I’ve not yet finished reading Mohicans, but thus far Cora, whose racial background satisfies the most essential prerequisites of the Tragic Mulatto–that she be darker-haired and -complected owing to some infinitesimal trace of black blood in her; that that trace render her unfit as a marriage partner–she is no tragic figure. That is most likely because she already knows the details of her parentage and, as a result, is (with the possible exception of the Chingachgook and his son Uncas) the most comfortable in her racial skin. That comfort, moreover, seems to give her a strength that Alice utterly lacks. It may also be, in part, why the attention the men show Cora is of a sort for which the best descriptor is “sexual.” In the most explicit expression of that attention, when the duplicitous Huron Magua (to whom Cooper also gives the French name Le Renard Subtil, just in case the reader needs a further marker of his duplicitous nature–there’s that word again) leeringly proposes to Cora in chapter XI that she become his wife, Cora more than holds her own. The fair-skinned and blonde Alice is also beautiful, but she is much more childlike and naïve; the attention she tends to attract is more paternalistic. It’s thus very odd to see Heyward describe Alice in the passage quoted above as possessing “witchery.” If witchery it is, it is Glinda-Good-Witch-of-the-North witchery.

Cora will not survive the end of Mohicans. As Doris Sommer argues in Foundational Fiction’s discussion of the novel’s influence on Argentinian writer Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo,

[Cora's tragedy] is announced by the fact that she is the product of a leaky grid of blood. Her blood was so rich that it “seemed ready to burst its bounds” [11 in the Modern Library edition]. It stains her; makes her literally uncategorizable, that is, an epistemological error. . . . Cooper introduces these anomalous figures [Bumppo as well as Cora] as if to pledge that America can be original by providing the space for differences, variations, and crossings. But then he recoils from them, as if they were misfits, monsters. If Hawk-eye seems redeemable inside the grid of a classical reading because, unlike the gauchos, he is a man without a cross, he is finally as doomed as they are by Cooper’s obsessive social neatness. Hawk-eye disturbs the ideal hierarchies that Sarmiento and his Cooper have in mind, because neither birth nor language can measure his worth. (58-59)

Sommer’s reading here is another way of stating the terms of that tension between Reason and Nature that I mentioned earlier regarding a society’s attitudes about race. Whatever the truth of Sommer’s claim of Cooper’s “obsessive social neatness,” though, I’d argue that within the text–or more precisely, within Cooper’s characters–that debate is far from resolved, much less resolved neatly. The extent to which Cooper is actually aware of all this messiness–for which, after all, he as the author bears some responsibility–is a question Sommer, given how she characterizes Cooper seems not even to see as a question. This question of whether writers who create racially- and culturally-miscegenated characters are fully aware of how they destabilize narrative is an important one for this project.

Despite her passion, Cora exhibits a calmness: she clearly knows herself. Nowhere, thus far in the novel, does she wrestle with questions of her identity. As readers know, though, Natty Bumppo obsessively makes claims as to his “natur,” the most familiar assertion being that he is a man whose blood bears no cross. His mantra-like iteration, once we get over the impulse to mock it, becomes curious. No one in the novel questions that he is white; it is no secret that he was born of white parents but raised by Indians. Yet, if we may indulge in a bit of psychoanalysis, that constant iteration would seem to indicate that Bumppo feels a barely-subconscious anxiety about his background. Even as he expresses what can only be termed pride in his knowledge of the woods and the ways of Indians, it is as though he worries reflexively that in the eyes of other whites the very fact that he has this knowledge (or, alternately, a lack of knowledge that other whites “should” have) marks him as different in some essential way from other whites. To take only one example of this, when he initially does not properly read the tracks left by the Narraganset Bay horses that Cora and Alice are riding–a breed of horse that Cooper had earlier provided information on via a footnote for his readers’ benefit–Bumppo feels compelled to explain why he had failed: “[T]hough I am a man who has the full blood of the whites, my judgment in deer and beaver is greater than in beasts of burthen. Major Effington has many noble chargers, but I have never seen one travel after such a sideling gait!” (113) Bumppo apparently fears that someone might interpret his ignorance of one breed of horse, fairly uncommon though it is, as a sign that he is somehow less than white–hence his felt need to say that he has “the full blood of the whites.”

At the beginning of this post, I wondered whether, by rendering Bumppo’s pronunciation of the word as “natur,” Cooper might want to suggest something more existential about his protagonist: that he at some level feels some lack in his nature that puts him at risk of being alienated from the people with whom he claims a racial kinship. It’s here that I would like to engage in a bit more speculation: that the key to Bumppo’s anxiety is suggested by a pun, which may or may not be intentional on Cooper’s part, in Bumppo’s saying that his “blood bears no cross”: that is, that while Bumppo believes in God and “Providence,” it would be a mistake to identify him as a Christian–at least, as that term is understood by the other whites in the novel. At a time when religious affiliation, a community’s being held together and affirming its members via a shared faith in God–and, more precisely, a shared expression of that faith via theology and doctrine–was an accepted part of communal life and was fully embraced by almost everyone, it is not too excessive to suggest the possibility that Bumppo’s spiritual estrangement from his fellows compels him to affirm his kinship via his consanguinity–his “natur”–all the while fearing that even consanguinity might not be sufficient.

In a heated exchange with David Gamut, a psalmodist who, along with Cora and Alice, has just been rescued from their Huron captors, Bumppo reveals that while he believes the death of the Hurons he had just killed was “fore-ordered,” Bumppo makes abundantly clear that he does not share Gamut’s belief in the Puritan doctrine of foreordination, that, as Gamut puts it, “He that is to be saved will be saved, and he that is predestined to be damned will be damned!” Bumppo rejects this on the grounds that one actually has to bear witness to what befalls a person before one can say what his/her fate is. But what would be most unsettling to the sort of Christian that Gamut apparently is Bumppo’s explicit rejection of the authority of any printed book as providing the grounds for making claims about one’s salvation or damnation:

“Book! what have such as I, who am a warrior of the wilderness, though a man without a cross, to do with books! I never read but in one, and the words that are written there are too simple and too plain to need much schooling[. . . . ] ‘Tis open before your eyes, [. . .] and he who owns it is not a niggard of its use. I have heard it said, that there are men who read in books, to convince themselves there is a God! I know not but man may so deform his works in the settlements, as to leave that which is so clear in the wilderness, a matter of doubt among traders and priests. If any such there be, and he will follow me from sun to sun, through the windings of the forest, he shall see enough to teach him that he is a fool, and that the greatest of his folly lies in striving to rise to the level of one he can never be equal, be it in goodness, or be it in power.” (109)

Yet, firm as he is in his direct rejection of the truth claims made by Christians on behalf of the Bible, it is not as though Bumppo lives without doubts. In a later scene that can only be described as poignant, Natty engages Col. Heyward in a conversation about the nature of heaven as they return to the ruins of the fort named William Henry. The exchange is so remarkable that it is worth quoting at length:

“Speaking of spirits, major, are you of opinion that the heaven of a red-skin, and of us whites, will be one and the same?”

“No doubt–no doubt. [. . . ]

“For my own part,” continued Hawk-eye, [. . .] “I believe that paradise is ordained for happiness and that men will be indulged in it according to their dispositions and gifts. I therefore judge, that a red-skin is not far from the truth, when he believes he is to find them glorious hunting grounds of which his traditions tell; nor, for that matter, do I think it would be any disparagement to a man without a cross, to pass his time–“

“You hear [that noise] again!” interrupted Duncan.

“Ay, ay; when food is scarce, and when food is plenty, a wolf grows bold,” said the unmoved scout. [. . .] But, concerning the life that is to come, major. I have heard preachers say, in the settlements, that heaven was a place of rest. Now men’s minds differ as to their ideas of enjoyment. For myself, and I say it with reverence to the ordering of Providence, it would be no great indulgence to be kept shut up in those mansions of which they preach, having a natural longing for motion and the chase.“

Duncan [. . .] answered, with more attention to the subject which the humor of the scout had chosen for discussion, by saying–

“It is difficult to account for the feelings that may attend the last great change.”

“It would be a change indeed, for a man who has passed his days in the open air,” returned the single-minded scout; “and who has so often broken his fast on the head waters of the Hudson, to sleep within the sound of the roaring Mohawk! But it is a comfort to know we serve a merciful Master, though we do it each after his fashion, and with great tracts of wilderness atween us[.]” (184-185, italics added)

Bumppo makes as clear as he can without actually saying it that if heaven is indeed as he has heard it described “in the settlements” (read: a white race’s heaven), it would go against his “natural longing for motion and the chase.” Nor, moreover, does Bumppo feel it would be any “disparagement” of his nature–it would not be beneath him as a white man–”to pass his time–” and he does not finish his thought, but we can fill in the blank easily enough.

It is here that we see the clearest sign of Natty’s divided self, his “natur.” He wants his fellows to be certain they see only his whiteness, but what if it happens that, upon his death, God sees only his whiteness as well and assigns him a mansion in opposition to Bumppo’s particular “disposition and gifts”–which, as he says, run counter to those of most of the fellow members of his race? To be sure, Bumppo’s anxiety also rises in part from his deference to empirical evidence as the final arbiter of what is and is not so and the lack of empirical evidence in this world regarding the exact nature of the next. The best he can do, given this circumstance, is all that any believer can do: affirm his faith in “a merciful Master” who will recognize that we serve Him “each after his fashion.” This affirmation, this hope, is doubly crucial for Bumppo in view of his earlier rejection of the authority of the Bible in shedding light on precisely this matter.

By way of underscoring the importance of this anxiety, I would like to bring into the discussion a very different text whose protagonist, like Bumppo, becomes culturally estranged from his fellows: The Naufragios (translated as Castaways (first author-approved edition published in 1555) of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Castaways is Núñez’s recounting of the failed Pánfilo de Narváez expedition to establish a colony and find riches in what is now the Florida panhandle and Núñez’s journey with four other men (all the other members of the 600-man expedition are killed or die from storms, disease, Indian attacks, and even cannibalism) from Galveston Island to the Pacific coast of Mexico: a journey of eight years’ duration. Though the book contains almost no moments of introspection on Núñez’s part, the reader can easily note his gradual transformation from a man of no little authority (he was the expedition’s treasurer) who thought nothing of, for example, engaging in the common Spanish practice of kidnapping indigenous people to serve as translators, to a man who, quite literally owing his and his few remaining companions’ lives to the mercy of the Indians they meet over the last few years, becomes the Indians’ advocate when the Spaniards who rescue the travellers want their help in capturing and enslaving the Indians. It is also almost the only source of information we have regarding many of the the now-lost indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast of Texas and the northern Mexican interior.

Regarding the (possible) similarity I see between the Naufragios and Cooper’s novel: Núñez is of course writing his narrative after the fact, so some structuring of the book has occurred, and that is something to keep in mind regarding what follows. Towards the end of the narrative, Núñez describes his evangelizing of the Indians. Of his success, he writes, “[W]e found them in such a disposition to believe, that if there had been a language in which we could have understood each other perfectly we would have left them all Christians” (105). It is in the next chapter that the Spaniards first hear of the predations of other Spaniards on Indian villages. Núñez and his men tell the Indians that they want to meet these Spaniards in part to stop them from their raiding. What is interesting, though, is that in both the Spanish original and in the translation, Núñez refers to them not as Spaniards but as “Christians.” To be sure, this is a common practice in the chronicles of the time; surely, though, Núñez must have sensed–or hoped–that King Charles V, to whom the Naufragios is officially addressed, would grasp the sad irony of Núñez’s effective witnessing to the Indians and his demonstration of their amenability to conversion to Christianity, only to see reported, literally on the very next page, men labeled as “Christians” whose behavior runs completely counter to the examples of Christian charity set by Núñez.

The eventual meeting between these completely-naked, weatherbeaten castaways, their indigenous companions and the armed, armored and mounted “Christians” is probably the oddest moment in all the chronicles: Núñez argues, in Spanish, that the Indians not be enslaved and/but with the Indians, in the broken pidgen of indigenous words and gestures that he’s acquired, that he and his companions really are Spaniards, too–which the Indians don’t believe; meanwhile, the Spaniards, using an indigenous language, try to discredit the castaways and insist that the Indians should ignore them and listen to the “Christians” instead. Beneath the strangeness, though, I suspect that Núñez feels something like the same estrangement that Bumppo feels from the very people with whom he insists he belongs, their shared faith forming the basis for that insistence (though it may also be the case, given Spain’s particular historical moment, that self-identification by religion was, ipso facto, tantamount to self-identification by race). If he does not yet feel that estrangement but only confusion as his rescuers soon become his captors–he is imprisoned and eventually sent in chains to Mexico City, where he’ll begin to write this narrative–we can guess that he will eventually: After he is freed from jail, he is chosen to be the governor of a colony in Paraguay, but will be removed from his post two year afterward for being perceived to be more favorably disposed toward the indigenous people there than toward the colonists.

I am afraid I will have to sketch out this conclusion, at least for now. The essence of what I want to say here is that in each text what is assumed to finally, essentially–and ideally–define our relationship with our fellows but instead proves to be a source of irresolvable tension for these narratives’ respective protagonists is not race but religion. In Bumppo’s case, the combination of a different belief system and his almost-stated preference for the Indians’ conception of heaven over that preached about in the settlements are his sources of anxiety, which gets voiced in the punning statement that he is “a man without a cross.” Meanwhile, Núñez bears witness to and serves the Indians as a model of Christian charity, only to run afoul of his own countrymen who also claim to be Christians even as they enslave the Indians and pillage their villages. It’s due to this enormous contradiction that Núñez cannot persuade the Indians that he is one of these other men; nor can he persuade the “Christians” to cease their predations on the Indians–in fact, he will be imprisoned because of his perceived disloyalty to their authority. Each man becomes, or fears he is, culturally bifurcated: what I want to call New World men. More about what I mean by that in my next post.

I want to return to this image for a moment, which I posted on earlier, in light of a nudge I received from some reading I did last week.

From Sandra Messinger Cypess’ La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth, as part of a discussion of Rosario Castellanos’ essay, “Once Again Sor Juana”:

Veneration of the Virgin [of Guadalupe] transcends pure religiosity and has become equated with a sense of unselfish motherhood and postitive national identity. La Malinche, at the opposite pole, embodies both negative national identity and sexuality in its most irrational form, a sexuality without regard to moral laws or cultural values. (6-7)

Reading this reminded me–and made me rethink–my initial assumption about the frieze’s purpose in placing a beaver, an animal associated among some in the medieval Church with chastity¹, in this scene depicting the Virgin’s appearance to Juan Diego. Here is a bit of what I wrote in that earlier post:

Most of us are familiar with Renaissance-era depictions of animals or objects along with saints (think of Peter often shown with a set of keys, in reference to Matthew 16:19). What’s intriguing here is the application of this principle to a depiction of Juan Diego. It speaks to the apparent need to assert or remind the visitor of his virtue and, thus, of his worthiness to receive a visitation from the Virgin. It causes me to wonder if certain visitors were considered to need this reminder more than others did (even in the decades immediately following the apparitions, elements within the Church questioned the veracity of the story). And as for what indigenous people made of the beaver . . . As of this writing, I have not been able to find what if any significance beavers held for the Aztecs, but somehow I doubt that chastity figures into their thinking.

It occurs to me now, in light of my more recent reading (not to mention a recollection of Gruzinski’s The Mestizo Mind), that this frieze’s message may be directed less at a Spanish or even an Indian audience than to a third one: a mestizo audience coming to terms with its origins as a new people.

The passage from the Messinger Cypess book presents what has been the standard reading of La Malinche’s meaning in Mexican culture since the post-Independence days of the 19th century. But, while Messinger Cypess will go on to say that the early Spanish accounts of La Malinche paint her in a favorable light, she is silent on the question of how she was regarded among the early mestizo population of those early decades. Quite possibly among the Indians and mestizos of these early post-Conquest decades, there was emerging a mestizo narrative of la Malinche-as-betrayer/whore and her son by Cortés–the synedochic 1st mestizo–as damned, the embodiment of a culture’s Original Sin. It may be that no direct record of this alternate narrative exists, but we do know that the early priests were indeed cognizant of and, in some cases, sensitive to such matters as, significantly, mestizos–not Indians–would perceive such things.

If, then, there was already present at the very least an oral narrative that read the union of Cortés and La Malinche as emblematic of unpoliced sexuality and the betrayal of a nation in the very act of its creation, it is indeed possible to read this frieze as presenting something like an alternate First Parents narrative whose dynamic is, not coincidentally, also the exact opposite of that other narrative. The encounter between Juan Diego and the Virgin is devoid of all sexuality, as signified not only by the Virgin herself but also the presence of the beaver–and the claim that Juan Diego and his wife had taken vows of chastity after hearing a sermon preached on that virtue (by the way: Cortés was married at the time La Malinche became his mistress; moreover, when Cortés’ wife came to Mexico to be with her husband, she soon died under mysterious circumstances). Even so, the Virgin appears to Juan Diego simultaneously as the Mother of God and as a mestiza–that is, as the immaculately-conceived offspring of her appearance to Juan Diego.

The essence of the above–that the Virgin of Guadalupe occupies a position in the Mexican cultural psyche directly opposite that of La Malinche–is no new claim. What seems to be distinctive about what I’m saying here is that this frieze (clearly a deliberate feature of this building’s 1531-1709 construction) may serve as an indication that that dynamic may have appeared, or was anticipated, much earlier than is usually recognized. Moreover, this frieze seems to be doing more than conveying the essence of one narrative; it also may be offering up an implicit commentary on another narrative, one whose embrace may have been understood, even at that very early time, to be debilitating, if not actually destructive.
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¹Over at my other blog, my long-time Internet-acquaintance Raminagrobis, who knows a lot more about bestiaries than I do, offers some competing meanings of beavers here.

Aurora and Clotilde Nancanou receive Joseph Frowenfeld. Illustration by Albert Herter from an 1899 edition of The Grandissimes. Image found here.

George Washington Cable’s most famous novel (1880) is sneaky with regard to its examination of Creole New Orleans in those years just prior to and just after the Louisiana Purchase: strident when the reader expects (but does not necessarily want) it to be; wry, even sly, when the reader does not expect it. Consider these two brief examples involving Aurora and Clotilde Nancanou, the mother and daughter whose genteel destitution figures prominently in this novel.

The first passage provide a glimpse of the domestic dynamics of the Nancanou household:

[Aurora and Clotilde] sat down opposite each other at their little dinner table. They had a fixed hour for dinner. It is well to have a fixed hour; it is in the direction of system. Even if you have not the dinner, there is the hour. Alphonsina [their black cook] was not in perfect harmony with this fixed-hour idea. It was Aurora’s belief, often expressed in hungry moments with the laugh of a vexed Creole lady (a laugh worthy of study), that on the day when diner should really be served at the appointed hour, the cook would drop dead of apoplexy and she of fright[. . . .] Not that she felt particularly hungry, but there is a certain desultoriness allowable at table more than elsewhere[.] (216-217)

“In the direction of system” strikes me as both a marvelously evocative turn of phrase on its own terms and one that also speaks to the strange combination of surface rigidity and domestic compromise–perhaps even an unspoken resignation–at work in a world that we today rightly characterize as brutalizing and dehumanizing toward people of color, whether freedmen or not. System–structure, rules, codes–must be in place, even if those whose actions are ostensibly most governed by that system are “not in perfect harmony with” it. Moreover, as the concluding sentence makes clear, the system referred to is intended for public visual consumption; the novel’s later brief public scandal of Joseph Frowenfeld (the American who serves simultaneously as the author’s mouthpiece, the novel’s moral center, and Clotilde’s romantic interest) being seen leaving a mulatto woman’s house with a head wound is a scandal precisely because it is public.

[The dynamic at work here, by the way is strikingly similar to that regarding the establishing and (lack of) policing of the dress codes (and the reasoning behind them) depicted in Mexican casta paintings from the colonial era. The intent behind the dress codes was to make one's class--and, indirectly, one's caste--more publicly certain. Implicit in the code was the assumption that lower-caste members, no matter their skin color, tended not to be financially successful. But some lighter-skinned members of those lower castes inevitably did make money, as artisans, as merchants, etc., and it is all but certain that some of those with the means tried and succeeded in passing as higher-caste members. The dress code therefore provided them with a legally-sanctioned disguise.]

These public displays in the direction of system, in combination with domestic desultorinesses, can lead to some rather odd musings in the face of the more awkward consequences of the Peculiar Institution, as is the case with this second passage:

That same morning Clotilde had given a music-scholar her appointed lesson, and at its conclusion had borrowed of her patroness (how pleasant it must have been to have such things to lend!) a little yellow maid, in order that, with more propriety, she might make a business call. (205)

While Clotilde is a very young woman whose mother seems to have protected her from situations in which she would have come to understand that the mulatto girl’s existence might not have been a source of much pleasantness at her student’s house, it’s still hard not to recall this famous passage from Mary Boykin Chesnut’s Civil War diary: “[L]ike the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children-& every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think-” (source).

Such a world is one of tacitly-sanctioned virtual disguises even more impenetrable than the clothes one wears, a world of very odd public dances on whose strangeness no one comments. Thus, it is no accident, given Cable’s characters’ preoccupation with appearance (in all its senses) and underlying identities and entangled family roots of plantation families (just as one example, two men in the novel are named Honoré Grandissime, one a Creole, the other his mulatto half-brother), that his novel’s opening scene is a masked ball.

Note: This is heading in the direction of a preface or introduction to the book project. The image below is its starting place, at any rate. Would reading this make you want to read more? Comments welcome and encouraged.

Detail from a panel of Diego Rivera’s mural at the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City. Click to enlarge. Photograph by the Mrs.

In a panel filled with figures, most appearing in full or partial profile, all going about the business of colonizing/being colonized, this infant, suspended in a plain rebozo from its mother’s back, its skin slightly lighter than its mother’s, slightly darker than that of the soldier I assume is its father, gazes fixedly at something just above and beyond the viewer’s left shoulder. It is difficult to say what accounted for my standing in front of this image for some minutes when my wife and I visited the palacio (Mexico’s national capitol building) back in October: whether it’s that the baby is the only figure in the panel’s foreground looking in the viewer’s direction yet not quite returning the viewer’s gaze; or the color of its eyes–two tiny stones of aquamarine in a sea of reds and browns and yellows. Or both.

Though I did not have this image in mind when I worked on my dissertation, in a sense it is precisely because of what we see in it that I chose that dissertation’s subject: an attempt to discuss historical and fictional narratives of consensual miscegenation as tropes of New World culture more generally. It is not merely that individual mestizos, métis, and mulattoes are, to borrow Joel Williamson’s phrase, new people; it is that the culture that has emerged in this hemisphere is also, I argue, something demonstrably different from the European, African and indigenous cultures that contributed to its creation. Analogous to the baby’s not quite gazing directly at the viewer, New World culture is simultaneously familiar and strange–and, moreover, not one fully explained by most mainstream critical theories of culture.

As an example of what I mean by that last statement, here is a passage from the introduction to Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, coincidentally published in the year I defended my dissertation:

The move away from the singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’ as primary conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions–of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation–that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood–singular or communal–that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining society itself.

It is in the emergence of the intersticies–the overlap and displacement of domains of difference–that the intersubjective and collective experience of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How are subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender. etc.)? How do strategies or representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable? (1-2, emphasis mine)

Readers of Bhabha will recognize in this passage an implicit articulating of the concerns at stake in his concept of hybridity, an idea that has great resonance–and potential pitfalls–for the citizens of the Western Hemisphere¹, and one I am largely sympathetic with. But, the bolded passage strikes me, a citizen of this hemisphere and someone who attempts to understand and write about its culture, as not quite speaking to our cultural condition. I would argue that it is precisely in “those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference”–phenomena that Bhabha calls on critics to examine so as to be “theoretically innovative and politically crucial”–that we find the New World’s “narratives of original and initial subjectivities”: the very sorts of texts Bhabha argues we “need to think beyond.” To put this in terms of the baby in Rivera’s mural, Bhabha’s stance is that we already know where babies come from. I contend that, in this hemisphere, we’re still trying to figure out how to articulate where this particular baby comes from–and what those origins tell us about ourselves as a culture.

That articulation is complicated by the fact that the culture of this hemisphere emerged in historical time–October 12, 1492, was a Friday–yet all cultures that we know of attempt in some way to escape the gravity of that history. The thesis of Richard Poirier’s classic book A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature is precisely that that struggle is American literature’s implicit subject:

That writing exists not to be clarified but as a kind of drama of the search for clarity, that symbols, myths, and summaries are themselves only stabs in the dark, are among the presuppositions of this book. The great works of American literature are alive with the effort to stabilize certain feelings and attitudes that have, as it were, no place at all except where a writer’s style can give them one. And the attempt to do so occurs, especially in works of the [19th] century, within the context of inhospitable styles and structures. Language is never “free”; its forms are never “new,” and it is slightly unfaithful to those who proclaim the possibilities of “freedom” or “newness.”

American literature is a struggle with already-existing literary, social, and historical organizations for power over environment and over language itself[.](xxi)

The tension inherent in the struggle Poirier describes here is embodied in that very familiar term “New World.” That tension never gets resolved; hence, as Poirier notes, the writer’s attempts to explain, to account for, to make sense of, without never quite getting there. That tension is at the essence of the greatest novels of this side of the globe. So also is it present in the mythologies and even pathologies that have arisen around the historical narratives about Pocahontas, the Virgin of Guadalupe (which I’ve written about here) and La Malinche (which I’ve posted on here), Cabeza de Vaca, and the narratives of any number of other historical figures, some of which will be discussed in this project.

In an introductory chapter on Columbus, I will go on at some length about the idea of the New World as a heterotopic space, not to be confused with the space called the Americas. I will follow that with an extended reading of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Amado’s Tent of Miracles, in which I will try to call our attention to some features common to each text–in effect, a sort of poetics or rhetoric of these heterotopic spaces. Those features will become the subjects of the chapters that follow it, in which I will discuss a range of visual, literary and historical texts from throughout the Americas as illustrative of those themes. Foucault says that heterotopias are disturbing “because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ’syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also the less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and opposite one another) to ‘hold together.’² Since we are given only glimpses of these spaces but cannot enter them, my goal in these pages will be to the more modest one of trying to articulate why these spaces are so disturbing. If we cannot get the baby to look at us directly, perhaps we can begin to get at why we can’t.

By way of closing, I need to acknowledge and respond to something I know to be problematic for some readers. My discussing consensual miscegenation as a trope of this hemisphere’s culture of necessity requires me to address a subject so painful for many that even the word itself is anathema to them. Furthermore, discussing only narratives of consensual miscegenation may appear to some a deliberate skirting of the all-too-familiar (and painful) primal scene of miscegenation: the plantation rape scene, the conquistador’s forcible taking of an indigenous woman–or, even more egregious, an implicit rehabilitation of the Conquest and the Plantation. It is absolutely true that there is an American Narrative of racial admixture inseparable from the legacy of slavery and prejudice and bigotry and rape that began with Columbus’ arrival in this hemisphere and that, most unfortunately, has yet to reach a conclusion. It is also absolutely true that, running almost exactly contemporaneously with that more-familiar narrative but relatively less-examined, is another narrative of race relations, a New World Narrative of consensual racial admixture, one in which the people involved seek, in various ways and with varying degrees of success, to remove themselves from History, to not be ruled. Without at all denying or attempting to mitigate that former narrative’s power and horror or our need to understand and condemn its vestiges in today’s culture, my aim is to find a way to talk about that second American Narrative. That second narrative, as I will call it later, is the encounter with the Encounter: a wrestling with, an act of resistance to, a resounding No to the wreckage of lives and social orders caused by the first. But its No is not simply opposition. It is an attempt to build something different and new out of that wreckage.

__________
¹Joshua Lund’s The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing is a thorough critique of both those resonances and those pitfalls within a Latin American intellectual and literary context.

²Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; New York: Vintage, 1973), xviii.

To begin with, this passage from George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880):

Resolved, in other words, without being [Joseph] Frowenfeld the studious, to begin at once the perusal of this newly found book, the Community of New Orleans. True, he knew he should find it a difficult task–not only that much of it was in a strange tongue, but that it was a volume whose displaced leaves would have to be lifted tenderly, blown free of much dust, re-arranged, some torn fragments laid together again with much painstaking, and even the purport of some pages guessed out. (103)

Passages such as this occur with some frequency in miscegenation narratives: references to literal or, in this case, figurative books the understanding of whose contents demand patience and care on the part of the reader. In Go Down, Moses, there are the McCaslin plantation ledgers that Ike must come to terms with; in Jorge Amado’s Tent of Miracles, a main character writes a genealogy of Bahian families in part to demonstrate just how miscegenated ostensibly “white” Brazilian families in fact are; etc., etc. At one level, there’s no need to push this too hard. Such scenes occur in novels from throughout the Americas that have little or nothing to do with the theme of interracial relationships; I have mentioned here before that Roberto González Echevarría’s Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Literature could, with a bit of tinkering, serve as a useful way of thinking about the origins of the literature of the United States as well. But at another level, there’s a difference to be gotten at. Whereas González Echevarría’s book argues that the literature of the Americas has its origins in the imaginative rewriting of colonial-era records and histories of the region and therefore is an early version of (to appropriate a title) the empire writing back, in the case of narratives of miscegenation these Books either contain or cause a resistance to comprehending them even as they seek to serve as recordings, however oblique, of the facts of miscegenation.

Sorry for quoting myself, but: I tried to say something like this within the context of a post on casta paintings:

Given that these series of paintings are intended to be part dictionary of racial types, part social code, and part visual cabinet of curiosities, I tend to think that their audiences, if they thought about the correspondences between the paintings and the realities of New Spain, could not escape the uneasy feeling that a social order founded on racial difference would eventually become untenable–especially given that part of these paintings’ very point (and whether this point was intended or not is difficult to determine) is that those differences were becoming ever harder to discern in real life. These paintings end up implicitly depicting their own inadequacy to depict the very thing they’re intended to depict–another version of something I was trying to get at in this post with regard to American literature.

It can be discomfiting to talk about the emergence of a new people, especially when they are the by-product of an institution about which there was already considerable discomfort and when they serve, in the eyes of many, as an implicit condemnation of that same institution. Yet, those new people are the the subject of this particular Book of the New World.

More on this, sooner rather than later (I hope).

(Cross-posted at Blog Meridian)

Frieze depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe’s appearance to Juan Diego, on the east side of the old basilica dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico City. 1531-1709. Image taken by the Mrs. Click to enlarge.

As regulars here know, I recently posted a discussion of a couple of paintings depicting the Virgin that I saw on my recent trip to Mexico City. I’ll have more to say later regarding this façade within that context, but what I wanted to post on here is the depiction of Juan Diego. On the day we took the picture, I was more interested in the European-style hat on the ground directly below his kneeling figure and the maguey plant in the lower-right corner. (Pulque, a fermented drink made from the juice of the maguey, was drunk by the Indians on her feast day, December 12.) But as the Mrs. and I played around with cropping the image she had taken and we enlarged it, I really noticed for the first time the small animal to the left of the maguey plant.

We thought (at first) that it was a squirrel. However, in the course of Googling about for associations (if any) among squirrels and Christian and Aztec iconography and what any of that might possibly have to do with Juan Diego and/or the Virgin, I happened to run across this passage, from the Aberdeen Bestiary:

Of the beaver There is an animal called the beaver, which is extremely gentle; its testicles are are highly suitable for medicine. Physiologus says of it that, when it knows that a hunter is pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes. But if, once again, another hunter is in pursuit, the beaver rears up and displays its sexual organs. When the hunter sees that it lacks testicles, he leaves it alone. Thus every man who heeds God’s commandment and wishes to live chastely should cut off all his vices and shameless acts, and cast them from him into the face of the devil. Then the devil, seeing that the man has nothing belonging to him, retires in disorder. That man, however, lives in God and is not taken by the devil, who says: ‘I will pursue, I will overtake them…’(Exodus, 15:9) The name castor comes from castrando, ‘castrate’. (Emphasis added; image found here)

The clear association here between beavers and living a chaste life reminded me that it is said of Juan Diego that he and his wife–both early converts to Christianity–after hearing a sermon on chastity, dedicated themselves to live chaste lives. Some say that this is the reason the Virgin chose to appear to him. At any rate, I went back to the image of the frieze and enlarged it some more; sure enough, the animal has a flat tail, rather than a bushy one. And now, I would love to know what that plant is that it is eating.

The beaver’s appearance here in a depiction of a scene that it ostensibly has nothing to do with is at one level, that of iconography, perfectly understandable. Most of us are familiar with Renaissance-era depictions of animals or objects along with saints (think of Peter often shown with a set of keys, in reference to Matthew 16:19). What’s intriguing here is the application of this principle to a depiction of Juan Diego. It speaks to the apparent need to assert or remind the visitor of his virtue and, thus, of his worthiness to receive a visitation from the Virgin. It causes me to wonder if certain visitors were considered to need this reminder more than others did (even in the decades immediately following the apparitions, elements within the Church questioned the veracity of the story). And as for what indigenous people made of the beaver . . . As of this writing, I have not been able to find what if any significance beavers held for the Aztecs, but somehow I doubt that chastity figures into their thinking.

In short, in this frieze is a not-yet-seamless fusing of iconic languages, as embodied by the beaver and the maguey plant, from two different religious traditions. In the associating of European images–the hat and the beaver–with the Indian Juan Diego, we see hesitancy in depicting some more overt sign of his Indianness to the viewer due to those signs’ inevitable associations with the very religions that the Church sought to supplant. Besides, in the Church’s eye, the fact of Juan Diego’s Christianity would trump all other identities he might claim. Meanwhile, the maguey, a plant firmly linked to life before the arrival of the Spaniards, is a sturdy, literally rooted presence here. It’s a strange visual space, this frieze. But then again, the New World is a strange place.

Left: Anonymous, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de México, Patrona de la Nueva España. 18th Century. Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe, Mexico City (Image found here); right: Josefus de Rivera y Argomanis, Verdadero Retrato de Santa Maria Virgen de Guadalupe, Patrona Principal de la Nueva España Jurada en Mexico. 1778. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City (Image found here).

The Virgin of Guadalupe is not an overt subject of my project, but she could easily serve as the supreme exemplum of what I argue in that project is the essential state of being of the New World: a fusion of cultures and customs so complete that it is no longer possible to separate them one from the other(s)–and, moreover, that the recognition of that fact often comes as something of a shock to those who complacently assume otherwise.

I have written elsewhere of my profoundly-moving experience one December 12th (the Virgin’s feast day) when I visited the Basilica in Mexico City. My purpose in this post, though, you may be pleased to learn, is not to proselytize (full disclosure: I’m neither Catholic nor Hispanic, but I am a Christian and, speaking for myself out of that context as well as someone who finds much to wonder over in Mexican culture and history, I find it difficult to remain completely objective when discussing this subject). Rather, it’s to give the reader a quick sense, via some context and a discussion of some images of the Virgin, of what I mean when here and in my project I will make what I think is an important distinction between the terms “the Americas” and “the New World.”

No matter one’s opinion on the role of the Church during the conquest and colonization of Mexico and points south, it is inarguable that the syncretizing of Catholic and indigenous symbology and ritual was a practice engaged in so as to make the Christian faith more palatable to the Indians. This occurred at more than the level of the abstract. As my wife pointed out to me one day during our trip–something I’m a bit embarrassed to mention that, as many times as I’d visited these places before, I’d never really noted before–the older churches we saw very often appropriated the exact same pebbles-in-mortar construction methods in the building of their walls that we had seen at the pyramids at both Teotihuacan and Tlatelolco. This picture, courtesy of the Mrs., was taken at Teotihuacan and shows that method quite clearly. Both literally and figuratively, then, the outward form the Church took in Mexico during the colonial era was recognizably Christian; look more closely, though, and more than a few traces–and perhaps more than traces–of indigenous practices remained that played a significant role in the shaping and sustaining and perpetuating of that outward form. The Virgin of Guadalupe, and the cult that has emerged surrounding her veneration, is only the most prominent example of this phenomenon. For further reading on the fascinating and complicated topic of syncretism, I urge anyone interested to have a look at Serge Gruzinski’s book The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization.

For obvious reasons, syncretic practices, by the way, were controversial among Church hierarchy during this time, and the cult surrounding the veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe was not immune to critique. The Wikipedia entry on the Virgin makes clear that from the very beginning there were questions even as to whether Juan Diego was a real person, never mind the genuineness of the apparitions. But apart from those fundamental questions, there were other concerns just as fundamental in their own ways, chiefly involving the particulars of the early pilgrims’ veneration of her: for example, Indians were allowed to perform in her honor the same dances that, before the Conquest, they had performed in honor of the indigenous goddess Tonantzin, closely associated with the hill named Tepeyac where the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego.

I think it is difficult for non-Hispanics to appreciate fully the Virgin’s significance for–indeed, her centrality to–Mexican and, by extension, Latin American culture. (Never mind, by the way, the difficulties she and her cult pose to non-Hispanic Catholics, Protestants, and non-believers of whatever sort) Though, as with any manifestation of the Holy Mother, she is ostensibly a symbol of Christian faith, she also has significances that only tangentially touch on religion but which resonate profoundly throughout the Hispanic-American world. For Mexicans, she also signifies as a symbol of revolution, an assertion of Mexican nationalism: it was under a banner of her image that marched the army Miguel Hidalgo led in revolt against Spain on the night of September 16, 1810, the day which Mexico celebrates as its independence day. That power as revolutionary symbol, I would argue, still resides in her, dormant but present; the priest whose homily I heard that long-ago December 12th made the case that the Virgin was more powerful than any earthly force, that people had only to acknowledge that. One could understand those words in their spiritual sense, of course. But this was Mexico City, the capital of a now officially-atheist nation which, Mexicans in attendance there could not help but recall, had been inspired to revolt against Spain under this very image. Moreover, back in the mid-’80s the influence of liberation theology had spread from Central America into the southern Mexican state of Chiapas; if ever there were a region of Mexico ripe for rebellion, it was (and remains–see Comandante Marcos) Chiapas. The greater, deeper resonance that the Virgin has throughout Latin America, though, is her very appearance: not only that she appeared to a recently-convertered Indian, Juan Diego, in mid-December of 1531 (ten years after Cortés’ conquering of Tenochtitlan), but also the fact that she appeared to him–and us–via the image she left on Juan Diego’s ayate (something like a man’s rebozo) as proof for the bishop in Mexico City that he had seen her, as a mestiza. If La Malinche is, for Mexicans, the embodiment of Woman-as-Whore, surely the Virgin of Guadalupe is, quite literally, Woman-as-Madonna. But each of these women signifies something much more complicated than the stereotypical roles that women have historically been cast since, it seems, time immemorial. For Mexicans and, by extension, Hispanics, these women are also cultural, racial, religious, political–that is, literal as well as symbolic–Mothers of La Raza.

In the cultural history of the United States, it considerably understates things to say that we have no equivalent figures.

It’s difficult to find a place in Mexico where an image of the Virgin is not close by. Most of those images, though, seek to be more or less faithful to the original on Juan Diego’s ayate, on public display at the basilica dedicated to her in Mexico City. Aside from her mestizo features, that image tells us little about the geographical or cultural space within which she appeared. Given that the Virgin is eternal, transcending time and space, the image’s lack of such references isn’t unusual. What’s striking about the two paintings at the top of this post, which my wife and I saw at the Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe on our trip to Mexico City last week, as well as one below the fold, is that they supply that spatial and cultural geography. They explicitly place the Virgin within a New World context–not, I’d argue, an American one–as if to insist that the Virgin’s meaning is fully comprehensible only within that context. It is not enough to know that the Virgin is the Mother of God. One must also know where, how, and to whom she chose to appear.

[A quick aside: I don't know whether this matters, but in the interests of accuracy I think it better to err on the side of caution. I can't be entirely certain that the Ribera i Argomanis painting on the right is in fact the one we saw at the Museum of the Guadalupe Basilica. We did see a painting attributed to Ribera that bore a very close resemblance to the one you see here. We weren't allowed to take any sort of pictures in the Museum, so I have no independent means of confirmation. In any event, the listing of this particular image's home as the National History Museum, in combination with the existence of a very similar painting by an unknown hand, raises the possibility that Ribera i Argomais may have painted at least one other painting in addition to the one you see here. Also, the attentive among you will notice the inconsistent spelling of Ribera i Argomais' name. In the case of the painting, the spelling is that of my source for it; here, the spelling is that of the Museum's brief overview of its collection and history that I purchased on my visit.]

Apologies for the less-than-clear images and, thus, the descriptions that follow. In the first two paintings, as noted above, the Virgin, the rays emanating from her, and the angel below her whose upraised arms appear to be holding her aloft are what visitors to the Basilica will see in the original image. All that surrounds that image are the additions of the two painters. In the upper corners of the painting and immediately below the angel are cameo-shaped renderings of the three separate times the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego prior to leaving her image on his ayate as proof to show the bishop in Mexico City that he had seen her (the showing of that proof being the subject of the scene in the lower-right cameo. Though not part of the original image, such renderings are not uncommon inclusions in paintings of the Virgin.

The more intriguing additions, though, are the large allegorical figures on either side of the paintings and the image that seems to sustain the angel and the two cameo scenes underneath the Virgin. Those figures represent Europe (on the left) and America (on the right), each standing on a small rock surrounded by the same body of water. “America” is posed very similarly in each painting (each looks in the direction of, and gestures toward, the cameo depicting Juan Diego’s showing the image on his ayate), but note “Europe”’s positioning: each offers up a red crown to the Virgin, but in the anonymous painting she looks away from the Virgin and downward toward something in the lower-center of the painting (more about that later); in the Ribera i Argomais painting she appears to be looking directly at the Virgin. As I hope is obvious to the reader, it’s difficult to speculate as to the meaning of either of these choices for Europe’s gaze; moreover, while at some level these paintings had some Church sanction due to their content, their contents almost certainly weren’t as tightly codified as were, to give the most obvious example, the exact copies of the image itself produced at the Basilica for distribution to parishes throughout New Spain and beyond. Still, given the fact that one of these paintings almost certainly inspired the other (or, alternately, there exists an ur-painting common to both either unknown to me at present or now lost), the ambiguity raised in these two figures’ differing gazes is certainly curious.

What drew our attention to these paintings in the first place, though, is the image in the bottom-center of each: An eagle, its wings outstretched and holding a snake in its beak, perched on a nopal (prickly-pear) cactus growing out of a body of water. This is, as most people know, the image now found in the center of Mexico’s flag, and is a depiction of the sign the Aztecs were to look for to indicate where they were to build their city. The positioning of the image of the Virgin as being cradled or held aloft by the eagle’s wings is especially striking. Is there some sort of equivalencing of these two images, in that both are signs from a divinity specifically commanding its witnesses to build (the Virgin commanded Juan Diego to tell the bishop to build a sanctuary in her honor at Tepeyac)? Or, given the age of these paintings (both were painted at a 200-year remove from the Conquest), had the image of the eagle by this time lost its associations with the old ways and now stood as a desacralized symbol of Mexico? And even if the latter, is there not a suggestion here (via a visual resonance between this painting and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus) that the Virgin’s origins are neither “European” nor “American” but in some space shared by and common to yet, ultimately, distinct from both “Europe” and “America”? That space, I will claim more fully in a later post and in my book, is most properly designated as the New World. (And yes, I know how clunky this sounds. More to come in a later post, as I said.)

To my mind, these paintings pose two interesting questions: 1) Which came first?; 2) Could the unknown painter have been an Indian or mestizo? Both Gruzinski in his book and Ilona Katzew in her book Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico provide considerable background in the training and mentoring of Indian and mestizo artisans in colonial Mexico. Katzew notes that, while the painting of religious and state paintings were the provenance of Academy-trained painters, secular subjects could be painted by anyone. I find myself wondering how exactly these paintings and the one below would have been categorized; it seems to me, as I sit here, that one could make plausible arguments for either a secular or a sacred reading of them.

In this last, early painting, different in orientation but bearing some similarities to the ones above, Juan Diego displays the image of the Virgin on his ayate (Image found here; as of this writing, I know nothing more about this painting but will amend this as I learn more). In this instance, the viewer occupies the space that bishop of Mexico City would have occupied on that day Juan Diego brought him the miraculously-blooming roses that he thought was the proof the Virgin had provided him. As angels look on from the painting’s upper corners, we also find the faces of Europe and America, reduced in size to cameo-shaped portraits on the right and left sides, respectively, of Juan Diego. Below Europe’s face, at the lower-right corner of the ayate, appears the lion of Spain that appeared on its flags of the time; on the opposite corner appears the eagle with a snake in its beak and perched on a nopal. To me, there is something in the prominent positioning of Juan Diego’s head, directly over the Virgin’s (most paintings showing him holding the ayate place him to the side, often in a relative penumbra, almost disappearing relative to the displayed glory of the Virgin’s image) and, indeed, on almost exactly the same plane as those of the angels, that suggests something of his importance to this moment: we would not be seeing the Virgin if it were not for him. Compare as well the darkness of Juan Diego’s face to that of America on the left side of the painting. Perhaps this is an overreading, but it is as though his face is aggressively, insistently darker, that darkness enhanced by its contrast with the muted gold backdrop behind his head. That enhancing is by no means intended to be menacing, of course; on the contrary, it would be absurd to read it as anything other than an affirmation of Juan Diego’s Indianness via the Virgin’s having chosen to appear to him. In other words: whereas most renderings of the Virgin are about the Virgin, this painting is at least as much about Juan Diego and, by extension, the people he represents.

I say this out of a fair amount of ignorance: When I look at a painting of the Madonna by, say, Raphael, the last thing I think about is what the powers that be in Renaissance-era Italy were thinking as they looked at it. Why would they not have approved? I don’t sense in them a tension between approved-of renderings of the Virgin and Raphael’s paintings. Of course, a painting like Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto is another story: there, one can indeed sense a tension between messages. But I suspect that that tension was mostly class-driven (well, and Caravaggio-driven, too). The Madonna in that painting is still in some sense European: she is still, at base, an imagined cultural production of that people. The Virgin of Guadalupe–or, more precisely, her full meaning–did not exist and could not have existed prior to the Encounter. And further: Whatever happened in December of 1531 and the weeks and months following–whether miracle or fraud or some now-irrecoverable combination of the two–the Church lost control over the meaning of the Virgin and the resulting manner of her veneration in the instant that she appeared to an Indian as a mestiza. Which, of course, is tantamount to saying that it thus never had control over her. Such is her power in Mexico and throughout Hispanic America: that everyone knows this; all the Church can do is acknowledge it and appear to grant it official sanction as it is able via such means as papal visits and the move to canonize Juan Diego. These paintings seem to me implicit assertions that the Virgin is most definitively a New World thing–not an American thing, and certainly not a European one.

Should a culture have a memory faithful to history? What role can/should legend and myth play in such a culture?

These are questions that the post-Encounter culture(s) of the Western Hemisphere must of necessity be concerned with. Over at my other blog I’ve put up a brief post that wonders aloud about these issues. I hope you’ll have a look over there and leave your comments either here or there.

The Vintage edition of Go Down, Moses. Image found found here.

Hosam Aboul-Ela’s book, Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition, begins at the same place Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi does: that it might be useful to read Faulkner not as a Modernist or American writer, but as one whose region has much in common with those of other colonized places of the world, what Aboul-Ela calls the Other South. But whereas Glissant limits his discussion to Faulkner as a Caribbean (or Plantation) writer, Aboul-Ela’s range is more global and more overtly materialist in orientation. He uses the work of Peruvian intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), a progenitor of (economic) dependency theory as a starting point for articulating a theory of postcolonial experience that originates in those regions rather than in Europe or the United States. He devotes a little over half his book to laying out the resulting “Mariátegui Tradition” before moving on to reading Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion) and Absalom, Absalom! through this critical lens.

Given the orientation of the intellectual tradition of the Other South that Aboul-Ela outlines, it’s understandable why he chooses these works to discuss at length: they are the Faulkner novels that lend themselves most readily to such readings, driven as the plots of each are by the arrival in Mississippi of outsiders and their getting and controlling of property and wealth and the attendant power to the benefit of the Few As Possible and the detriment of local folks. But a chapter section entitled “The Ideology of Faulkner’s Form,” his lead-in to his reading of Absalom, Absalom!, made me curious, in connection with some comments I made here, what Aboul-Ela might have to say about the ideology inherent in Go Down, Moses‘ form. So, below the fold I once again mount my GDM hobby-horse.

First, some passages from Other South that give a sense of Aboul-Ela’s orientation re the idea of the ideology of form and how, when discussing similarities between Faulkner and writers from the postcolonial world, he means something other than “influence.”

A reconsideration of the literature treating Faulkner’s relationship with Latin American novelists confirms the importance of the ideology of form. For example, Gabriel García Márquez states: “I think it is the method. The Faulknerian method is very effective for telling about the Latin American reality. Unconsciously, this is what we discovered in Faulkner. That is to say, we were living this reality and we wanted to tell about it and we knew that the European method wouldn’t work and neither would the traditional Spanish one and all of a sudden we found that the Faulknerian method is extremely well suited for telling this reality.” [. . . ] Method, I believe, here relates to narrative structure. [. . .] While this often cited statement by García Márquez has sometimes been interpreted to refer to Faulkner’s “modernist” style, the Colombian actually states that he is talking about a relationship between “method” and “this reality” that “we were living.” In other words, he connects literary form and material conditions, arguing for a kind of experimental neorealism, for a literary phenomenon invested in verisimilitude, more than for a borrowing of modernism’s fascination with the aesthetic realm. Borrowing this structure from Faulkner proves valuable for certain writers from the Global South because of parallels in their mutual experiences with colonial economies and unequal economic development, as these phenomena affect daily life, social conditions, political institutions, and personal relationships. (134)

Notice that this is a sort of materialist rewriting of the theory of archetypes, which I find intriguing.

Anyway.

For Aboul-Ela the form Absalom, Absalom! takes is shaped by Faulkner’s understanding of his region’s sense of the nature of History:

Joeé Carlos Mariátegui’s description of the structure of history as encompassing “stages that are not entirely linear in their development” not only exemplifies the long trajectory of thinking in the Global South that challenges the Hegelian–and Eurocentric–associations of history with linear, causal progress but might also be productively compared to William Faulkner’s novelistic attacks on linearity. I noted in chapter 3 that thinkers like Mariágui necessarily view the sweep of history with less optimism than Hegel (or, for that matter, Marx), optimism that resulted in the hyperemphasis on teleology present in Hegelian historiography. A Peruvian in the 1920s, rather, surveyed history from the subject position of an individual in a geohistorical context that had been branded by the era of Spanish colonization; by the undercutting of independence and nationalism by British and American commercial interests in the nineteenth century; and by the continuing struggle with economic, political, and social unequal development in the early twentieth century. I have distinguished between the Eurocentric historian–who might think of history as a linear series of stages, causally linked with one another, evolving gradually toward an apotheosis, with Europe’s material preeminence serving as a sort of culmination–and an oppositional historian–who might start from a critical view of this European preeminence. History, in other words, might not be a straight line. Euro-American colonialism does not result from natural and organic laws of cause and effect or from the grand design of a powerful and knowing prime mover. Rather, historical trajectories are multiple and must be seen from multiple points of view. (135, emphasis added)

These two passages, as I said earlier, set up his reading of Absalom, Absalom!, and those familiar with that novel’s structure would probably agree with Hosam Aboul-Ela’s argument that such a claim about history is compatible with it. But whereas in that novel the multiple narrators are ostensibly trying to understand the mystery of Thomas Sutpen–that is, their overt subject is the collective retelling of the single story of this man–what of Go Down, Moses, with what I take to be its parallel historical narratives? What might its form tell us about its ideology?

What follows is just a sketching out, without specific quotes from the novel. Apologies in advance.

In the Glissant post I linked to earlier, I had this to say about Go Down, Moses‘ form, with an assist from James A. Snead:

That design, James A. Snead argues in his reading of the novel in his book Figures of Division, is a miscegenated design: it has attributes of, and confuses the traditional distinctions between, both novels and short story collections. Thus, Snead writes, because narrative is traditionally a site of authority and rule, a structure which disrupts conventional notions of narrative implicitly calls into question other such rules of ordering. Therefore, “[t]he prose of Go Down, Moses is in the truest sense a ‘dialogue,’ not an authoritative ‘telling’” (206).

The novel is dialogic in another sense as well, that of its parallel narratives. There is that narrative that flows through the personage of Ike McCaslin, who seeks to figuratively as well as literally close the ledgers/legacy of his grandfather via his relinquishing of the family plantation and his efforts to ensure that his grandfather’s bequests of money to his (the grandfather’s) black descendants are distributed. Let’s call this the “white McCaslin narrative.” It would be a mistake to call it simply “the McCaslin narrative” because, even as Ike seeks to bring to a close (and believes he has done so) the McCaslin family narrative, another one has continued on its course unbeknownst to Ike until he is made aware of it in the person of Roth’s lover in “Delta Autumn.” As she recites her ancestry (she is the granddaughter of Tennie’s Jim, himself the son of Tomey’s Turl, who is the son of Ike’s grandfather by a slave, herself also offspring of the grandfather by another slave woman), she becomes the embodiment of the very ledgers that Ike had thought, for all these years, that he would never have to open again. Tennie’s Jim, by the way, ran away from Mississippi on the night before his 21st birthday, refusing to accept his share of the legacy from Ike’s grandfather (just as Ike does, in his own way, via relinquishing the inheritance of the land). Let’s call the narrative she symbolizes the “black McCaslin narrative.”

So, whereas in Aboul-Ela’s reading of Absalom, Absalom! we have multiple threads of history required to weave together the story of Thomas Sutpen–the construction of history–Go Down, Moses‘ form suggests a deconstruction of a historical narrative via the irruption of a black narrative into a white-constructed one. Strangely, then, Ike shares one crucial similarity with Thomas Sutpen, in that both presume to have full control over their respective narratives via closures they attempt to effect. In terms of its form, then, Go Down, Moses is perhaps something like what Thomas Sutpen’s own version of his life might look like.

But regarding that irruption of the one narrative into the other: what sort of ideology might be implied by that? Is it Faulkner’s implicit argument that blacks and whites, given their tragic history, are better off in their separate spheres, at least for now? Or is Faulkner implicitly arguing that that separateness has made and will make nothing better, and so, sooner or later, brave, generous souls should–must–risk love for each other? Or perhaps both are true? It’s hard to reconcile these two narratives in Go Down, Moses, to find any sort of correspondence, much less a happy one, between them–they are parallel in more ways than one, and that, on the whole seems to be okay by the respective keepers of these narratives, with the brief exception of Roth and her lover.

As for me, I find enormous ambiguity in Go Down, Moses that leads me to wonder, as I did in the Glissant post, just how much control Faulkner is exercising over his material here, whether (in my reading) he is fully aware of the extent to which he is undercutting the very authority he spends so much time on as he establishes Ike as Southern White Historian. I hasten to add that I don’t see that as a weakness; indeed, I see it as an implicit affirmation of my dissertation’s–and my book-project’s–central argument: that the effects of miscegenation’s unanticipated irruption into dominant culture’s narratives are analogous to those effects that the Encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas had for both groups of people.

I could let both Faulkner and myself off the hook and say that intentionality doesn’t matter, as far as my thesis is concerned: If there’s a primal scene/archetypal moment (you may choose your preferred term; I personally have no dog in the psychoanalytic-theory fight) for American culture, broadly defined, it is the Encounter. But having said that, I’m also curious about the extent to which Faulkner is weighing all this as he makes his choices as a writer. He very rarely was what one would call forthcoming as to his ends, and not terribly helpful as to his means–especially on matters that, as I suspect is true of this book–go deep, deep into him.

Caroline Barr (1840-1940), the Faulkner family maid, to whom Go Down, Moses is dedicated. Image found here.

“They endured,” as readers of “Appendix: Compson” know, is the sum total of how Faulkner describes Dilsey, the Compson’s black maid in The Sound and the Fury. Glissant finds that a crucial textual touchstone in his effort to determine how Faulkner locates African-Amercans in his (Faulkner’s) vision of the South. If you read closely the excerpts from Glissant’s Faulkner book that I included in my previous post, two arguments emerge.

The first is that Faulkner confers not merely a sort of nobility upon black people relative to whites, he even holds them aloft–or prefers to hold them aloft–from History. They, unlike Faulkner’s whites, have no fate, no destiny to work out:

[Zack Edmonds] thought [as he looks at Lucas Beauchamp], and not for the first time: I am not only looking at a face older than mine and which has seen and winnowed more, but at a man most of whose blood was pure ten thousand years when my own anonymous beginnings became mixed enough to produce me. (Go Down, Moses 69, italics in the original).

Though Glissant does not say so explicitly, his early statement that Faulkner’s vision is that of epic invites the analogy: In that epic vision of the South, blacks are to the gods as whites are to mortals . . . except, of course, blacks are by and large unable to shape circumstances to their own advantage. Marginalized deities? The second is that, while Faulkner clearly sees such a positioning as honorific and ennobling of black people, Glissant and, by extension, African-Americans, see this (or should see this) as patronizing at best and, at worst, a denial of the same human agency that Faulkner’s whites have been cursed with.

All the above is why, as I’ve thought about all this, Go Down, Moses seems such a central text in the Faulkner canon–perhaps even the central text–and I’m not just saying that because if it weren’t for this novel I might very well not have written the dissertation (such as it is) that I did, much less be revisiting it now. In GDM, it seems clear, we find not only, through Ike McCaslin in particular, Faulkner’s clearest iteration of his conception of black people, we also find its most forceful rebuttal–as forceful as any that Glissant or any other critic could offer. The question that arises in my mind is, just how aware was Faulkner that his novel does that.

Those familiar with the history (publishing and critical) of Go Down, Moses know that its structure began posing problems from the very beginning: The initial dust jackets sent to Faulkner for his approval had the book’s title as “Go Down, Moses and Other Stories,” which angered the author. Even though much of the book consists of previously-published short stories, Faulkner added (most crucially, section 4 of “The Bear”) and reworked material in those stories so as to make them cohere into something he insisted was a novel.

The critical given is that Go Down, Moses is a novel, albeit a rather oddly-constructed one. Its chapters–if that’s the right word–have discrete titles which are not arranged in chronological order and whose characters do not often appear from one story to the next. The first-time reader would be forgiven if s/he thought this book were a short-story collection. Yet when one tries to write about one of the chapters in isolation, one realizes one more often than not has to take up material in one of those other chapters–sometimes several others. All that is Faulkner’s design.

That design, James A. Snead argues in his reading of the novel in his book Figures of Division, is a miscegenated design: it has attributes of, and confuses the traditional distinctions between, both novels and short story collections. Thus, Snead writes, because narrative is traditionally a site of authority and rule, a structure which disrupts conventional notions of narrative implicitly calls into question other such rules of ordering. Therefore, “[t]he prose of Go Down, Moses is in the truest sense a ‘dialogue,’ not an authoritative ‘telling’” (206).

That all makes sense, except that miscegenation is surely a central theme of this novel: it is Ike McCaslin, having learned that his grandfather had fathered a daughter by one of his slaves and then a son by that same daughter, who relinquishes his inheritance of his grandfather’s land and distributes the legacies set aside in that inheritance for his grandfather’s black descendants, so as to begin to do his part to atone for those sins. In more ways than one, Ike seeks to close the book on the past (here symbolized by the plantation ledgers where Ike learned of his grandfather’s outrages) so as to never have to re-open them and begin afresh. One cannot get more “authoritarian” in intention than that.

Yet, in “The Bear” with his cousin Cass and, even more important, in “Delta Autumn” with his kinsman Roth’s lover, Ike has conversations with people who call into serious question the wisdom of his actions–actions which, if Glissant’s reading of Faulkner generally is correct, Faulkner himself would approve of but which, when critiqued, seem allowed to stand (at least, as I read these moments): just because Ike feels despair does not mean that we have to, no matter how much we may find him a sympathetic figure. Consider, for example, this scene from “Delta Autumn,” what Eric Sundquist calls the grandest moment in all of Faulkner:

“That’s right. Go back North. Marry: a man in your own race. That’s the only salvation for you–for a while yet, maybe a long while yet. We will have to wait. Marry a black man. You are young, handsome, almost white; you could find a black man who would see in you what it was you saw in him, who would ask nothing of you and expect less and get even still less than that, if it’s revenge you want. The you will forget all this, forget it ever happened, that he ever existed–” until he could stop [talking] at last and did, sitting there in his huddle of blankets during the instant when, without moving at all, she blazed down silently at him. Then that was gone too. She stood in the gleaming and still dripping slicker, looking quietly down at him from under the sodden hat.

“Old man,” she said, “have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you dont remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?” (346)

You can’t get more dialogic than that. More crucially, though, it is an answer for which Ike literally has no reply.

But Roth’s lover–not just a mulatto (what Glissant, characterizing what he takes to be Faulkner’s opinion of them, calls a “genetic and cultural Snopes”) but also, as she reveals, the granddaughter of the son that Ike’s grandfather had fathered by his own daughter–got all that?–clearly is more admirable than the parasitic Snopes. Yet neither is she a stoic like Lucas Beauchamp or Sam Fathers, content to sit in silent judgment on the doings of white folks. She wants, as she says, only “Yes” from Roth–only affirmation of the love she feels for him–gets only money and a “No” from him. She leaves, her dignity intact, for somewhere–one gets the feeling that it is some place, even if she only returns to Vicksburg, that Ike (and perhaps even Faulkner, if Glissant is right) cannot even conceive of.

All this is a long way of saying that, at least as far as this woman is concerned, I would argue that Glissant is mistaken about the role of mulattoes in Faulkner–and, frankly, it’s a puzzle to me as to why that is, given how intelligently he reads Faulkner otherwise. Joe Christmas, this woman, and her grandfather James Beauchamp (known by the white McCaslins as Tennie’s Jim), Faulkner’s most prominent mulattoes, certainly destabilize the order of things in Yoknapatawpha County, but not in the ways the Snopes clan does. Indeed, James had deliberately chosen to leave the county on the eve of his 21st birthday, when he would be able to receive his inheritance from the McCaslin estate, so Ike could not find him to give that inheritance to him; and though it appears that Roth’s lover has returned to Mississippi to stay, she works as a schoolteacher: not the sort of job that either removes one from History or, one could hope, causes one to be a blight on the community. (Joe Christmas, by the way, is harder to characterize in these terms because it is only assumed but never definitively determined that he is of mixed race.) Indeed, Walter Taylor and others have argued that, in an alternate chronology of events, Roth’s lover would actually have made an ideal wife for Ike, that together they could have expiated Old McCaslin’s sins and, symbolically for Faulkner, the South’s as well.

Even so, Glissant argues that Faulkner isn’t interested in depicting alternate universes, or even alternate Souths: only his own, as he sees and comprehends it. However, the fact that we can see those alternate Souths in Faulkner’s work raises some tantalizing questions about reading and authorial intent. To fully work out what I’m mulling over just now would require another substantive post. For now, though, I’ll just say that there is such a thing as an author not fully comprehending the scope of his work and that, as embodied in Roth’s lover, “Delta Autumn”’s–and Go Down, Moses‘–power (for this reader, at least) derives in large measure from precisely Faulkner’s not being entirely in control of all that material’s plausible meanings