Paranoid Readings and the Impossible Real
The motivating theme and title of Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, "passing"
typically refers to a "black" person's successful attempt to pass as
"white." Because of the assumptions surrounding the racial categories
of "black" and "white" in America—particularly the persistent
influence of the "one drop" rule—a person is passing, and therefore
authentically black, even if that person's lineage is more "white" (or anything
else) than "black." For this reason, characters of mixed race, as'
well as the critics who analyze those characters, almost always privilege
the black portion of their lineage as authentic.'* When passing, though,
and as critics like Cutter, Ginsberg, and Wendy Doniger have demonstrated,
a character of mixed race frustrates this virtually unconscious
deferral to black. Passing is thus a powerful subversion of the basic
assumptions that perpetuate mythologies of race (and the very possibility
of authentic identity). As it is predicated upon the fact that race
is performance, the act of passing suggests that all racial categories are
arbitrary and ultimately untenable. As Ginsberg suggests, "both the
process and the discourse of passing challenge the essentialism that is
often the foundation of identity politics [and] discloses the truth that
identities are not singularly true or false but multiple and contingent"
(4).^ This "truth" is, moreover, suggested in the very etymology of
the term. Derived from the Latin passes ("to step or pace"), "passing"
connotes transience, the sense of being between places, of being
neither inside nor outside (yet both inside and outside) a particular
space or grouping. Passing is not to have been already let "passed"; it
is not to be before the pass, nor is it to be safely on the other side of the
pass. Simply, passing suggests a mode of becoming rather than a mode
of being. As regards a text that is significantly titled Passing, this is an
important distinction. Although it is obviously interested in the issue
of race, and racial ambiguity, Larsen's text—like the concept of passing
itself—evokes a more general ontological threat of transience and
instability.
On the surface, Larsen's novel is primarily interested in the phenomenon
of racial passing. However, as the critical debate surrounding
Passing suggests, the thematic of the text (as well as the implications of
the title) are not necessarily limited to the problematic of racial transgression.
Many critics, in fact, have suggested that the novel's focus on
race is a deflection of other much more troubling (or "unspeakable")
issues. Typically, critics tend to suggest that these issues are encoded in
the surface tensions of the text, tensions that we must "decode" if we
are to access the "true" implications of the text. For this reason, some
critics have shifted the focus from race to class,^ while others have read
Passing as a coded exploration of homosexual desire. Ultimately, these
critics force us to consider the possibility that "passing" (as an act and
as the tide of the novel) has multiple implications, implications that
encompass race, class, and sexuality. At the same time, though, many
of these critics end up performing the type of "paranoid" reading that
Brian Carr has recently associated with a critical desire to "decode" the
true meaning of Larsen's text finally.^
Focusing specifically on the critical debate surrounding the homosexual
subtext of Passing, Carr suggests that "The scholarly attention
to sexuality in Passing tends toward [a] functionalist depth-and-surface
model, allowing the critic to uncover Passings 'double burial' and the
'radical implications' of [its] 'erotic subplot'" (288). The problem for
Carr is that this model is ultimately deceiving; it suggests that the text
has certain "potentialities [that are] available only to the critic's capacity
for resurrection and actualization" (288). By employing a Lacanian
model of paranoia, Carr works to demonstrate that this critical desire to
stabilize the text, to locate the "true" (and final) meaning of its various
"symptoms," speaks to a type of critical paranoia—or rather, a critical
compulsion to "substantialize everything as if there were no nothing"
(283). Moreover, as Carr notes, this paranoia ultimately mirrors the
very delusional paranoia that critics tend to associate with Irene's various
attempts to sidestep the issue of her own sexuality—and, thus, the
real reason for her attraction to Clare—by focusing on the much safer
issue of race. In short (and if we extend Carr's analysis a bit further),
we might say that there is a critical tendency to approach Passing in the
same way that Irene approaches Clare: as a type of mystery that must he
solved, a dangerously unstable object that requires stabilization. This is
not to deny the sexual undertones (homoerotic or otherwise) in Passing.
Rather, Carr's analysis of critical "paranoia" suggests that we can view
Clare (like the text) as a type of Lacanian "symptom."
From a Lacanian perspective, our sense of a coherent, stable, and
understandable reality is dependent upon our absolute immersion and
faith in an all-pervasive symbolic order, a social order of codes and discourses
that define and fix the world through which we move. If this
symbolic order fails or is disrupted then we are faced with the "impossible
Real"—or rather, we are faced with that which precedes and exceeds
symbolization. The "Real" is "impossible" because it cannot be;
it "is" only insofar as it "is not." The Real is the inherent lack around
which the symbolic order is structured. And, because it is the impossibility
of any fixed meaning, the Real simultaneously and paradoxically
makes possible our desire for that which is stable and final. We thus
mask, or eUde, the frustrating and utterly unfathomable nature of the
Real via a process of symbolization, a process that, as Zizek suggests,
"mortifies, drains off, empties, carves the fullness of the Real" (169).
In short, and this is what Carr's argument highlights, symbolization is
an interpretative gesture; by seemingly "decoding" a given text, event.
or person, the process of symbolization superficially determines and
stabilizes the meaning of that text, event, or person. However, when
this process of symbolization fails—^when, that is, it overtly stumbles
and is unable to mask the impossibility of any final and stable truth—
our faith in reality as a stable field of determinable meanings is undermined.
This moment of failure is the experience of the Real, of
that which "isn't," of that which refuses to be (something). The Real is
thus "a shock of a contingent encounter which disrupts the automatic
circulation of the symbolic mechanism; a grain of sand preventing its
smooth functioning; a traumatic encounter which ruins the balance
of the symbolic universe of the subject" (Zizek 171). And, as Carr
suggests, this experience of the Real can be equated to the reader's
(and Irene's) experience of Clare. Clare's (passing) presence in Passing
resists complete apprehension; she disrupts our illusion of a coherent
and stable beauty because she refuses to be fixed or understood via a
process of symbolization. Simply put, Clare can be read as a symptom
of the Real, a "nonobject" (Carr 283) that is frustratingly resistant to
symbolic apprehension.
However, our desire for complete satisfaction (be it narrative or
ontological) inevitably compels us to subject such symptoms to a process
of symbolization and, thus, to efface the threat of the impossible
Real. We are compelled to interpret, or "decode," such symptoms so
as to maintain, as "Ziiek would have it, "the balance of the symbolic
universe of the subject" (171). The problem, though, as I demonstrate
more fully below, is that it is virtually impossible to avoid engaging in
a process of symbolization. Nevertheless, Carr's identification of certain
paranoid readings is a valid one and, for this reason, I would like
to avoid reducing the text's themes to a single factor: race or gender or
sexuality or class. Rather, I want to stress the more general ontological
dilemma that the act of passing foregrounds throughout Larsen's
text. Passing, in Passing (and as its title), ultimately comes to denote the
threat of, and the freedom implied by, identity (racial identity, gender
identity, national identity, sexual identity, and so on) as a type of the impossible
Real. More specifically, though, passing exposes identity as the
effect of utterly contingent and unstable moments of (dis)locadon. By
perpetually "passing" throughout the novel, Clare demonstrates that
our sense of identity is paradoxically affected by our utter immersion
in and OUT complete separation from any number of communal "totalities."
Clare's passing state challenges the possibility of stable identity
because it forces us to accept the fact that we can never be wholly
inside nor wholly outside any given community (or category) of being.
As a result, Clare embodies a certain threat and a certain freedom—or
rather, she embodies the threat of freedom. After all, the very freedom
that Clare's "passing" state intimates both attracts and repels Irene (if
not the reader).
PG'S 57-59
Toth, Josh. "Paraniod Readings and the Impossible Real." Deauthenticating The Community: The Passing Intrusion of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen's Passing 33.1Spring 2008 57-59. Academic Search Premier. EBSChost. Drain-Jordan Library, West Virginia State University 08 April 2008 .
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