Inter-Racial Sex: A Passage to India and Light in August

Over at 3QD Morgan Meis tells us that this is the 100th anniversary of A Passage to India. Accordingly I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. It's one of the oldest posts here, having originally been posted on May 6, 2010. It is the third in a series of five posts dealing with the symbolic deployment of racial difference. The first was about Shakespeare's Caliban while the second was about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. All five have been collected into a working paper,  Five Easy Pieces: Race in the Symbolic Universe (June 2014).

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Now I want do deal with projected sexuality as depicted in two more recent novels: William Faulkner's Light in August (1932) and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924). Faulkner, like Twain, is central to the recognized canon of American literature and Light in August is one of his most important works. Forster of course, is British, not American, and, as such, is a more direct heir to the psycho-cultural dynamic of Prospero's magic island. But Forster's novel is worth discussing because it displays much the same psychological dynamics as Faulkner's even though the racial Other is an Asian Indian rather than an African American. The psycho-cultural dynamic I'm concerned about didn't originate in America. The European settlers brought it with them. It is a Western problem, not an exclusively American one – nor, for that matter, is it exclusively Western (whatever that means), but that’s well beyond the scope of this post.

A Passage to India centers on Adela Quested and Dr. Aziz. Ms. Quested came to India to be with her fiancé, Ronny Moore, who was stationed there. Dr. Aziz is a local physician who befriended her in her desire to see the "real" India. In particular, he took her and some companions to see the Marabar caves, a local natural wonder that was sacred to the Hindus. While walking in one of these caves Ms. Quested become confused, lost all sense of herself, and after coming out concluded that she must have been raped by Dr. Aziz. From that suspicion came a trial and during the trial Ms. Quested admitted that Dr. Aziz had not followed her into the cave at all. Hence he could not have raped her.

Why would Forster make such an incident the center of his novel? Because he wanted to underline a hidden sexuality in the British attitude toward the Indians. Just as Tom Sawyer used Jim as a screen on which to project his fantasies of escape and capture, so Forster's British used the Indians as a screen on which to project their own sexuality. Ms. Quested came to India to be with her fiancé, a man she found to be stilted, boring, and less interesting than the enthusiastic Dr. Aziz. The warmth and sexuality she saw in Aziz was the warmth and sexuality she wanted in her fiance, but was unable to find. And the outrage which the British community felt over this alleged rape had more to do with their collective fears and hidden desires than it had to do with justice.

Much of the book is conversation. And much of that conversation is that of one social group trying to make some sense out of the actions of another social group. For the most part we have Indians trying to make sense out of the British, and British trying to make sense out of the Indians. Much of the mutual puzzlement can justifiably be attributed to cultural difference. But these conversations aren't matters of mere curiosity about the others; they are part of a social process. And that social process is one of oppression. The British, in their conversations, talk of the inferiority of the Indians and, hence, the justice of British rule. The Indians are concerned both with insulating themselves from the British and with maintaining their dignity in the face of the ruling raj.

Forster's British men think of the Indians as women (or children). And, just as man is destined to rule over woman, so the British are destined to rule over Indians. Indian women have almost no role in the book; the key Indian characters are all male. And they are depicted in ways that give them many of the stereotypical attributes of women—they are emotional, dependent, changeable, they take poetry seriously. Forster is quite clearly sympathetic to these men; but his British males are not. Let us grant that Forster's sympathetic portrayal of Aziz and friends is accurate—I certainly don't have any grounds on which to question it. As such, it does reflect real cultural difference. But that cultural difference functions in this novel as sexual difference, the politics are sexual politics. The cold, rational British male must rule over warm, emotional creatures - such as women and Indians.

We see a typical example of this attitude in the testimony of the Superintendent of Police, Mr. McBryde, who opened the trial for the prosecution. At one point McBryde remarked, under the general heading of Oriental Pathology, that "the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer, but not vice versa . . ." At this point someone in the court most ungraciously commented "Even when the lady is so uglier than the gentleman?" McBryde's comment is standard racist fare. The "darker races" are sexually rapacious and inevitably drawn to white women. The anonymous reply, while certainly not meeting current tests of political correctness, restores a measure of volition and even dignity to the sexual preferences of the "darker races." The statement doesn't deny sexuality, but it clearly indicates that Aziz and others exercise discrimination in their choice of objects. They are not the slaves of mere whiteness.

Sam Clemens at the Cotton Club: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I originally published this at the end of April, 2010. I'm bumping this to the top of the stack as it is directly relevant to my current work on Matt Jockers' Macroanalysis.

This is the second post in a series on Race in the Symbolic Universe. The first one is here. (Cross-posted at The Valve.)

In Playing in the Dark, a set of essays on race in American literature, Toni Morrison is led "to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature . . . are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence. . . . Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence--one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness." That is to say, the sense of American identity embodied in our literature is at least partially achieved through reference to African Americans, with various Prosperos continually defining themselves against various Calibans.

In discussing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Morrison notes "the apparently limitless store of love and compassion the black man [Jim, the escaped slave] has for his white friend and white masters" and points out that Huck and Tom subject Jim to "baroque, endless, foolish, mind-softening" humiliation, which Jim accepts at face value. The question is: What is Mark Twain thus revealing about the role black people have in the white psyche? What needs do whites thus satisfy?

The basic story of Huckleberry Finn is well-known: Huck runs from home to escape his alcoholic and abusive father and is joined by Jim, a slave running for freedom. They ride a raft going south on the Mississippi and have adventures along the way. Jim is captured, Tom Sawyer arrives and helps Huck to rescue him. There are complications but, in the end, Jim is free and Huck decides to continue fleeing.

Let's take a look at the last sixth or so of the book, which is about the elaborate shenanigans Tom and Huck undertake toward the end of rescuing Jim. This is where they inflict most of the humiliation on Jim, all in the name of freeing him. Freeing him from what?

Five Easy Pieces: Race in the Symbolic Universe

Another working paper: SSRN link: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2473235. The five pieces have been previously published on New Savanna, but the introduction is new.

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Abstract: How did Western culture get from Shakespeare’s Caliban to Bill Cosby’s Dr. Cliff Huxtable? This essay examines that trajectory by consider six imaginative works: Shakespeare's The Tempest, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Forster's A Passage to India, Faulkner's Light in August, Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Cosby Show. The focus is on the projective dynamics of racisim where the racial Other is made to express feelings and desires that the dominant culture denies.

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The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery. . . . For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.
– Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

There's a young black boy on my job and those white cats have made him tell them so many lies about what they call his love life that he can't tell whether he's coming or going. They want to believe that we screw like dogs or cats--you know, just go out there and get you a piece, just like they might scratch their backs or get a glass of water. . . Another thing, if we were just like dogs, then all the rotten things they have done and are doing to us would be okay!
– Clifford Yancy, in John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso

Introduction: A Universe of Symbols

Each culture has a universe of symbols through which its members understand themselves and one another. We use these symbols to elaborate our mental world and to communicate with one another, for symbolism gives graphic and linguistic form to our feelings and desires. The olive branch and white dove of peace, the blood-red planet Mars betokening war, the serpent of wisdom, or of life and healing, are examples of such symbols. American society is culturally diverse. While all Americans may share some symbols–perhaps the American flag, the Thanksgiving turkey–other symbols belong to specific cultures. Each subculture has its own symbolic universe, with its own symbols.

European-American culture includes a vast network of symbols, a network in which African-Americans have played, and continue to play, an important role. The way whites symbolize blacks has more to do with the hearts and minds of whites than it does with black reality. Thus if we are to understand the role that black culture has played in the development of general American culture, we will need to understand the role that white culture has already assigned to blacks. The subject is vast, but we don’t need to survey it all in order to get the lay of the land. A few examples will serve.

The Funkified Standard Version of the American Dream: The Cosby Show

This is the fifth in a series of five posts dealing with the symbolic deployment of racial difference. The first was about Shakespeare’s Caliban; the second was about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the third dealt with A Passage to India and Light in August; and the fourth was about Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Cross-posted at The Valve.

The works we've examined so far—Shakespeare's The Tempest, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Forster's A Passage to India, Faulkner's Light in August, and Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit—differ in many ways. What they share is a common division within their symbolic universe. In each case we have the world of white people, who dominate the action, and the world of some non-white Others, who play a critical role in the emotional lives of the dominant whites. This split is at the heart of the social interaction which has, in the United States, given us a twentieth century expressive culture which is, in music and other spheres, driven by the expressive achievements of African Americans. In the twentieth century, many white Americans have, with Eddie Valiant, decided to reclaim their projected desires by learning to act like those Others they had formerly despised.

I now want to consider the The Cosby Show, one of the most successful television shows in recent history. In this show the Others have moved front and center. This is their show, they are the characters we must identify with.

This program created by a stand-up comedian and actor, Bill Cosby, centered on a thoroughly middle class black family, the Huxtables. This family embodied widely shared values and aspirations which we might as well call The American Dream — interesting and remunerative careers for mother (lawyer) and father (physician), attractive children, familial harmony, an elegant home and nice clothes all around. Previous African-American families on prime-time television had been quite different. Fred Sanford (& Son) was a junkman living in the ghetto. George Jefferson (& family) was very successful, but also very insecure in the status attendant upon his material success. He was constantly on the lookout for racial slights. His insecurity may well be closer to reality than the Huxtables’ easy self-assurance, but, remember, TV is mythology, not sociology. The myth is that everyone has a right to what the Huxtables had. That, by the way, these particular people are black, simply puts African-Americans at the center of this myth.

As a statement of the situation of black America The Cosby Show was certainly inadequate, and was criticized on that account. But it is quite clear that Cosby never intended a full sociological treatment of contemporary African America. He was interested in mythologizing and, as mythologist, he was brilliant. As an example, consider the scene where, as a present to Cliff's (played by Cosby) parents on their forty-ninth anniversary, the whole family performs to a record of Ray Charles’ "Night Time is the Right Time."

The Hollywood Version: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

This is the fourth in a series of five posts dealing with the symbolic deployment of racial difference. The first was about Shakespeare’s Caliban; the second was about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the third dealt with A Passage to India and Light in August.

Cross-posted at The Valve.

Robert Zemeckis's 1989 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit uses cartoon characters in roles which Hollywood had assigned to blacks back in the thirties and forties--suggesting that Disneyland is basically the Cotton Club in which black performers have been replaced by mice, ducks, dogs and other cartoon characters. The basic technical gambit, and triumph, of the film is to mix animated characters with live actors. This technical wizardry is thematically important.

In the film's Los Angeles there are two worlds, that of people, and that of Toons, classic cartoon characters from Betty Boop through Dumbo to Elmer Fudd. The Toons and their world are consciously modeled on white stereotypes of blacks. That is to say, they enact the symbolic role which whites have developed for blacks. The Toons are born entertainers: they sing, they dance, they tell jokes—the few positive roles which American popular culture has, until recently, allowed to blacks. One of the settings for the action is a night club where the entertainers and staff are Toons, but the clientele is strictly human, a setting modeled after those clubs, such as Harlem's Cotton Club, where the performers and staff were black while the patrons (and owners) where white.

One could imagine the same story being made using blacks instead of Toons. However, that film would surely, and properly, have been attacked for its blatent racism. While racism is alive, and altogether too well, in contemporary American society, sensitivities have changed. Hollywood no longer allows itself to indulge in stereotyping as blatent as it once enjoyed. The film Zemeckis made replaces racism with the technical virtuosity needed to mix animated characters with live actors. Instead of reviling the film for its racism, we can revel in its virtuosity. This basic structural device allows Zemeckis to create a film which shows that there are things the human characters need to do to live their lives, or, at least, to live them well, which those humans cannot do for themselves. They depend on Toons to complete their emotional lives.

Race in the Symbolic Universe 1: Caliban

The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery. . . . For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.
—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

There's a young black boy on my job and those white cats have made him tell them so many lies about what they call his love life that he can't tell whether he's coming or going. They want to believe that we screw like dogs or cats—you know, just go out there and get you a piece, just like they might scratch their backs or get a glass of water. . . Another thing, if we were just like dogs, then all the rotten things they have done and are doing to us would be okay!
—Clifford Yancy, in John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso

This is a series of short pieces dealing with the representation of race in American culture:

• Shakespeare's Caliban
• Sam Clemens at the Cotton Club: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Inter-Racial Sex: A Passage to India and Light in August
• The Hollywood Version: Who Framed Roger Rabbit
• The Funkified Standard Version of the American Dream: The Cosby Show
• Cultural Evolution

The first follows immediately in this post. I’ll post the rest over the next week or three.

Shakespeare's Caliban

The symbolic universe of white America originated in Europe. And Europeans had, by the late Renaissance, developed an image of blacks. In The White Man's Burden, Winthrop D. Jordan showed that Europeans were disposed to see blacks as strongly emotional and sensual, qualities they were coming to reject in themselves. In the late Renaissance blacks were likened to beasts. In Bacon's New Atlantis (1624) the "Spirit of Fornication" was depicted as "a little foul ugly Æthiop" (Jordan, p. 19). Jordan notes that Englishmen "were especially inclined to discover attributes in savages which they found first, but could not speak of, in themselves". Thus before the European settlers of North America had any substantial contact with Africans, they had a lascivious place prepared in their symbol system through which to understand and interact with them. 

 

We can see this symbol system in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Its central figure, Prospero, is a magician who calls storms into being and conjures visions before the eyes of the other characters. In this conjuring he enacts the dramatist's role. Prospero is Shakespeare's symbolic representation of his own role in life and The Tempest is his statement about the nature and purpose of dramatic art. In this play Shakespeare presents his symbolic universe, a symbolic universe which has been central to the imaginative life of European culture. In his plays Shakespeare drew on a wide variety of sources, but The Tempest is his own through and through. In it, he distilled all he had embraced in his career and presented the essence. What role does he assign to Africans?

There is one character in the play, Caliban, who is generally thought to embody European views of Africans. Stephano, one of the strangers shipwrecked on Prospero's island, remarks thus of Caliban on first seeing him (2.2.58-72):

What's the matter? Have we devils here? Do you put tricks upon 's with savages and men of Inde, ha? I have not scaped drowning to be afeard now of your four legs. . . . This is some monster of the isle, with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an ague. Where the devil should he learn our language? . . . If I can recover him, and keep him tame, and get to Naples with him, he's a present for any emperer that ever trod on neat's leather.

Caliban was, in point of mythical fact, the son of Sycorax, a witch who lived on the island when Prospero arrived. Prior to the time of the play, Prospero taught him to speak and made him his slave. Then Caliban fell from Prospero's favor after attempting to rape Miranda. During the play Caliban is part of a ludicrous plot to overthrow Prospero—which will then give him sexual access to Miranda. Thus Caliban is plagued with the sexuality which Europeans have been seeing in non-Europeans, especially Africans, ever since they began to trade with and to conquer them.

However, when the overthrow plot is finally foiled, Prospero asserts of Caliban that "this thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine" (5.1.275 - 276). What does Prospero mean by this? Having regarded Caliban as his slave, there is no point in acknowledging that relationship, for that ownership and masterhood is taken for granted. The only thing which makes sense is that Prospero is now taking responsibility for Caliban's rebellious and sexual ways. That means that, in some sense, Prospero now regards them as his own rebellious and sexual ways. Prospero and Caliban are one being, with Prospero representing the conscious desires and Caliban the unconscious.

We don't have to push this very far to get into waters deep and dark. For, Caliban had originally fallen from favor for attempting to rape Miranda, Prospero's daughter. If Caliban is but an agent for Prospero's own repressed desire, then it was Prospero who had, unconsciously, desired to rape his daughter. With this acknowledgement, we are now in the psychological realm pioneered by Sigmund Freud. The notion of unconscious sexual desire between members of the same family was shocking in Freud's day, as it is in ours. But in our day, incest has become the kind of shock which is discussed on talk shows and in tabloids. We are, at last, trying to deal with such matters.

Modern film-makers, for example, can be freer and more explicit about the relationship between the conscious and unconscious than Shakespeare could ever have been. For example, Forbidden Planet is a science fiction film from the mid-fifties and was based loosely on The Tempest. Instead of a nobleman/magician marooned on an island in the Mediterranean we have a brilliant scientist, one Dr. Morbius, marooned on a distant planet. Instead of the sprite Ariel to do Prospero's bidding, we have Robbie the Robot. Instead of Caliban the man-monster, we have the Monster from the Id. Recognizing the symbolic connection between Caliban and the id of Freudian psychology, these film-makers made that connection explicit by naming the monster after that very id. In the movie, the monster arose when Morbius's unconscious somehow linked up with a fantastic power-generating system left behind by an ancient, and now dead, civilization. A connection which Shakespeare had only hinted at was made more explicit by post-Freudian film-makers of the fifties.

Returning to Shakespeare, the point is that, however great his artistry, he was not exempt from standard European prejudice. He painted Caliban with the same brush Europeans used to paint their pictures of Africa and Africans. However, he did, just barely, manage to indicate that the colors and forms in that picture came, not from Africa, but from himself, from Europe. Whatever Africans were really like, their picture was European, painted to meet European psychological needs. Caliban was Prospero's creature, acting out those desires which Prospero himself could not acknowledge.

The Tempest was written in 1611 and first performed in 1612. The first blacks, twenty of them, arrived in North America at Jamestown in 1619. While a culture's symbolic universe can change over time, the necessary time span is greater than the seven or eight years between The Tempest and Jamestown. The symbolic universe Shakespeare presented in his play is the same one inhabited by the Jamestown colonists. Their twenty blacks would represent the same forces to them that Caliban represented to Shakespeare and his audience. African cultural reality would be forced to bow to the intense pressure of European psychological need.

cross-posted at The Valve