Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel 2019001179, 9780367140878, 9780429030116

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Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel

How does racial ideology contribute to the exploration of narrative voice? How does narrative (un)reliability help in the production and critique of racial ideologies? Through a refreshing comparative analysis of well-­established novels by Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, Albert Camus, and Alejo Carpentier, this book explores the racial politics of literary form. Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel contributes to the emergent attention in literary studies to the interrelation of form and politics, which has been underexplored in narrative theory and comparative racial studies. Bridging cultural, postcolonial, racial studies and narratology, this book brings context specificity and awareness to the production of ideological, ambivalent narrative texts that, through technical innovation in narrative reliability, deeply engage with extremely violent episodes of colonial origin in the United Kingdom, the United States, Algeria, and the French and Spanish Caribbean. In this manner, the book reformulates and expands the problem of narrative reliability and highlights the key uses and production of racial discourses so as to reveal the partic­ipation of experimental novels in early and mid-twentieth century racial conflicts, which function as a test case to display a broad, new area of study in cultural and political narrative theory. Marta Puxan-Oliva (PhD Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2010, Humanities and Comparative Literature) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and an Assistant Professor at the Universitat de Barcelona. She has received several fellowships, especially a Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (2013–2016) at Harvard University and the Universitat de Barcelona. A specialist on narrative theory, racial studies, and World Literature, she has published articles in English Studies, Journal of Narrative Theory, Journal of World Literature, Amerikastudien/American Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, Els Marges, and L’Époque conradienne. She is a member of the research group Global Literary Studies (GlobaLS) at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Figures of Finance Capitalism Writing, Class and Capital in Mid-Victorian Narratives Borislav Knezevic The Other Orpheus A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality Merrill Cole The Individual and the Authority Figure in Egyptian Prose Literature Yona Sheffer The Pictorial Third An Essay into Intermedial Criticism Liliane Louvel Making and Seeing Modern Texts Jonathan Locke Hart Cultural Evolution and its Discontents Robert Watson California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels Exiled from Eden Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel Marta Puxan-Oliva

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/literature/series/LITCRITANDCULT

Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel Marta Puxan-Oliva

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Marta Puxan-Oliva to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Puxan-Oliva, Marta, author. Title: Narrative reliability, racial conflicts and ideology in the modern novel / Marta Puxan-Oliva. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Series: Literary criticism and cultural theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019001179 Subjects: LCSH: Race in literature. | Narration (Rhetoric)— Social aspects. | Discourse analysis, Narrative—Social aspects. | Fiction—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. Classification: LCC PN56.R16 P89 2019 | DDC 809/.933552—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001179 ISBN: 978-0-367-14087-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-03011-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To Ricardo Piglia and to Noel Polk, for the company they keep

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Experimenting with Reliability, Exploring Racial Conflicts 1 1 A Voice of Persuasion, the English Gentleman, and British Imperialism in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim 37 2 Reliability as a “Passing Zone”: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

79

3 Degrees of Reliability, Miscegenation, and the New South Creed in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! 117 4 Estranging, Discordant Reliability, and French Colonial Algeria in Albert Camus’s L’étranger 148 5 Narrative Perspective and the Lights and Shadows of the Haitian Revolution in Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo 183 6 Conclusions 229 Bibliography Index

235 261

Acknowledgments

It is a hard enterprise to acknowledge all the people who have contributed to improving the thinking and encouraging the effort of the eightyear research process that culminated in this printed book. I can only mention a few of those who have left their print in the perspectives and suggestions that I offer the reader here. I would like to thank my ­generous postdoctoral mentors first: Nora Catelli, for her constant encouragement and support from her early assessment of my dissertation and her sharing of her impressive intellectual curiosity and profound knowledge of literature; Martin Puchner, whose discussions on book structure and the publishing process were very helpful; and Werner Sollors, whose specialty on interracial relations and whose intellectual and personal generosity immersed me into a wisdom that expanded enormously the mastery of his brilliant books. I am grateful to Mariano Siskind, with his personal and intellectual proximity, his guardianship of my academic well-being, and his direct but sweet way of inviting me to rethink to whom I wanted to talk and how I should value and address my own contribution in many hours of fulfilling conversation; to the professors and graduate students at Harvard University who shared the research and the writing, especially to Vincent Brown for our discussions on the problems of racial justice; to Elena Fratto for her interest on reliability; to Antonio Arraiza for his sharing of Latin American literature and Carpentier; to Eloi Grasset for our morning coffees before writing; to Glenda Carpio for her classes on James Weldon Johnson and Chesnutt; to my colleagues in the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Department of African and African American Studies; and to the stimulating lectures and seminars at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies. Thanks also to those from whom I learned and shared the specialization fields, for racial studies from Kenneth W. Warren, for narrative theory from Jakob Lothe and Greta Olson, from whom I received endless knowledge and vital trust in my work. To all my friends and colleagues in the field, I owe many suggestions, comments, and interests, especially to Esther Gimeno Ugalde, Neus Rotger, Carles Prado, Diana Roig Sanz, Annalisa Mirizio, Max

x Acknowledgments Hidalgo Nácher, Daniel Aguirre, David Yagüe, Carlos Varón, Rosario Hubert, Sergi Rivero, Sean Seeger, Eralda Lameborshi, Tim Melley, ­Birgit Spengler, Robert Hampson, Brian Richardson, Stefan Iversen, ­Peter ­Rabinowitz, John G. Peters, Marco Caracciolo, David Damrosch, Karen Thornber, Sarah Copland, Josep Maria Fradera, Enric Ucelay Da Cal, Mauricio Tenorio, Maria Antonia Oliver, Pere Gifra, my thesis supervisor Miquel Berga, and Louise Nilsson. And to Marc Gil Garrusta, whose final push enabled the manuscript to find a home at Routledge. To the European Commission, I owe the granting of a Marie-­Sklodowska Curie Fellowship (2013–2016) that sent me to Harvard, where the research conditions and the Widener Library set me in the inspiring, optimum environment and well-being I needed to write the manuscript. I would not have been able to accomplish it without this generous position. The postdoctoral fellowships at the Universitat de Barcelona and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya have ensured and enormously facilitated the book completion. My gratefulness goes to Michelle Salyga and to Routledge since she was very efficient and welcoming after the manuscript had circulated through difficult paths. It could not have found a better press. My gratefulness goes also very especially to the open-minded external readers with their helpful comments, whose enthusiasm and embracing of the critical bridging of narrative theory and racial studies was courageous and solidly argued. Igor Knezevic, Olga Knezevic, and John Shakespear made the style of this book much more readable and accurate. My family and closest friends have lived the joys of reading, writing, and thinking with me, and have kept me standing, my head up, when the delayed process sucked my forces and swallowed my trust. They kept my balance as my son Pere kept my feet grounded, while the book grew at a much slower rhythm than he did. Finally, I dedicate this book to Noel Polk and to Ricardo Piglia. Noel’s enthusiastic edition of my first article on Faulkner secured a distant but warm friendship. The greatest specialist on Faulkner, whose Library of America editions are a treasure, he died shortly after a visit to Barcelona where he evoked a daily Faulkner through endless anecdotes while walking through the city. Ricardo taught me to read as a writer and shared his public admiration for Conrad and his secret passion for a Faulkner, whom, he said, he felt too close to write about. His perspectives and his deep affection breathe with me, and nurture the ways I sense literature, intimately. To them, this book.

Introduction Experimenting with Reliability, Exploring Racial Conflicts

How can the act of burning a human being alive possibly be equivocal? How can there be debate about what has happened and how it is to be perceived and told? In James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), an African American man is burned alive by a white lynch mob in the US South. The novel’s narrator, a young, lightskinned African American musician, looks on as the man is lynched. He relates how “fuel was brought from everywhere, oil, the torch; the flames crouched for an instant as thoughs to gather strength, then leaped up as high as their victim’s head”; the narrator further relates how the man being lynched “squirmed, he writhed, strained at his chains, then gave out cries and groans” until “the cries and groans were choked off by the fire and smoke; but his eyes bulging from their sockets, rolled from side to side, appealing in vain for help” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 113). This shocking scene of extreme racial violence follows a stretch of the novel in which the unnamed narrator has tried to come to terms with his own blackness. During his visit to the South, he has gained a profound knowledge of living African American music and folklore, and been inspired to engage in a social project: he plans to use folk music to uplift African American people and their culture. Surprisingly, instead of leading this character deeper into the fight against inequality, the sight of the lynching has the reverse effect on him. He decides to change his name, cultivate a mustache and let the world take him for what it will, and he adopts a new attitude that “would neither disclaim the black race, nor claim the white race” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 115). From that point on, the character-narrator abandons his initial commitment to uplifting African American culture and decides to “pass for white,” that is, to act like a white person and thereby avoid the limitations that segregation imposed on him as an African American. Unlike most “passing” characters in popular “passing novels” of the early twentieth century, which ultimately realize that they want to reconcile with their African American identity and culture, the character-­ narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man does not reconcile. Instead, he decides to “pass” and to renounce his own race. The turning point in his unconventional development is, precisely, the

2  Introduction lynching scene. Arguably, in this famous scene, the character-narrator portrays the lynching unsympathetically, describing the facts rather than the emotions that might arise at the sight of such a horrifying deed. As readers, we may feel disturbed by the narrator’s reaction. Why does this character, who has shown himself to be confiding and sensitive, behave this way? Is he actually so selfish that, faced with this brutal scene, he resolves to save himself and abandon the African American fight to its own means? Or is it that the pain of witnessing the lynching is so unbearable that he rejects his own heritage as a desperate way out? Has his earlier confiding tone been no more than a way to gain our sympathy or even “play a joke” on us, as he later says? This scene leaves us with an unresolvable doubt. Seen from this angle, the character’s unexpected reaction expresses a deeply ambivalent perspective on the contemporaneous discourse about African American uplift. This is not the only narrative scene in which the burning of a human being is presented as equivocal. In Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo [1949, The Kingdom of this World], the Mandinga character Mackandal is burned alive for allegedly leading the Haitian slave revolt in front of slaves gathered in Le Cap’s central square and French-­Haitian colonials leaning on the balconies, fanning the sticky-hot air off of themselves. Mackandal is brought to the square in chains, tied to a pole, and burnt alive. In accordance with the novel’s representation of the Haitian Revolution from the cultural and epistemological perspective of the Vodou tradition, the slaves watch as the burning body frees itself from its bonds, rises into the air, and soars overhead. The slaves cry “Macandal Sauvé!” [Mackandal saved!] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 46) and return to the plantations “riendo por todo el camino” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 49) [laughing all the way (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 45)] since Mackandal had kept his promise of remaining in the Kingdom of this World, and “[u]na vez más eran burlados los blancos por los Altos Poderes de la Otra Orilla” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 49) [once more the whites had been outwitted by the Mighty Powers of the Other Shore (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 46)] – the Vodou deities. This scene is climactic because it simultaneously displays the most brutal violence perpetrated against the slaves and the most liberating perspective offered by Vodou beliefs. Nevertheless, while the scene is mostly told through the eyes of the faithful slaves, the reader is reminded that “muy pocos vieron que Mackandal, agarrado por diez soldados, era metido de cabeza en el fuego, y que una llama crecida por el pelo encendido ahogaba su último grito” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 49) [very few saw that Mackandal, held by ten soldiers, had been thrust head first into the fire and that a flame fed by his burning hair had drowned his last cry (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 46)]. With this momentary shift in perspective, the burning scene becomes disturbingly confusing, and unresolvable doubt is cast on the very heart of the novel’s effort to rewrite the Haitian Revolution from

Introduction  3 the slaves’ perspective. Is El reino de este mundo suggesting that the slaves’ perspective and the Vodou beliefs that have been overlooked in historical accounts of the Haitian Revolution are, in fact, not truly credible? With this gesture, the novel seems to downplay the revaluation of historical discourse about the Haitian Revolution that accompanied the recuperation of the Vodou culture in post-emancipation Cuba, even as Carpentier’s narrative borrows and contributes to that revaluation. Literary criticism has faced at least two main problems in dealing with these scenes. The first is an ideological problem: how are these equivocal scenes of human burning to be read with regard to each novel’s stance on the racial debates of its time? The second is a problem concerning narrative discourse: how reliable or unreliable are these narratives? Because the novels’ narrators are not clearly definable as reliable or unreliable, these scenes pose the question of reliability as an unsolved problem of narrative discourse. That is, they do not fit into discussions about unreliability, even though the interrogation of reliability is at their core. Furthermore, because these novels question narrative reliability, the burning of Mackandal and the lynching that the ex-colored man witnesses unsettle any straightforward interpretations of the novels as having clear political stances with regard to contemporaneous racial matters. In fact, the scenes seem to reveal that ideological ambivalence and narrative credibility are intertwined problems. As such, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and El reino de este mundo both suggest that the interrogation of narrative reliability has both made use of racial ideologies and been used to interrogate them. The scenes of public racial murder in these novels indicate that ideology and narrative form are likely more interrelated than literary criticism has been ready to acknowledge thus far. These novels, in particular, make extensive use of historical context and the operative ideologies of their time in the fabric of their narration. Indeed, the perspective shift during the burning of Mackandal and the unsympathetic manner in which the ex-colored man describes and reacts to the lynching only make sense when read in light of contemporaneous historical discourses: that of the Haitian Revolution and the Vodou culture in post-­emancipation Cuba, and that of African American uplift during the first decades of segregation in the US. Only in this context does these novels’ formal interrogation of narrative reliability become fully visible. This book focuses on the intertwined relationship between narrative reliability and racial conflicts and ideologies. It argues that the problem of reliability in narrative fiction often makes use of the problem of reliability in historical discourse and that we need to examine a work of fiction’s historical context in order to comprehend technical modulations of narrative reliability. The novels examined here are deeply embedded in contexts of racial conflict. Through technical innovations in exploring what I will propose as the “problem of narrative reliability,” these novels render the political and social debates of their time in polemical, often

4  Introduction highly ambivalent ways, placing them on uncertain, irresolute ground and thus generating heated critical debates about both their narrative forms and their political stances. Through a comparative study of relevant texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), William ­Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Albert Camus’s L’étranger [1942, The Stranger], and the aforementioned novels by Carpentier and Johnson, I argue that the enactment of racial conflict is used to experiment with “narrative reliability,” that is, to interrogate the credibility of narrative discourse and, in turn, that of racial ideologies.

Historicizing Narrative Theory By focusing on the intersections of narrative reliability and racial conflict, this book aims to show that the relationship between history and narrative is tighter than is commonly assumed in narrative theory. Thus far, narrative theory has primarily historicized narrative form by addressing the history of the critical interpretation of literature or through the borrowing of relevant interdisciplinary theoretical concepts, or it has considered the ways in which historical genres, ranging from historiography to other subgenres of nonfiction, can be read from the point of view of narrative theory. This has led to a growing awareness of the ill-defined boundaries between history and fiction, both understood as “narrative.”1 This blurring of boundaries has been remarked on by texts and critics of so-called “postmodernism,” in which individual perspectives and the questioning of truth, and distinctions between arts and other disciplines, have often created the effect that historical discourse and fiction can stand on the same ground. The intention here is not to restore fixed boundaries between disciplines, arts, or discourse genres. However, the opposite extreme will also be avoided, and historical discourse and fictional narrative discourse will not be considered as being on the same level. Proposed in Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay “Le discours de l’histoire” (1967), and developed and anchored by Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), the equating of history and fiction was eventually embraced by a number of narratologists and historians. Meanwhile, Dorrit Cohn in The Distinction of Fiction (1999) and Lubomír Dolezel in Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (2010) have argued in favor of a clearer distinction between fiction and history. Dolezel argues that while at the level of textual discourse we can find similarities between historical discourse and fictional discourse, nevertheless the possible worlds in history and fiction do not correspond. As the critic states, [b]oth fiction and historiography construct possible worlds. However, their modes of construction, in their functions, and in their structural and semantic properties, the two kinds of possible worlds

Introduction  5 show fundamental differences. The possible worlds framework enables us to reassert the status of historiography as an activity of noesis: its possible worlds are models of the actual past. Fiction making is an activity of poiesis: fictional worlds are imaginary possible alternatives to the actual world. (Dolezel 2010, ix)2 Keeping this distinction, critics like Walsh, Iversen, Nielsen, and Phelan (Iversen and Nielsen 2016; Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh 2015; Walsh 2007) have recently found in “fictionality” a productive concept to examine the ways in which the discursive quality of imagination plays a role in discourses that refer to actual states of facts, drawing the links between fictional and historical discourses in a nuanced manner. In this book, I take sides with the idea that fictional narrative discourse is distinguished from historical discourse, even if ideological discourses, or the telling of history, are subject to a certain emplotment, to selection of events, and to issues of authority, as suggested by Hayden White. I aim to illuminate precisely the ways in which historical discourses are integrated and transformed into fictional narrative discourses and submitted to the distinct features of the latter. It is in this sense that, instead of considering the relations between history and narrative in the terms established by White, and developed in the broader current definitions of narrative, the aim here is to see those relations by understanding history in literature through an approach much closer to Marxist, postcolonial, and cultural perspectives on literature, which consider history not as fiction but as a factual reality that affects and is formally expressed and represented in literature. Too frequently criticism on the relationship between literature and history has been unidirectional, and that direction has been one of reaching out, of reading literature as another approach to understanding historical developments or processes, analyzing the ways in which history is encoded in literature. While the efforts to disclose the complex ways in which literature is useful in understanding history have been considerable and important, the look inside narrative is still insufficient. Although in those interrelations, even if at the level of discursive language, there are common features, narrative discourses preserve their fictional status, while historical discourses preserve their historical nonfictional distinction. Acknowledging those interrelations does not necessarily lead to “the fatal equation,” as in Dolezel’s critique of White, but rather enables the apprehension of the different ways in which materials and products from other discourse modes affect one another. Over the past three decades, Susan Lanser has thoroughly demonstrated that it is necessary to consider the role of gender ideologies in narrative strategies (1992, 2009). She has established a clear approach to considering the uses of ideology in narrative theory and the uses

6  Introduction of the latter for ideological purposes. Yet her propositions have only lately been fully embraced, and they are still incipient. Several critics, including ­Warhol (1999), Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Monika ­Fludernik, Stefan Iversen, Agsnar Nünning, Roy Sommer, Henrik Skov ­Nielsen, Gerald Prince, Greta Olson and Sarah Copland (2016, 2017), ­Christopher González, and Divya Dwivedi, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Richard Walsh (2018), have recently emphasized the need for a contextualist or culturalist approach to narrative theory that would consider the effects of historical context on narrative form. In an essay entitled “Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies: Towards an Outline of ­Approaches, Concepts and Potentials,” Ansgar Nünning briefed “­contextualist narratology,” describing it as a kind of integrated approach that puts the analytical tools provided by narratology to the service of a cultural analysis of narrative fictions. Focusing on ‘the study of narrative forms and their relationship to the culture which generates them’ (Onega and García Landa 12), cultural narratology explores ‘cultural experiences translated into, and meanings produced by, particular formal narrative practices’ (Helms 2003, 14). (2009, 59) One of the aims of contextualist narratology is the reading of how narrative operates within culture. While his book seeks to fathom “forms and functions of narrative within culture,” it also seeks to reach in and therefore to see how historical discourses and events are used for technical purposes. Several cultural approaches to literature, including of course the postcolonial, have developed theoretical concepts that center on cultural discourses. These helpful postcolonial concepts – hybridity, stereotype, mimicry, counterdiscourse, migration, colonial discourse, identity, exploitation, double consciousness, or the global South, among many ­others – certainly nuance our perspective of how discourses work in the colonial and postcolonial historical contexts, and from a colonial and postcolonial perspective. Within this theoretical framework, hesitant steps toward what has been labeled a “postcolonial narratology” have mostly centered on looking at how these concepts work in relation to narrative. Roy Sommer offers an overview of the ways in which postcolonial narratology operates. As the critic explains: There have so far been too few contributions to the debate initiated by Fludernik, Gymnich and others to evaluate their possible implications for narrative theory. Their postcolonial narratologies are part of the postclassical or context-oriented ‘school,’ which Fludernik (2000, 87) has termed ‘thematic narratology.’ Both are – at least

Introduction  7 for the time being – less concerned with re-examining narratology from a postcolonial perspective than in bridging the gap between narrative theory and postcolonial literary studies. Their main interest lies in making use of narratology’s heuristic potential for a better understanding of how ethnicity or postcoloniality is evoked in fictional narrative. By putting theory to the test, however, future contributions to postcolonial narratology may also reveal blind spots, insufficient distinctions and a lack of precision in some areas of narratological systematics – reader constructs, ethnicity of narratees or the concept of intended audiences are obvious targets for postcolonial revisions of narrative theory. (Sommer 2007, 69) This is, indeed, a welcome step in the promising direction of a postcolonialconscious approach to narrative. 3 However, we should remain mindful of the fact that too often, postcolonial approaches to literature pay attention to postcolonial discourses only, rather than to the historical problems that explain the need for a postcolonial perspective. It appears that most of the work begun by “contextualist narratology,” including the postcolonial approach, has focused its attentions on the concepts generated by cultural studies and postcolonial discourses rather than on the problems that underlay those concepts in particular contexts.4 In this sense, there is a high risk of only engaging narrative with the theoretical aspects of history rather than engaging narrative with historical problems by attending to historical discourses and not their related historical problems. It is on this point that most historical approaches to narrative might have fallen short. 5 Cultural discourses have a strong effect on social, legal, economic, and political organization and hierarchies. And power agents use discourses to enact that power. We should be mindful that a crucial distinction when we regard cultural – meaning ideological, political, social, legal, and economic – discourses is that they have a contextual social function that they do not have in fiction. Their ends are different, they function differently, and it is in those differences that we find the historical and fictional distinctions. In attending to historical discourses, but specifically to their enacted consequences, which can be as factual as impeding a citizen to vote, we are likely to find them as important as the discourses themselves since discourses are used as tools to justify actions and to dictate solutions to social problems. In this sense, our aim of seeing how history works in narrative should be guided by a genuine concern for, and understanding of, the historical problems to which cultural and political discourses respond. This is the way a historian thinks; this is the way we as narrative theorists must think too, if we wish to produce genuinely interdisciplinary work in the process of unfolding historical problems, through multiple discourses, in the making of narrative form.

8  Introduction In the last decade, there have been significant and fruitful efforts to understand political and cultural contexts in formal terms. Books like Sue Kim’s Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race ­ atherine (2009) and On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative (2013), C ­Romagnolo’s Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-­Century Feminist Fiction (2015), and Christopher González’s Permissible ­Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature (2017), and the edited collections James Donahue, Jennifer Ho, and Shaun Morgan’s ­Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (2017) and Divya Dwivedi, ­Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Richard Walsh’s Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives (2018) demonstrate the great potential of this emergent area of study. In this direction, Greta Olson and Sarah Copland provide a particularly suggestive approach, which they refer to as “the politics of form.” In their introduction to the special issue “Towards a Politics of Form” (published in 2018 in book form as The Politics of Form), Olson and Copland write: [T]he politics of form begins to address the need for the development of a political analysis of aesthetic and narrative forms, to articulate specific models and methods for performing such analysis and to reflect on the politics of the work that is thereby undertaken. Specifically, our desire is to politicise narratological and formal analysis while retaining the form specificity that has been a feature of narratology. (2016, 207) What is distinctive about this approach is its willingness to target specific political contexts that do not fit into identifying techniques that are universally applicable to other historical situations. Reflecting on the relations between ideology and narrative form should help make narratologists aware that history determines narrative technique to an extent that has been blatantly overlooked. Likewise – and no less importantly – the “politics of form” approach invites cultural, racial, and postcolonial literature critics to restore an awareness that history cannot be disentangled from formal experimentation and a recognition that if we are to understand how narratives converse with racial conflicts and ideologies, we need to study the technical ways by which literature represents and enacts them. This book pursues this path by focusing on the uses of racial conflicts for developments in narrative reliability.

Reframing “Narrative Unreliability” as “The Problem of Narrative Reliability” In examining “narrative reliability,” I focus on an aspect of narrative that theorists have explored extensively for several decades in the form of “narrative unreliability.” I seek to fully reframe those findings and

Introduction  9 approaches by focusing on the same problem that the issue of “unreliability” poses, namely, the questioning of credibility in narrative, by taking another angle of reflection that understands “reliability” as a principle of narrative discourse. A brief account of the development and nuances of “narrative unreliability” will establish the parameters of the discussion undertaken in this book. “Unreliable narration” as a concept in analysis of narrative has been employed since Wayne Booth defined it half a century ago in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Booth stated, “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (1961, 158). In examining Henry James’s problematic narrators, the critic instigated an interrogation of the assumptions around narrative authority and began a fruitful reflection on the specificities of “unreliability” in narrative fiction. Narrative unreliability has been the subject of an impressive body of theoretical explorations along rhetorical, cognitive, constructivist, receptionist, unnatural, and cultural lines, which has enabled us to map the diverse ways in which a narrative can suggest unreliability. Along these axes, we can determine textual signs of unreliability and character-narrator building; the effects of unreliability in the interactions between reader and fiction, including the historical readings; ethics and narrative; and, more recently, the uses of unreliability in other media or disciplines.6 There is no doubt that this extensive body of criticism has helped us to comprehend “unreliability.” Nonetheless, it has seriously prevented us from comprehending what I refer to as the “problem of narrative reliability” as a whole. For this reason, the debate on narrative reliability needs to be fully reframed. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, such as that of Jakob Lothe or Tamar Yacobi, developments of the opposition between “reliable” and “unreliable” narration resulting from Booth’s otherwise rich nuancing have tremendously undercut the reach of the problem that Booth originally identified. This has limited our understanding of many literary works in which narrative voices, while not qualifying as “unreliable,” nonetheless intensely explore the problem of narrative reliability, powerfully emphasizing the complexities of this narrative principle. As Ansgar Nünning notes, pointing to the root of the problem, “The notion of unreliability presupposes some default value which is taken to be unmarked ‘reliability.’ This is usually left undefined and merely taken for granted” (2008, 42). Awareness of the problem has been inherent in the history of the narrative concept. In their influential article “The Lessons of Weymouth: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day,” James Phelan and Patricia Martin pointed out that recognizing these different kinds of unreliability allows us to move away from the common assumption that reliability and unreliability

10  Introduction are a binary pair, that once any unreliability is detected all the narration is suspect, and, instead, to recognize that narrators exist along a wide spectrum from reliability to unreliability with some totally reliable on all axes, some totally unreliable on all, and some reliable on one or two axes and not on others. (1999, 92) Yet most studies of complications in narrative authority continue to be centered on the concept of “unreliability.” Critics of unreliability have tended to view “unreliability” and “reliability” as counterparts rather than as extreme forms in the modulation of what I refer to as the “principle of narrative reliability.” Here, I am proposing a major change: reliability and unreliability should no longer be thought of as opposites that correspond to credible vs. non-credible accounts of a story; rather, “narrative reliability” should be understood as the measure of credibility that the narrative itself provides to an authorial reader, mostly through experimentation with narrative voice. The main exploration of the possibilities and the limitations of reliability results in what I call “the problem of narrative reliability” in fiction. The problem of narrative reliability was diagnosed – yet has remained mostly unexplored – as far back as Tamar Yacobi’s 1981 article “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem,” in which she described this feature of narrative discourse by noting that [t]here can be little doubt about the importance of the problem of reliability in narrative and in literature as a whole. It arises with respect to every speaking and reflecting participant in the literary act of communication, from the interlocutors in dialogue scenes to the overall narrator to the author himself; and its resolution determines not our view of the speaker alone but also of the reality evoked and the norms implied in and through his message. (1981, 113) While later contributions have enormously refined our conceptions of unreliability, going back to these initial observations on the problem of narrative credibility should help us highlight our present limitations.7 The aim of this book is to reframe the studies of what is currently known as “narrative unreliability” in order to amplify its scope to that of “the problem of narrative reliability” as a whole. This contribution to the field should greatly help to include in the discussion a range of texts that, while deeply concerned with the problem of reliability, have not been included in studies on unreliability – or not fully so – simply because their narratives cannot serve as clear examples of unreliability. All the novels discussed in this book target the problem of reliability yet are not easily classifiable with our current types of unreliability.

Introduction  11 Most explorations of narrative credibility have been undertaken by critics interested in extreme forms of interrogation: namely, narrative unreliability. The intention here is not to explore “reliability” as a “counterpart” but rather to focus on the problem that underlies this discussion – the problem of narrative reliability. It will be referred to as the problem of narrative reliability because I am interested in the ways in which the principle of narrative reliability that all narrative must engage with is interrogated, problematized, and explored. For this reason, whenever the term “narrative reliability” is used in this book, it is meant to signify the issue of credibility in narrative, taken in all its forms. Frequently, it will be referred to by extending aspects of “reliability” that have only been considered in the criticism of “unreliability” in an attempt to see those aspects as affecting the issue of narrative credibility from a broader perspective. I should mention here that I am using “credibility” as a synonym for reliability and that these terms have not thus far been commonly equated. In my view, credibility is the capacity of the ideas exposed in a discourse to be believed and therefore trusted. I use this term because it does not imply any resemblance between the text and the material world, as “verisimilitude” would, nor does it imply that the ideas are “true” per se. An account may be believable and believed but untrue. Belief involves “agreement” and “trust,” and it is, therefore, a matter of negotiation. As Novalis’s epigraph in Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) suggests, “It is certain my Conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.” For a statement to be credible, there needs to be someone – real or figurative – who believes or trusts it. I see “reliability” as a principle of discourse – and, for our specific purposes here, of narrative discourse. In other words, there is no way we can think about discourse without thinking about its capacity for reliability or credibility; however, that reliability or credibility is modulated along a wide range of variations, from full reliability to unreliability.8 Reevaluating the nuances of narrative reliability as considered by the criticism of narrative unreliability will help in the exploration of this aspect of narration. The first general point is that we understand “unreliable narration” as a mode of narrating that, mostly by means of narrative voice, creates distance between the rendering of the story and the story itself as it is supposed to have happened within the fictional world.9 Too many qualifications might easily be made here; yet the fundamental idea is that the text invites the reader in varied ways to articulate that distance and thus to perceive that an alternative way of seeing and telling the story is possible. The erosion of the credibility of the narrative voice is the main focus, regardless of whether or not that voice is characterized. By understanding that subjects are vulnerable because they cannot escape a phenomenological perception of reality, and consequently that discourse as a human production cannot escape that nature either, the

12  Introduction initial purpose, interest, and scope of this technique in fiction should be clear enough. Whereas under that general assertion it might seem at first glance that all narrators are not fully credible, it is possible to distinguish “unreliable narration” because it makes credibility the conflict of the narrative itself, thus bringing to the forefront the problems of the telling rather than the problems of the represented. Kathleen Wall explains this key difference: If there are, then, no fully reliable narrators, how do we recognize an unreliable one? […] First, unreliable narration is invariably signaled by the author in the form of verbal or mental habits that would problematize narration of the issues at hand. Or there are contradictions or inconsistencies in the diegesis that undermine or question the accuracy of the narrative. These verbal habits and diegetic inconsistencies must be presented as more than interesting and human aspects of character; they must problematize, complicate, or undermine our understanding of the central issues of the work as a whole. (1994, 39) In fact, we might see “narrative reliability,” especially in its problematizing forms, as a device for metafictional commentary. As we will see in all the case-novels of this book, the problem of narrative reliability is always metafictional in that it involves a questioning of the identification between things and words, constantly signaling the différance by focusing on the erosion of narrative discourse. The problem of narrative reliability hinges on the mimetic and nonmimetic discourses in a way that makes this particular aspect of narrative fiction especially attractive since the narration is indexed as necessarily engaged with the story’s fictional trust, which enables its very existence, while simultaneously signaling the narrative as intrinsically flawed and, therefore, discourse as an impossible medium for the representation of factual worlds. At the core of the interrogation of narrative reliability, there lies the difficult acknowledgment that there is no unequivocally “natural” (mimetic) or “unnatural” (antimimetic)10 approach to fiction and that there is no exclusively natural or unnatural approach to language. That is, there is no such thing as a fully natural or a fully unnatural achievement in narrative because the mediation of language always interferes with reference through mimesis, and yet attempts at nonmimetic discourse can never fully avoid a certain referentiality that makes words meaningful. This is the precarious edge upon which fiction that interrogates narrative reliability stands, particularly in those texts that do not enable a full negation of the narrative accounts in relation to the stories that the fictional world seems to support as true. In fact, obvious unreliable accounts most often attempt to achieve a natural relation between fiction and reality, which is of course in itself an illusive effect, given that the text

Introduction  13 is discourse. In any case, it appears that the most complicated texts that explore reliability are not those that clearly feature textual unreliability but rather those that resist classification because they face the problem as an unresolvable problem in fiction, as we will see, and transcend the fictional barriers, making fiction the finest locus of exploring the limits of this problem inherent to discourse. Narrative unreliability has been considered from a variety of what claim to be clearly distinct approaches to narrative theory, providing a fine spectrum of insights into distinct aspects of the concept and producing a more nuanced definition. In recent years, there have been a few attempts to reconcile those perspectives which from my point of view enable a better grasp of the range of factors that are intertwined in the technical generation of this narrative effect.11 As Elke D’Hoker and Gunther Martens state in their introduction to Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-century First-Person Novel, the different articles in this book contribute to the on-going debate about the possible reconciliation of recent rival conceptions of unreliability, such as cognitive, rhetorical, and genre-based approaches, while some of the most prominent representatives of those theoretical currents also elaborate their position in the volume. (2008, 1) This book inscribes itself in the perspective that considers that the factors targeted by the rhetorical, cognitive, unnatural, reception, and cultural approaches must be regarded as complementary rather than supplementary. My contribution to the debate on un/reliability is twofold: in the first place, it introduces the use of history for the innovation in narrative reliability; in the second place, it reframes the field by discarding oppositions between unreliable and reliable narration, and proposes that critics focus on the “problem of narrative reliability” in fiction. The reader of this book should concede that it does not take positions for or against the roles of authors, readers, or ethics as unique in defining narrative reliability because, as will be evident in my case studies, I consider all of them crucial and absolutely integrated in the modulation of narrative reliability as a narrative technique, which makes me benefit from several concepts from these various theories at certain specific points of my argument. What I am to modify is the critics’ approach only to “unreliability” instead of to the problem of narrative reliability, which is a reframing that addresses all critics working on “unreliability” or “reliability.” I will review some of the concepts that are going to be helpful in my approaches to narrative reliability. The main factors that approaches to unreliability have already considered as affecting reliability are, borrowing from Per Krogh Hansen’s (2007) attempts to examine criticism in an

14  Introduction integrated fashion, intratextual and extratextual, meaning either found in the actual text or externally producing the effects of unreliability.12 Because of the number of different but partially overlapping taxonomies used in the criticism on unreliability, I will adhere to Hansen’s determination that, when viewing all the approaches to narrative broadly, the operation of reliability – rather than just Hansen’s “unreliability” – is a product of the interaction between internal and external factors, which any communicative approach to literature, and the rhetorical and receptional or cognitive approaches derived from it, should encompass.13 Understanding narrative unreliability as it appears in the text means seeing the erosion of narrative reliability at the textual level. This is particularly interesting for this book because the analyses of these novels lay out some understudied factors that appear in the text and that contribute to the problematizing of narrative reliability. I suggest that there are multiple ways to mark an erosion of narrative reliability at the textual level; these are in general clearly traceable when the narrator is intended to appear unmistakably unreliable but less so in those texts that hinge on the ambivalence produced when interrogating the grayest areas of credibility in discourse. As we will see from the novels analyzed, the textual markers that problematize reliability include, among other things, specifying the narrator’s limited knowledge; a highly personalized voice whose prejudices, interpretations, and judgments are signaled as conflicting with the expectations of a more neutral suggested rendering of the story; the uses of language in the narrative; the explicit manipulation, transformation, or invention of characters or episodes; the existence of explicit motivations that invite the voice to manipulate the story; the presence of factual contradictions in the narrative; the undermining of narrative authority through, for instance, narrative levels or orality markers; the juxtaposition of narrative voices; the usage of genre conventions; the deployment of paratexts; the use of narrative enigmas or first-, second-, and third-person narrative voices; elision; decentering; and the modulation of the distance between narrative voice and narrative perspective. Several concepts have already emerged from this complex interplay which express the distinctions between kinds of unreliability. I will only specify here the terminology that is especially instrumental for the argument of this book and the cases under study. A first set of distinctions between types of unreliability centers on the relation between narrative voice and knowledge of the story. Wayne Booth (1961), followed by Phelan and Martin (1999), and Olson (2003), established a distinction between those narrators who do not report accurately – in relation to what the text as a whole seems to convey – because they do not have sufficient knowledge of the story and/or the world around them, and those who do not report accurately because they do not want to, manipulating the story in order to offer what is in fact a pretended truth in the

Introduction  15 fiction. At the basic level, Olson (2003) has named the former “fallible narrators” and the latter “untrustworthy narrators.” This distinction is going to be useful for us since most character-narrators in the novels explored here are “fallible” in the sense that they do not have enough information to piece together the stories they are trying to rescue from the archives of memory. Others are at times clearly “untrustworthy,” meaning that they have the information, but, for various reasons and with different aims, they intentionally fail to divulge it. Several other types of narrators, however, are conscious of their insufficient knowledge and are therefore clearly fallible yet problematically so because their lack of knowledge does not always prevent them from manipulating the story, which makes them untrustworthy as well. Although this classification cannot be used systematically, it will serve its purposes at various points over the course of this book. As is already evident, the diversity of forms in which the voices relate to knowledge, truth, and manipulation renders the aforementioned classification limited. This precise complexity of forms prompted Phelan and Martin to distinguish between six types of unreliability in one of the most nuanced contributions to the topic. Their types consider three axes along which unreliability occurs in narrative voice. As they claim, “the metaphor of axes of unreliability helps to differentiate among these kinds: unreliable reporting occurs along the axis of facts/ events; ­unreliable evaluating occurs along the axis of ethics/evaluation; and unreliable reading occurs along the axis of knowledge/perception” (Phelan and Martin 1999, 94). Phelan and Martin add another distinction that works for each of the axes by adding the prefixes under- and mis- to distinguish between fallible narrators and untrustworthy narrators correspondingly, that is, narrators that fall short in the telling because they cannot do any better and those who voluntarily tell through distortion. Altogether, these lead the critics to establish “six kinds of unreliability: misreporting, misreading, misevaluating – or what we will call ­misregarding – underreporting, underreading, and underegarding” (Phelan and Martin 1999, 95). These types can be seen operating in different combinations at different times in the narrative in various ways of narrating, and they often occur simultaneously. These six types of unreliability already point to another significant distinction: the problem of judgment in relation to the telling of a story. To maintain the distinction at a textual level at this point of the exposition, both Phelan and Martin, and Dorrit Cohn have introduced the idea that “unreliability” sometimes seems to refer to the reporting of facts and sometimes concerns judgments that compel the reader to see a story from a particular ideological or moral point of view, which, when undermined by the novel as a whole – or what critics call the implied author or the norms of the work – results in what Cohn has labeled “discordant narration” (“mis/underregarding” in Phelan and Martin). Thus,

16  Introduction “discordant narration” makes sense when there is an indication that the narrative voice’s judgment is so misleading that it has a detrimental effect on the rendering of the story. Cohn argues that subjective opinions, as the basis for the detection of discordant narration, can be handled in one (or both) of two different ways: first a narrator may verbalize his or her ideas gnomically, by way of generalizing judgmental sentences that are grammatically set apart from the narrative language by being cast in the present tense. […] [or] the narrator may also verbalize ideas adjectivally, by judgmental phrases that infiltrate descriptive and narrative language and that often apply to the other characters of the fictional world. (2000, 307) Her contribution is fundamental for the argument of this book as she underlines the textual cultural and ideological factors distorting the narratives, detectable in homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrations.14 Additionally, Cohn introduces the external factors involved in the creation of the effects of unreliability, mingling internal and external factors. While her “discordant narration” mainly relies on textual markers as the guide for readers to infer interpretations of the texts, she also suggests the possibility that in non-blatant forms of unreliability, readers themselves attribute discordant narration, introducing the interaction between text, real author, and real readers. As she observes: It is essential to realize, however that the conditions mentioned above, though both necessary and sufficient for diagnosing discordant narration, do not enforce such a diagnosis. Readers are provided with a different option: they may attribute biases and confusions inscribed in a work’s normative discourse to its author rather than to its narrator, seeking to explain them by the biographical, or generational-historical circumstances that attend its genesis. The perception of narrative discordance, in other words, is a reader’s (more or less conscious) choice, intimately related to his or her assumption that the author means for us to recognize the narrator as a fallible commentator. (Cohn 2000, 308) In recalling the reader’s importance in the interpretation of the effects of unreliability in fiction, which has been the focus of constructivist and cognitive approaches to narrative, Cohn considers the reader’s interpretation of discordant narration as focused in the “genesis” of the fictional text, thus reestablishing the connection between real author and text by considering contextual circumstances as interpreted by the reader. This incorporation of context into the interpretation of unreliability differs

Introduction  17 from the dominant cultural and historical claims in the study of this technique, and it is closer to the perspective that this book takes. Considering the cognitive reader-centered theories of Monika Fludernik and Ansgar Nünning, Bruno Zerweck argues in his article “Historicizing Unreliable Narration” that [i]f one accepts that the effect of unreliable narration depends on readers’ interpretative strategies and culturally determined models such as personality theories or generally accepted values and norms, then one cannot exclude from the analysis of a text’s unreliability the cultural context in which a narrative text is read. (2001, 157) This is clearly demonstrated in Vera Nünning’s (2004) tracing of the contradictory readings of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and the whole range of texts that have merited different readings in Zerwek’s survey of the history of unreliability. Since the calls for historicizing unreliable narration mainly stem from an increasing awareness that knowledge frames were crucial in the interpretation of fiction through the cognitive approach,15 these claims – with few exceptions, such as that of Bareis (2013) –16 have been primarily focused on the importance of the historical circumstances of the reader, as well as on the historical changes in the interpretation of a text, rather than on the circumstances of the author, reluctant as some of these critics are to assume the idea that authors, both implied and real, have anything to do with literary texts other than writing them.17 The rhetorical approach to narrative, particularly James Phelan’s, has considered the external factor of the reader in terms of values without missing the textual anchoring of the uses of reliability. This approach mainly considers the reader from an ethical rather than a political or historical perspective. In his important essay “Estranging Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita,” Phelan examines the ways in which unreliability functions not only as an estranging technique but also as a bonding technique, connecting the ethical reactions of the reader to those of the narrator. As he specifies, “in estranging unreliability, the authorial audience recognizes that adopting the narrator’s perspective would mean moving far away from the implied author’s, and in that sense, the adoption would be a net loss for the author-audience relationship,” while in bonding unreliability, the discrepancies between the narrator’s reports, interpretations, or evaluations and the inferences of the authorial audience have the paradoxical result of reducing the interpretative, affective, or ethical distance between the narrator and the authorial audience. In other words, although the authorial audience

18  Introduction recognizes the narrator’s unreliability, that unreliability includes some communication that the implied author – and thus the authorial audience – endorses. (Phelan 2007, 225) In his ethical reading – which of course always has a real reader referent that would connect to the work in terms of values – Phelan mainly refers to an authorial audience, which emphasizes the textual aspect of an ethical reading of unreliability at the same time that it brings a dimension that is clearly connected to the context of the real reader. While the focus in consideration of the contextual influence in narrative reliability has mostly been on the reader, less narrative criticism has considered the author’s historical context. Luc Herman and Bart Vervaek have redirected attention to the context of the author as producer and receiver of his own texts in their article “Didn’t Know Any Better: Race and Unreliable Narration in ‘Low-Lands’ (1960) by Thomas Pynchon” (2008). As they argue, the preface to the 1984 edition of “Low-Lands” in Slow Learner suggests a reading of the narrator as ideologically biased by the racist ideology of the time of its first publication, and yet several elements having to do with Pynchon’s context and political stance call into question his suggestions, made in the later preface, regarding the narrator’s unreliability. The essay points out the contextual interpretations of reliability at the different levels of authors, paratexts, texts, and readers – both general readers and authors as future readers of their own texts, an analysis that has many parallels to that of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in this book. For this particular case, the critics look at “Low-Lands,” drawing attention to the author’s production of the text and his own later reading of that same text from a contextual framework that has seen changes in the racial ideologies that are at the base of the unreliability of the fictional text. In this sense, unreliability is a product of the author’s intentions in shaping the text, in relation to a particular context, at the same time that it is a product of the author’s rereading of his own texts. Herman and Vervaeck’s essay is highly relevant in that it brings back the author’s intervention in the technique of narrative unreliability. That is, the creation of unreliability has to do with the author’s intentions and the author’s context, aspects that have long been disregarded in narrative theory and that, until recently, have been almost exclusively argued for from the ethical and gender approaches to narrative. Although this book does not argue for a return to the intentional reading of fiction, it would appear nevertheless that in most cases, as long as unreliability is a textual feature, the real author has intended to create that effect, and the contemporaneous reader would benefit from the uses of their own historical context in the problematization of reliability and therefore interpreting through the lenses of ideology. In taking into consideration the

Introduction  19 author in his/her context, I do not intend to examine or make any statements about the real author’s personal beliefs or ideology. I am uniquely using the author’s context and life to see the intervention of these in the very form of the novels.18 Likewise, I will be less concerned with examining the political preconditions of reading that Peter Rabinowitz studied in Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation – which already demonstrated the need for considering politics in narrative theory – but will rather pay attention to the ways in which texts themselves filter historical arguments, beliefs, references to historical facts, and political and social conventions that demand, at a textual level, reader participation in a shared elaboration of a dynamic narrative form. Following Rabinowitz, in the sense of seeing history in the text, I will treat the readers’ attempt to read as the author intended, not as a search for the author’s private psyche, but rather as the joining of a particular social/interpretative community; that is, the acceptance of the author’s invitation to read in a particular socially constituted way that is shared by the author and his or her expected readers. (1998, 22) Along these lines, similarly to the workings of textual irony or other kinds of humor, unreliability as a narrative technique closely depends on interpretation and therefore on both what the author produced in the text and what the reader reads in it. This is obvious in a technique that involves silence and counterreadings as a way to convey meaning, and as a core strategy of narrative construction. For this reason, I will align with critics focusing on authors and readers as the crucial focus for elaborating reliability. When we turn our attention to the achievements of cultural and postcolonial approaches to literature, the discounting of the author has long been overcome, and authors and their contexts are again a crucial part of the historical interpretation of texts, bringing a vast amount of information highly relevant to the interpretation of fiction. To overlook their achievements would be to dismiss a great deal of significant work written over the last decades and to ignore many of the threads that weave the fabric of literature. Similar efforts to recuperate the context of production are certainly needed in narrative theory as well, not necessarily to see texts in a systemic fashion – which is also needed – but at least to better distinguish the ways in which the context of production intervenes in the very shaping of technique and so in narrative form as our objective. I will try to show that the context of the production of a text, at the authorial and historical levels, strongly conditions narrative technique, not least of all the exploration of the problem of narrative reliability. In focusing intensely on the reception aspects of

20  Introduction narrative effects, production aspects that are textually present and that predispose certain readings rather than others, producing particular effects, have been blatantly overlooked. The historical context of production as being used in technique is a crucial factor in the shaping of unreliability and, by extension, reliability. The argument here is not for exclusive importance but for added importance. Rather than attempting to be conciliatory, I see a need to integrate authors, texts, readers, and their historical contexts, which should be examined in their combined production of narrative form. Studies of unreliability also question the idea of truth in fiction.19 The idea is problematized, at least in the sense that if the narrators do not tell the truth of the story, there must be a more objective version against which their discourse is constructed. 20 The problem arises when we ask: Is there really a “true” account of events after phenomenology has exposed subjectivism – and later semiotics and deconstruction – most explicitly so as occurring in modern narratives? At another level, which regards the distinction between history and fiction, critics have asked: Is truth possible in fiction? Don’t these extreme forms of narration, which are highly metafictional, precisely designate fiction as fiction, which means that it need not follow the ontological expectations and logics of the real world against fictional worlds? In other words, isn’t unreliability in fact an unnatural mode of narration? I see part of the richness of the problem of narrative reliability that I claim that we study precisely in those questions remaining unresolved. Problematizing reliability in its multiple narrative modalities indeed means continually insisting on the idea that there is another account of events, closer to what really happened as implied in the fictional world, suggested as at least truer than the one rendered in the narration. It also implies that fictional discourses and real-world (or factual) discourses work similarly in the sense that fictional discourses can be questioned in terms of truth as much as real-world discourses – involving beliefs, considered mainly in ideologies – and can thus be seen as misleading and biased. Nevertheless, problematizing reliability simultaneously entails considering the other end of the questioning in relation to truth – that, as shown by narratives, discourses are always submitted to subjective perspectives which make truth in the fictional and the real worlds an unattainable or even absurd objective. Experimenting with reliability also means, as noted earlier, drawing attention to metafiction, particularly when used in what Brian ­R ichardson (2006) terms “extreme forms of narration,” which are remarkably unnatural because they display features of discourse that are simply ­impossible in the real world. The debates on naturalness or unnaturalness, and how much the idea of truth is a valid idea in the real and fictional worlds, do not seem to be resolvable, and problematizing narrative reliability seems precisely to point to those questions as unsolvable and thus ambivalent.

Introduction  21 To insist, narrative reliability hinges precisely on discourse and the factual world, necessarily constructing discourse on the assumption of truth, even if questioning its value or its very existence. In other words, there is no possibility of building on the idea of credibility without the idea of a true referent – be that in the real or the possible worlds – as much as there is no possible idea of credibility without questioning whether attaining truth is possible. In this sense, I propose that the narrative interrogation of reliability, and unreliability as one of its forms, hinges on a mimetic approach to fiction with regard to the real world and an antimimetic distinction of fiction. Natural narratology critics – those who see unreliability as a way through which readers cognitively react to discourses in the real world – may have been startled by Richardson’s proposition that unreliability can be considered as functioning antimimetically in postmodern fiction, where it has frequently been claimed that unreliability, since it presumes truth to some degree, has no place. And yet, as Richardson demonstrated, in its most ambiguous forms, it does have a place. R ­ ichardson isolates five types of unreliable narrators that cannot be assumed as credible within fiction because they break the conventions of mimetic fiction, that is, they narrate in “impossible ways.” He distinguishes between “fraudulent narrators” or narrators that could not possibly have been thought to express what they do; “contradictory narrators,” who articulate contradictory versions of events; “permeable narrators,” who blend with other figures in the narrative; “incommensurate narrators” or those who cannot be the single source of a set of clearly heterogeneous voices; and “disframed narrators,” who move between narrative levels in the text in ways that are impossible outside fiction (Richardson 2006, 103–105). These highly metafictional modes of narration break with the illusion of truth and dramatically increase the distance between narration and reader in ways that evince the undeniable fictional aspect of narration but preserve the predisposition of the reader to “believe” the narrator, maintaining a sense of trust between reader and author. However, these unnatural uses of unreliability certainly break with the idea that there is a truth in the real world that is reachable and therefore question whether there is any use in attempts to represent it through fiction. In their treatment of fiction as clearly distinguished from real-world discourses, unreliability is mostly sustained at the level of narrative fictional conventions. I am interested in the unnatural and natural approaches to reliability because I conceive reliability as functioning at those two levels simultaneously. For this reason, the unnatural forms of narration, such as second-person narratives, “we” narratives, permeable narrators, or the denarrated, have a profound effect on the shaping of the complex explorations of reliability in the modern novel, especially in those texts that unsettle the relationships between phenomenology and ontology, between discourse and things, and between possible and factual worlds.

22  Introduction Many modern novels, such as those under study here, already use unnatural strategies – albeit in a more mimetic way than radical postmodern texts – to force into the fictions the metafictional aspects of narrative reliability at the same time that they build narratives integrated with contemporaneous historical events and discourses, enabling the texts to transcend the limits of fiction and become active participants in historical racial debates. This strand of the modern novel, therefore, acts in what are apparently two contradictory manners: one that treats fiction as commentary on the distinction of fiction, approaching it unnaturally, and one that substantially integrates contextual historical events and discourses, and inevitably engages the texts with contemporaneous politics. Seeing the problem of reliability from this perspective demands that history be considered an integral condition of fiction. Greta Olson’s recent essay “Questioning the Ideology of Reliability in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist” illuminates the kind of developments in our understanding of narrative reliability that I have pointed out. She argues that the role of unreliability in The Reluctant Fundamentalist can only be understood by identifying the narrator’s perspective as opposing the dominant ideological view of Arabs in a post-September 11 US context. She concludes that “to recognize The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s ideological critique, the reader must attend to the political context to which the text responds” (Olson 2018, 170). From this point of view, the uses and modes of reliability should be examined on the basis of changing readerships and political contexts. What Olson’s essay makes clear, therefore, is that an ideological take on narrative theory, such as her proposed “politics of form,” must engage with cultural approaches to literature – including specific postcolonial and gender approaches – as well as the contingent political and historical contexts that make the developments in narrative technique relevant and meaningful for each literary text.

Narrating Racial Conflicts and Ideologies Because the discursive nature of ideologies is instrumental in the establishment of relations of power, racial ideologies and conflicts represent an optimal – albeit largely unexamined – example of how history can be used to interrogate narrative reliability. Since my almost exclusive preoccupation will be with those, some precisions on the category of “race” as it is understood here are required. However much it may appear that society has abandoned the idea of a biological basis for “race,” as Adolph Reed Jr. observes, recent worrying developments in the medical field point at a revitalization of some of these ideas, for which purpose we will invoke his insistence on the fact that “race is a category that has no substantial roots in biology” (2005, 12). As he points out, this should not prevent us from acknowledging that “race is a social reality” (Reed

Introduction  23 2005, 13). Thus, “race,” as understood by “scientists,” in the sense of a qualitative differentiation between groups of people based on biological criteria, does not have any credibility, nor do we here consider it a valid or definitive cultural delimitation of any group of people. Epistemologically, we may understand “race” as a “social construction” (Reed 2005, 33). However, the discarding of “race” as a real ontological entity should not distract us from perceiving its reality, as Reed also points out. We should understand that “race” exists as a “belief.”21 This unessential existence is nonetheless crucial since it is precisely its operativeness in historical contexts that explains its endurance. We need to understand the extent to which the belief exists in order to understand how “race,” as Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out, “has described and inscribed differences of language, belief system, artistic tradition, and gene pool, as well as all sorts of supposedly natural attributes such as rhythm, athletic ability, cerebration, usury, fidelity, and so forth” (1986, 5). In turn, these differences have exerted their power in “naturalizing images of existing hierarchies, which validate the values, prejudices, and socioeconomic position of the relatively privileged by making them appear precisely not as the product of contested and contestable social relations” (Reed 2005, 33). It is in this sense that we need to understand “race” as an operative “reality,” functioning in racial ideologies and in what Shelby calls its derivative “ideological practices,” as the debates voiced in the case studies of this book will show. 22 With this conception of race as a starting point, I concur with the approach of scholars like Werner Sollors and Eric Sundquist, who consider race in literature beyond concerns about racial identities, and focus on the ways in which racial ideologies operate at the political and social levels in what I will refer to as contemporaneous “racial conflicts.” When examining the Harlem Renaissance, George Hutchinson suggested the reasons why and the ways in which the critical study of racial conflicts and ideologies was relevant in an observation that is still valid today. For Hutchinson: ‘Race’ remains a powerful social determinant; it is useless to speak of ‘transcending’ it or to wish it away, however fictional it may be. What, then, to do? A place to begin is with a recovery of historical complexity, particularly at those moments when and places where the intertwined discourses of race, culture, and nation were exposed to questioning, to skepticism, to transformation, however small and localized, and when possibilities for coalitions of cultural reformers were envisioned and exploited. (1995, 26) Exploration of narrative reliability certainly plays an important role in seeing racial conflicts and ideologies in their most problematic form.

24  Introduction Along with Hutchinson’s view, this book discusses “race” in terms of “racial ideologies” and “racial conflicts” at a local historical level, that is, it analyzes for each case the particular racial discourses that were active in the contemporaneous racial contexts, expressing their contradictions and other political and social layers of the discussion, which include citizen rights and national, gender, and class debates. In addition, within the plurality of racial discourses and conflicts, I will focus on a few that have a strong legacy of the scientific discourses that shaped race relations by the mid-nineteenth century and that mainly derive from Victorian conceptions of race as biologically determined, which Douglas Lorimer (2013, 4) has brilliantly identified as the core of racial ideologies. 23 Those conceptions were primarily used to anchor racial ideologies that were key in the colonial and imperial discourses that established power relations and hierarchies in the late nineteenth century. Each of the racial discourses treated in this book was operative between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century within specific colonial discourses or derived from them – mainly French, British, English, Cuban, and North-American. It is in this precise way that this study differs from others that treat “race” at an abstract level or that, in dealing with race in postcolonial theory, do not address the ideologies from a historically contingent point of view. 24 Postcolonial critics, from Edward Said (1979, 1993) to Homi Bhabha (2004), have considered the discourses of race as the core of the colonial discourse and therefore also as contested, from the postcolonial perspective. In dealing with racial discourses as functioning in colonial or postcolonial contexts, this book shares the critical perspective of postcolonial studies in that it analyzes the discourses that establish hierarchies of power relations based on current or former colonial dominions and contexts. Several concepts coined by postcolonial theorists in connection with the racial conflicts and discourses discussed here are used, most prominently the concepts of “hybridity,” pertaining to the problems that miscegenation generated in the US segregation system or in the challenge to the late nineteenth-century discourse of British imperialism through the secondary half-caste characters in Lord Jim; Bhabha’s concept of “mimicry,” as appearing in the narrator’s passing attitudes in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man or in the Bugis in Lord Jim; Said’s and later definitions of the “Other,” such as those by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (2002, 2000), which are at the root of all the racial discourses treated here and target Malays, African ­A mericans, Haitians, and Algerian Arabs in the several contexts, always in contrast to various racial definitions of “whiteness”; we see the territories where the racial conflicts addressed here take place as complex “contact zones,” as Pratt (1992) defined them; and the “créolité” as a Caribbean version of that “hybridity” that is at the core of revisions of composite identities, like those Édouard Glissant describes in La

Introduction  25 poétique de la rélation (1990), as very clearly occurring in the postcolonial rewriting of history and the uses of créole in Carpentier’s revision of Haitian history as well as his deployment of “the marvelous real” in El reino de este mundo. Sharing this postcolonial racial perspective, I will follow Toni Morrison’s suggestion that we must look at whiteness as the counterpart that is being constructed against, and that justifies, the “Other” and that we need to think of the discourse of the “Other” as essential in the construction of the self. Morrison points out that “[w]hat Africanism became for, and how it functioned in the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary ‘blackness,’ the nature – even the cause – of literary ‘whiteness’” (1993, 9). Studies of whiteness enable us to see racial discourses and Otherness more broadly, and these have been crucial in the identification of the English gentleman as the most developed racial discourse in Lord Jim. The racial “stereotype” has been by far the most useful postcolonial concept in my identification of the ways in which the questioning of reliability uses historical contexts. As I have extensively argued elsewhere, I conceive of racial stereotypes as narrative forms (Puxan-Oliva 2016). I will take Bhabha’s idea of the stereotype as my starting point. In his seminal essay on the structure and workings of racial stereotypes, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Bhabha defines the “stereotype” as an ambivalent structure that is “one of the most significant discursive and physical strategies of discriminatory power – whether racist or sexist, peripheral or metropolitan” (2004, 95). The notion of ambivalence is central to the stereotype for it gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalization; produces that effect of probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically constructed. (Morrison 1993, 95) While this notion enables us to see clearly the ambiguity, and multiple forms that enable the perpetuation of racial stereotypes, and therefore elucidates the dynamics of these stereotypes within the colonial discourse, it does not fully explain how racial stereotypes operate with regard to narrative technique. Toni Morrison’s observation that stereotypes are a form of narrative economy enables us to push their limits further, to see them function as narrative forms, as a strategy for telling stories. 25 For her, the stereotype is useful for the purpose of narrative economy since it “allows the writer

26  Introduction a quick and easy image without the responsibility of specificity, accuracy, or even narratively useful description” (1993, 67). I propose here that the stereotype is neither fixed in content nor merely a secondary and inaccurate assumption used to advance the narrative; instead, it is a mode of narration that unfolds in, and has specific functions within the narrative, which completely determine the representation of race in our particular case. 26 Stereotypes, therefore, are not only raw, fixed bits of content; they contain narratives, structured stories. For instance, as we will see, the idea of the English gentleman in turn-of-the-century Britain corresponds not only to a set of character traits but also to the story of an individual who comes from a middle-class family, is educated in a public school, and will most likely serve in the British Civil Service. The gentleman might go to the colonies and end up as a colonial officer in one of the distant outposts of the informal empire. In this way, the stereotype contains with itself an entire narrative. This particular narrative of the gentleman is one that authors have used, mostly through their narrators’ accounts, to explore narrative reliability in novel ways. In Conrad’s Lord Jim, for example, the contemporaneous stereotype of the English gentleman is used to imply a number of implicit racial and character traits, and prescribed careers, allowing readers to engage with the narrator as he questions Jim’s status as an English gentleman in the first part of the book. On the other hand, Jim is eventually developed into a well-rounded character, while several colonial stereotypes are used in the novel’s second part to create flat characters who restore him – albeit problematically – to his role of a respected colonial officer. In conceiving of racial stereotypes as narrative forms that import previously established, implicit narratives into fiction, one comes to understand that historically charged and socially functioning stereotypes – activated in the narrative because they are shared by a community of contemporaries – serve an aesthetic purpose in a narrative text and are being deployed for their narrative capabilities. Racial stereotypes are woven into modern narratives via hints that gesture at preconceived narratives, which the reader is then asked to incorporate into a reading of the text to accomplish functions, such as filling crucial narrative gaps. Racial stereotypes are therefore being deployed as forms of narration – or, if you wish, ways of narrating. Only by knowing the historical specificities of the English gentleman stereotype and the particular political context surrounding its use in Britain from the 1860s to the 1910s can we unfold the narratives encapsulated within it and identify both the technical ways in which it is used to question narrative voices in Lord Jim and the specific aspects of British imperialism that the novel is simultaneously criticizing and deploying. We might already be aware that Lord Jim generally presents an ambivalent view of the ideology of British Imperialism and that this ideological ambivalence is represented through the novel’s ambivalent technique, but we have not thus far been

Introduction  27 able to identify the mechanisms through which the particularities of that ideology are actually deployed in the narrative to achieve technical and formal innovation in narrative reliability. Racial stereotypes represent the most tangible way of identifying how historical contexts, and specifically the ideological discourses that define them, are used for the purposes of narrative form. But they are not the only materials that are incorporated into narrations. Some novels use political arguments locally formulated within the broader framework of racial discourses. Chapter 3 will address one such example: in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Shreve – the novel’s narrator – solves the mystery of Charles Bon’s murder by adding details to the story, including the suggestion that Bon might have been “passing for white,” so that the reader thinks that the murder was motivated by the prevention of miscegenation. Shreve’s otherwise unconfirmed attribution of racial identity to Bon is only possible because it makes use of political arguments and ideas around anti-miscegenation and state laws that were codified in the discourse of the New South Creed. These arguments and notions, which were operative during the same time period as the novel, are called upon to fill gaps that the narrative clearly establishes as ultimately ambiguous. In this case, we must understand the political, legal, social, and cultural aspects of anti-miscegenation legislation during segregation in the US to comprehend how the problem of narrative reliability is formally addressed in the novel. Precisely because stereotypes are not the only way in which the narratives refer to and incorporate racial conflicts into the shaping of narrative form, and because we acknowledge that broader abstract conceptions of “racial stereotypes,” such as “slave” or “half-caste,” do not invoke the same narratives for each racial conflict, it is clear that to fully understand what they incorporate, and what specific racial conflict they discuss, it is necessary to historicize the racial stereotypes as well and go beyond their fixed content or general image in order to see how they operated in society and which particular types of individuals they targeted in their active contexts. Even if many stereotypes have common features that have been preserved over time and space, their politics and history are absolutely contingent, and it is precisely those contingent conflicts that are being incorporated into the fictions and that have been activated in the shaping of narrative technique. Because of their contextual specificity, stereotypes, political arguments, and events call for the participation of the authorial audience, that is, they appeal not to all readers but to those that can effectively incorporate history. 27 It is precisely that historical knowledge contemporaneous to the novels that introduces the whole racial conflict into the narrative, while at the same time, it is being used to denote genre, to shape narrative progression by providing readymade stereotypical narratives, to generate a contrapunctual historical narrative, to shape polyphony through ideologies, to affect character

28  Introduction building and narrative enigmas, to determine perspectives or affect paratexts, and to shape different versions of one text. The specific textual components mentioned earlier serve to problematize narrative reliability. In using historical context in their modulation of the problem of narrative reliability, the novels not only innovate formally but also manage to present the complexities of racial discourses, and related conflicts, as we will see for every specific case.

The Chapters in this Book To demonstrate at a practical level how history is being used to in-form the problem of narrative reliability, and along with our understanding of history and racial discourse as socially operative and always particular, each chapter of this book is dedicated to a case study based on one particular conflict, a set of concomitant racial discourses and practices, and one particular problematization of narrative reliability. The novels all demand a degree of participation that involves the incorporation of historical knowledge dealing with contemporaneous racial conflicts, which contributes to the problematization of narrative reliability. Each chapter is a specific test case that illuminates understudied factors in the building of reliability and that, in its specificity, shows history as a key condition of narrative reliability. A brief description of the chapters should provide a clearer sense of how the theoretical claims made here are addressed by drawing specific analyses that will make evident the usefulness of the methodological approach and the reformulation of narrative reliability being proposed. Chapter 1 is focused on the uses of narrative enigma, narrative progression, genre conventions, and my most reliant example of racial stereotypes as components of the problematization of narrative reliability. In it, I argue that Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim stands in an ambivalent position with relation to the key figure of the English gentleman and with relation to the British Civil Service reforms of the 1870s, in turn, essential for understanding the controversy over Britain’s “informal empire” in Malaysia. Lord Jim (1900) takes this stand through Marlow’s persuasive voice, which uses genre – the adventure novel – and narrative enigma, in combination with contemporaneous assumptions regarding the stereotype of the English gentleman as a colonial officer, in order to create a central doubt around Jim and thus an opportunity to see the colonial officer as an imperial ideological construct. Lord Jim shows the uses of British imperialist ideology at the end of the nineteenth century, and debates over empire and colonial management, for the fulfilling of a narrative enigma that is key in the interrogation of narrative reliability. Therefore, it crucially uses the historical narrative of the English gentleman to explore how the narrative enigma can affect narrative reliability.

Introduction  29 Chapter 2 addresses paratexts, genre, and narrative versions as underestimated factors in the questioning of narrative reliability. In it, I argue that James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912, 1927), published anonymously in 1912, and republished under Johnson’s name in 1927, during the Harlem Renaissance, makes use of the context of racial segregation in the US, and the growing influence of African American political and identity discourses as part of the emerging Civil Rights movement, to innovate in the uses of genre and paratexts in relation to reliability. The anonymity and adscription to autobiography found in the paratexts of the 1912 edition, constituting a political act and the threat of a real “passing for white,” place reliability at the threshold of narrative and firmly situate the questionable trust between the fictional and real worlds. In the second edition, the revelation of authorship and the clear adscription to the novel genre reclaim reliability for the fictional world instead of keeping it on the periphery of the real world, as the first edition did, and thus, the new edition restores reliability to its conventional fictional realm. This case study interrogates the textual location of reliability, reinforcing its dependence on historical context and thus further complicating the fragile boundaries between fact and fiction. Chapter 3 incorporates polyphony, narrative progression, and narrative enigmas in the building of narrative reliability. In it, I argue that ­William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) uses polyphony and narrative enigma to interrogate narrative reliability through degrees of trust that compose an ambivalent narration, which is ingrained in an ambivalent racial position with regard to segregation, instituted by the new US postbellum regime. The novel uses the political discourse of the New South Creed that led to segregation to create a legitimate focus on anti-­ miscegenation as the only possibility for maintaining segregation and white supremacy. The novel’s central enigma is speculated on progressively through the invocation of racial, cultural, and political assumptions from the New South discourse that enable, in turn, narrative progression and the eventual resolution of the enigma. However the narrative enigma remains a racial mystery because it leaves no trace of evidence. The active use of prevailing racial arguments invites a collaboration between reader and text that mimics the social collaboration required to build a racial community in the contemporaneous US context. However, progressive narrative resolution parallels a progressive narrative erosion of trust that holds the novel in an ambivalent, highly debatable position. The interrogation of race as a category is thus actively used to explore a problematic narrative reliability. Chapter 4 focuses on first-person narratives, character-narrator construction, and a problematic selection of events in relation to a colonial conflict. The chapter aims to demonstrate that the innovative, objectivist first-person narrative technique in Albert Camus’s L’étranger [1942.

30  Introduction The Stranger] underreports the colonial historical context in which the story unfolds: in this case, primarily the pre-independence situation in Algeria. Because of the conflictive colonial situation in Algeria in which he finds himself, the narrator uses an ambivalent estranging and discordant narration. The protagonist avoids expressing his emotions or ideology with regard to the racial distinctions between pied noirs and Arabs, and what Chaulet-Achour distinguishes as Algerité/Arabité. These racial distinctions are rhetorically underrepresented in the colonial discourses in French Algeria, even by the discourse of the Méditerranée, which Meursault heavily borrows to shape his narrative. The apparent blindness to contested colonial identities and political conflicts establishes the novel’s narrative strategy in the questioning of narrative reliability. This questioning of narrative reliability, in turn, effectively interrogates colonial justice. Chapter 5 addresses maladjustments between narrative voice and perspective. The chapter argues that Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo [1949. The Kingdom of this World] uses the technique of the “real maravilloso” (the marvelous real) as a way to produce maladjustments between narrative voice and narrative perspective, which results in a questioning of narrative reliability. Through this technique, the novel uses postcolonial Caribbean readings of the Haitian Revolution as the first revolution for the independence of America alongside claims of Afro-Antillism and Afro-Cubanism as the most representative national folklore. The novel deploys the Cuban contemporaneous problem of defining a Cuban national culture on the simultaneous basis of a social revolution and a racial character, categories that were already developing as not equivalent and even conflictive. The uses of Vodou and the postcolonial and colonial historical discourses on the Haitian revolution are called into the novel to shape a new Americanist perspective of the “real maravilloso” that is, in fact, intrinsically ambivalent in its questioned reliability. In sum, by revisiting these novels, this book shows that literary critics have not paid nearly enough attention to the role of history as a set of contextual conflicts, events, and ideas that have been used for the purposes of innovating within narrative form, of in-forming narrative. Focusing on the uses of racial ideologies and conflicts to experiment with narrative reliability, I have worked on a theoretical, methodological, and case-based level, hoping to forge one path toward this not quite undiscovered yet clearly insufficiently explored territory. Indeed, as Ansgar Nünning puts it, “although we have recently witnessed both a cultural turn and a great revival of interest in the study of narrative across various disciplines, narratology and context-sensitive interpretations of narratives still seem oceans apart” (2009, 56). Bridging this gap, and taking advantage of the substantial work done by historians; anthropologists; sociologists; legal historians; and critics of racial, cultural, postcolonial,

Introduction  31 and gender studies, as well as by the emergent approaches of the “politics of form” and contextualist narratology, will help literary critics recover the essential and integrated conception of history and narrative form that produces literature and seek a way in which we can move forward toward a historicized understanding of narrative.

Notes 1 This might have resulted in an overuse of the word “narrative,” now applied in many other disciplines that have started to gain a deeper apprehension of their discursive component. This redefinition of “narrative,” which avoids an aesthetic component that was previously involved in narrative as fiction, has proliferated to such an extent that it has been included in The ­C ambridge Companion to Narrative in Marie-Laure Ryan’s essay “Toward a Definition of Narrative” (2007). See also for that extension and discussion on the redefined concept of narrative, Pier and García Landa (2008), Alber and Hansen (2014). Limited to the arts but considering “narrative” in a broader postclassical sense, see Altamiranda (2009). 2 For an excellent and cogent essay that condenses the critic’s argument, see Dolezel (1999). 3 See also for this move toward a “postcolonial narratology,” Prince (2005), Gymnich (2002), and Fludernik (2007). On how ideology influences narratology, see Herman and Vervaeck (2007). Most of these approaches derive from the acknowledgment that contextual narratologies do not leave behind but rather enrich, and are interdependent with, formal narratologies, as I aim to demonstrate. As Dan Shen also states: It should also have become clear that asking contextual approaches to stay away from narratology (Diengott) is to shut the door to beneficial, invigorating forces and resources, indeed to the very ‘savior’ of narratology at least with reference to North America. For the sake of the development of the field of narratology, it is high time to clarify the different relations the different kinds of narratological investigation bear to reader and context, to distinguish between generic function and contextualized significance, and to see the relation between contextual narratologies and formal narrative poetics not as one of mutual exclusion, but as one of mutual nourishment. (2005, 165) 4 Along with Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory (Dwivedi, Nielsen, and Walsh 2018), Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres (Goebel and Schabio 2013) is one of the few collections of essays that directly addresses the narrative aspect of postcolonial literature. In focusing on genre and postulating a new aesthetics of genres that differs from “Western” aesthetics, by paying attention to different literary traditions, the book invites one to think about postcolonial literatures from an insider’s perspective rather than using the vocabularies of European and North American theories of narrative. However, although this book proposes to reexamine narrative theory based on a wider range of postcolonial literatures, it does not address historical conflicts per se and reinforces a notion of “genre” that seems problematic to me. Since the novels analyzed in my book were produced within a European/North American context, and since I examine racial discourses emerging from colonial discourses modulated

32  Introduction into a clearly Modernist experimentation, the present work necessarily engages with the vocabularies developed within the theory of narrative up to this point. 5 In some ways, this could be perceived in Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). However, Jameson is concerned with Marxism rather than with history itself, which makes his reading of narrative theoretical rather than contextual. 6 In addition to those cited in the Introduction, see especially, on the character-­ narrator building the first book on unreliability, Riggan (1981); on textual signs, including the discussion of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators, see Margolin (1986), Fludernik (1999), Behrendt and Hansen (2011), D’hoker and Martens (2008), and Meindl (2004); for a focus on readers and historical readings, see especially Nünning (1997); on ethics and reliability, see Bareis (2013); on intermedial studies of unreliability, see Richardson (1988), Koch (2011), Nünning (2015), Laass (2008), and Ensslin (2012). 7 See an expanded yet less flexible version of Yacobi’s model which draws a sharp distinction between constructivist and rhetorical approaches to (un) reliability in her coauthored essay (Strenberg and Yacobi 2015). In their article “Unreliable Narration with a Narrator and Without,” Köppe and Kindt (2011) identify the problems arising from rigid distinctions between reliable and unreliable narration, yet they still keep that polarity. Focusing on criteria for “reliability,” Margolin (2015) also makes note of the problem but still maintains the polarity and equates reliability with “credible.” Very recently, and most interesting from the point of view this book undertakes, David Stromberg (2017) has proposed going beyond unreliability by accepting the unresolved narrative tension produced in the distance between the narrator and the narrated. 8 A very close concept is that of “narrative authority.” Narrative authority seems to be a surprisingly neglected feature of narrative voice, notwithstanding Lothe’s important contribution, not only in his study of Conrad’s narrative method (Lothe 1989) but also in correlating it with the construction of narrative reliability. See the excellent overview of narrative theory in Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction (Lothe 2000) and his article “Authority, Reliability, and the Challenge of Reading: Narrative Ethics in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones” (Lothe 2013). In the latter work, he addresses reliability as I understand it in this book (Lothe 2000, 25–27; 2013). He considers narrative authority as pertaining to the ­i mplied author, which I consider as part of the general narrative discourse. In contrast to many other dictionaries of narratology or literary theory which do not include the concept of “narrative authority,” Gerald Prince’s does, defining it as “the extent of a narrator’s knowledge of the narrative situations and events,” and associating it with the entry “privilege,” which he describes as “a narrator’s special right or ability. The narrator may be more or less privileged in knowing what cannot be known by strictly ‘natural’ means” (Prince 1987, 9, 77). Booth refers to it as “artificial authority” (1961, 4). David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan’s most recent Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005) does not include the term. In the absence of more detailed definitions, I will venture to define “narrative authority” as the degree of credibility that a narrative discourse is endowed with by the fiction. Thus, narrative authority is the credibility that elements such as knowledge and the transference of human qualities to the narrative voice – such as perception, precision of language, honesty of intentions, or eloquence – as well as sociocultural conventions lend to the narrative, measuring in a number of different

Introduction  33 ways the distance between narrative discourse and the story told. In a pioneering study of narrative reliability, Susan Sniader Lanser addressed the problem of what she called “mimetic authority” and referred to the axes of “dissimulation-honesty,” “unreliability-reliability,” and “narrative ­i ncompetence-narrative skill” that were later developed by critics of unreliable narration (1981, 171). 9 Narrative voice is the instance most commonly responsible for the building of narrative credibility in narrative discourse. In this book, I rely on G ­ enette’s basic concept of voice, which, although it has been further refined, responds to my own view of “narrative voice.” Within the older concept of “point of view,” Genette distinguished between a voice that utters the discourse and a perspective/focalization or observing eye, with all their combinations and nuances – a distinction that Stanzel, Bal, and C ­ hatman endorsed. G ­ enette (1980) makes the distinction between “mode” and “voix” – “mode” and “voice” in the English translation. The French critic assumes Vendryès’s grammatical definition of “voice” and reads it in narrative discourse: “[voix:] Aspect de l’action verbale dans ses rapports avec le sujet […] Bien entendu, le sujet dont il s’agit ici est celui de l’énoncé, alors que pour nous la voix désignera un rapport avec le sujet (et plus généralement l’instance) de l’énonciation” (Genette 1972, 76). Referring to this definition, Genette later adds that “[c]e sujet n’étant pas ici seulement celui qui accomplit ou subit l’action, mais aussi celui (le même ou un autre) qui la rapporte, et éventuellement tous ceux qui participent, fût-ce passivement, à cette activité narrative” (1972, 226). For a thorough and very recent survey of the history of the criticism on “narrative voice,” which includes, and in part focuses on, strange challenging voices in relation to “unnatural narratology,” see Hansen et al. (2011). See also Bal’s reconsiderations (2001) and the whole issue on “La voix narrative” in Brau (2001), and the more recent questioning of the narrator in Patron (2009). 10 See especially for the definition of the natural approach to narratology ­Fludernik (1996). On unnatural narratology, see Brian Richardson’s seminal study (2006) and the most recent (2015). For a recent collection of essays on unnatural narratology, see Alber, Skov Nielsen, and Richardson (2013). 11 This is part of a more general and welcome practice in narratology of late. The combination of perspectives from dialoguing points of view in the most recent basic bibliography in narratology can be found particularly in ­Herman et al. (2012) and Alber and Fludernik (2010), compilations that are rapidly becoming the most up-to-date points of reference within narrative studies. 12 Hansen considers the following variants as the basis for his typology, which I will not borrow, for the sake of clarity, in this particular section: the intranarrational, or homodiegetic, narrators that are unreliable themselves; internarrational or unreliability as arising from the contrast with other narrators’ accounts and out of the unreliable narrator; intertextual, considering the intertextuality of character types in the history of literature as suitable for being unreliable; and the extratextual, considering the reader’s projections of her own values and knowledge onto the text, which culturally affects the reading of unreliability (Hansen 2007, 241–244). This approach in fact involves considering the relations and relevance of rhetorical and receptional or cognitive approaches, such as those reviewed in Dan Shen’s “Unreliability” (2013) in The Living Handbook of Narratology. 13 My understanding of “narrative reliability” is limited to narrative, to literary prose. While postclassical narratology, in its extension of the idea of narrative to other arts and disciplines, is also concerned with “unreliability,”

34  Introduction mine is an exclusively literary understanding. See examples of transmedial unreliability in Brütsch (2014) and Nünning (2015). 14 There has been a long debate on the possibility of finding unreliable narration in heterodiegetic narrators. See, for example, Köppe and Kindt (2011), Martens (2008), Cohn (2000), and Behrendt and Hansen (2011). 15 For an introduction to the cognitive perspectives on narratology, see David Herman’s compilation (2003), which contains essays by the major cognitive narratologists. 16 Although Bareis strongly supports the polarized reliable/unreliable narration, I concur with him in his contextually diachronic interpretation of reliability, when he argues that [t]he theoretical design of diachronic approaches to narratology should take ethical questions into account, just as any other approach to narrative should, but it should only take into account the ethical dimension with which the author could be part or with which the author could be familiar. To apply ethical standards from later periods to a work written earlier allows for anachronistic and faulty readings. The core feature of the theoretical design of unreliable narration in diachronic approaches does not primarily depend on ethical questions. Instead, unreliable narration can be best described as an extremely complex interplay between different criteria located in and in-between the author, the reader, and the narrative itself. (Bareis 2013, 55) 17 See especially for reader-centered studies Zerweck (2001), Nünning (2004), and Nünning (1999). 18 See the discussion of Dan Shen in her “‘Contextualized Poetics’ and Contextualized Rhetoric: Consolidation or Subversion” (2017), in which she argues that the historical contexts of the implied author and reader might be a way to bring into a more fruitful discussion the possibilities of a contextualized narratology. 19 See specifically on this topic Zipfel (2011). 20 I understand the idea of “truth” in the fictions as clearly unrelated to any idea of absolute “Truth” but rather as Diana Battaglia defines it in her article “Tiempo, verdad e historia en cuatro ficciones contemporáneas” when she says that “the ‘ficcional truth’ is strictly ‘true’ in and for the narrative world.” She continues, “the basis on which it should be judged is the extent of its agreement with, or divergence from, the narrative facts as ‘authenticated’ to the greater or lesser degree by the narrator, the only authorized source” [my translation from: “la ‘verdad ficcional’ es estrictamente ‘verdadera’ en y para el mundo narrativo construido, y el criterio para juzgarla es la concordancia o discordancia con los hechos narrativos ‘autentificados’ por la capacidad mayor o menor del narrador, única fuente autorizada” (Battaglia 2006, 48)]. I agree with Battaglia’s idea that the text constructs its own truth, but, as I will demonstrate in this book, the truths of the story are constructed or deconstructed through different sources that include the narrator but are not exclusive to this narrative instance. 21 Tom Shelby considers beliefs a primary unit of analysis in the study of ideologies. He considers racism an ideology. In defining beliefs and their relation to ideologies, he says: ‘Beliefs’ are to be understood there as mental representations within the consciousness of individual social actors; and, as we shall see, ideologies cannot have their peculiar and profound social impact without being

Introduction  35 received into the consciousness of human beings. These mental representations express or imply validity claims, that is, knowledge claims about the way the world is or about what has value. (Shelby 2003, 157) 22 Once again, Shelby’s clarification with respect to this is helpful: since we can think of the ideological character of a practice in terms of its role in disseminating and buttressing ideological beliefs (as with the Klan rally) or its being reinforced through and legitimated in terms of such beliefs (as with forced segregation and exclusion), I will consider ideological beliefs to be the primary object of ideology-critique, treating talk of ‘ideological practices’ as a derivative usage. (Shelby 2003, 175) This book is concerned with both racial beliefs as part of a racial ideology and their ideological practices in given contexts. 3 I examine ideologies that include these definitions of race and look forward 2 to the moment when a more pluralistic definition of races starts becoming evident, especially in the US in the 1930s, in Cuba in the 1930s and 1940s, and in Algeria in the 1930s and 1940s, and which becomes further developed in opposition to biological conceptions of race, but very problematically so, in an attempt to move away from nineteenth-century colonial definitions. Lorimer discusses the influence of this scientifically grounded ideology of race and its periodization: The ‘scientists’ discourse was unavoidably informed by colonial conquest, the clash of cultures, and the construction of unequal relations between peoples of diverse origins living within colonial jurisdictions including former slave societies. In fact, cultures according to the thinking of time, defined distinct essences of peoples, and the scientists through comparative anatomy and other methods searched for a biological explanation for those presumed cultural essences. The retreat of scientific racism in the 1930s first involved the rejection of Jews and European ethnicities as races. (Lorimer 2013, 4) 24 Jennifer Ho’s Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture adopts a similar take. See her introduction for the need to trace the contexts for the racial categories in their social use. 25 Understanding the stereotype linguistically as well, Raphaël Baroni suggests that the stereotype is “particulièrement practique pour analyser les questions liées aux régularités instituées au sein de l’interdiscours, dans toutes les formes ces dernières peuvent prendre” [particularly useful in analyzing the issues related to the regularities established at the core of the interdiscourse, in all forms in which they might appear] (2011, 7). Baroni also sees the stereotype being recalled in the narrative but does not think of it as a form of narrative. He uses the stereotype to argue that we should consider genres as a subcategory of stereotypes: “Dans ce contexte, le genre apparaît alors comme une forme particulière de ‘stéréotypie’: c’est un ‘stéréotype générique’” [In this context, genre appears as a particular form of ‘stereotype’: it’s a ‘generic stereotype’] (Baroni 2011, 7). As I will argue later, I see the stereotype almost in opposite terms, as sociocultural clichés framed within narrative genres. Entirely devoted to the stereotype from multiple topographic, aesthetic, and ideological perspectives, Issue 17 of Cahiers de Narratologie (Perli 2009) offers an approach that, albeit not integrating

36  Introduction these multiple perspectives, brings them all together. At a basic level, although the critic only superficially embraces the ideological/historical implications of the stereotype, I concur with Vincent Stohler’s bringing together under the concept of “stereotype” a cluster of older critical concepts: Pour éviter toute confusion, certains théoriciens ont également proposé une terminologie précise qui permet de classer les stéréotypes en fonction du niveau d’abstraction de leurs composants: cliché, lorsque le stéréotype se situe sur un plan proprement linguistique et qu’il reproduit une structure syntagmatique ou phrastique; poncif, lorsque le stéréotype agit sur un plan thématique ou narratif, reproduisant des thèmes littéraires (décors, personnages, actions, scénarios, schémas) et lieu commun ou idée reçue, lorsque le stéréotype agit sur un plan idéologique (représentations mentales, propositions, valeurs.) Le terme de stéréotype est quant à lui réservé pour qualifier l’ensemble du phénomène. [To avoid confusion, certain theorists have proposed a precise terminology to classify the stereotypes in relation to the level of abstraction of their composition: cliché, when the stereotype is linguistic and reproduces a syntagmatic or phrasal structure; poncif, when the stereotype is thematic or narrative, reproducing literary themes (settings, characters, scenes or schemes) and lieu commun or idée reçue when the stereotype is ideological (mental representations, propositions, values). The term stereotype is reserved to mean the whole phenomenon.] (Stohler 2011, 2) Stohler’s analysis of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet also points to the stereotype as being used to shape the structure of a novel, which we will see occurring in Absalom, Absalom! and Lord Jim. 6 Jean-Louis Dufays offers an interesting description of some functions of 2 the stereotype in narration in his chapter “Statuts, fonctions et effets de la stéréotypie” (1994, 225–286). His conception of the stereotype is very broad, encompassing codes from languages to particular styles to social or cultural stereotypes. His book is almost unconcerned with the sociohistorical dimension of the stereotype and builds a theory of reading from the idea of the stereotype. The aforementioned chapter, though just a broad overview, gets closer to the kinds of functions I analyze here. In contrast, Ruth Amossy’s Les idées reçues: Sémiologie du stéréotype (1991) focuses on the active role of the stereotype in contemporary culture, with a special though not exclusive interest in mass culture and offers a much more ideological and political examination of the stereotype in general. 27 I also agree here with Peter Rabinowitz’s (1998) focus on the politics of the authorial audience and the crucial importance of their interpretation of the text.

1 A Voice of Persuasion, the English Gentleman, and British Imperialism in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

As its title ironically suggests, Lord Jim presents an exalted image of a deflated colonial man. He is referred to as Tuan Jim by the M ­ alay population of Borneo, which the novel roughly translates as Lord Jim in its title – a version of the parodic “hidalgo” Don Quijote de la Mancha, and a designation that, using the first name of a character whose last name we do not even know, only works to undermine the haughty category of “Lord.” This warning is followed by another one, in Novalis’s epigram to the novel: “It is certain my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.” There is no question about the relevance of paratexts in Conrad’s novel – or the relevance of paratexts to reliability, which will be extensively discussed in Chapter 2. Lord Jim is certainly a novel about the fragility of beliefs and the importance of conviction in a narrative in which truthfulness is uncertain. The beliefs expressed in the narrator’s persuasive voice are those of an imperial gentleman rather than an English Lord. While it has been frequently assumed that Lord Jim elaborates a general formal ambivalence to embody an ideological ambivalence with regard to British imperialism, this assumption has only reposed on the general thematics of the text, especially focusing on the representation of the colonized, or on taking British imperialism as a whole, without paying attention to the specific problems in the British Empire that the novel targets. Critics of Lord Jim have not addressed problems such as the debates over the management of the informal empire, and the worth of keeping the British informal dominions despite the emergent financial and military problems they brought over the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The arguments on Englishness and race, and their embodiment on the English gentleman as a figure that the British Empire could educate and export for the management of this informal empire have been mostly overlooked by criticism on ­Joseph Conrad. This disregard has resulted in a misunderstanding on the political conflict and debates that Lord Jim targets and discusses. Furthermore, and most importantly for the argument of this book, Lord Jim deploys the specificities of these contemporaneous imperial debates, which are shaped mostly in racial terms, to design a narrative

38  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim strategy of questionable reliability. This book puts flesh and bones on the conflict targeted and on the narrative technique that uses it for the questioning of reliability. In this chapter, I argue that the ambivalent elaboration of the problem of reliability in Lord Jim interrogates this principle through the crucial use of the figure of the English gentleman as British imperialism had constructed it to serve specific political objectives in the second half of the nineteenth century. Lord Jim deploys and interrogates the historical specifics of the late Victorian imperialist discourse that were used to justify Britain’s informal empire. Providing a persuasive rather than unreliable voice, Marlow’s narrative of Jim takes advantage of racial stereotypes and literary genre conventions, drawing ambiguous narrative developments and establishing a relation to the reader akin to what Phelan (2007) has termed “bonding unreliability.” Conrad’s elaboration of the problem of narrative reliability enables the novel not only to simultaneously interrogate and support the imperialist ideology, but to specifically target the debates on Britain’s informal control over some of its imperial territories, using this material to examine the possibilities of narrative reliability as a narrative principle. Conrad’s interrogation of narrative reliability in Lord Jim can only be grasped through the reader’s capacity to import those particular political arguments and, most specifically, the racial stereotype of the English gentleman in its contemporaneous distinctive use. In other words, if the reader or the critic does not know the narrative that was encapsulated in the stereotype of the English gentleman at the times and his expected performance in relation to the British empire, the narrative structure of this novel cannot be fully understood. By calling into the discussion the contemporaneous political debates over the critical management of the informal Empire, and its central figure of the English gentleman, this chapter discloses the ways in which Conrad used through his narrator Marlow these historical materials and narratives so as to experiment with the problem of narrative reliability and its possible modulation, mainly through the use of racial stereotypes as narrative forms and through their use for narrative progression and the narrative enigma. In doing this, the chapter not only provides a new historical reading of Lord Jim but it fully discloses the way in which that generally assumed ambivalence is technically developed through active deployment of contemporaneous historical discourses. As we will see, Lord Jim uses these historical conflicts and discourses to innovate in narrative enigma, narrative progression, and genre so as to problematize narrative reliability, using ideology to fill a gap that the character-narrator locates at the center of the telling and gradually driving the story toward a conventional adventure novel that would overshadow potential ideological skepticism. Conrad’s novel, therefore, introduces the aforementioned elements as key factors in the interrogation of narrative reliability.

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  39

Colonial Officers, the English Gentleman, and the Late Victorian Crisis of Imperial Confidence Lord Jim is a novel about the crisis of confidence that articulates the problem of narrative reliability by interrogating an epitomic figure of the late nineteenth-century British Empire. A brief summary of the novel will help illuminate the importance of context for the novel, and will facilitate its discussion. Jim is a first mate of the Patna steamship carrying 800 pilgrims to Mecca across the Indian Ocean. The ship is involved in an accident and Jim and the rest of the white crew abandon the sinking ship, leaving the sleeping pilgrims on board. The crew is tried in a court of inquiry that strips Jim of his navigation command certificates, and which is attended by Marlow, who takes on the telling of Jim’s story. Marlow is intrigued by the question of how a man seemingly so sound could fail so profoundly, and sets out to discover what kind of a man Jim is. ­Fascinated by Jim, Marlow helps him find several jobs, which Jim quits whenever he fears his deed has been discovered. Seeing Jim’s desperation, ­Marlow sends him to a remote post in Patusan, in Borneo or Sumatra, with the help of the influential German trader Stein, very well known in the ­Malayan straits and islands. There, Jim’s outcast status is reversed because he manages to integrate, solve local conflicts, and provide advice so valuable that he becomes the de facto ruler of the Patusan Bugis. His adventures, courage, and sound rulership transform him into a greatly admired Tuan, a character which Marlow tells by adopting the adventure novel genre. But Jim’s story ends tragically when the wretched outcast Gentleman Brown convinces Jim to let him go, and subsequently ambushes and kills the son of the Bugi ruler Doramin, Dain Warris. After this final failure, Jim presents himself to Doramin, who shoots him dead. Jim leaves his half-caste companion, Jewel, and his devoted servant Tamb’Itam with Stein, in the gloomy atmosphere that has also left Marlow with an impenetrable doubt about Jim. Because Lord Jim targets a specific political debate occurring in the last decades of the nineteenth century within the British Empire, it is of primordial importance that I provide here a concise study of the functions and uses of the English gentleman as a contemporaneous political type in relation to his role in the Imperial administration in the late ­Victorian Empire. These are the problems, arguments, and codes that Lord Jim targets and uses to elaborate narrative reliability. While, historically speaking, there has been little consensus on what exactly a gentleman was in turn-of-the-twentieth-century England, this figure was nevertheless of great social relevance. The following anecdote told by Christine Berberich effectively illustrates what many understood the “English gentleman” to be: “When, on 15 April 1912, the Titanic sank, many of her male passengers acted out what it meant for

40  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim them to be gentlemen, by refusing seats in the few lifeboats” (2007, 3). It is almost ironic that a decade earlier, Joseph Conrad decided to question Jim’s gentlemanliness in Lord Jim (1900) by making him leap from a sinking steamship onto the only available lifeboat, abandoning 800 Muslim pilgrims on board. Or perhaps, on closer inspection, it is not ironic but rather reveals a central image that serves as a basis for questioning the title character’s “gentlemanliness.” Jim’s jump, like the evacuation of the Titanic, constitutes the critical moment in which one has the opportunity to demonstrate a prescribed social behavior that is seen as a reflection of individual moral character, a “who comes first?” protocol that reveals what society expects a gentleman to be through his actions. The appearance of the English gentleman in Lord Jim is often regarded as a question of manners as reflected in a turn-of-the-century novel. Nonetheless, in this chapter, I will demonstrate that Lord Jim carries that question beyond manners by choosing a setting in which the issue displays its full political significance. Indeed, Lord Jim assumes that the problem of the gentleman is not only a problem of social manners, but rather a social problem that had become, at the turn of the twentieth century, a political problem. Since being a gentleman meant being in alignment with whatever was thought “gentlemanly,” whenever there were problems with defining a “gentleman,” these frequently revolved around the rhetorical construction that furnished the conventional, identifiable image of the gentleman. And when these problems became entangled with politics around the 1870s, its definition became an ideological problem. Indeed, part of the complication surrounding the role of the gentleman in English society was that this figure was eventually also meant to function politically in the British Empire. The colonial successes of the British Empire were morally grounded not on religious proselytizing missions but rather upon civilizing missions, the values of which were encoded in the ideal figure of the gentleman. The latter was especially important at a critical moment, in the wake of ­ mpire, what was perceived as an ultimately futile militarization of the E when moral attitudes in the management of colonial territories had once again become crucial. Extensive imperial propaganda and persuasive narratives were even more necessary, and reinforced the English gentleman. Because critics of Lord Jim have mostly remained on the understanding of the English gentleman as a question of manners, they have missed the political implications that are brought into the narrative, which in fact determine the problem of narrative reliability. A crucial moment on the politization of the English gentleman is its development as the ideal profile for Englishmen who will enter the Civil Service. Most civil servants received their education in public schools, which trained them in gentlemanly values. The Civil Service Reform of 1870 in Britain created

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  41 possibilities for the middle class to enter the British Civil Service, which had formerly functioned exclusively through patronage and influence.1 This “democratization” contributed to social mobility for the middle classes since any man entering the Civil Service and being assigned to an imperial post was immediately considered a “gentleman.” A key component of these reforms was the introduction of competitive examinations as a requirement for entry into the Civil Service. The public schools, which as a result of Thomas Arnold’s 1830s reforms had already been consciously imparting a repertoire of conventional virtues to aspiring young gentlemen, and emphasizing the utilitarian needs of business and commerce over the Classics, became crucial for exam preparations. The case of the Indian Civil Service is exemplary of this change. As Maria Misra explains: In 1870, the ICS exam was setting questions such as: “‘Fortitude, Courage, Endurance, Valour, Virtue.’ Show by the help of sentences in which these words occur, how they differ in meaning.” Between 1890 and 1938, the sociological and educational profile of colonial administrators became strikingly homogeneous, and not remarkably different from what it had been under the patronage system. Never less than 60% of recruits came from elite public schools, and between 70% and 77% had degrees from either Oxford or Cambridge. (2008, 151) The public schools from this time on specialized in the “manufacture” of gentlemen; the schools became “character factories” (Waters 1997, 8), to prepare men for the Civil Service and for the governance of the Empire. The careful training and selection of these gentlemen-officers seem to have been particularly important for the control of what was called the “informal empire,” or those dominions that were not settler colonies and were not intended to be self-governed, but where British officers were present in fewer numbers, and which were often ruled in collaboration with the local regimes or elites. To a certain extent, these dominions were dependent on the capacity of British officers to establish influence over and negotiate with local governments, and for that reason colonial officers had a crucial advisory role in places such as Malaysia, as it was known at the time. 2 A good example of this type of colonial officer is Sir Frederick Weld, Governor of the Malay States between 1880 and 1887, a paternal relative of Hugh Clifford – a contemporary and friend of Conrad, who had also served as governor in the Malayan states. Weld “was opposed to annexation, believing that Malays required ‘personal government’, and fearing that ‘annexation’ means increased red-tapeism and an increase of technicality. Without annexation you rely more upon

42  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim good officers” (Tidrick 1990, 90). By providing advice, teaching cooperation, and touting respect for traditions, the British organized a system of control in the Malay territories based on subtle incursion, which initially regarded Residents as mere advisers, but by the Pangkor Engagement of 1874 had in fact given them control of revenues and general administration in various states. As Tidrick reminds us, “[a]dvice under these circumstances was of an imperative nature, but Hugh Low [next Resident in Perak] knew how to sweeten it with tact and jocularity and so was accounted an outstanding successful resident” (1990, 91). Each gain in administrative rule was dependent on how well the officers performed at securing trust and giving advice that would persuade the Malay sultans of the benefits of having permanent British representatives at their courts. Weld and Low’s careers, distinguished by success in administration and in increasing authority in the Malay states, are exemplary of the roles and strategies fashioned by British colonial officers in the informal empire, and are of particular relevance to Lord Jim. Indeed, Joseph ­Conrad chose the Malayan territories – roughly Sumatra and Borneo since they are fictionalized – as the main setting for what have been called his “Malay novels,” and the problems encountered in their government, including the complex negotiations between the English, Dutch, and ­Malay, are at the core of the novels of Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, The Rescue, Victory, and Lord Jim, as Robert Hampson (2000) has demonstrated. 3 Conrad’s choice of Malaysia was in part due to his own experiences in the region. In 1887, Conrad went to Semarang, in Java, but was injured and had to go to a hospital in Singapore. There, he met William Lingard’s nephews and son-in-law, who introduced him to the captain of the small steamer the Vidar, which “made regular voyages between Singapore and small ports on Borneo and Celebes. James Lingard had been living for some years as a trading agent on Borneo, at Berau, on the river Berau Singai” (Najder 2007, 115). In August of that year, Conrad joined the Vidar crew as first mate. He made four voyages around Borneo and the Celebes over a period of four months. It was Conrad’s first opportunity to travel to the interior of Borneo, which he later portrayed in his works, and, in fact, in Tanjung Redeb, Conrad met the Englishman James Lingard, nephew of William Lingard, as well as an Eurasian Dutchman, Charles William Olmeijer, the prototype for Conrad’s Almayer. Although deeply rooted in his biographical experiences, Malaysia is primarily a perfect example of the key role of colonial officers, and a convenient setting in which to interrogate the precarious system, so reliant on the ideological effectiveness of British officers in colonial outposts. One main problem in the criticism of Lord Jim is that critics have rarely identified Jim as the gentleman Marlow sees in him and, therefore, they have missed his political implications. Presented as a failed

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  43 gentleman in the first part of the novel, Jim later has the opportunity to demonstrate his skills as an imperial English gentleman in a territory where attempts of indirect rule required exemplary individual exertions. In this sense, the choice of Malaysia along with the English gentleman puts forward immediately the problem of the informal empire and the crucial role of individuals in their successful management. In order to target the increasing problems in the informal empire, Jim’s background as first mate in the British Merchant Marine is not uncommon in relation to his later activities in Patusan as indirect rule of the Malay and Straits states was driven by essentially commercial aims. The interest lay in the trading of pepper, tin, timber, rubber, and coal as well as in the region’s strategic location in relation to the commercial routes between India and China, and Australia. The British Merchant Marine also recruited gentlemen who acted under the protection and jurisdiction of the British Empire and who, simultaneously, were responsible for opening up new routes of commerce that frequently led to informal dominion of territories and outposts.4 The Malay territories are therefore also a special signpost of the importance of the sea for the British Empire and of the close connections between the British Merchant Marine and colonial rule. Particularly after the Colonial Service Reform, the English gentleman’s opportunities for social mobility through education and ­character-building increased, and he could subsequently find plenty of scope for his ambitions in the government of the Empire. The public schools were in charge of this character-building. As Douglas Lorimer explains: At the expanding public schools, the sons of the country gentlemen and of wealthy urban businessmen learned, often at the expense of sentiment and intellectual achievement, the virtues of manliness and athleticism. They also learned how English gentlemen ruled an Empire, and they came to have pride in, and some actually to emulate, the achievements of these schoolboy heroes. The public schools disseminated both the creed of the gentlemen and the ideals of Empire. (1978, 113) Manliness, athleticism, and heroism would combine with other qualities such as youth, courage, and Christianity to constitute the ideal of the gentleman.5 Moreover, as Lorimer demonstrated, because of its progressively growing association with race, the tracing of the English gentleman exemplifies the racialization of British society during the second half of the nineteenth century, actively helping define the merits of the civilizing mission, even to those officers who did not identify with social Darwinism.6

44  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim Indeed, if the black gentleman was a common and fully accepted figure in English society by the 1840–1850s, by the 1860s, the English gentleman had been defined as white. Prominent black abolitionists of the first half of the century, for example, “in manner, in speech, in dress, in their own confidence and social ease, and even in their mental outlook, were eminently qualified, and therefore acceptable in the best circles of Victorian society” (Lorimer 1978, 52). Lorimer distinguishes between “ethnocentric” and “racist” or “racialised” societies: The term ‘racist’ is best limited to those societies which see themselves superior by reason of their biological inheritance, whereas the more common ethnocentric assumption of cultural superiority still admits the possibility of the outsider conforming to the supposedly superior norm. (1978, 16) Lorimer utilizes the idea of the “gentleman” to reconstruct the historical path from the primarily ethnocentric Victorian society of the first half of the nineteenth century to the racialized society of the mid-century through to its close. Throughout the 1860s, these changes could be perceived in the English idea of the gentleman, which would remain fixed up to the last decades of the century, creating many outstanding literary figures such as Marlow and Jim: At the same time, the standards of respectable mid-Victorians were changing. Those Englishmen interested in black improvement had demanded success in life and respectability in conduct from white and black alike. During the 1860s and after they added to this demand for respectability and success, the new and more rarified quality of gentility. By its very nature this quest for gentility proved more restrictive, for only a few could gain entrance into this elite rank of leadership and authority. Overseas, black communities had failed to conform even to respectable standards. […] With the change in mid-Victorian attitudes, the colour of a man’s skin rather than his social accomplishments began to weigh heavier in the English assessment of individual blacks. The Victorians never seriously questioned the Negro’s capacity for physical labour. His supposed inferiority only applied to those positions filled by the upper and middle classes, or what Haliburton had styled the places of gentlemen. This change in attitude rested upon an extension of social attitudes already present in Victorian society to include racial differences. Once the assumption was made that blacks could only perform labouring tasks and never approach gentlemanly status, respectable Victorians simply applied to all men with black skins the same judgments, manner, and bearing that they adopted toward

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  45 their social inferiors within English society. When this association between African descent and lowly social status became more firmly fixed, and was added to the latent suspicions and aversions produced by xenophobia and ethnocentrism, racial attitudes became more rigid and emotive in character, and a new inflexibility and contempt characterized English attitudes to the Negro. (Lorimer 1978, 60) This Victorian change of attitude redefined the idea of the gentleman, and from this moment on, “a white skin became one essential mark of a gentleman, and blacks of all ranks and degrees were firmly placed in the lowest orders of nature and society” (Lorimer 1978, 68), thereby making the English gentleman a racial category. The subsequent decades of the nineteenth century saw a growing emphasis on the racial aspect of the gentleman as the fundamental stereotype of the English upper classes, owing a great debt to both popular culture and the ideological work of “scientists” engaged in the definition of “Human Races.”7 By the end of the century, a virulent imperialism, and the proliferation of racial discourse, coincided with a crisis of Empire and a profound sense of decline that was beginning to set in, summed up by Brantlinger: The vanishing of frontiers, the industrialization of travel and warfare, the diminishing chances for heroism, the disillusionment with civilization and the civilizing mission – these late Victorian and early modern themes point insistently toward another: the decline of ­Britain’s position in the world as an industrial, military, and imperial power. (1988, 44) In the closing decades of the century, many more aggressive literary responses would either try to subvert or debate this English crisis of confidence.8 The figure of the English gentleman has been studied through the lens of his status within English society, his role in the racialization of the second half of the nineteenth century, his function in the Civil Service, and in the informal empire as a colonial officer. Nevertheless, while these elements have been treated separately, this chapter looks at all these aspects at once since they are being deployed simultaneously in Conrad’s Jim.9 This conflation of several aspects of the gentleman has been mostly overlooked, and has certainly not yet been studied by Conradian critics. The gentleman’s chief features and values, as well as Jim’s racial profile, guide Marlow’s narration to fully distinguish Jim as an English gentleman.10 Yet, as we have seen, identification with gentlemanliness implies discursive knowledge of what a gentleman is by

46  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim convention and, in the context described earlier, an ideological commitment to the social and political functions that gentlemen performed in the domestic and imperial contexts. As the contemporary reader would have understood,11 Jim is, as he tells Marlow, “a gentleman, too,” simply because, as Marlow’s friend puts it, “I know a gentleman when I see one, and I know how a gentleman feels” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 114). If one knows what a gentleman is, it is because there is a pervasive social and ideological discourse that has struggled to educate and put this social figure into play. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the British Empire went through a turbulent period, which triggered complaints of abandonment of domestic affairs and of excessive cost of military expeditions in some of the informal dominions, above all to deal with problems in India that started in the wake of the Indian Mutiny (1857), the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and the Governor Eyre controversy (1865), the crisis in Egypt and the Suez Canal (1886), and finally the Boer Wars (1899–1902). These colonial ventures intensified the debates around Englishness and un-Englishness in the practices of imperial rule, and roused sentiments and complaints that have been qualified as anti-­ imperialist. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim certainly partakes of this growing ambivalence and doubt regarding the British Empire, in its moral, political, economic, and national aspects. Conrad’s criticism of the English gentleman in Lord Jim, and of Kurtz as a colonial officer “gone native” in Heart of Darkness, has prompted critics to label Conrad an anti-imperialist.12 As I have stated in the ­I ntroduction of this book, I do not wish to get into judgment or establishment of the authors’ ideas, but there are a couple of points I want to make here because a more historically nuanced understanding of C ­ onrad’s ­ ctions as context will avoid straightforward claims that render the fi introducing much simpler political discussions than those they actually introduce. Following the direction that this chapter takes, matters seem far more complicated when attending to the debates over imperialism and in light of the military problems and expenses in the informal colonies. The difficulties in unequivocally qualifying Conrad’s position as either imperialist or anti-imperialist lay in the fact that the national category of Englishness and the racial category of Anglo-Saxon were used to support antagonistic views with respect to the management of Empire. Indeed, the construction of the gentleman in the late nineteenth century participated in the development of the identities of “English” and “Anglo-Saxon” – the latter a fully racial category, the complex and confusing definition of which was reflected in the contradictive responses in the Empire and imperialism debates from the 1870s onward.13 The difference between the self-sufficient government of the settlement colonies and the indirect exercise of authority in the informal dominions – which prompted most of the controversial military interventions and

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  47 produced instability – became entangled with the discussion about Englishness.14 Each side accused the other “un-Englishness.” To understand the essence of this discussion, it is important to note that the different territories of the British Empire did not receive the same consideration. As Mira Matikkala explains: The greatest enthusiasm for the empire was expressed towards the settler colonies, which at the same time were not considered to be ‘empire proper;’ indeed, they were not even usually thought of in terms of ‘imperialism’. In this sense the interest which the Imperial Federation League generated in the 1880s was not necessarily imperialistic as such: it might as well be interpreted as an attempt to turn the attention away from the ‘irksome’ imperial issues, like Egypt, the Sudan, or India, back to the settler colonies. It was an attempt to remind what the British Empire first and foremost was really about. In this picture the empire was the result of a ‘natural expansion of England’ – colonisation was the term used – whereas India and ­A frica, and the imperialism they represented, were distracting factors. […] Whereas the empire signified emigration and kinship to most, imperialism was connected to militarism. (2011, 12–13) The critics of Imperialism – or of the empire beyond the settler ­colonies – have been categorized as anti-imperialist, even if in fact, as Matikkala warns, these critics were opposed to imperialism but not the Empire since “defending the empire from imperialism and all the vices connected to it formed a general current in a wide spectrum of criticism” (2011, 13). Along with the economic reasons that divided public opinion on the handling of an expanding empire, there was a shared patriotic argument based on a sense of Englishness that was defined in almost contradictory terms, one centered on the Empire and on manly English military values, and the other on humane and liberal English values (Matikkala 2011, 78). In fact, imperialists linked imperialism so closely with patriotism that they did not hesitate to label anti-imperialists ‘unpatriotic’ or ‘un-­ English.’ This rhetoric was at first directed at Liberals in general by the Conservatives, to which the Liberals responded by labeling Disraeli and his imperialism ‘un-English’ instead. (Matikkala 2011, 78) Both the economic argument and that of Englishness were very prominent at the turn of the century, when Lord Jim was published. Just two years later, they were fully developed in J.  A.  Hobson’s better-­ known Imperialism: A Study (1902) which, although highly critical of

48  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim imperialism, clearly argued for continued faith in, and the need for, the British Empire. These arguments were therefore used to question the kind of values that the English were exporting through imperialism, and the challenges that they would have to face due to the neglect of domestic affairs and investment, and what several anti-imperialists referred to as “re-barbarization.”15 Lord Jim participates in this specific debate, and its ambivalent position with relation to the debates around the English gentleman and the management of the British Empire encompasses the diverse and conflicting perspectives on the matter, a plurality that is at the core of the novel’s treatment of the problem of narrative reliability. The debates in fact in-form the problem of narrative reliability in the novel, conditioning the issue of reliability in storytelling. In this context, the critique of the English gentleman in the first part of the novel, expressed through doubt over the appropriateness of Jim’s performance in comparison to the standard of conduct, engages in the debate over the fragility of this “character” as defined by the public schools, and as exported in service of the British ideology of imperialism via the Colonial Service or the British Merchant Marine. Yet Marlow’s voice of persuasion introduces us into a telling driven by doubt, which progressively inclines toward admiration for Jim, and a future restoration of the figure of the ­English gentleman in his role as a British colonial adviser and resident in ­Malayan Patusan. In his redemptive telling, Marlow exonerates Jim’s virtuous white gentlemanliness at the same time that he preserves doubt over the effectiveness of ideology and personal government in the informal British Empire. Lord Jim addresses the imperial crisis as being above all a questioning of the ideological construction of the gentleman that was seen as crucial to the colonial agent’s performance, and faith in the informal empire and in personal government. The exploration of the possibilities of narrative reliability in Lord Jim is precisely possible by the uses that the novel makes of this multilayered approach to the crisis of the British informal dominions.

A Crisis of Confidence, or Marlow’s Critical Reliability on the English Gentleman Narrative reliability in Lord Jim revolves around a doubt. It is a book about a doubt and the uncomfortable telling of that doubt. As F. R. ­L eavis observed, “Marlow is the means of presenting Jim with the appropriate externality, seen always through the question, the doubt, that is the central theme of the book” (1963, 189). Indeed, it is Marlow himself who poses the enigma, who feels the need to investigate why one who looks so much like a gentleman, like “one of us” – a sailor, a British Merchant Mariner, an English gentleman, an imperial gentleman, a white man –16 would act so improperly as to abandon a sinking ship together with its

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  49 white crew, leaving 800 pilgrims to their fate. Marlow already refers to his doubt in his first description of Jim: There he stood, clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on; and, looking at him, knowing all he knew and a little more too, I was angry as though I had detected him trying to get something out of me by false pretenses. He had no business to look so sound. Marlow continues by admitting that he “liked his appearance” because “he came from the right place; he was one of us” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 30); yet this contrast between Jim’s reprehensible deed and his appearing like an English gentleman disturbs him. Indeed, he declares: I tell you I ought to know the right kind of looks. I would have trusted the deck to that youngster on the strength of a single glance, and gone to sleep with both eyes – and, by Jove! it wouldn’t have been safe. There are depths of horror in that thought. He looked as genuine as a new sovereign, but there was some infernal alloy in his metal. How much? The least thing – the least drop of something rare and accursed; the least drop! – but he made you – standing there with his don’t-care hang air – he made you wonder whether perchance he were nothing more rare than brass. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 32) The enigma, which concerns both Jim’s morality and fate as an individual, and the fate and power of the racial community he stands for, dominates Marlow’s thoughts until it turns into a veritable obsession that drags the reader toward the epicenter of the narrative.17 This enigma in the story is in fact the first factor that enables C ­ onrad to put forward the problem of narrative reliability as central to the novel.18 The narrative enigma as a strategy of narration would deserve further attention. As a narrative strategy, the enigma is a gap of information in a story. It becomes a narrative enigma when the teller himself is missing that information, and its pursuit drives the telling. Conrad deals with the problem of narrative reliability by employing the enigma as the center in the narrative structure which allows him, as Piglia suggests of enigmas, to develop several narrative voices that attempt to approach the gap in information so as to attain a certain sense of the story they are telling (2006, 201).19 Contrary to what we will see in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, that narrative enigma concerns judgment rather than facts, and thus Marlow as a narrator becomes, as Dorrit Cohn has argued in regards to Heart of Darkness, a subtle discordant narrator (2000, 309). 20 It is Marlow himself who puts Jim’s secret at the heart of the matter since the facts of the story are clear; only Jim’s intentions and

50  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim the inconsistencies between Jim’s appearance and his actions give rise to what becomes the secret for Marlow, who is certain the issue of the jump is much less clear than it appears to be. By placing his doubt about Jim at the center of the narrative, Marlow uses it as the narrative enigma of his storytelling. This allows his character-narrator to provide the story with a strong moral orientation, which, in turn, invites much more “judgment,” opinion, and interpretation. It is through this strategy that Marlow can finally develop his own story of Jim, selecting a complementary voice, choosing the events to be recounted, and drawing upon his ample storytelling skills. 21 In the end, Marlow’s voice becomes so persuasive that it spreads a temporary mantle of safety over both himself and Jim as he remembers him. Eventually, the enigma extends to collective identities, which generalizes the moral doubts and makes persuasion central to the representation of “race” in Lord Jim, as well as making “race” central to the development of the narrative enigma. Marlow’s narrative authority and his choice of the enigma as a structure for his storytelling are strongly supported by the novel’s organization of narrative levels. In Lothe’s words, Marlow is “a personal narrator with an original and productive authorial function” (1989, 174). Conrad elaborates this narrative authority in Lord Jim primarily through narrative levels. The frame narrator as a distant third-person voice is endowed by convention with a general authority over the narrative, which is enforced by its placement in the most external narrative level, and its consequent function of framing the narrative. This voice tells the first four chapters, and chooses and introduces Marlow for the telling of Jim’s story, filtering other narrative voices. As Lothe has argued, within Marlow’s discourse, we find a similar selection of voices that narrate episodes of the story. In granting him the function of narrator, the frame narrator overtly transfers his narrative authority to Marlow. Furthermore, by remaining silent at the end, the frame narrator does not close Marlow’s narration. This produces an imbalance between the narrative levels, as the novel never returns to the first narrative level, but rather begins with the frame narrator’s and ends, in an unnatural framing – specifically, Richardson’s (2006) disframed narrator – with Marlow, the antimimetic effect reinforcing narrative discourse as the sole foundation of the story. With this gesture, the frame narrator affirms Marlow’s authority over the final version of the story. In a remarkable essay, James Phelan has observed that “[a]lthough Conrad does not make Marlow a wholly reliable narrator […] he does not do anything to undermine Marlow’s conclusion that Jim existed at the heart of an enigma” (2008,  48), and thus the frame narrator does not question Marlow’s focalization of the enigma as the epicenter of the story. 22 At the core of Marlow’s doubt about Jim is his identification of Jim as an English gentleman and therefore, as the racial stereotype it entailed at the times. Marlow’s doubts are overshadowed by Marlow’s own loyalty

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  51 to the moral values that the English gentleman and the sea officer represent. Marlow struggles to reconcile Jim’s gentlemanliness with his actions, so unbefitting the character prototype. This is the point at which the influence of history as a factor for the problem of reliability becomes clear. Marlow calls in the contemporary problem described earlier in order to set up his narrative enigma. His implicit questioning of the stereotype of the English gentleman only makes sense if readers contextualize the figure in light of its role and the discussion surrounding it at the time of the book’s publication. Thus, the problem that constitutes the enigma is only manifest if the reader is able to see Jim from Marlow’s contextual perspective. In Mark Conroy’s words, “we are tempted to read it as a definite sign that Jim is an embodiment of ideology itself – an insubstantial mirage existing uncomfortably among brute material and social facts” (1985, 114). Jim clearly seems to meet all the qualifications that defined the ideological stereotype of the English gentleman. By drawing on his defining characteristics, the reader can build Marlow’s narrative progression around the enigma in all its scope. The racial stereotype of the English gentleman offers an encapsulated narrative of an ideal Englishman educated in gentlemanly values who will serve the Empire successfully and encounter well-known situations that he will masterfully and heroically overcome. In order to bring into his narrative the prototypical story of the gentleman, Marlow makes continuous references to the codified virtues of the English gentleman. Clear examples of Marlow’s regard for Jim as a gentleman are his emphasis on appearance and courage. Appearance is emphasized in the opening of the novel: “He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built” and “he was spotlessly neat, appareled in immaculate white from shoes to hat” (Conrad 1996, 7); courage, which Marlow also perceives as a feature of the community they both belong to, appears repeatedly, as when he tells that: I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us. He stood there for all the parentage of his kind, for men and women by no means clever or amusing, but whose very existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage. I don’t mean military courage, or civil courage, or any special kind of courage. I mean just that inborn ability to look temptations straight in the face – a readiness unintellectual enough, goodness knows, but without a pose – a power of resistance, don’t you see, ungracious if you like, but priceless – an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and inward terrors, before the might of nature and the seductive corruption of men – backed by a faith invulnerable to the strength of facts, to the contagion of example, to the solicitation of ideas. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 30)

52  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim His upbringing in a parsonage, along with his honesty, seriousness, and youth, are also part of Marlow’s reading of Jim’s right appearance: And all the time I had before me these blue boyish eyes looking straight into mine, this young face, these capable shoulders, the open bronzed forehead with a white line under the roots of clustering fair hair, this appearance appealing at sight to all my sympathies: this frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful seriousness. He was of the right sort; he was one of us. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 50) Jim’s Christianity, his athleticism as demonstrated in the adventures in Patusan, and his insisted whiteness, along with the aspects mentioned earlier, bore the stamp of the English gentleman and his education in the public schools, which, as Eldridge notes, were “the nursery of empire.” As he explains, [f]rom the 1850s, their whole ethos – fagging, the perfect system, the cult of athleticism, the house, Spartan living conditions – was geared to instilling group and institutional loyalty, obedience, ‘manliness,’ self-control, resourcefulness, the ability to command, all the qualities essential to a ruling race capable of surviving in imperial climes. In short, the training of ‘character’ took precedence over intellectual studies. (Eldridge 1996, 90) a character that Lorimer pictures as “a new breed of taciturn, manly, tough-minded, stiff-lipped, young gentlemen who could no longer tolerate the emotional appeals which had moved an earlier generation” (Lorimer 1978, 113). And yet this idealized stoic hero is also capable of abject failure. That is the heart of the matter, the real narrative enigma. Marlow inescapably reveals the flimsiness of an ideological creed supporting an entire system of imperial government in his identification of Jim as a gentleman historically specific. Indeed, while not emphasized in Marlow’s telling, it is evident to the reader that in Lord Jim, the ideal features of the imperial English gentleman may have negative consequences if excessively present: an excess of manliness and physical fitness results in impulsive violence and aggressiveness; excessive youth explains Jim’s childish, idealistic illusions of becoming a hero from an adventure novel as well as the impulsive decision to jump from the ship; an unflinching disposition aimed at resisting and protecting himself against his guilt reached inconceivable proportions and left him completely isolated from the human world, even from his love interest, Jewel. Finally, his Christianity is questioned as he is unable to free his conscience from the offending act, as a result of which Jim is

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  53 not allowed to return home. These excesses enable the reader to share Marlow’s doubts regarding Jim’s gentlemanliness, in spite of his progressive exoneration of the latter’s actions. Marlow’s narrative enigma concerns the English gentleman and his failure not only in terms of manners but, as argued before, as a political figure mostly responsible for the correct and successful management of the informal Empire during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Certainly, while Marlow’s concern initially appears to be with the individual and his morality and trustworthiness, Captain Brierly, the interrogator in the Inquiry, makes the revealing observation that the problem posed by Jim’s deed is not only a communal problem but, in fact, the problem of the imperial crisis of confidence and the questioned imperialism during those decades. As he makes clear to Marlow: The worst of it, ‘he said, ‘is that all you fellows have no sense of dignity; you don’t think enough of what you are supposed to be.’ […] ‘This is a disgrace. We’ve got all kinds amongst us – some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose. We are trusted. Do you understand? – trusted! Frankly, I don’t care a snap for all the pilgrims that ever came out of Asia, but a decent man would not have behaved like this to a full cargo of old rags in bales. We aren’t an organised body of men, and the only thing that holds us together is just the name of that kind of decency. Such an affair destroys one’s confidence. A man may go pretty near through his whole sea-life without any call to show a stiff upper lip. But when the call comes… Aha!… If I…’ (Conrad 1996 [1900], 44) By appealing to mutual trust as the essential feature that holds the community under the category of “white men” together (Mulhern 2006, 70), Brierly elevates the problem of Jim as an individual to the political problem of the English gentleman as a pillar of faith in the proper control of Empire. In fact, Novalis’s epigram to the novel – mentioned at the beginning of this chapter – reflects his awareness of the fragility of the ideological foundations of Empire, condensing the prominence of discursive authority in Jim’s telling of his own story, in Marlow’s retelling of it, and in the ideological discourse underpinning the imperial enterprise. The problem Lord Jim addresses is that of narrative authority, and therefore, of narrative reliability – because trust is the basis for reliability. The problem of reliability in Lord Jim is therefore, as mentioned in the Introduction, a problem that is not developed around a clear elaboration of unreliable narration, but rather a narration that problematizes narrative reliability. The narration provides reasons for the reader to trust and sympathize with Marlow’s account, at the same time that it

54  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim provides motives for doubt, in a conflicted development that suspends any possibility of a straightforward claim about his reliability and yet does not allow the narration to resolve this problem since it is located at the very core of the narrative. Conrad’s subtle interrogation of reliability is weaved into Marlow’s relationship with Jim and into the contextual need to preserve trust in an ideological discourse that holds the community of “us” together. This is crucially evident in Marlow’s changing attitudes in his telling of Jim’s story. Marlow’s relationship with Jim grows increasingly intimate, Marlow eventually becoming a kind of father figure for Jim, with “the feeling that binds a man to a child” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 79). Marlow struggles with Jim’s pleas for pity, feeling moved and yet afraid of his possible imposture. As he remarks, By Jove! He was amazing. […] I tell you it was fabulously innocent and it was enormous! I watched him covertly, just as though I had suspected him of an intention to take a jolly good rise out of me. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 60) He moves from a skeptical perception of Jim, and the assessment that “[u]pon the whole he was misleading” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 49), to complete faith in him, as he declares, reacting to Jim’s tale, “I was moved to make a solemn declaration of my readiness to believe implicitly anything he thought fit to tell me” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 79). His attitude finally becomes protective toward Jim, finding himself “unreservedly responsible” for him (Conrad 1996 [1900], 111). This affection permeates the telling, producing a bonding reliability, questionable precisely through the bonding effects described by Phelan (2007). Marlow listens to Jim’s self-conscious, dramatic telling of the Patna accident, which over the course of Chapters VII–XII progressively awakens sympathy in Marlow, a sympathy he, in turn, transfers to the reader. Hence, it is not only Jim who asks for “an ally, a helper, an accomplice” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 59) but also Marlow who asks for pity and absolution. Indeed, he pleads for pity for the character he is constructing, whom he will eventually call “my Jim” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 121). He utilizes the interlocution mode once again, dramatizing Jim to that effect: “Can you imagine him, silent and on his feet half the night, his face to the gusts of rain, staring at sombre forms, watchful of vague movements, straining his ears to catch rare low murmurs in the stern-sheets!” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 76). 23 ­Marlow’s tone and continuous invoking and dramatizing of the painful episode in the lifeboat are narrative resources used to elicit the readers’ pity for Jim. As he finally reveals, “[p]erhaps, unconsciously, I hoped to find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 35). Arguably, Marlow’s gnomic comments are a narrator’s recourse to

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  55 “bonding reliability,” or a questionable reliability that claims an understanding of the narrators’ efforts to make the readers see the character as the narrator sees it, with a sort of faint unreliability but immensely appealing as well (Phelan 2007, 229). At the other end of Marlow’s oscillating narrative attitude toward Jim is the undercurrent of doubt. As part of the problematization of reliability, Marlow’s doubts about Jim are echoed at the story level in his doubts about discourse as a means of communication. Marlow’s telling, particularly in the first part of the novel, is charged with deep concerns about the limitations of human knowledge and of verbal communication, which he experiences in his approach to, and telling of, Jim. 24 As he declares, “[i]t is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 109). This feeling lasts until his final encounter with Jim, when this doubt is still evident: I cannot say I had ever seen him distinctly – not even to this day, after I had my last view of him; but it seemed to me that the less I understood the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt which is the inseparable part of our knowledge. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 134) In this last view from the boat taking Marlow back to “the world,” he affirms: “For me that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 199). 25 This introduces the problem of discourse into the work: information is incomplete because the speaker’s knowledge is limited, so the perspective received by the audience is, necessarily, incomplete and likely misleading. This is what makes Marlow, at least, a fallible narrator. But the problem goes beyond knowledge to exposing language itself as a frustrating device for conveying reality. In a metafictional move, ­Marlow himself brings awareness of the limitations of language for ­attaining real knowledge, as when he notes that “[h]e existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you. I’ve led him out by the hand; I have pared him before you” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 136), thus acknowledging that the audience’s information is secondhand with regard to Jim and his world: “I can’t explain to you who haven’t seen him and who hear his word only at second hand the mixed nature of my feelings” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 59). As Martin Ray puts it, this is Marlow’s conflict between a wish to communicate to his audience (in order to control or exorcize his experiences) and a knowledge that successful communication entails the annihilation of that language

56  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim by which he seeks to support or re-establish a stable vision of reality. He must maintain language while acknowledging that communication demands its extinction. (1984, 23)26 Orality is a factor that contributes greatly to this paradox of discourse since it helps Marlow involve his audience in the storytelling, enhancing the sense of a differentiated community of the British Merchant Marine, while at the same time signaling the fallibility of discourse in its oral fragility and the need for preserving the phatic function that highlights the dependence of the story on discourse. 27 The paradox of discourse as continuously troubling Marlow led Edward Said to argue that this feature of Conrad’s “utterance is the form of the negation” (1974, 131), which characterizes all his work. Marlow is a fallible narrator who, nevertheless, warns his audience about the fallibility of storytelling and the impossibility of its being otherwise. 28 Marlow puts the linguistic nature of the telling firmly in the foreground of the narration to make certain that his audience is positively aware of his telling. Yet the doubt concerns not only the difficulties in trusting discourse as an epistemological tool that can reach the ontological nature of things, but goes even further to interrogate fiction as fiction. That is, pointing at the ultimately discursive nature of the story also draws attention to its fictional composition. Marlow’s invocation of his own reflections on his uses of discourse is translated into his storytelling. Mediation allows a personal display of the narrative, and control of several factors which significantly contribute to the ways in which the audience perceives the story. Particularly relevant here in terms of evincing Marlow’s narrative strategy is his echoing of Jim’s manipulation of time, selection, and dramatization in the telling of the jump, which Jim uses to persuade ­Marlow, and Marlow uses to persuade his audience. A frequently overlooked strategy, this temporal manipulation consists of a very extended and detailed description, physical as well as psychological, of the situation as viewed from Jim’s limited perspective, followed by an elusive telling of the crucial event that constituted the first act of a lifelong downfall, the deed that made Jim an outcast forever. More precisely, the final moment before Jim’s decision, when the lifeboat is already in the water waiting for him, lasts from page 66 to 69; this is followed by the ellipsis of the jump marked only by a silent dash: “[…] he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out – ” “‘I had jumped […]’ He checked himself, averted his gaze […] ‘It seems,’ He added” (­Conrad 1996 [1900], 69). Whether this ellipsis means that the action is not important, or perhaps far too important to be described or even mentioned, is uncertain, but what is certain is that the jump does not appear in the narrative, it has been jumped over. Of course, the emphasis here,

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  57 not incidentally, is on Jim’s feelings about the moment, which have been interpreted as honest. Marlow’s narrative in the first part of the novel is concerned with the “why,” not the “how,” about reasons and judgments behind actions rather than actions themselves. The ellipsis of the jump and the treatment of time in the aspect of duration – something that takes scarcely a couple of minutes is narrated at length – are also signs of the manipulation of the story to produce certain effects, in this case signs of Jim and ­Marlow’s complex and persuasive narrative. As ­Padmini Mongia suggests, “[t]he crucial detail of the Patna episode – the abandonment of the ‘human cargo’ (14) by the white officials responsible for it – is consequently deemed incidental” (1992, 176). It is not only treated as incidental at the story level, but its ellipsis is actually a major move considering that this is the central component around which ­Marlow’s enigma revolves. The omission of the jump brakes the condition of “completeness” of the narrated that Uri Margolin states as crucial in the building of narrative reliability (2015, 43). In line with Marlow’s crafting of narrative, as Allan Simmons points out: [t]his suppression raises the question of how we judge someone who is, paradoxically, innocent of the transgression he has committed. It also renders the narrative proleptic and analeptic about the moment it elides, implicitly questioning the figures through which the novel’s convergent meaning emerges. (2000, 41)29 Marlow’s omission echoing Jim’s ellipsis is a major narrative strategy of persuasion, and one so evident that it alerts the reader to Marlow’s problematic narrative. Viewed in totality, Marlow’s narrative articulates a double mode at the level of the story, in what Suresh Raval has called a “double epistemological mode: one emphasizes the inescrutable nature of Jim, whereas the other insists on Jim as ‘one of us’” (1981, 388). At the narrative level, this instability in the Patna part of the novel is echoed in the reader’s relationship with Marlow’s narrative, in which the reader alternates between being a critic and being an accomplice of Marlow, in a play with an estranging reliability yet one that progressively leaves less room for skepticism in the episodes before Jim goes to Patusan.30 These fluctuations in narrative reliability also work in relation to the modes of narration associated with the fictional genres present in the novel. Lord Jim articulates a tension between what Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan labeled Modern and mythical narratives, in her excellent Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (1991). This movement between an interrogating modern mode, and a trusting, consistent, mythical one, is particularly deployed for the narrator’s purposes in the transition between the socalled first and second parts of Lord Jim.

58  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim The alternation between narrative modes is a result of the fact that Marlow’s protectiveness toward Jim does not obscure his acknowledgment of the fact that Jim, though having his own reasons and feelings for it, has become an outcast. For this, he gives him a second chance by having Stein send him to Patusan. This change of setting, which is accompanied by a more straightforward and confident mode of narration borrowed from contemporary adventure novels and travel writing, intensifies the process of narrative persuasion that is taking place in Marlow’s telling. Marlow’s change of narrative mode justifies the change of setting to colonial Patusan. This new setting transposes his doubts over the standard of conduct and the real correspondence between ideology and the reality of Empire to a more extreme colonial context. There, at least one of the values that define the gentleman, the racial factor, is firmly anchored, providing an exoneration of past deeds as well as a reinforcement of the civilizing virtues of the English gentleman, and therefore restoring an ideological trust that accompanies a trust in the individual. The colonial Malay setting will provide Jim with another opportunity to live up to the ideal of the English gentleman in his role of colonial officer, and will offer Marlow the possibility of narrating him through a more dignifying lens.

A Gentleman in Patusan: Regaining Reliability, Racializing the Narrative Enigma The Patusan portion of Lord Jim engages in the process of regaining narrative reliability mainly through the incorporation of a contemporary imperial discourse that, in racializing the narrative enigma which questioned Jim in the first part, manages to substantially restore the credibility of the English gentleman. To do so, Marlow changes its mode of narration to more action-driven storytelling. Borrowing the genre conventions of nineteenth-century British travel writing and adventure novels, Marlow’s telling modifies his narrative mode and highlights other contextual components of the narrative, most especially race, that reorient the treatment of narrative reliability in the second part of the novel, revising the interrogation pursued in the first part. In its second part in particular, Marlow superimposes to his narration of Jim the career of James Brooke, a historical figure whose imperial celebration had achieved a wide public recognition and continued to fascinate the British audience at the turn of the century.31 In calling James Brooke into the narrative, Conrad introduces through Marlow’s telling the colonial trajectory of a colonial ruler who offers a prominent example of the complexities of colonization, its models, and the contradictions inherent in the informal empire that resulted in the imperial crisis of confidence of the late nineteenth century. Even taken as a whole, his

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  59 case reflects these complexities, in his role as a “White-Rajah” who, as Hampson reminds us, satisfied fantasies of power (as in Kipling’s ‘The Man Who Would be King’ or Haggard’s King of Solomon’s Mines), while the myth created about him in reports like the above also disguised that fantasy of power with the reassurance that the English imperialist was not only working for the welfare of the people he annexed but also with their good will. (2000, 5) No less importantly, his writings became a model after which many similar works were fashioned. In the news items that appeared in The Illustrated London News in the 1840s about the new British dominions in the Malay Archipelago, James Brooke was always present as a white discoverer who gained ruling privileges in the region of Sarawak, the island of Labuan, and North Borneo. When he died in 1868, his obituary in the same influential newspaper sung his praises, describing how: Landing in Sarawak, a province in the north-east of Borneo, he gained the affection of Muda Hassim, uncle of the Sultan of the island; and, having assisted in suppressing a rebellion of the D ­ yaks, he received the title of the Rajah of Sarawak, in 1841, from the Bornean Sultan. His official proclamation as Governor of Sarawak dates from Sept. 21, 1841, on which day the British flag was hoisted there. The new Rajah immediately set about the reform of the local government, the framing of laws, and the improvement of the ­people thus strangely subjected to his all but irresponsible sway – the sway of the “Tuan Besar,” or great man, as the natives persisted in calling him. (Illustrated London News 1868) The article concludes by saying that [t]he Rajah was, both at home and abroad, much and deservedly respected. His name, indeed, merits a place in history; for all must agree in admitting that he rendered immense services to the country with which his career will be indelibly associated. (Illustrated London News 1868) Marlow takes advantage of the contemporary writings, news reports, travel narratives, and adventure novels in building a heroic career for Jim in Patusan, as Robert Hampson (2000), Andrea White (1993), and Linda Dryden (2000) have shown, and as it is clear by reading the periodicals in which Conrad himself published. He imports the conventions of the

60  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim imperial genres to set up the contrasts that would blur initial doubts over Jim as a gentleman and as an outcast, and thus give him a fresh opportunity, which proves truly beneficial since, as Marlow explains, “[n]ow and then, though, a word, a sentence, would escape him that showed how deeply, how solemnly, he feels about that work which had given him the certitude of rehabilitation” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 150). Marlow himself admits that he too was proud – of him, if not so certain of the fabulous value of the bargain. […] I was more struck by the other gifts he had displayed. He had proved his grasp of the unfamiliar situation, his intellectual alertness in that field of thought. There was his readiness too! Amazing. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 149) Despite the laudatory tone of Brooke’s obituary, which is naturally even more pronounced in the compilation of James Brooke’s narratives by Keppel and Mundy, James Brooke’s career does not really match the career of an ideal colonial officer (Brooke and Keppel 1846; Brooke and Mundy 1848). The great reputation as an imperial hero that Brooke enjoyed since the publication of his journals and the acclaim that followed him in his 1846 visit to England were absolutely undeserved, given the nature of his personal government of Sarawak. His rule rested on absolute personal justice, negligence of commerce, ambivalent dependence on the British government, and a state of permanent war against groups that were polemically labeled as “pirates.” The wars against the Saribas and Skrang Dyaks were so bloody and so miserably reported on that as a result Brooke had to face auditions in Britain in 1851, and his reputation was not cleared until 1854 when it was declared that there was not enough evidence to condemn him, partly because his rulership in Sarawak was not a Colonial Office appointment but the product of a peculiar agreement between the Sultan and himself. It was passed down to Brooke’s heirs for several generations, until 1946. 32 Violence and arbitrary personal government in a dominion that was not easily recognized by the British government and that was only reluctantly assumed as part of the informal empire reveal the disjuncture between the propagandistic tone used in relation to Brooke’s expedition in the Bornean territories and the realities of empire. As Tidrick concludes, Brooke’s case is one example of a colonial gentleman who “horrified the Colonial Office but inspired the Colonial Service, especially in Malaya” (1990, 39). 33 Critics have mostly missed that Marlow’s narrative of Jim takes a similar approach of only indirectly referring to, and even omitting, the ­violent effects of Jim’s character and conquests, as when his only comment on Jim’s fight with a Dane (in which Jim almost drowned the man) is “[i]t was very lucky for the Dane that he could swim” (Conrad 1996

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  61 [1900], 120) – or when he indifferently recounts the episode in which Jim forced the drowning of three men who were planning to kill him in Cornelius house (Conrad 1996 [1900], 180); or when he refers to Jim’s “excellent plan” for the defense of his personal “fort” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 202). Much like with Brooke, Jim’s years in Patusan are ultimately portrayed as another “imperial quest” (Rawa 2005). I focus here on the example of Brooke, because it provided the kind of historical incorporation that I explore in this book for the modulation of narrative reliability. Lord Jim calls into the narrative the career of James Brooke. In identifying the historical reference, the contemporaneous reader can anticipate that Jim’s actions are told as an imperial quest and can anticipate his relations and future role as white governor of the Bugis. The novel uses the narrative that is implied in the character of James Brooke so as to trust the narrative quest that Marlow aims at telling in his attempt to restore Jim as a successful English gentleman and colonial governor. In this sense, the racial stereotype of the English gentleman that had shaped the colonial representation of James Brooke for the British audience returns reaffirmed to provide an anticipated narrative that will fulfill the doubt about Jim’s past. However, the incorporation of James Brooke’s career serves a double purpose in the novel since it also evinces that the gap between the ideology and the image of the Empire and the reality of those engaged in personal expeditions and enterprises on the ground was as big as the one Marlow builds and notes in his own telling of Jim’s story. Similar to what happens to the narratives and news on James Brooke, the conviction that faith in the telling and the external projection of the Empire is necessary is what leads Marlow – and the British newspapers – to reproduce the discourse of imperialism, even if he is fully conscious of the contradictions encountered when that discourse is seen through the actions of historical individuals. 34 Here, the argument of this book is clearly articulated again – that is, the racial stereotype of the English gentleman as a piece of the discourse of imperialism is an ideological necessity that arises in moments of crisis when the fragility of British rule in the informal dominions is exposed, and it is this specific ideological discourse that is in-forming the narrative problem of reliability in Lord Jim. As shown in Brooke’s particular case, the rebellions of the Dyaks, Malays, and Chinese against British rule were obscured by propagandistic public writings throughout the nineteenth century, which shaped the tradition of rendering the Malay dominions, at least from James Brooke to Hugh ­Clifford. In this, their writings reflect their participation in the imperial propaganda, which intensified in the period between the 1870s and World War I, in view of the crises in Egypt, India, and South Africa, especially. These propagandistic efforts, which were in any case not “officially orchestrated” but were in fact initiatives of the many who

62  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim were taking part in the imperial enterprise, disseminated a popular imperialist culture, which John MacKenzie described in great detail in his Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (1984). 35 A great part of this imperialist culture was nurtured by racial perspectives which encompassed the nationalist definitions of the English and, more broadly, Anglo-Saxon identities. These, as we have seen, also participated in and grew as part of the imperial project, yet problematically so. Nurturing the imperialist discourse, these notions coalesced into an ideology that – like all the racial ideologies explored in this book – was based on beliefs, and their capacity to convince people that they explained realities. As long as the ideas managed to persuade British people that the image of actual, successful imperial dominions could hold true, the discourse functioned. And it certainly did so, through several mediums, from postcards, to advertising, and writings. This imagery of Empire – as it is well known and has been thoroughly studied – effectively codified images of the British people and of “native peoples,” which reinforced the binary opposition between the civilized and the uncivilized. This corpus of images and stereotypes of the latter, often infused with overtly racial views, was set in stark contrast to the images of Anglo-Saxon, and more specifically, English people, and especially the English gentleman. These notions have been thoroughly discussed elsewhere, but their relevance here pertains to the issue of the ideological persuasion that occurs within imperial literature, and Conrad’s treatment of it in regard to narrative reliability. Conrad’s use of imperialist discourse is particularly relevant to Lord Jim, as the second part of the novel fully engages with the language of imperial persuasion, having previously set the stage, as we have seen, for a highly problematic narration that makes trust on Jim and on the English gentleman from a political perspective a fundamental yet unsolvable problem. While other Conrad novels such as Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the islands, Victory, or The Rescue utilize imperial discourse, they do not set the stage for as thorough an interrogation of this discourse as Lord Jim does. Marlow’s skepticism toward Jim, and his obvious process of narrative persuasion, which questions the possibility of a reliable narration, has prepared the audience to doubt his telling as much as he doubts Jim’s narration of his story. Marlow’s eventual conversion to a more trustworthy and persuasive discourse, driven by a desire to exonerate Jim which turns into an almost obsessive fixation on the innate and inherent rightness of the character, is effective yet doubtful given the conditions of the narrative he has previously stated. After drawing attention to the problem of narrative reliability in the first part of the novel, Marlow attempts to restore his own narrative authority regarding what the novel as a whole suggests might be a biased perspective. Several factors make his process of persuasion a problem

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  63 for the narrative reliability of his voice in the novel. Narrative conventions of the genre of the adventure novel and travel narratives, and the gender and racial implications that are constitutive of the genre, form the strongest factor of narrative reliability with which Conrad is working. Aside from Jakob Lothe, there are practically no studies that look at Lord Jim in its borrowing of several genres and the effects and order of those borrowings (Lothe 2008). Hardly any has dedicated attention to the way in which those borrowings modify the novel’s gradual development of the issue of narrative reliability from the point of view of narratology. Although distinguishable in many aspects, travel literature and the adventure novels that significantly contributed to the construction of imperial authority, both enjoyed a great deal of social authority during the second half of the nineteenth century. As Andrea White’s study made clear, travel narratives adopted the methods of fiction to attract readers as much as adventure novels aimed at furnishing real knowledge. Furthermore, it is crucial to note that in contemporary periodicals, the distinction between fiction and nonfiction was not always clear. One could find travel writing alongside fictional installments without prior indication of genre distinctions, as for instance in Blackwood’s, where Hugh Clifford’s travel reports on Malaysia were published next to adventure novel installments.36 As White has argued, [i]n its construction of the imperial subject, then, adventure fiction derived its authority not only from its popular appeal but also from societal approval of its basic, and rather non-fictional, claims to be educational and inspirational, for the extent to which this discourse resembled the travel writing of the day, gave a special status to adventure fiction. (1993, 40) Thus, in late nineteenth-century imperial magazines, we find editorial articles containing news, travel literature pieces, and installments of adventure novels between the covers of the same magazine, with little distinction made between them. With regard to the adventure novel, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the genre earned a high degree of respectability, even though it was addressed to young adults and had traditionally been viewed as popular literature. The adventure novel, presented as educational and as rendering information about the newly acquired territories, following the lines of imperial ideology, was naturally placed alongside nonfiction texts that informed readers about current events in the Empire. This gave “the adventure fiction an influential power that its predecessor, the Romance, lacked, one that shaped, with real consequences in attitude and policy, the attitude of generations of readers towards the imperial subject” (White 1993).

64  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim This feature is relevant because Conrad made extensive use of this cultural textual authority to rebuild Marlow’s narrative authority in the second part of Lord Jim. Contrary to the frequent assertions that the two informal parts of Lord Jim, that is, the Patna and the Patusan sections, are incongruous, it is argued here that the use of the adventure novel genre in the second part provides a clear corrective to the uncomfortable doubt Marlow faces in the first part. It affords a shelter that brings Marlow and his audience back to a safer and more reassuring worldview. Once again, Marlow’s choice is possible because of the cultural authority that imperial novels and travel writings enjoyed. Along with cultural authority, the genre conventions that reinforce Marlow’s authority include the exotic colonial setting, the exaltation of colonial adventurers, explorers, and rulers, and the racial discourse upon which the civilizing mission rested. These elements being truly cultural, rather than merely linguistic, they provide a strong foundation for authority because they introduce a language that is reinforced and fully encompassed by the working context. A thorough examination being beyond the limits of this chapter, we will examine a few instances that will illuminate the uses of cultural ideology in the narrative discourse, particularly the deployment of racial discourse as codified in the genre of the contemporary adventure novel. The first evident genre feature that Marlow newly borrows for the Patusan part is the language of the exotic. The language of the exotic provides a setting that reinforces the idea that colonial and metropolitan societies and individuals are polarized, or the notion of historical progress linked to civilization in which modern Western societies evolve, while other, more primitive ones stay immobile unless introduced to civilization, a distinction that David Adams’s Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel (2003) and Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (1988) explore in a larger context but also in relation to Conrad. This notion, as we have seen, underpinned the governance of the informal empire and justified personal authority in exemplary places such as Malaysia. As Marlow observes when remembering Patusan: But as to what I was leaving behind, I cannot imagine any alteration. The immense and magnanimous Doramin and his little motherly witch of a wife, gazing together upon the land and nursing secretly their dreams of parental ambition; Tunku Allang, wizened and greatly perplexed; Dain Waris, intelligent and brave, with his faith in Jim, with his firm glance and his ironic friendliness; the girl, absorbed in her frightened, suspicious adoration; Tamb’ Itam, surly and faithful; Cornelius, leaning his forehead against the fence under the ­moonlight – I am certain of them. They exist as under an enchanter’s wand. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 196)

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  65 Through this static recollection of still lives, we are given the whole story of Patusan. Marlow steps back from his last image of the country to let the characters unfold, but they are as still as Patusan’s landscape, and they remain “in the memory motionless, unfaded, with its life arrested, in an unchanging light.” The emotions, “the ambitions, the fears, the hate, the hopes, […] they remain in my mind just as I had seen them – intense and as if for ever suspended in their expression.” Patusan is therefore condemned by memory to that state of permanence, out of time. Meanwhile, by contrast to the memory’s arrest of time, Marlow’s trip back home restarts the movement intrinsic to “the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.” If those Patusani wax figures exist under “an enchanter’s wand” – indeed, Marlow’s – “the figure round which all these are grouped – that one lives, and I am not certain of him. No magician’s wand can immobilise him under my eyes. He is one of us” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 196). Marlow’s introduction of this conventional description of the Other creates the difference pointed out by Glissant: “je peux reconnaître ta différence et penser qu’elle constitue dommage pour toi. Je peux penser que ma force est dans le Voyage (je fais l’Histoire) et que ta différance est immobile et meurte” [I can acknowledge your difference and continue to think it is harmful to you. I can think that my strength lies in the Voyage (I am making History) and that your difference is motionless and silent] (1990, 30). While ­Glissant considers that awareness of pointing out one difference “n’obligue pas à s’impliquer dans la dialectique de leur totalité” [does not compel one to be involved in the dialectics of their totality] (1990, 30), Marlow makes use of that difference precisely to set narrative authority in his historical colonial account. However clear his ideas about the contrast between the colonial space of Patusan and that other world of his own, the certainty of the storyteller is challenged when he focuses on a member of his own community who displays an unexpected complexity. Marlow attributes Jim’s personality at this point to his belonging to a much more complex world which cannot even be fixed by the memory’s power to stop time and structure the past into pictures. It is the condition of a telling dependent on memory that explains the different treatments of the two worlds, that of Patusan and the one where the “we” of the narrative belongs, which are newly and clearly divided in the narration. Memory can produce a single fresh canvas of Patusan but requires much more space and many more words to remember a figure that, however flawed, is still a part of the community. Its uncertainty and enigma demand a longer tale. In this sense, Marlow’s personal interest in Jim, along with that of his community of listeners, is reinforced by his conception of how memory works and how remembering is predetermined by the spaces and the people recalled. This distinction in essence is transcribed in the narrative

66  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim by Marlow’s use of round and flat characters. While it is obvious that other flat characters exist in the part dedicated to the Patna incident, it is remarkable that most of them, who live together with Jim not for the duration of a single sea voyage but for years, appear in the second part only sketchily described, without a voice, or simply not evolving in the manner of round characters. An efficient way of drawing flat characters that would be identifiable and at the same time would support the construction of the main character is, precisely, to adhere to the flatness of stereotypes. Here, I want to make an essential distinction. Marlow deploys the stereotype of the English gentleman extensively, along all his narrative, which has it as an encapsulated narrative that can be gradually unfolded and that readers can naturally assume as a reliable unfolding of the events. This stereotype being imported at length imbues Jim with complexity and, according to Marlow, a more humane character, which as a fictional character makes him more mimetic, and therefore more credible. But the stereotype of the English gentleman is not quite fitting Jim. In order to restore his credibility, Marlow resorts to flat racial stereotypes, the contrast to which reestablishes Jim as a full character. Since Marlow’s colonial epistemological division corresponds to racial lines, resorting to colonial racial stereotypes that have the benefit of being readily acceptable to potential readers, and that are certainly operating within the problem the novel addresses, seems only logical. As in the other cases analyzed in this book, the use of racial stereotypes in Lord Jim is essential as a basis for the credibility of discourse that can be deployed within the contemporaneous historical context. In Lord Jim, the flatness of the racial stereotypes of the colonized, which differs from the broader perspective of the concept as defined in this book, corresponds to Marlow’s need for developing Jim as a complex character, and at the same time reflects that the imperial crisis of confidence that involved the debate on the governance of the informal Empire was not at all centered on the colonized peoples but rather on the profile and performance of the colonial officers, as I have demonstrated earlier. For this very reason, racial discourse in Lord Jim should be truly reconsidered. As I show, and contrary to what most critics have suggested, the racial discourse in Lord Jim does not focus on the presentation of colonial peoples but rather on the presentation of the figure of the English gentleman.37 As argued earlier, racial stereotypes here work as narrative forms (Puxan-Oliva 2016). It is what stereotypes do for the narrative rather than what they say that interests us, even if what they say is important as well. It is crucial in this analysis to see how stereotypes are used for the progression of the narrative and for the problematization of narrative reliability. Lord Jim strongly borrows the stereotype of the English gentleman, defining and unfolding it at length, as we have seen, by constructing narrative progression along the expectations that an English

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  67 gentleman must meet in terms of an arranged set of actions and values. The stereotype is used in its narrative possibility to literally construct plot. In addition, the novel increasingly uses other racial stereotypes to set contrasts to and modulate the credibility of the target stereotype of the English gentleman. The novel mainly sets this stereotype in contrast to the Malay stereotypes. However accurately and richly portrayed, the diverse population of the Malay Archipelago – the Bugis, Arabs, and Malays – are taken together and used in the narrative to set a contrast between the English gentleman and the “native peoples” that enables a restoration of the codified virtues that render colonial officers the representatives of civilization, and that therefore attempts to obscure past evidence about the inherent dangers of an overabundance of those virtues. A couple of examples about Marlow’s building of new stark contrasts shall suffice here. As Marlow states while referring to Dain Warris, the Bugi ruler Doramin’s son, [t]hat brave and intelligent youth (‘who knew how to fight after the manner of white men’) wished to settle the business off-hand, but his people were too much for him. He had not Jim’s racial prestige and the reputation of invincible, supernatural power. He was not the visible, tangible incarnation of unfailing truth and of unfailing victory. Beloved, trusted, and admired as he was, he was still one of them, while Jim was one of us. Moreover, the white man, a tower of strength in himself, was invulnerable, while Dain Waris could be killed. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 214) This progressively constructed contrast makes clearer to the audience that Jim undoubtedly belongs to “us.” As Linda Dryden has stated, ­Marlow deploys the colonial racial stereotypes in multiple forms, such as in the depiction of Dain Waris, the hero’s native friend, who is adopted “by virtue of his or her status as a ‘noble savage’” (2000, 40). In another instance, we find the description of the uncivilized, almost-savage native in the Rajah Allang. Rajah Allang was one of the belligerent forces in Patusan, “the worst of the Sultan’s uncles, the governor of the river, who did the extorting and the stealing, and ground down to the point of extinction the country-born Malays, who, utterly defenceless, had not even the resource of emigrating” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 138). Marlow describes him when he and Jim “paid him a visit of ceremony” as a dirty, little, used-up old man with evil eyes and a weak mouth, who swallowed an opium pill every two hours, and in defiance of common decency wore his hair uncovered and falling in a wild stingy locks about his wizened grimy face. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 138)

68  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim This reception scene delineates his physical appearance in accordance with his character and actions in such a way that the character does not give rise to any hint of doubt, but appears unambiguously in Marlow’s memories: When giving audience he would clamber upon a sort of narrow stage erected in a hall like a ruinous barn with a rotten bamboo floor, through the cracks of which you could see, twelve or fifteen feet below, the heaps of refuse and garbage of all kinds lying under the house. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 138) If this is not revolting enough, his wickedness is further emphasized by the fact that Jim risks being poisoned by the Rajah’s coffee every time he visits. The Rajah is surrounded by approximately 40 people, who contribute to the threatening environment with their “movement, coming and going, pushing and murmuring, at our backs.” Their appearance is just as shabby, though less aggressive: “The majority, slaves and humble dependants, were half naked, in ragged sarong, dirty with ashes and mudstains” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 138). Yet just in case the reader misses the contrast between Jim’s clean and bright attire and the Rajah and his dependants and slaves’ dirty and ragged garb, Marlow provides a reminder: In the midst of these dark-faced men, his stalwart figure in white apparel, the gleaming clusters of his fair hair, seemed to catch all the sunshine that trickled through the cracks in the closed shutters of that dim hall, with its walls of mats and a roof of thatch. This stark contrast sets the scene for his key observation that “[h]e appeared like a creature not only of another kind but of another essence. Had they not seen him come up in a canoe they might have thought he had descended upon them from the clouds” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 138). If this is the general dynamic in the borrowing of racial stereotypes, Lord Jim is, however, far more ambivalent than it appears. Marlow’s borrowing of the genre of the adventure novel is far too evident to be missed by the reader, who is also repeatedly warned about the literary conventions, an effect which Marlow warns his listeners that Jim himself suffered (Conrad 1996 [1900], 9, 141, 156, 165, 177). In acknowledging the usage of literary conventions, Marlow points out his use of racial stereotypes for his own narrative. This is crucial in the articulation of the instability of Marlow’s narrative voice, which, even if Marlow’s discourse grows in conviction and straightforwardness by focusing on actions and taking advantage of flat stereotypes from the adventure novel

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  69 in the second part of the novel, nonetheless his narrative elicits doubt. Marlow embraces the genre of the adventure novel too thoroughly to make it effective in its direct communication with the audience, thus destabilizing narrative trust. 38 Yet Marlow’s powerful voice of persuasion is fully active, despite its own self-revelation. The narrator’s use of Jewel serves as an outstanding example that combines the racial and gender stereotypes of the colonial discourse. Marlow’s portrait of Jewel enables him to disavow her version of the final episodes of Jim’s story. In Marlow’s descriptions of Jewel, she transforms from a beautiful, exotic, and childlike figure to a “ghostly figure” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 183). Her version of the story, which would have voiced her conviction that “they always leave us” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 184) and her accusations leveled against Jim and Marlow that “you are mad or false” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 244), or “You are false!” directed at Jim alone (Conrad 1996 [1900], 245), will be erased from the narrative by the end. Her feelings toward white men put pressure on ­Marlow when she asks him angrily at Stein’s house: “you always leave us – for your own ends. […] Ah! you are hard, treacherous, without truth, without compassion. What makes you so wicked? Or is it that you are all mad?” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 206). Her berating and Marlow’s feeling that “though by nothing but his [Jim’s] presence he had mastered her heart, had filled all her thoughts, and had possessed himself of all her affections, she underestimated his chances of success” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 184), along with her daring to doubt his word (Conrad 1996 [1900], 187) in contrast to the rest of his subordinates in Patusan, makes Jewel a threatening presence in ­Marlow’s narrative, not far removed from her wicked stepfather ­Cornelius and in a sense even more dangerous because, however stereotyped, she is not portrayed scornfully, and she benefits from the superior intelligence entailed by the benevolent half-caste stereotype. Her authority in the narrative, though denied by Marlow, is reinforced by the fact that Jewel voices Marlow’s fears to the extent that when she is telling him the reason for her fear, Marlow feels that [f]or a moment, I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive. But still – it was only a moment: I went back into my shell directly. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 186) The first part of the novel elaborates upon the very doubt and enigma that Jewel clearly understands. But Marlow’s inability to resolve it, and the possibility that an imperial figure like Jim would appear to the world not only “under a cloud” but as either mad or false, frightens him, as

70  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim it had frightened Captain Brierly. Marlow’s retreat back into his shell is narratively performed by his rejection of Jewel’s storytelling at Stein’s, withholding it from the reader, and thus echoing the omission of Jim’s jump. About his listening, Marlow says only that: I did hear. I heard it all, listening with amazement, with awe, to the tones of her inflexible weariness. She could not grasp the real sense of what she was telling me, and her resentment filled me with pity of her – for him too. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 207) When the moment arrives for Marlow to call on the very last witness of Jim’s demise, he refuses Jewel’s testimony because “the girl’s eyes had watched him too, but her life is too much entwined with his: there is her passion, her wonder, her anger, and, above all, her fear and her unforgiving love,” and endorses instead Jim’s servant, Tamb’ Itam’s faithful narrative (Conrad 1996 [1900], 231), exerting the power of the male colonizer. Jewel’s narrative function can be envisioned as a fulfillment of the stereotype of the half-caste, whose hybridity threatens the apparent stability of the colonial discourse. For this stereotype in its most basic form, one might profitably turn to H. L. Malchow’s exploration of the Gothic in nineteenth-century Britain, where he asserts that, on the one hand, [b]oth vampire and half-breed are creatures who transgress boundaries and are caught between two worlds. Both are hidden threats – disguised presences bringing pollution of the blood. Both may be able to ‘pass’ among the unsuspecting, although both bear hidden signs of their difference which the wary may read. (1996, 168) On the other hand, however, the half-breed could be viewed sympathetically, not as a racial danger to whites, but as a superior class of Negro, touched by the saving grace of white blood; or, alternatively, as an object of sympathy, a ‘victim of class and colour,’ unfairly rejected, martyred, by both worlds. […] [A]n eternal victim raised from the bestial, not merely by evangelical exhortation, by the blood of the lamb, but by the actual blood of the white paternalist. (Malchow 1996, 173)39 Being a female and defenseless, Jewel only has the power of her words at her disposal, which she uses to lament her doomed fate, and to focus blame on Jim as a white colonizer.40 Nevertheless, after the fashion

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  71 of most imperial literature, a genre that Marlow tries to fit her in, as Spivak argued in her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), the colonized have no voice, and thus her counter-narrative is censored. Of course, Marlow reproduces Jewel’s words and actions in a way that allows her to stand by herself, but his judgmental commentaries accommodate her figure to the stereotypes of the “exotic” woman and the “half-caste.” Furthermore, it has been overlooked that in fact Marlow uses her stereotype for narrative purposes, conditioning narrative voice. He deliberately uses the silenced voice of the female half-caste stereotype to exclude Jewel’s narrative of the final events in Jim’s life of which she is a direct witness. He therefore expurgates her discourse and disavows her doubts – which happen to coincide with his own – for the sake of an image of Jim more controllably overshadowed and suspiciously close to that of the adventure novel hero, a parody which has the ambiguous and paradoxical effect of simultaneously endorsing the genre it counters. Marlow’s adventure-novel telling of Jim, the white ruler of Patusan, is finally overshadowed by the episode of Gentleman Brown, which recalls the ambivalent English gentleman in that it enhances a stainless Jim, at the same time that it precipitates a second failure that will end with his own suicide-like killing. A real outcast, Gentleman Brown is imprisoned in Patusan and appeals to Jim’s sense of racial kinship to let him escape. Jim’s eventual consent, however, does not prevent Gentleman Brown from taking revenge by killing Dain Waris, which, in turn, leads to Jim’s death. Almost a parodic figure, “Gentleman Brown” interrogates the signification and credibility of the social and racial categories that Marlow struggles with. With his “mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty,” Brown condemns Jim for his righteousness in what seems a perfect portrait of the stereotype of the gentleman. But he sees this as an opportunity to ask for Jim’s sympathy: there ran through the rough talk a vein of subtle reference to their common blood, an assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of secret knowledge that was like a bond of their minds and of their hearts. (Conrad 1996 [1900], 229) Paradoxically, the “common blood” here does not imply courage, clarity, and daylight, but rather fear, guilt, secrecy, and darkness. Inherent in this is a perverse call of whiteness that involves betrayal: for Brown, whiteness becomes a cultural bond that will allow him to convince Jim that “it would be the best to let these whites and their followers go with their lives. It would be a small gift” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 233). But the parody embodied in Gentleman Brown simultaneously serves other

72  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim ends. If the interrogation of whiteness and gentlemanliness is evident in Brown and in the features he shares with Jim, the traitor who abandoned the Patna, the latter, in contrast to Brown, now decides to be faithful to the correct code of conduct, offering a fair resolution to the conflict. Here, then, whiteness draws a sharp line of separation between two worlds and works as a reminder of where Jim belongs. Brown acknowledges an implied standard of conduct in Jim’s whiteness when he affirms that “I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 226). The figure of the white English Gentleman is now clearly reinforced by the image of two characters whose position – “separated only by a muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which include mankind” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 226) – reveals their respective places in Marlow’s moral universe, in which Jim earns his redemption, and therefore inclusion, in contrast to the impostor Gentleman Brown, as “one of us.” Henceforth, in this final resumption of the debate over gentlemanliness, whiteness has a double-edged function in the character of Brown. Ultimately, the episode reveals the vast chasm between the nominal category and fleshand-blood individuals: that of discourse and realities. The Gentleman Brown episode changes the perception of Jim’s ultimate success, reinforcing Marlow’s ambivalent perspective, and returning to the issue of the gentleman from an explicitly racialized perspective. After Gentleman Brown’s ambush and murder of Dain Waris, the subsequent anger of the Bugis, and Doramin’s killing of Jim, Marlow’s tale of palpable colonial success is increasingly less clear and credible. At the end of the novel, Marlow says that Jim “passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.” Marlow qualifies Jim’s life as an “extraordinary success.” And yet there remains the shadow of doubt as to whether or not he is referring ironically to what would have been Jim’s perception of himself. Afterward, he qualifies him as an “obscure conqueror of fame” with an “exalted egoism,” who has left behind a woman to celebrate his “wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.” Nevertheless, it is only after this complex revelation of Jim’s ambivalence that Marlow insists that Jim is “one of us”: “He is one of us – and have I not stood up once, like an evoked ghost, to answer for his eternal constancy?” He adds, “Was I so very wrong after all?” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 246). The certainty in the precariousness of beliefs, which results in Marlow’s fathoming of “the narrative presentation of Jim’s problem as intrinsically difficult and possibly even insoluble,” as Lothe notes (1996, 169), is thus, albeit very reluctantly, the only remaining and vertiginous conviction. Marlow resorts to the most abstract imperial racial discourse encapsulated in the flat colonial stereotypes in order to restore Jim’s accord with the ideal of the English gentleman, thereby ensuring the progression of the narrative toward a safer imperial view. Marlow starts his

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  73 narrative by drawing a political contemporary imperial debate through a modulated importation of the specific racial stereotype of the English gentleman, a figure with designated social and political functions around which the contemporaneous discussion on colonial officers and the costly management of the informal dominions revolved in the last decades of nineteenth-century Britain. This codified figure acts as a search path following the disclosure of the narrative enigma. As the maladjustment between Jim and the English gentleman grows, the credibility of this figure and the political discourse it involves is eroded. Marlow inflicts a turn in the narrative mode that will change this growing erosion of the English gentleman as a model colonial officer. As the novel moves to the colonial Malay setting, Marlow’s narrative calls in the most abstract racialized discourse of imperialism, borrowing the flat stereotypes of the colonized subjects in order to restore the credibility of the stereotype of the gentleman, making the differences sharper and the definition of characters less nuanced. The narrative use of these stereotypes enables Marlow to reestablish trust in its imperial function. The narrative uses of the stereotypes, and the integration of historical debates where the stereotypes function in the narrative as it progresses, problematize narrative reliability in Lord Jim. Even if Marlow’s narrative, like that of Absalom, Absalom!, gradually racializes the story through several operating factors, Marlow’s doubts about Jim are always under the surface. Finally, the narrative stands on the ambivalence arising from the central doubt, an enigma which is inevitably unsolved. This enigma deserves not only a courageous approach that brings Marlow to the edge of the cliff but also a fitting discursive ideological strategy capable of rendering tolerable the doubts over the imperial immediate financial and military problems, and the imperial ideologies that incorporate arguments on Anglo-Saxonism and Englishness to defend contradictory stands with regard to the future strategies of the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. In Lord Jim, Conrad approaches this particular imperial conflict as a problem. He addresses it as a problem of confidence, and so as a problem of the credibility of imperial discourses which, even as they accommodated opposing views on the convenience of holding onto and managing the settler colonies and the informal dominions, relied heavily upon the racial and national, white and English perspectives. The reader becomes entangled here with the crisis of the informal empire and personal rule in the figure of the English gentleman as he settles in Malaysia, at the same time that an interrogation of the reality of discourses is underway. Ideology is perceived as that which holds historical circumstances together, and yet ideology is simultaneously perceived as discourse, and thus as the unsuitable yet indispensable means for the comprehension of those circumstances. For this, Conrad’s treatment of narrative reliability enables him to write from a point where discourses contain the historical crises yet are not for this reason ontologically identifiable with them

74  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim since they remain at an almost intolerable discursive level, incapable of grasping the far more complex realities. By way of conclusion, Conrad’s novel does not simply reflect an ambivalent imperial ideology. As I have argued, Conrad’s Lord Jim targets and deploys the debates over the forms of Empire by forcing the reader to import the codified arguments and racial stereotypes that are being instrumental in the immediate context for the discussion of the management of the informal dominions of the British Empire in the late nineteenth century. Without the reader’s and critic’s expected participation of importing historical knowledge, there is no informed distance between Marlow and Jim, between Marlow and the historical debate, and between Marlow and the reader. To create those layered distances, Lord Jim resorts to different developments of racial stereotypes and political arguments, and uses them narratively, to shape the narrative enigma, to negotiate genre conventions, to signal metafictional comment, and to fully condition narrative progression. In using specific pieces of the contemporaneous political discourses to shape the aforementioned elements, Lord Jim problematizes narrative credibility. The novel creates a distance that is political because it interrogates the effectiveness of the political discourses that are being used in the debate over the informal dominions. At the same time, as long as the distance is discursive within a narrative, it is deployed within the fiction as a problem of narrative reliability. Therefore, one can argue that this specific imperial historical debate enables the introduction of active racial stereotypes that fully determine narrative progression, endow and deprive narrative authority, and inform the narrative enigma so as to problematize narrative reliability.

Notes 1 For an overview of the Colonial Service in the British Empire, see KirkGreene (1999). 2 Malaysia is so clearly a dominion in which informal rule was being tested that it appears as a prototype in the explanation of indirect rule in P. J. ­Marshall’s edition of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (1996, 163). 3 I assume Hampson’s definition of the term “Malaysia”: In using the term ‘Malaysia,’ I am thinking less of this complicated political history than of the earlier currency of the term. ‘Malaysia’ seems to have been coined in the 1830s and was in general use in England by the end of the nineteenth century to describe ‘a geographic-zoological-­ botanical region comprising the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Borneo, Sumatra, and Java. […] The ‘Malaysia’ of Conrad’s Malayan fiction stretches from Singapore to Bali, from Achin to New Guinea, from Sourabaya to Manila. However, its centre is the island of Borneo. (2000, 14) For a broader colonial perspective of these novels, see also Collits (2005), Henthorne (2008), S. Ross (2004), Darras (1982), and Parry (1983).

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  75 4 For the role of the free trade and the expansion of maritime commerce in the British Empire in the mid- and late nineteenth century, see Martin Lynn’s “British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth ­Century” (1998); and John Darwin’s “Traffic and Trade” (2012, 150–188). This economic debate on the opening of markets was used in arguments for and against imperialism, as Matikkala (2011) and Porter (2008) have fully shown. On Conrad’s works in relation to the maritime tradition, see Burgess (1976) and Mark D. Larabee, “Joseph Conrad and the Maritime Tradition” (2010). 5 See Mangan and Walvin (1987) and Tosh (2005) for studies on manliness in nineteenth-century Britain. 6 Hugh Clifford is a privileged example of this, as Tidrick’s chapter shows. As a friend of Conrad and a writer whose writings significantly shaped the British colonial representation of Malaysia, he is a great example of an imperial officer apparently indifferent to social Darwinism but one who justified and contributed to the establishment of indirect rule in Malaysia. For an extended study of Clifford’s role in Malaysia, see Holden (2000); see also Hampson (2000) for his relationship with Conrad, and for Malaysia in the British literary tradition. 7 See Lorimer (1978) Chapters “4. Mid-Victorian Philanthropy and the Popular Stereotype of the Negro” and “7. Scientific Racism and Mid-Victorian Racial Attitudes” for an analysis of the multiple cultural influences that shaped racial stereotypes of the so-called “races of men.” On the pseudoscientific arguments that constructed “race” and which led to the racialization of Victorian society, see Bolt (1971) and Stepan (1982); and Lorimer (2013) for the scientific racial discourse of the late nineteenth-century ­British Empire. 8 With regard to the domestic crises related to the imperial crises in literature, see Bivona (1990) for his comparison of Haggard, Conrad, and Hardy in relation to how imperialism affected domestic concerns. 9 Aside from the sources cited in the text, refer to the key studies on the ­English gentleman by Brander (1975), Gilmour (1981), Mason (1982), and Castronovo (1987). 10 Sherry points to Jim’s historical gentlemanliness: Linked with the attitude of not shirking and of ‘fighting this thing down’, is the ideal of the English gentleman. References to Jim’s gentlemanliness are made constantly in the novel, and in this sense also he is distinguished from the rest of the deserters. It implies a special mode of speech and behaviour on Jim’s part, and his action and his situation in the Inquiry become much worse because of his transgression of the gentleman’s code. (1966, 75) Like Sherry, Darras points to Conrad’s distance from Jim’s gentlemanliness: Certainly Jim is given preparatory school language and enthusiasms which do not suit the man we have met earlier narrating the story of his disaster to Captain Marlow. No doubt Conrad was trying to reproduce the language of a young gentleman and we must take into account that preparatory school slang may have sounded less absurd then than it does now. But it may be Conrad’s intention to offer in this way a submerged criticism of Lord Jim, indicating his fundamental immaturity. The inadequacy of Jim’s response in terms of language at certain crucial moments suggests an ironic attitude to his hero on Conrad’s part. (1982, 77)

76  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim The figure of the English gentleman has been acknowledged by Simmons (2004) and Acheraïou (2009), who all refer to the English gentleman in context but do not develop the idea further. 11 Acheraïou’s Joseph Conrad and the Reader (2009) certainly provides a very valuable argumentation for the necessity of accounting for both the author and the reader (both real and implied) – from both a post-structuralist and postmodern point of view, close to that of Phelan – as collaborators in the production of meaning, which is certainly very close to the conception of how literature works as addressed in this book. 12 See Torgovnick (1990) for a monograph on the idea of “going native.” 13 See the illustrative compilation of contemporaneous texts of the debates in Cain (1999). 14 For the formation of Englishness as an identity in the imperial context, see Baucom (1999). 15 See Matikkala for an analysis of the elements of anti-imperialism and imperialism and for the full explanation of the arguments touched on briefly here. 16 The phrase “one of us” has intrigued all critics of Lord Jim and has been read to include the whole range of communities mentioned here, almost becoming a leitmotif not only of the novel but of its criticism. I particularly agree with ­Mulhern’s idea of it, very much in accord with Jameson’s (1981), which considers that the expression “one of us” does not only refer to the fellowship of the sea [b]ut the body of men thus held together in the ideological cohesion of class values which cannot without peril be called into question is not merely the confraternity of the sea; it is the ruling class of the British Empire, the heroic bureaucracy of imperial capitalism which takes that lesser, but sometimes even more heroic, bureaucracy of the officers of the merchant fleet as a figure for itself. (Mulhern 2006, 259) 17 Some articles and books are strictly devoted to the issue of morality in the novel from a nontechnical point of view. See, for example, Panichas (2000) and Daniel Brudney’s highly defensive, “Marlow’s Morality” (2003) or ­Grazyna Branny’s (1997) comparison of Conrad and Faulkner from this perspective. It is worth quoting here Bruce Henricksen’s linking of morality to the colonialist discourse: An affirmation of this moral identity is crucial to the ideology of colonialism, and in this novel Marlow is more sympathetic to colonialism than he is in Heart of Darkness. But if Marlow’s oppositional discourse in Heart of Darkness is haunted by its official other, Marlow’s more hegemonic discourse in Lord Jim, so openly nostalgic for the values of home and the codes of British Merchant Marine, is nonetheless haunted by unofficial stories. (1992, 88) Thus, morality also results in controversy, as R. A. Gekoski has suggested, since [i]f Lord Jim is morally ambiguous, it is so because its subject is moral ambiguity. Marlow’s understanding of his involvement with Jim, and what Jim represents, does not lead to any given moral truths, but rather indicates the lurking paradoxes that underlie any given moral stance. (1978, 93) 18 Later in his career, this strategy will also be developed in Under Western Eyes. See especially Eloise Knapp Hay, “Under Western Eyes and the Missing Center” (1991). The secret as a narrative strategy in fact permeates Conrad’s works, as Robert Hampson has shown extensively (2012).

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim  77 19 In Piglia’s words: el secreto sería un lugar vacío que permite unir tramas narrativas diversas y personajes distintos que conviven en un espacio atados por ese nudo que no se explica. […] Es decir, que el secreto funciona como un mecanismo de construcción de la trama porque permite unir sobre un punto ciego una red de pequeñas historias que se articulan, de una manera inexplicable, pero que se articulan. De ahí la sensación de ambigüedad, de indecisión, de las múltiples significaciones que tiene una historia, porque inmediatamente nosotros empezamos a incorporar razones para hacer circular esa historia con un orden que, en realidad, el relato mismo ni nos desvela ni nos descubre. (2006, 201) 20 Marlow as a narrator of several of Conrad’s novels is an extremely complex figure dealt with at length by criticism. For Marlow as a narrator and character, see Bloom (1992), Paris (2005), and Wake (2007). 21 For Marlow’s uses of repetition, “thematic apposition,” and “associative method” in his telling, see, respectively, Miller (1982), Watt (1979), and Lothe (1989). On Conrad’s narrative strategies see the excellent Lothe (1989) and Greaney (2002). 22 See the edited volume by Lothe, Hawthorn, and Phelan (2008) for very sharp analyses of Conrad’s narrative. 23 Brian Richardson refers to the interlocutor as a disembodied narrator who poses questions that the narrative responds to, unsettling the traditional notion of a narrator (2006, 79–86). Marlow in his function as an authorial narrator constantly resorts to interrogation as a guided mode of narration that contributes to his metafictional discourse, at the same time that it clearly drives the reader in one direction. 24 Studying it through impressionism from a philosophical point of view rather than from the visual arts, in an exploration of subjectivity in the relation between object and subject without giving prominence to none, John Peters argues that in Lord Jim, the relationship between self and other in Marlow and Jim shows the need to think about subjectivity as going beyond the social conventions in the community (2001, 61–85). 25 Some other examples show Marlow’s insistence on this: “He was not – if I may say so – clear to me. He was not clear” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 107), or “I could never make up my mind about was whether his line of conduct amounted to shrinking his ghost or to facing him out” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 119) or “I am fated never to see him clearly” (Conrad 1996 [1900], 146). 26 See also on the same topic, Reeves (1985). 27 Discussions on orality in Lord Jim can be found in Malbone (1965), Craig (1981), Barrett (2001) and Puxan-Oliva (2011), and in Conrad’s works in Lucas (2000). 28 Reprinted in Said (1983). 29 Simmons’s observation is that the juxtaposition of narrative levels creates a slippage that “threatens the reality of the text” (2000, 44) and therefore enters the realm of postmodern fictions about fictions. Simmons’s proleptic associations of this jump with other jumps in the novel are also produced by sounds, as Denise Ginfray (2004) shows. 30 On skepticism in Conrad’s works, see Wollaeger (1990). 31 For exhaustive accounts of Conrad’s historical sources in the Malay novels and short stories, with a special emphasis on the story of James Brooke, the ship Jeddah, the Lingards, and Wallace and other travel writings, see Sherry (1966); see also the more recent Yeow (2008).

78  Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim 32 For the historical case of James Brooke, see Tidrick (1990, 33–39) and the excellent study by Walker (2001). 33 Along the same lines, Andrea Rhen also notes that [w]hile Brooke’s reign was dogged by English controversy about his right to use force in order to obtain and administer his state, the overwhelming majority of published English accounts about Sarawak celebrate Brooke as a noble, self-sacrificing, exemplary British gentleman who kindly agreed to protect indigenous Borneans from exploitation by Muslim Malay overlords and from the rapacious expansionism of Dutch colonization in the area. (2012, 290) 34 On this point, see Cohen (2003) and Krishman (2004). On the use of the discourse of colonialism in Conrad, see also Humphries (1989), Conroy (1993), and Pauly (1999). 35 See another key study in August (1985). 36 See also for a thorough study of the narratives and imagery of Empire in magazines and other forms of circulation, Donovan (2005). It is worth recalling here that although in my analysis I rely on the Lord Jim published as a novel in 1900, this work had been previously published in Blackwood’s Magazine from October 1899 through November 1900. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund have studied the effects and role of the Victorian Serial, and have included precisely Lord Jim: A Sketch in their chapter “Prefiguring an End to Progress” in their The Victorian Serial (1991). 37 As I claim in this chapter, in Lord Jim, the racial discourse is embedded in the idea of the English gentleman from the 1860s, which grew in importance as the racial scientific discourse became dominant for the imperialist ideology. Discussion of race in the novel highlights other clearly racial inscriptions, such as the Arab pilgrims (Moore 2000); or the Malays in Patusan, or the opinions of the privileged reader for whom Marlow writes and who makes clear racist statements (Conrad 1996 [1900], 201). As the privileged man’s opinions make clear in contrast to Marlow and Jim’s, Marlow is in this novel much more subtle in his unfolding of the racial discourse, which is in fact inscribed in the very figure of the English gentleman, than he is in Heart of Darkness, where racist discourse in the division of black and white is prominent. Discussions about racism found in Hamner (1990) and ­Firchow (2000) and in Bender (2005) have therefore concentrated in his 1899 novel rather than in Lord Jim. 38 Noting the metafictional drawing of attention to stereotypes in relation to genre conventions in Jarciel Poncela’s Amor se escribe sin hache, Cécile François notes the same effects on the reader: Ces parabases récurrentes ont pour mission d’attirer constamment l’attention sur les codes et les conventions qui régissent la construction du roman d’amour traditionnel en jetant un regard oblique et démystifiant sur ce genre de littérature. Dans le deuxième volet de la trilogie, le narrateur dénonce ainsi ouvertement les scénarios routiniers du roman populaire en proposant une double lecture d'un épisode incontournable. (2009, 3) Considering the stereotype in postmodern parodies of the quest motif and the maritime novels, see Karoui-Elounelli (2011). 39 See also in relation to the half-caste figure in Conrad, Chon (1998), and Moutet (2002). 40 For a combination of the issues of Jewel’s race and gender, see Schneider (2003). On Conrad and gender issues, see Hawthorn (2007) and Roberts (2000).

2 Reliability as a “Passing Zone” James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man In his autobiography Along This Way (1933), the African American writer James Weldon Johnson reflects on coming of age as follows: [t]he time of the psychological passing over from boyhood to manhood is a movable feast. The legal date fixed on the twenty-first birthday has little or no connection with it. This passing over is really not across a line, but across a zone. There are some who are driven across early in life by the steady pressure of responsibility. A few, projected by some sudden stroke of fate, take the zone in a single leap. But most of us wander across somewhat as the Israelites wandered across the Arabian Desert; and a good many of us grow old without ever getting completely over. (Johnson 2000 [1933], 125) Johnson envisions the movement toward adulthood as a passing “zone” rather than a passing “line,” the former being nothing but an artificial imagined passage from “boyhood to manhood,” socially sanctioned by a date printed on a legal document. The metaphor of a prolonged transition that one moves through, which may even become a permanent state of in-betweenness, is particularly interesting in light of the cluster of historical and narrative aspects that comprise Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912, 1927). The object of this chapter is to show James Weldon Johnson’s enactment of this “passing zone” in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a work in which history and the problem of reliability are intricately bound. As described in his autobiography, the “passing zone” refers to the complications of maturation and to the historical passage that concerns one particular individual. The “passage” is therefore a movement in time from one moment to another, through the perspective of the subject and his or her lived experience. But this passage zone also condenses racial passage, strongly suggested by the word “passing,” while the birthdate denoting legal adulthood is as determinative as that of a legal racial adscription drawing the color line, a reference few would have missed at the time of the book’s publication, in the

80 Johnshon’s The Autobiography midst of US racial segregation (1896–1964). The passing zone is also, in this multilayered image, the zone of ambiguity and of Bhabha’s (2004) “white but not quite,” the ambivalence of the passage, and the threshold, which is the crucial standpoint for the problem of narrative reliability as it has been established in this book. Indeed, the striking ambivalence of ­Johnson’s novel, in terms of narrative reliability, defines a “passing zone” that gradually extends the false line between reliability and unreliability, and renders through gradation and nuance a much broader scope for the problem of this narrative principle. Furthermore, as this chapter argues, Johnson’s multilayered image vividly illuminates the work’s most salient innovations in further entangling the issue of reliability, by intricately blurring the distinctions between history and fiction through a challenging use of genre and paratexts as components of narrative reliability. His “passing zone,” therefore, invokes a redefinition of the color line, and the understanding of “passage,” insofar as it forces us to reconsider the bildungs of a roman, that passing zone that is the history of a text, and the changes it imposes on its very narrative technique, and in this case specifically its narrative reliability. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man urges us to examine the key uses of genre, paratext, and editions in the interrogation of narrative reliability. From the perspective of narrative theory, as I argue in this chapter, the two editions of this novel can be seen as two different texts because of the formal changes affecting reliability, and yet they are two editions of the same text that are being affected by the change in racial debates. How are we going to consider those two formal elaborations of reliability in what is in fact the same and yet a different text? Johnson’s image of the passing zone can help us fathom that ambiguous terrain, thus far unexplored from the point of view of narratology. One significant underpinning of this “passing zone” that Johnson’s novel enacts, which directly affects its narrative reliability, is the historical aspect, that is, the ways in which the publishing history of the novel shows the historical changes that occurred between the dates of its two editions, 1912 and 1927, and that result in the aforementioned differences in narrative form. As Walter Benn Michaels extensively argues in his book Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995), during the aforementioned period, racial discourse in the United States devel­ enaissance oped the idea of cultural pluralism. Indeed, in The Harlem R in Black and White, George Hutchinson describes how Franz Boas’s shift to considering “cultures” instead of “evolving civilizations,” along with William James’s and John Dewey’s pragmatism, gradually supplanted the biological conception of race in favor of a tendency to think of racial difference in cultural terms, and to embrace cultural pluralism (1995, 29–92). Moreover, as Michaels asserts, the pluralist movement tried to invalidate a political conception of race, asserting that race was not related to citizenship, but to culture. Through that reformulation of the

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  81 concept of race, several races could coexist in America without risking fusion into a single race, which would constitute a menace to the “white race.” In describing the conceptual shift from the “Progressive racism” that was dominant until the 1920s to “nativist pluralism,” ­Michaels points out that [p]rogressive racism was nationalist, concerned with eliminating sectional differences and deploying racial identity on behalf of both the nation and the state. It was hierarchical and assimilationist: white supremacy made possible the Americanization of the immigrant. […] Nativism, by contrast, was plural and anti-assimilationist. (1995, 67) Nativism, in embracing pluralism, changed the perception of “races” within the US, in the sense that [o]nly the pluralist, ultimately unconcerned with whether the different is either better or worse, must judge on the basis of difference as such. In pluralism one prefers one’s own race not because it is superior but because it is one’s own. (Michaels 1995, 66) These changes are most visible in the relations between racial groups since pluralism presumes that difference exists and cannot and must not be overcome. While maintaining racial boundaries, the new dominant cultural conception of race clearly facilitated a discourse of racial pride and the cultivation of one’s own perceived racial traits. Of course, in the African American intellectual tradition, building racial pride through culture was also part of the political agenda. As we will see, the formal changes discernible in the two editions of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man are directly correlated with the pluralist and cultural changes in the conceptions of race. In erasing mulattos as a distinct racial category in the 1920 census, the most ostensibly evident biological aspects of race were comfortably accommodated within a culturally biracial society in which mixed-race individuals were definitely ascribed to the “Negro race.”1 By registering these historical changes in racial discourse, while simultaneously keeping the novel a highly ambiguous passing novel, the text stands in the ambivalent position from which it can be read as an affirmation of cultural racial identity, as much as a “biological” challenge to the very idea of race – called into question by the possibility of “passing for white.” The ambivalent stance of the novel with regard to the changing conceptions of race draws a “passing zone” between the publication dates of its two editions, 1912 and 1927. As we have seen from Walter Benn Michaels and George Hutchinson’s arguments, there was a movement in Johnson’s time that had been

82 Johnshon’s The Autobiography gradually expressing itself publicly toward considering black culture as an integral part of a plural American culture. This had the effect of breaking racial stereotypes rooted in traditional representations of slavery and minstrelsy. 2 Johnson, along with other intellectuals, such as Du Bois and the Harlem Renaissance authors and critics, believed that artists and intellectuals should play a key role in channeling the qualities and values of black culture into the pool of American culture(s), a strategy which they considered the least combative and most effective for fighting against racial prejudice and injustice. In 1928, Johnson claimed: To-day a newer approach is being tried, an approach which discards most of the older methods. It requires a minimum of pleas, or propaganda, or philanthropy. It depends more upon what the Negro himself does than upon what someone does for him. It is the approach along the line of intellectual and artistic achievement by negroes, and may be called the art approach to the Negro problem. This method of approaching a solution of the race question has the advantage of affording great and rapid progress with least friction and of providing a common platform upon which most people are willing to stand. (Johnson 2008 [1928], 210) Johnson’s autobiography Along This Way can be read as a textual demonstration of this desire to develop awareness of and respect for black culture, which in Johnson’s case was most deliberately expressed in music and poetry. In the aforementioned quoted essay, “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist” (1928), Johnson already succinctly assesses the success of the process of integrating black culture into the US establishment, observing that [a] generation ago the Negro was receiving lots of publicity, but nearly all of it was bad. There were front-page stories with such headings as, ‘Negro Criminal,’ ‘Negro Brute.’ To-day one may see undesirable stories, but one may also read stories about Negro singers, Negro actors, Negro authors, Negro poets. The connotations of the very word ‘Negro’ have been changed. A generation ago many Negroes were half or wholly ashamed of the term. To-day they have every reason to be proud of it. (Johnson 2008 [1928], 221) This contribution to “American culture” was seen in racial terms since the individual artists were “bringing something fresh and vital into American art, something from the story and their own racial genius: warmth, color, movement, rhythm, and abandon, depth and swiftness of emotion and the beauty of sensuousness” (Johnson 2008 [1928], 219).

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  83 The interest in African American cultural values went hand in hand with interest in “Negro psychology,” as will be shown later. These efforts contributed to the Advancement of Colored People in terms of social justice, and laid the foundation for that advancement by encouraging resistance through racial pride, thereby reversing the racist social perceptions which had, as Johnson notes, penetrated the self-perceptions of many African Americans. Cultural and artistic contributions became, in the 1920s and 1930s, a strategy in the fight for racial equality, as much as in the building of racial pride. One can argue that the publishing history of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man embodies the history of these racial changes as they pertained to society, culture, politics, and identity. In turn, this changing history profoundly determined the chameleonic nature of the work’s narrative form. As I will show, alterations to the work are determined by the changing ways in which African American culture was produced and received, and display the problems of each historical moment, drawing a passing zone that, in turn, profoundly determines the changing form of the novel and its varying uses of narrative voice in a challenging text that reinscribes the complexities of the problem of narrative reliability. This chapter argues that James Weldon Johnson’s experimentation with narrative reliability in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man responds to, and benefits from, its social context, and the literary tradition that grew within that context. The changing context results in a narration that is intentionally ambivalent in regard not only to narrative form but also to the context to which the first, anonymous 1912 edition belongs; alternatively, the new edition, published in 1927, confined the ambivalence to the interior of the fiction, as a response to the new racial scenario. Revealing authorship is a choice that affects the reception of a work and interrogates the final narrative form of the novel. Furthermore, revealed authorship interrogates the ways in which genres and paratexts (such as signatures, titles, and prefaces) are read in relation to the work as a whole, in an almost postmodern experimentation with narrative form. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man magnified the questions that the title in Lord Jim had raised, regarding the narrative discordance between author, implicit author, and narrator, thus emphasizing the problem of reliability in relation to the question of truth as discussed in the Introduction. Before developing this central idea, a brief summary of the novel will aid the discussion. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man tells the story of a very light-skinned mulatto who decides to “pass for white.” He tells his own secret story, from his birth in Georgia a few years after the end of the Civil War, through his upbringing in Connecticut, growing up with a single, also very light-skinned, mother, to his adulthood. The main character – whose name is never revealed – is gifted with musical and literary talent, which becomes evident from an early age. An incident

84 Johnshon’s The Autobiography at school reveals to him that he is “black” and becomes a turning point in his new double Duboisian perspective of the world. At twelve, he is introduced to his respectable white father, who admires his music, gives him a coin necklace, and sends him a piano. His mother tells him that she was his paternal grandmother’s sewing woman, and that his father was a college man who was about to be married to the young daughter of a great Southern family. The father never pays another visit. After the narrator’s mother dies, he decides to go to Atlanta University, but is robbed, and consequently cannot pursue his academic interests. He gets work at a cigar factory with other blacks, as well as Cuban workers, and teaches music on the side. He moves to New York to find another job, and becomes enchanted with the flourishing nightlife, the gambling and parties at which there is frequent mingling between blacks and whites. His discovery of ragtime and his gift for playing it (adapting classical music to ragtime rhythms) make him the perfect New York high society entertainer, and he becomes a popular performer. He meets a white millionaire who contracts him and brings him to Paris, where the relationship between the two men develops into a warm and rather egalitarian friendship. In Paris, he sees his father and his white family in a theater. There, and later in London, the millionaire introduces him into intellectual and artistic high society, to whom the protagonist successfully introduces ragtime as the “new American music.” Europe makes him realize that he wants to fully explore and exploit African American music, so he returns to the United States to immerse himself in the Southern cradle of black music. There, he is faced with extreme racism, and witnesses the crucial episode of his life: a brutal lynching that prompts his escape back to the North, and his decision to “pass for white,” get a decent job, make money, and forget about his racial constraints altogether. Trouble comes when he feels the need to tell his white future wife that he is black, which makes her break off the relationship until she realizes that she loves him regardless of his race. The novel ends following the death of his wife, who has left him with two children unaware of their blackness, with the main character revising the old manuscripts of his “sacrificed talent” and realizing that he has not accomplished his ambition of leading the race, concluding that: “I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 127).

Anonymity, Autobiography, and the African American Literary Tradition in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was first published anonymously in 1912.3 As an “autobiography” written by a black i­ndividual struggling with a contemporary racial conflict, it perfectly inscribed

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  85 itself in a long tradition of literature by African American authors, which went back to the decades preceding the Civil War. Indeed, the autobiography was from the early African American literature a prominent genre, one that framed slave narratives, and eventually developed into the foundational texts of the African American intellectual political project of racial uplift, from Frederick Douglass’s The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by himself (1845) to Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903).4 Despite the shift from the early “narrative” to the modern “autobiography,” as Robert Stepto observes, “The Autobiography is, like the Douglass and Du Bois narratives, a coherent expression of personalized response to systems of signification and symbolic geography occasioned by social structure” (1997, 44). Considered alongside other personal accounts, and the critical attitude toward similar experiences reported and denounced in the aforementioned autobiographical texts, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’s narration of experiences of racial conflicts and problems related to education, labor conditions, industrialization, regional differences in civil rights and behaviors, the practice of “passing for white,” racial prejudices, and lynching – concerns elaborated through reflections with a strong ideological purpose – as well as a laudatory exploration of black culture, were all features that contemporary readers of a book bearing this title might have expected. 5 Nevertheless, in its first edition in 1912, the text is problematically “anonymous,” and anonymity in this case should be regarded as participation in the problematization of narrative reliability. In principle, anonymity is not strange in the genre tradition since many slave narratives were, after all, anonymous.6 In alignment with its anonymity, the text does not provide the name of the protagonist and is vague about his ­family and geographical origins, silences which, as Valerie Smith observes, while resembling the anonymity of several slave narratives by former slaves who ignored their origins or were looking for protection, do not fit the circumstances in 1912. As she notes, born after the Civil War, and apparently with no black relatives still living, the ex-colored man fears neither recrimination under the slave codes nor recapture under the Fugitive Slave Law. Rather, his circumspection is prompted by the desire to protect his wife relatives from embarrassment, and of course to protect his public identity as a white man. (Smith 1997, 92) Being an autobiography about the secret experience of “passing,” as ­Jessie Fauset noted in her 1912 review for The Crisis, “the work is, as might be expected, anonymous” (Fauset 1997 [1912], 21).

86 Johnshon’s The Autobiography However, as Philippe Lejeune (1975) admits, anonymity is at least a source of ambiguity when applied to autobiographies.7 While I concur with Lejeune’s examination of autobiography as a literary genre, and the discussion that follows implicitly posits autobiographies as literary artifacts, it is essential to consider the genre’s investigation of the limits of history and fiction. That is, examination of the historical context, particularly as it pertains to the author, should not be discarded as irrelevant to the autobiographical text, because it is part of the work’s generic distinction to establish a dialogue with its context in its exploration of the limits and possibilities of discourse. Deprived of historical context, autobiographies make no sense as such. Accordingly, the possible contextual motives behind the anonymity of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man are relevant in that they interact with the reader’s interpretation of the text. The motives behind Johnson’s decision to publish the novel anonymously are an unresolved secret at the center of critical discussion about the work. The reasons provided by Johnson himself in his “real” autobiography are scarce and unsatisfactory. Regarding the signature and title, he states that I turned over in my mind again and again my original idea of making the book anonymous. I also debated with myself the aptness of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as a title. Brander Matthews had expressed a liking for the title, but my brother had thought it was clumsy and too long; he had suggested The Chameleon. In the end, I stuck to the original idea of issuing the book without the author’s name, and kept the title that had appealed to me first. But I have never been able to settle definitely for myself whether I was sagacious or not in these two decisions. (Johnson 2000 [1933], 239) In her carefully researched article “Keeping the ‘Secret of Authorship’: A Critical Look at the 1912 Publication of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” Jacqueline Goldsby, having looked at the historical evidence and Johnson’s unpublished diaries and letters, argues that [w]hen The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was published by Sherman, French, and Company in 1912, Johnson was an ambitious but struggling musician-diplomat whose reputation as either a poet or novelist was not yet secured and could not be developed freely, given the temper of the times. (1998, 244) Goldsby demonstrates that “Johnson not only wanted his anonymously published novel to succeed in the literary market” – as Goellnicht (1997)

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  87 argues too, pointing to Johnson’s choice of a white publisher and the politically and commercially successful genre of black autobiography – 8 but also “the Autobiography was intimately linked to his struggles with the Taft and Wilson administrations to upgrade his diplomatic appointment in the US consular service” (Goldsby 1998, 247).9 To this, we might add Johnson’s personal relations with Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, who, in spite of their profound disagreement over how to proceed with racial uplift, supported him in his professional career, as Levy’s (1973) biography details.10 While there are multiple reasons that might explain the decision to keep the authorship secret, the actual motives, because they are not fully revealed, make the interpretation of this literary event difficult to unravel. For this reason, since the secret authorship is “expected,” in a sense, it is still possible to take The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as Johnson’s biographical account of his life, which has been done in several interpretations of the novel, as Joseph Skerrett (1997) argues, such as those by Sterling Brown, Hugh Gloster, David Littlejohn, ­Stephen Bronz, and Nathan Huggins, which base their interpretations, to different degrees, on Johnson’s biography, arguing that his views are aligned with those of the narrator. Drawing incisively on Johnson’s own autobiography, Joseph Skerrett himself in “Irony and Symbolic Action in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” compares the protagonist with D, Johnson’s close friend, and associates the millionaire with Dr. Summers, interpreting these incorporations symbolically but still drawing correspondences between biographical material and the novel. And yet, even if one might find motives for anonymity, we should keep in mind that, as Frederick Griffiths has pointed out, “anonymous writers are disruptive autobiographical writers. They report on lives that do not culminate happily in the writing of the life, for this final act of self-fashioning is tainted with self-denial” (2002, 331). Furthermore, the biographical correspondences suggested by the genre adscription of the first edition are ambivalently dismissed by the fact that the text is not even an autobiography but actually a novel. The secret of authorship is finally replicated, as Goldsby notes, in an archival secret, the need for the preservation of the secret in passing that makes the book for Sollors an “act of passing” (1997, 265), the secret of genre, and the secret of where the authority of the text as a literary event stands. The anonymous autobiography already posits the problem of uncertainty and opens the door to the interrogation of authority.

Genre, Anonymity, and the Questioning of Truth The manner in which the genre of autobiography inherently blurs the line between fiction and reality, which crucially affects reliability, is further magnified in Johnson’s case by the fact that this is a “hoax”

88 Johnshon’s The Autobiography autobiography since the narrator telling his life story is not James ­Weldon Johnson.11 While autobiography complicates the relationship between fiction and reality, an anonymous autobiography additionally suspends that relationship since “anonymity” is taken as a measure to protect the author from the impact that telling the “truth” might have in its reception context. In light of the later disclosure that the work is fiction, the anonymous first edition can be read as a “hoax” autobiography. From the retrospective consideration of the 1912 text in reference to the “true” authorship of the 1927 edition, the first edition approaches far more closely the untrustworthiness that the narrative itself suggests in its internal textual functioning.12 Ironically, in confusing the boundaries between fiction and reality, the first anonymous edition of the novel partially achieves to point out the human truth of the story as its primary value. Indeed, both Fauset and Matthews (the latter shared with Johnson the secrecy of authorship) reviewed the novel following that line of argument. Fauset claimed that [i]t is indeed an epitome of the race situation in the United States told in the form of an autobiography. The varied incidents, the numerous localities brought in, the setting forth in all its ramifications of our great and perplexing race problem, suggests a work of fiction founded on hard fact. (1997, 21) Matthews, in turn, suggested [t]hat the story of this ex-colored man’s career, from his childhood to his maturity, with its many episodes in many cities, was written by a colored man is indisputable; […] It may not be a record of actual fact, but it contains what is higher than actual fact, the essential truth. It has indisputable veracity, even if it is imagined rather than recollected. (1997, 22) Johnson writes that he is satisfied that [w]hen the book was published (1912) most of the reviewers, though there were some doubters, accepted it as a human document. This was a tribute to the writing, for I had done the book with the intention of its being so taken. (Johnson 2000, 238) Empowered by the confessional tone and by its final authentic value derived from a moral rather than a factual perspective, which Micaela

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  89 Maftei (2013) has recently argued as relevant to the truthfulness rather than the truth of autobiographical narratives, the ambivalence of the anonymous autobiography interrogates the distinctions between fiction and reality, and at the same time proposes to overcome them in order to consider the text as part of a humanist discourse that is penetrating black culture in its building of racial pride.13 Lending weight to Matthews’s description of the veracity of the text, and even going further by turning the text into a political act is the fact that an autobiography of an individual “passing for white,” in contrast to a novel, can claim “passing” as a real contemporary social practice. Furthermore, in maintaining the secrecy of authorship, the novel keeps the secret of “passing for white,” which is essential to the real contemporary practice of passing. Through the formal doubt of authorship, it is possible to think of a real author telling his real story of passing, and accomplishing what the narrator calls “the capital joke I was playing” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 119). That is, as an anonymous autobiography published in 1912 by a white press, and partially targeting a white audience, the text can function as a literary event that shapes a political event: it presents evidence that there are real “passers” in the “Jim Crowed” United States, who represent a threat to racial segregation and to white supremacist fears of losing power and of being secretly poisoned with black blood.14 Goellnicht notes this point from a formal perspective when he suggests that one might argue that the Ex-Coloured Man’s continued passing, with its insistence on the importance of mimicry and his refusal to name himself, becomes an even more threatening position to white society because that society cannot identify and safely control him. He remains an unknown and thus a continually potential subversive force. Once the one who passes reveals himself, his subversive potential is in a sense exhausted; he becomes a known entity and is relegated to his ‘proper’ position. (Goellnicht 1997, 129) As a literary event, Johnson’s work is a step further in the literary treatment of passing as he not only distances himself from the sentimental passing novels, which mostly end with a sheltering return to the embrace of the “black race,” but in dragging in the whole political force of the Douglass-Washington-Du Bois memoirs, and in simulating the act of passing for white, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was indeed a political act in 1912. As a political event – seen in Johnson’s renunciation of his post as consul, when he associates his novel with racial injustice –15, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man denounces the falsity of racial divisions and threatens social stability by revealing a hidden case of passing. Thus, as a passing autobiography rather than

90 Johnshon’s The Autobiography a passing novel, the text does not restrict the issue of passing to the fictional world, but faces it as a real problem by enacting it and purposely constructing the narrowest possible margin of separation between history and fiction. While in the 1912 edition the aforementioned considerations of truth and humanity, and the text as a political event, inspire the text’s reliability in relation to its historical context and existence, at the same time, as many critics that will be discussed later have argued, the adscription to the genre of autobiography is an obvious parody of this genre. Indeed, its generic adscription is also an elaboration of the principle of narrative reliability that, instead of limiting itself to the text within the covers of the book, extends to the “passing zone” that the genre of autobiography draws between the fictional and the historical worlds – what Catelli (1991) calls the “autobiographical space” – a threshold that is readable in the paratexts as well. This leads to a point that narratologists have not sufficiently explored: the interrogation of the principle of reliability starts even before the reader has established a fictional pact with the narrative text itself since the interrogation is located in the very context in which the novel is published. What is this text? Is it a real account? Who is the author? In a literary strategy even closer to the Spanish picaresque novel than that which Vauthier (1973) suggests, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man questions reliability at the level of the literary event taking place in the historical world, specifically at the level of the literary systems pointed out by Tynianov and developed by a long list of critics, most notably Itamar Even-Zohar.

Paratexts: Thresholds of Narrative Reliability As we have already seen, the questioning of narrative reliability occurs at the threshold of narrative, that is, at the level of what Genette called the “paratexts,” at the level of genre, title, signature, and prefaces. As Genette defines it, the paratext is, rather, a threshold […] It is an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text), an edge, or, as Philippe Lejeune put it, ‘a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text.’ Indeed, this fringe, always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that – whether well or poorly understood and achieved – is at the service of a better reception

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  91 for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies). (1997, 2) Genette identifies prefaces as the primary type of paratext, one that is of key importance to the editorial changes made to The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. While Genette identifies several functions of the preface that vary from one preface to another, the main unifying functions are “to get the book read” and “to get the book read properly” (1997, 197). As a paratext, prefaces are a threshold that assume an authoritative – yet not at all authoritarian – guiding function, “the correctness of the authorial (and secondarily, of the publisher’s) point of view” which, as Genette puts it, “is the implicit creed and spontaneous ideology of the paratext. […] Valid or not, the author’s point of view is part of the paratextual performance, sustains it, inspires it, anchors it” (1997, 49). Furthermore, and highly relevant to the argument of this book, Sarah Copland notes that the paratext in general is by its very nature much more in flux than the text itself in the course of its publication history, so it is much more closely tied to contingent historical and cultural circumstances and to actual readers from specific times and places. (2018, n9. 107) The preface as paratext, therefore, is a privileged starting point from which to examine the relationship between text and context. Persuasive or not, the prefaces to The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man suggest readings that, fully nurtured by their contemporaneous contexts, crucially determine different treatments of narrative reliability for each edition. In its 1912 publication, the preface to The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man seems to function as a reinforcement of some of the elements of the title and signature, and of the narrative text itself. It refers to some of the most problematic aspects of the book, in a preliminary and preparatory commentary at the threshold of narrative. Signed by “The Publishers,” yet known today to be Johnson’s writing, the preface attributes the novelty of the book to the fact that it “makes no plea for the Negro, but shows in a dispassionate, though sympathetic manner, conditions as they actually exist between the whites and blacks to-day” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 3). Next, the preface focuses on perceptions that whites and blacks have of each other, exposing the problem of the double audience that prompted much discussion from the end of the nineteenth century and into the 1930s. The preface refers to a privileged “bird’s eyeview” (detached, neither black nor white) that gives a “glimpse behind the scenes of this race-drama” into the “inner life of a Negro in America.”

92 Johnshon’s The Autobiography Most remarkably, it points out less amicably that the book reveals that the “prejudice against the Negro is exerting a pressure, which, in New York and other large cities where the opportunity is open, is actually and constantly forcing an unascertainable number of fair-complexioned colored people over into the white race” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 3). With these brief introductory remarks, the preface points to the dispassionate and sympathetic tone that has come to be the most hotly debated element of ambiguity in the novel, as we will see next. The preface also alludes to the contemporary preoccupation with the double audience, also addressed later, that has been taken as the reason for the original anonymity of the work, and for its false passing for an autobiography, and finally, to the uncertainty of authorship suggesting a current passing experience and revealing it as a common practice, which reinforces the impression that this is indeed a literary event and might be a political act, an “act of passing.” The preface, therefore, highlights those aspects that most unsettle reliability and instill confusion in the reading and interpretation of the text. Looking at the text as a whole, the border between the fictional and the real worlds is located in the paratexts that predetermine those ­inside-outside relationships. The questioning of the “autobiographical pact,” like that of the “fictional pact,” upon which is founded the assumption of trust in the autobiographical voice or the fictional narrator, destabilizes the text from the outset. The exploration of narrative reliability in this novel therefore starts in the paratexts as textual constituents already on, or within, the covers of the book. As we have seen, the 1912 preface to the novel insists upon the idea of an objective account, and points to uncertainty as a factor that would undoubtedly influence our reading of the narrative it frames.

Questioning Reliability within the Fiction: Between the Joke of Unreliability and the Sympathy of Confession Though echoed in the paratexts, the problem of reliability occurs within the narrative itself in a manner similar to the other novels discussed in this book, and to the narratives studied by narratologists in their theorizations of the problem of reliability/unreliability. The paratexts here constitute another layer of the problem of narrative reliability, one that is echoed or doubled in the fiction starting in Chapter I of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, through the cynicism of the first-person narrative voice. Even though critical discussion about the novel has frequently dealt with the uses of irony and the narrative authority of the narrative voice, there is no study that analyzes its effects from a narratological perspective, least of all one that connects its technical nuances to the revision of the factors intervening in the exploration of narrative reliability as a theoretical concept. This book contributes to criticism of Johnson’s novel with this new approach, and it will, in turn, use his novel as a revelation of new

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  93 textual components through which to consider the problem of narrative reliability. My narratological close reading, therefore, should tease out the complexities that The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man explores in regard to the problem of narrative reliability in fiction. As we will see, from a general narrative perspective, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man mainly displays Cohn’s (2000) discordant narrative voice – or a general misregarding, in Phelan and Martin’s (1999) classification – one that the reader feels is providing a not-­fullytrustworthy moral perspective and judgment of the narrated events, but which does not necessarily question the facts, and which in this case is not underegarding but misregarding. In other words, the narrative voice shows a self-conscious act of judgmental deception. There is strong, albeit scattered, evidence of unreliability, unavoidable in any interpretation of this novel. It may be found in the very first two paragraphs of the novel, which read: I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life, the secret which for some years I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions; and it is a curious study to me to analyze the motives which prompt me to do it. I feel that I am led by the same impulse which forces the unfound-out criminal to take somebody into his confidence, although he knows that the act is liable, even almost certain, to lead to his undoing. I know that I am playing with fire, and I feel the thrill which accompanies that almost fascinating pastime; and, back of it all, I think I find a sort of savage and diabolical desire to gather up all the little tragedies of my life, and turn them into a practical joke on society. And, too, I suffer a vague feeling of unsatisfaction, of regret, of almost remorse from which I am seeking relief, and of which I shall speak in the last paragraph of this account. (Johnson 2004 [1912], 5) This beginning of what Jeffrey Williams calls “narrative reflexivity” (1998) and Cohn has labeled “gnomic commentary” (2000, 307) is, to say the least, shocking. It builds upon both the cultivation of intimacy and its destruction, by noting the extreme parodical distance of the joke on society, and therefore the joke that the narrator almost menacingly plays upon the reader. The other key moments in the expression of narrative unreliability occur when the main character escapes from the South, after the turning point of the lynching, goes back to New York, and decides to pass for white. There, he refers to the joke again, and the private ways in which he laughs at people. As he asserts: The anomaly of my social position often appealed strongly to my sense of humor. I frequently smiled inwardly at some remark not

94 Johnshon’s The Autobiography altogether complimentary to people of color; and more than once I felt like disclaiming: ‘I am a colored man. Do I not disprove the theory that one drop of Negro blood renders a man unfit?’ Many a night when I returned to my room after an enjoyable evening, I laughed heartily over what struck me as the capital joke I was playing. (Johnson 2004 [1912], 119) Again, the protagonist’s attitude is close to cynicism, a complex elaboration of Du Bois’s double consciousness. This is strongly reinforced by his valuing of making good money and his declarations that he “began then to contract the money fever, which later took strong possession of me. I kept my eyes open, watching for a chance to better my condition” (­Johnson 2004 [1912], 117), a distant moral tone that is emphasized by expressions like: “What an interesting and absorbing game is money-­ making!” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 117). This exciting moment in the protagonist’s life, in which he feels for some reason that passing might be a successful way out of pain for the sake of racial responsibilities, is immediately followed by a romantic episode. As he writes, “Then I met her, and what I had regarded as a joke was gradually changed into the most serious question of my life” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 144). At the end, the narrator confesses that he has ambivalent feelings provoked by the classic mulatto internal racial division.16 In a very intimate tone, he confesses that [i]t is difficult for me to analyze my feelings concerning my present position in the world. Sometimes it seems to me that I have never really been a Negro, that I have been only a privileged spectator of their inner life; at other times, I feel that I have been a coward, a deserter, and I am possessed by a strange longing for my mother’s people. (Johnson 2004 [1912], 126) Equally confusing, right before the close of the novel, he considers black public figures, such as Booker T. Washington, and admits that [b]eside them I feel small and selfish. I am an ordinary successful white man who has made a little money. They are men who are making history and a race. I, too, might have taken part in a work so glorious. (Johnson 2004 [1912], 127) This textual evidence forces us to take the problem of reliability in this novel as it appears in the other novels under study here: as an unresolved problem. Similarly to Lord Jim, alongside clear evidence of the narrator’s unreliability, the novel is also permeated by a powerful confessional tone that lends strength to the authenticity and remorse in the narrator’s

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  95 voice. And therein lies the heart of the problem. The radical cynicism encountered at the beginning and reproduced toward the end is compensated for by the intimacy of the voice, the sharing of the confession, and the set of values that go along with the African American tradition of racial uplift. But there is no way to obviate the fact that the narrator explicitly compares himself to a “criminal,” who looks for a selfish and yet ultimately unsuccessful redemption via the reader-confessor, an effect reminiscent of the narrator’s passing of the secret to the reader in Henry James’s The Figure in the Carpet. Similar to a narrative strategy that Ralph Ellison will adopt in his fictional preface to Invisible Man – which Huston Baker (1973) signaled as Johnson’s successor – part of the ambivalence with which the problem of narrative reliability is discussed in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man has to do with the simple fact that the cynicism that constitutes the main feature of the novel’s narrative unreliability is highly compensated for by a deep confessional tone that pulls the reader into the explicitly defined role of confessor. Johnson situates the unreliable cynical voice in the narrative framework, specifically in the fictional preface to the narrative, almost precisely as Ellison later did, thus laying a foundation of unreliability at the threshold of the story by linking it to the very narrative situation. The narrative of the events then changes to a confessional tone that conveys intimacy, which, as Terrence Doody notes, is intrinsic to confession since confession – at least when not forced, I would add – almost always “relies on the power intimacy itself can have to create a response” (1980, 23). This infuses the narrative with a dramatic sense of events, seeking empathy, and imbuing the work with the narrative tone of African American sufferings evident in many texts in the tradition of the tragic mulatto literature and slave narratives. The voice draws the reader into a close relationship with, and elicits a sympathetic attitude toward, the narrative and its voice.17 The effect of this kind of unreliability affecting the reader’s emotional and ethical responses qualifies as “bonding unreliability” on the part of the narrator. As quoted in the Introduction, Phelan defines “bonding unreliability” as the discrepancies between the narrator’s reports, interpretations, or evaluations, and the interferences of the authorial audience have the paradoxical result of reducing the interpretative, affective, or ethical distance between the narrator and the authorial audience. In other words, although the authorial audience recognizes the narrator’s unreliability, that unreliability includes some communication that the implied author – and thus the authorial audience – endorses. (2007, 225) Unlike Lord Jim and Absalom, Absalom!, where the questioning of reliability permeates from the narrative framework into each of the events

96 Johnshon’s The Autobiography told, in this case, the more radical warning at the beginning is softened and almost dismissed by a persistently confessional narrative mode, which produces the bonding effect. There is a history of criticism concerned with confessions in relation to law, to psychoanalysis, to narrative, to religion, often linked to social punishment and control, or to unresolved conflicts in the inner self.18 With the exception of El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of this World], all the novels in this book can be read as confessional narratives, involving conversations that in telling secrets function as confessions, and appeal to a search for intimate truth as part of the fictional world. There is no oral conversation in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, but the novel nevertheless establishes, much in the manner of Rousseau’s Confessions, an explicit narratee that functions in the writing as a listener or confessor in this particular mode of narration. In Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, Paul de Man has synthesized confession in the following way: To confess is to overcome guilt and shame in the name of truth: it is an epistemological use of language in which ethical values of good and evil are superseded by values of truth and falsehood, one of the implications being that vices such as concupiscence, envy, greed, and the like are vices primarily because they compel one to lie. By stating things as they are, the economy of ethical balance is restored and redemption can start in the clarified atmosphere of a truth that does not hesitate to reveal the crime in all its horror. (1979, 279) Indeed, one of the defining features of the confession is the necessary assumption of truth. As Peter Brooks also explains in Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature: Confession is considered to bear a special stamp of authenticity. From the thirteenth century, when the roman Church began to require annual confession from the faithful, it has become in Western culture a crucial mode of self-examination; from the time of the early Romantics to the present day, confession has become a dominant form of self-expression, one that bears special witness to personal truth. In an increasingly secularized culture, truth of the self and to the self have become the markers of authenticity, and confession – written or spoken – has come to seem the necessary, though risky, act through which one lays bare one’s most intimate self, to know oneself and to make oneself known. (2000, 9)

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  97 There are many subtle ways in the novel in which the call for authenticity and trust comes from an appeal for “community” with the speaker, an affective bond that Doody understands as essential to establishing the relationship between confessor and speaker that in her view is specific to confessional narratives (1980, 6). Aside from the remarkable confession at the close, and the introduction to the romantic episode, appeals to shared experiences repeatedly compel the reader to become emotionally involved with the intimate life of Johnson’s narrator: In the life of everyone there is a limited number of unhappy experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in long years after they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life. (Johnson 2004 [1912], 15) We find comments dealing with the narrator’s own values, such as honesty: “It is strange how in some things honest people can be dishonest without the slightest compunction” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 19), or sympathy for the suffering of others: “but I have rather sympathy than censure for these victims, for I know how easy it is to slip into a slough from which it takes a herculean effort to leap” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 70); and deep feelings and sensitivity: “I will not rake over this, one of the two sacred sorrows of my life; nor could I describe the feeling of unutterable loneliness that fell upon me” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 32), or “I may live to be a hundred years old, but I shall never forget the agonies I suffered that night” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 41), or “My affection for him was so strong […] I could easily fill several chapters with reminiscences of him; but for fear of tiring the reader I shall go on with my narration” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 90). The narrator cultivates a sense of complicity with the reader using comments such as “Perhaps the reader has already guessed” (Johnson 2004, 20) or “Of course, the reader must know” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 21), and expresses a concern for the accuracy of his account: “I do not wish to mislead my readers into thinking that […]” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 52), and “No one who has traveled can question the world-conquering influence of ragtime, and I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say […]” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 54). By way of these compelling and mostly metafictional comments, the reader becomes, as expected from the beginning, a confessor. A confessor, and a companion sharing the sociocultural and political contexts of race relations, through the long analyses and informed descriptions of the contemporaneous situation of African Americans in the US in the serious and concerned tone reminiscent of Washington and Du Bois, which compelled later authors of the Harlem Renaissance to take the text as a model of African American racial authenticity. The sociological didactic

98 Johnshon’s The Autobiography commentary – which Heather Russell argues is a “social authorial voice” that highlights the discontinuity with the narrator’s voice and creates a formal ambivalence proper to African Atlantic narratives ­(Russell 2009, 45) – contributes to the restoration of narrative ­authority.19 The sociological and the intimate narrative modes combined have the effect of producing an authenticity in confession that seeks understanding and redemption through sympathy and ideological accord, in a manner similar to that of Jim’s confession. While confessions presume the revelation of truth, the fact that they are merely speech acts, or performative speech, complicates their effect and form. Building on the French proverb: Qui s’accuse s’excuse, and following De Man, Peter Brooks argues that beneath the necessary assumption of truth in any confession, “[t]here is something inherently unstable and unreliable about the speech-act of confession, about its meaning and its motives” (2000, 23). The ambivalence in the fact that the speech act might be true but the content of the confession might be biased makes confession a form of self-exculpation. Confession brings into the speech act several constituents that problematize its presumed reliability. Among other things, it implies a bond in the dialogue that contains, and activates, elements of dependency, subjugation, fear, the desire of appropriation, the wish to appease and to please. It leads to the articulation of secrets, perhaps to the creation of a hitherto unrealized truth – or perhaps the simulacrum of truth. (Brooks 2000, 35) This inherent instability is exaggerated by the juxtaposition of the conspicuously unreliable voice at the start, and the confessional tone that follows. The trust built throughout the narrative is brought into question in the complex episode of the lynching scene. Fleming (1971), Nownes (2005), and others have taken the episode and the consequent attitude of the ex-colored man as a major instance of what they have perceived as the disturbingly “dispassionate” attitude of the narrator. In the scene, the narrator witnesses and describes in a rather objective manner the cruelty of the situation: His eyes were dull and vacant, indicating not a single ray of thought. Evidently the realization of his fearful fate had robbed him from whatever reasoning power he had ever possessed. He was too stunned and stupefied even to tremble. Fuel was brought from everywhere, oil, the torch; the flames crouched for an instant as though to gather strength, then leaped up as high as their victim’s head. He squirmed, he writhed, strained at his chains, then gave out cries and groans that I shall always hear. The cries and groans were choked

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  99 off by the fire and smoke; but his eyes, bulging from their sockets, rolled from side to side, appealing in vain for help. Some of the crowd yelled and cheered, others seemed appalled at what they had done, and there were those who turned away sickened at the sight. I was fixed to the spot where I stood, powerless to take my eyes from what I did not want to see. (Johnson 2004 [1912], 113) Added to the “coldness” of this description is the narrator’s consequent decision: I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead. All the while I understood that it was not discouragement or fear or search for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals. (Johnson 2004 [1912], 115) These are, indeed, the most controversial passages of the novel. Failure to provide a passionate account reflective of his own sufferings can come across as moral distance; discordant narration; or an “unsympathetic,” “dispassionate,” “inhuman,” or “unsolidary” reaction (Fleming 1978, 38, 1971), or, worse, can make the narrator complicit in dehumanizing the victim (Japtok 1996, 43; Warren 1995). In a contrasting view, Goldsby (2006) reads the lynching scene as a “metonymic” description that avoids the realist approach because of the traumatic effects that modern mass-consumption of violence is daily generating, destroying the limits of what can be conceived as “real,” and explaining the profound shift in the narrator’s life. 20 Similarly, Rebeccah Bechtold sees the novel as commenting the “aesthetization of violence” as a strategy in which the novel as a whole “over-aestheticizes to draw attention to the political implications of aesthetic representation” (2011, 34) as the (im)possibility of responding to violence, thus suggesting irony through the possibility of a double narrative that generates distance at a structural level rather than at the level of the narrator. 21 For Nownes (2005), the detachment is a conscious and ironic adoption of a double consciousness that refuses even the duboisian perspective, which still determined racial definitions and relations. The complexity of the narrative treatment of the scene arises from the tension produced by an uncommon “dispassion” in a narrative that has thus far been so deeply invested with emotional involvement by the narrator and reader, moreover, in a scene

100 Johnshon’s The Autobiography that depicts lynching as a most inhuman yet common practice that produces real trauma in both life and narrative. The narrator’s reaction of laughing at society, found in the chapter following the lynching scene, is frequently used to support the argument that the narrator is suspiciously distant, and reinforces the effect of that ambivalence. Once again, laughter functions to reinforce the distance between narrator and reader, violently tearing the narrator’s affiliation with the Negro race in a betrayal unheard of in other passing novels, where the initial, understandable yet condemnable, betrayal of passing is redeemed by an acknowledgment of, and willingness to belong to, the African American community. And yet the effect of laughter works in the opposite direction as well since, as Glenda Carpio argues in Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, by most accounts, African American humor, like other humor that arises from oppression, has provided a balm, a release of anger and aggression, a way of coping with the painful consequences of racism. In this way, it has been linked to one of the three major theories of humor: the relief theory made popular by Freud. (2008, 5)22 As the ex-colored man suggests, “[i]n many instances, a slight exercise of the sense of humor would save much anxiety of soul” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 111). Charles W. Chesnutt’s sense of humor, Gwendolyn Brooks’s images of laughing, or George Schuyler’s parody of the limits and functions of mimicking in Black No More are clear instances of a multilayered laughter providing different responses to the hard, violent, and oppressive situation of blacks from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In this sense, from the literal “laughing fit to kill” of the mob, or the desperate product of a lynching, to the ironic detachment of a social joke, there is a spectrum of treatments that have in common humor as a response. In fact, laughter, as an extreme form of humor, is often no less ambiguous than subtle irony, as Johnson himself suggests in his autobiography, referring to the stigmatized black laughter: I wish I knew as much about the philosophy of laughter. Their deep, genuine laughter often puzzled and irritated me. Why did they laugh so? How could they laugh so? Was this rolling, pealing laughter merely echoes from a mental vacuity or did it spring from an innate power to rise above the ironies of life? Or were they, in the language of a line from one of the blues, “Laughing to keep from crying”? Were they laughing because they were only thoughtless? Were they laughing at themselves? Were they laughing at the white man? I found no complete answer to these questions. Probably, some

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  101 of all the elements suggested entered in. But I did discover that a part of this laughter, when among themselves, was laughter at the white man. (Johnson 2000 [1933], 120) Johnson’s uncertainties on how to understand black laughter are not dissimilar to the reader’s uncertainties upon facing the ex-colored man’s laughing “heartily” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 119), in the chapter following the lynching. Indeed, Johnson experiments with reliability as a form of textual irony that is brought to the level of social irony through the publishing of a hoax autobiography, and through the mischievous secret practice of passing for white. 23 He is playing a joke on society. The narrator’s cynicism can therefore be viewed as a way of facing social repression, or as a disdainful perspective that the reader is encouraged to reject. In fact, unreliability is a kind of joke using and exploiting humor and trickery, just as much as “passing” can be seen as a dramatic trick on white society, one that ambivalently invites understanding and disapproval. 24 In spite of the confessional tone suggesting authenticity, the clear textual evidence of unreliability and the lynching episode have compelled critics to elaborate on the distance imposed between narrator and reader. This distance is constructed through irony that serves as evidence of discordant narration. Critics have provided arguments, following the textual steering, to doubt the narrator’s account on the basis of the ex-colored man’s systematic “evasiveness” (Smith 1997, 94), “emotional passivity and detachment” (Pisiak 1997, 27), 25 “excessive concern with security and self-protection” (Garrett 1971, 6), and evident alignment with white middle-class capitalist and classist values, and the discrepancy between his pretentious ambitions – evoked when he says that “[t]his was gratifying to a certain sense of vanity of which I have never been able to rid myself” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 59) – and his mediocre achievements, which result in his “less than heroic” “perils and travails” (Stepto 1997, 51). 26 While the confessional tone mitigates the distance for some time, the effects of those preliminary warnings about the narrator’s “impulse which forces the unfound-out criminal to take somebody to his confidence,” and his unsettling comment that he is “playing with fire” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 5) continue to resonate. This analysis of the effects of the 1912 edition prompts a final key question: how does the simultaneous construction and erosion of narrative authority affect the paratexts, and how do these, in turn, affect the fictional voice? As demonstrated in this chapter, the questioning of reliability that narratologists have generally applied to fictional worlds, when applied to paratexts, amplifies and extends the interrogation to examine the rigid lines that separate fiction from history and the indeterminate location of reliability within historical discourse. It is arguable

102 Johnshon’s The Autobiography that in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), title, signature, and preface, as the most relevant paratexts, work together to enhance the narrative ambivalence in the expression of the problem of narrative reliability in what is presented to the public as an autobiography. Certainly, as a prominent example of the dynamic between paratext and text with regard to reliability, it seems that the choice of anonymity, over pseudonymity, for instance, reveals that doubt rather than falseness shaped the narrative. 27 The playful articulation of trust and authenticity, framed through an aggressive narrative that challenges the reader’s implicit trust, only to rapidly earn it again through the confessional narrative mode, makes The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man a novel that problematizes narrative reliability rather than a novel featuring unreliability. The novel does not “lie” by supplying a “fake” author, and yet it leaves the shadow of doubt regarding authorship in a genre that is most dependent on an author as part of its claim to authenticity. The genre confusion between novel and autobiography also reveals that one of the most problematic aspects of reliability is its referral to the idea of “truth,” in this case particularly emphasized by the presumption of “historical truth.” In linking the cover page to the beginning of the narrative text, Johnson’s 1912 preface amplifies the unsettling relations connoted by the title and signature, and fully developed within the fictional narrative, by underlining the truth of the story, and justifying its anonymity. The concern with reliability therefore echoes across Genette’s narrative levels, strengthening the bonds between the fiction and its historical context. Furthermore, the paratexts’ interrogation of reliability reproduces the nuances through which the problem is examined. In other words, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in its 1912 edition betrays the reader’s expectations by defying the genre’s prescribed use of titles, continues to mislead in the preface, then confuses the reading rather than misleads it by not providing the author’s name. Echoing what the paratexts anticipated, the narrative voice in the fictional text wedges a discordance into the bond between narrator and reader by boldly pronouncing a confessional speech act that leaves the narrator, as the implicit author of the autobiography, in a type of moral, historical, and formal limbo, in one of the “passing zones,” resting precisely on transition or, as Genette puts it, on transaction.

New Edition, New Paratexts, New Narrative Form? In 1927, Alfred A. Knopf published the second edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, signed by James W. Johnson and with a preface by the white patron writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten, who encouraged the novel’s re-edition. 28 In some respects, the new edition is a different book both in formal terms and as a literary event. 29 Although any new edition of a book can be considered a

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  103 different book, it is arguable that the changes between these two editions are so significant that one is forced to consider the problem of significantly distinct versions of a text, and how changes like those in the paratexts need to be taken into account in any interpretation of ­Johnson’s novel.30 Unfortunately, Genette’s pivotal study is, as he himself admits, a typology rather than a consideration of how paratexts work and interrelate in a text. Moving beyond Genette’s typology, the question pursued here is therefore: How do the changes in the paratexts affect the novel as a whole in terms of form? How does the revelation in genre generated by the discovery of authorship influence the way the text demands to be read? And finally, how does the new preface intervene as a new guide to reading, and in its interaction with the other paratexts and the main fictional text? More specific to the discussion here, how do paratexts intervene in the formal configuration of the problem of narrative reliability? And, going further, if the changes to those paratexts register and interact with the new historical context, how do historical changes intervene, through paratexts, in the elaboration of the problem of narrative reliability? This chapter argues that The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man experiments with paratexts and the contemporary racial conflict linked to them, as textual components in the exploration of narrative reliability, and therefore expands the limits within which narrative reliability has been critically discussed thus far. 31 The 1927 edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was published in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, was enthusiastically backed by one of the movement’s most prominent patrons, and was revealed to be written by a nationally respected African American diplomat, essayist, songwriter, poet, and political activist in the NAACP. Johnson being a respected political leader of the Harlem Renaissance, along with Alain Locke and Du Bois, his name on the book cover certainly made a difference, at least to the African American reader. In 1927, the essence of the author’s political career and his stance was unambiguous. The new preface effectively accompanied and encouraged a new reading of the novel in accordance with the changes in the dominant conceptions of race, now culturally and pluralistically understood, reflecting the changes within the African American community itself, which was headed toward a more deeply rooted tradition of racial pride. In his preface, Van Vechten makes a few important remarks: (1) he denies that it is an autobiography since “it has little to do with Mr. Johnson’s own life” (1997, 25), though he underlines the text’s “truth” once again, writing that “it is imbued with his own personality and feeling, his views of the subjects discussed, so that to a person who has no previous knowledge of the author’s own history, it reads like a real autobiography” (1997, 25); (2) the preface insists once again on the portrait of a collective racial experience since “it reads like a composite autobiography of the Negro race in the United States in modern times”

104 Johnshon’s The Autobiography (Van Vechten 1997, 25); (3) he notes “how much has been accomplished by the race” (Van Vechten 1997, 25), mentioning better working conditions, the development of Harlem, and the great number of contemporary African American artists; (4) he insists on the Autobiography being a “source-book for the study of Negro psychology” and “a portrait of Negro character,” in the tradition of Washington, Chesnutt, and ­Dunbar, yet one that chooses “an all-embracing scheme” (1997, 26), describing “pretty nearly every phase of Negro life, North and South and even in Europe” (1997, 26), and he lists all those aspects of Negro life and “character.” Van Vechten notes the racial cultural value of the text to the enterprise of recounting and bringing to the surface “Negro” cultural values in a demonstration of the importance of black culture, and of the shift from the stereotypical representations of the “Old Negro” to the discernible achievements of Locke’s “New Negro.” Van Vechten reads the Autobiography through the lens of its historical moment in 1927, and the black writer and race leader who wrote the book back in 1912. 32 Nevertheless, his preface invites a reading that focuses on that truthful account of “Negro life,” “Negro psychology,” and the struggles evoked in the confessional and sympathetic body of the narrative, dissipating any of the disquieting uncertainties around the narrator’s voice. Under his guidance, the work almost becomes an ethnographic document of “how a coloured man lives and feels” (Van Vechten 1997 [1927], 27), rather than a novel, precisely because it establishes a less ambivalent correspondence between genre and truth, and between the fictional and the real worlds: the narrator is not the author, and this is a novel; more specifically, this novel is a fictional autobiography that tells the collective life of the Negro race.33 The novel, after all, seems to fit much better within the parameters of the Harlem-cultivated passing novel. The new signature and the relationship between Johnson, the author, and Johnson, the real public man and artist endow Van Vechten with a great discursive authority that enables him to write a preface that establishes from the outset a reading that points to the “plain truth” of the story in regard to humanity and race, wiping out any of the problematic formal aspects of the previous edition. Not authorial like the 1912 preface, Van Vechten’s preface provides the novel with an external contextual authority that buttresses the interpretation of the novel as primarily being intended for a “Negro audience” rather than for a white one, in a new context in which black literature had a stronger focus on building racial pride and achieving racial uplift, as we have seen earlier. 34 There is a remarkable difference between the 1912 and 1927 prefaces that highlights the changes in racial conceptions and the growing importance of cultural pluralism and that contributes to what we might consider a different form of the novel. This is the problem of the double audience. As Johnson famously wrote in “The Dilemma of the Negro

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  105 Author” – in what has been read as an elaboration of Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness: “[t]he Aframerican author faces a special problem which the plain American author knows nothing about – the problem of the double audience” (Johnson 2008 [1928], 202). From his point of view, “there needs to be a fusion of the two audiences into one,” because thus far, “[t]he situation […] constantly subjects him to the temptation of posing and posturing for the one audience or the other; and the sincerity and soundness of his work are vitiated whether he poses for white or black” (Johnson 2008 [1928], 207). Consequently, “when a Negro author does write so as to fuse white and black America into one interested and approving audience he has performed no slight fear, and has most likely done a sound piece of literary work” (Johnson 2008 [1928], 208). As insisted upon in the 1912 preface, the problem of the double audience was far more present for the first widely acknowledged African American authors as conceptions of racial hierarchy had not yet been transformed into a racial pluralism, and the efforts to break stereotypes and publish were more likely to succeed when authors followed the moderate and conciliatory modes suggested by Booker T. Washington. This was so much the case in a cultural context imbued with images of ­A frican Americans drawn from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Uncle Remus’ stories that when Charles W. Chesnutt published The Conjure Woman (1899) with the white Houghton Mifflin Company, the publisher did not mention that he was a black author because, as Chesnutt points out in his essay “Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem,” “at that time a literary work by an American of acknowledged color was a doubtful experiment, both for the writer and for the publisher, entirely apart from its intrinsic merit” (2002 [1931], 910). While this omission of his race was later heavily criticized, Chesnutt tells how in 1899 it never occurred to him “to claim any merit of it” (2002 [1931], 910). Paul Dunbar received similar criticism for his ambivalence in regard to the audience he was addressing, and for what was deemed to some extent an accommodation with the prevailing image of African Americans, and a craft of African American art that was much more acceptable to a white audience. At the core of this debate, Dunbar’s use of black dialect became part of a long discussion about artistic uses of dialect, which was simultaneously perceived as a sign of rigid stereotyping that helped perpetuate an imposed racial categorization, or as the distinct racial language of the New Negro. 35 Part of the debate involved the ways in which white audiences had, over the decades, been imposing acceptable “Negro stereotypes” as the “contented slave,” the “wretched freeman,” the “comic Negro,” the “brute Negro,” the “tragic mulatto,” the “local color Negro,” and the “exotic primitive,” which Sterling Brown identified in “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” (1933) and which also concerned Johnson, Chesnutt, and Du Bois. The debate also referred to the still-intolerable representations of African Americans, such as those Johnson considered

106 Johnshon’s The Autobiography in 1926, when he wrote that “white America does not welcome seeing the Negro competing with the white man on what it considers the white man’s own ground” (Johnson 2008 [1926], 205). On the opposite side, there was concern with the images of Negro life that from Johnson’s point of view were taboos within African American art: images of gambling, night life, urban life, and capitalist ambitions, which, due to the influence that the double audience had exerted on the African ­A merican literary tradition, were still felt by African American authors as not fitting the “defensive and exculpatory” attitudes of wanting to appear nice to both audiences. This is the charge Johnson lays against African American literature in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance in “The Dilemma of the Negro Author.” Johnson’s novel already attempted to fuse these audiences in 1912 by confronting and parodying the stereotypes of African Americans, while simultaneously exposing the taboos that still concerned black artists. Nevertheless, the development of a more self-conscious African American audience partly explains the different presentation of the 1927 edition. By 1927, things had changed in the worlds of US art and publishing. As Chesnutt notes, “Negro writers no longer have any difficulties in finding publishers” (2002 [1931], 912). Evoking the changes for the Negro artists as a result of a cultural change that Johnson noted in “Racial Prejudice and the Negro Artist,” Chesnutt observes that I have lived to see, after twenty years or more, a marked change in the attitude of publishers and the reading public in regard to the Negro fiction. The development of Harlem, with its large colored population in all shades, from ivory to ebony, of all degrees of culture, from doctors of philosophy to the lowest grade of illiteracy; its various origins, North American, South American, West Indian and African; its ambitious business and professional men, its actors, singers, novelists and poets, its aspirations and demands for ­equality – without which any people would merit only contempt – presented a new field for literary exploration which of recent years has been cultivated assiduously. (2002 [1931], 911)36 The period comprised between 1912 and 1927 had brought the vogue of “things Negro” which, as Langston Hughes observed in his celebrated essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” at least “brought [the Negro] forcibly to the attention of his own people among whom for so long, unless the other race had noticed him beforehand, he was a prophet with little honor” (2001 [1926], 42). The re-edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man undoubtedly fitted into that new exploration, and into a growing African American audience that was eager to receive new perceptions of their racial identity and new

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  107 defining features of which to be proud.37 Still a subject of debate, in which figures like Schuyler did not support affirmation of racial difference, the question of racial definition in a context increasingly permeated by the pragmatism and cultural pluralism of the second half of the 1920s was marked by an increasingly positive view of racial difference. As Langston Hughes famously claimed in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”: to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering ‘I want to be white’, hidden in the aspirations of his people, to ‘Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro – and beautiful!’ (2001 [1926], 43) In addition to contributing to the earlier mentioned racial pride, Du Bois suggests that beauty is for him an “apostle of truth and right,” for which reason his own art is bound to justice and is therefore unashamedly “propaganda and ever must be” (2001 [1926], 49). 38 The prefaces to the 1912 and 1927 texts powerfully emphasize the differences between the two editions in regard to the problem of the double audience, demanding two distinct readings that generate two different explorations of narrative reliability. When the 1912 preface explains that it is very likely that the Negroes of the United States have a fairly correct idea of what the white people of the country think of them, for that opinion has for a long time been as is still being constantly stated; but they are themselves more or less a sphinx to the whites, and later remarks that “it is curiously interesting and even vitally important to know what are the thoughts of ten millions of them concerning the people among whom they live,” it clearly makes an appeal to a white audience, which is a secondary concern in the 1927 preface. The attempt to fuse audiences in 1912, when there is hardly a cohesive black audience, and the novel’s “elevation” of the reader “where he can catch a bird’s-eye view of the conflict which is being waged” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 3) echoes the ex-colored man’s decision to “neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race” (Johnson 2004 [1912], 115), which places him into a kind of “ex-colored” racial limbo or passing zone in which the 1912 novel and the 1912 anonymous author stand. 39 The “neither-nor” mulatto dilemma of what Chesnutt’s The House behind the Cedars referred to as the “new people” refrains from making a clear racial choice of audience, claiming the “passing zone” as a legitimate space – perhaps unsatisfying, or perhaps a perfect fusion that would overcome the double audience. This possibility makes the 1912 edition

108 Johnshon’s The Autobiography stand in an extremely ambiguous position in terms of the way(s) in which the text relates to its white and black audiences, seemingly succumbing “to the demands of the white publishing establishment” and simultaneously “mimicking the discourse of white authority” (Goellnicht 1997, 120), thus in fact playing a joke on both white and black audiences. In downplaying the importance of the double audience, promoting the real author Johnson as a novelist, explicitly inscribing The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man into the African American tradition, and viewing the novel as a composite map of Negro psychology, life, and sufferings, the 1927 preface gains a more discrete black audience that is now far more prepared and willing to embrace racial difference and to take The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as a seminal text.40 In light of the significant changes that the paratexts of the 1912 and 1927 editions introduce into the formal conception of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the new question for narratology is: How is the treatment of the problem of narrative reliability affected by these paratexts? As it has been argued earlier, the 1927 edition of the Autobiography seems to remove narrative reliability as a problem exclusive to fiction, one active only from the moment the reader accepts the fictional pact, and applying exclusively to the interior of the fiction rather than to the external circumstances framing the fictional text. The ex-colored man as a narrator is still problematic in his balance between cynicism and authenticity, but this is a problem now confined to the fictional world. The problem of reliability has once again shifted from an interrogation of the problem of truth in discourse – fictional and historical – to the problem of truth in fiction, and in the relations between implicit author, text, and authorial audience, that occur within the textual fictional world. That is a major shift from the 1912 edition, which had doubled the problem of narrative reliability by its ambivalent use of paratexts. The traditionally considered fictional text echoed in the relation between fictional and real worlds, grew beyond the limits of the fictional world in the doubled anonymity of author and narrator, and the autobiographical invitation of identifying the real author with the narrative voice of the recounted events. Furthermore, the unnamed narrator is reflected in the unnamed author, an unknown individual who might be secretly living amongst us. Transcribing the problem of reliability to the relation between fictional text and real context, the 1912 novel as a literary event questioned social discourse – in this case, a racial discourse that shaped segregation – a discourse that occurs within the realm of history, a questioning that makes that which is being said much more valid for the current sociopolitical discourse. Once the veil of anonymity is removed, the problematization of narrative reliability within the novel’s historical context disappears as well, and the novel becomes an actual novel, clearly located within the realm of fiction. The questioning of reliability obviates the effects of uncertainty that a “passer” would

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  109 have generated in the contemporaneous context, therefore appealing far more to the reader of fiction than to the US citizen, reducing secretism to a fictional motif and more easily reconciling with the passing novels and with the racial discourse of its time, leaving therefore only the internal framework of fiction as the locus for the questioning of a larger ironic discourse, the interrogation of which has been abruptly cut short by the author’s signature and the consequent clarification of the text’s genre.41 These lines of inquiry open up many complex and thorny questions, to which there can be no fully satisfactory answer. The analysis of the crucial differences created by paratexts in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man undertaken here invites an investigation of the unstable boundaries not only between reliability and unreliability, between autobiography and the novel, and between fiction and nonfiction, but also between editions. The two editions can formally be seen as two different texts, with regard to narrative reliability. Their paratexts strongly condition their form, making them simultaneously one novel, but two texts, like a double experiment, or even a triple experiment if we also consider Johnson’s own autobiography Along This Way, which also reinforces Johnson’s autobiographical distance with The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In brief, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man not only includes many common elements of the African American literary tradition, and commentary on the contemporary and historical oppression of African Americans in the US, but also serves as a path for African American intellectual history in that it constitutes James Weldon Johnson’s bildungs in the formal transformation of the text itself, which is to a great extent conditioned by historical changes and by his own biography. The formal changes made to the 1927 edition justified and enabled, at the time of publication, a reading in accordance with the historical changes in the racial conceptions and race relations in the US, and at the same time these sociohistorical changes explain the formal changes, which are primarily focused on and experiment with the question of narrative reliability. In conclusion, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man problematizes narrative reliability within the fictional text, but in 1912 extends this problem to historical discourse through the use of its (apparent) genre’s literary conventions, and through the use of paratexts as factors in reliability in the text as part of a literary system, and particularly in its formal aspects. This unbalanced reliability relies heavily on the narrative frame but practically dissolves in the confessional and intimate tones, occasionally discordant and dispassionate, of the body of the text, a tone not far from that of L’étranger. In the first edition, the paratextual thresholds act in accordance with and as a reinforcement of the blurred lines of reliability, bringing history into the narrative – only through history can we get the ex-colored man’s ambivalence – and investigating

110 Johnshon’s The Autobiography the real act of passing, while the second edition is partially cut off from those effects, which further dilutes the complex irony and the problem of narrative reliability, as expressed in the fictional text. The revelation of authorship and the dissolution of the menacing secret of passing enable the text to address much more directly aspects of Negro character and life, and to situate itself more comfortably within the African American literary tradition, especially among the 1920s Harlem passing novels. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, therefore, displays a much better understanding of conventional dichotomies (age, color, reliability) as “passing zones,” zones of transition and zones of transaction. The “passing zone” is therefore a compelling perspective from which to observe, as Johnson does, the formal complexity of the problem of narrative reliability – one that refuses the deterring reliable/unreliable line – and explores the space of doubt and uncertainty, of the “not yet” or “not quite,” but that is gradually, like age, like history itself, like racial distinctions, like the practice of “passing for white,” a specter of irony and a gradual questioning of the narrative voice within the text and in the history of the text, that text that is and is not at the same time, that changes by shades, in nuances.

Notes 1 As an instance of the complex combination of race as natural and race as cultural, see Japtok (1996). 2 On the complex origins of minstrelsy, see Lott (1993). 3 Johnson’s anonymous publication of a pretended autobiography precedes Gertrude Stein’s later unsigned publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933. 4 On African American autobiography, see especially the introductory Harris (2014), Mostern (1999), and Williams (2000). See an anthology of extracts from autobiographies and other genres, such as memories, diaries, and letters of African American people, illustrating this wide literary tradition in Boyd (2000). 5 Vera Kutzinski reads the African American autobiography from the angle of the fictional autobiography, via James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale as a way to criticize the established procedures of constructing race and genre identities. 6 On anonymous autobiographies in the African American tradition, including the ones mentioned but specifically Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, along with Johnson, see the excellent discussion in Griffiths (2002). 7 In his classic and still very valuable study Le pacte autobiographique, Lejeune bases his definition of autobiography perhaps excessively on the author’s identity as associated with a proper name and identified with narrator and character. He overlooks the historical problem of anonymity as protection, and too confidently places autobiographies with an explicit autobiographical pact in an uncertain classification. However, he interestingly imagines an undefined case in which there is anonymity and no name for the character-narrator – which is The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’s case – as a case of fascinating indetermination. See his chart of autobiographical and novelistic combinations in Lejeune (1975, 28).

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  111 8 As he asserts: Not nearly so new, and far more popular with white audiences, was another African American genre: the narratives of slaves and ex-slaves that dominated black autobiography into the twentieth century. Johnson seems to have attempted to gain credibility and a market for his text by trading on the importance of autobiography in early African American writing. The slave narrative was a politically charged genre that was widely recognized and read in the nineteenth century, during the antebellum and Reconstruction eras, and which was still considered more important than the African American novel at the start of the twentieth century. (Goellnicht 1997, 117) Expanding on that autobiographical contract that in fact involves a racial contract with the audience, Jennifer Schulz (2002) argues that the ex-­colored man’s life is a continuous search for agency in establishing social and racial contracts, which in fact are inescapable contracts in which he as an African American has little or no freedom of choice. From a different angle, Kathleen Pfeiffer concludes that “through his racial vacillation, the Ex-­Colored Man locates his self-invention in an identity that is both sympathetic to many races and independent of any single racial affiliation” (2003, 81). Similarly, Masami Sugimori (2011) argues that Johnson’s inescapability from a widely determined white perspective is clear in the narrator’s views and narratives of both The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Along This Way. 9 Johnson’s treatment of his consular period in Nicaragua (1909–1913) is obscure, to say the least. He was the officer in charge of helping organize a counterrevolution in order to insert a pro-US president, while at the same time being fully committed to the reality of racial oppression in the US. Brian Russell Roberts (2010) studies the relationship between Johnson’s diplomacy and the novel’s strategies of indirectness as being part of the same anti-racial program. On the complicated relations between African Americans and US imperialism, with specific attention to James Weldon Johnson, see John Cullen Gruesser’s (2012) chapter “Annexation in the Pacific and Asian Conspiracy in Central America in James Weldon Johnson’s Unproduced Operettas” in which he argues that Johnson’s operettas gave him an opportunity to satirically criticize US imperialism at the same time that they had limited commentary on the involvement and prestige of African ­A merican soldiers in the US expansion in the Pacific; see Gruesser’s entire book for a broader perspective on the relations between African Americans and imperialism. Also on imperialism, see Harilaos Stecopoulos’s arguments on Johnson’s trajectory, from seeing US imperialism in his collaborations against the Nicaraguan Revolution as a “passing” opportunity to join a national effort that would potentially integrate African Americans, to later disagreeing with US imperial expansion; and Amanda Page for a similar argument that considers Latino/Latinas and Latin Americans in the relations between imperialism and the domestic US context in The Autobiography and Johnson’s other writings as central in the questioning of the binary racial system of the US. 10 For Johnson’s difficult balance between Washington and Du Bois, see Eugene Levy’s biography of James Weldon Johnson, James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (1973, 99–119). 11 There is an extensive bibliography on autobiography; for an introduction to the genre, see especially Wittman and DiBattista (2014); Lejeune (1975); Catelli (1991); Olney (1988); and the more period-specific but still useful

112 Johnshon’s The Autobiography Nussbaum (1995), Fleishman (1983), Barros (1998), and Loureiro (2000). For a postclassical reconsideration of autobiography from the cognitive perspective, see Löschnigg (2010). Nora Catelli (1991) finely addresses that intersection between language and reality that she calls the “espacio autobiográfico” [autobiographical space], by comparing the theories of Paul de Man and Philippe Lejeune and analyzing the uses of autobiography by female writers. It is important to remark here that The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is not exactly a “fictional autobiography” in the sense that in appearing unsigned, it was commonly confused with a conventional autobiography, which makes this case more problematic and interesting. Even if taken as an autobiography rather than a novel, the genre itself admits unreliability, as Dan Shen and Dejin Xu argue, because the case of autobiography is more complicated, since unreliability can occur not only at the intratextual level but also at the extratextual and intertextual levels. […] In terms of the extratextual level, peculiar to autobiography versus fiction, factual unreliability is usually a matter of discrepancies between the textual and the historical worlds involved. (2007, 56) In asserting the negotiation of the genre of autobiography with the factual world and truth as a genre value, Shen and Xu argue for the possibility of an unreliability that goes beyond the text because of that negotiation. Johnson’s case is even more ambivalent, forcing readers in its ambiguity to deal with current discussions as part of a reading of the 1912 edition simultaneously as an autobiography and as a novel. Interestingly, they use Douglass’s autobiographies to examine the intertextual differences as part of racial debates close to those exposed here. 2 Sollors observes another contemporary novel by Abraham Caham, Autobi1 ography of an American Jew (1913) – expanded into a longer book entitled, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) – using a strikingly similar narrative strategy, which he further identifies as an ironic perspective that is characteristic in its linking of modern techniques with ethnic perspectives (1986, 168). 13 See Kenneth Warren’s (1995) argument in “Troubled Black Humanity in The Souls of Black Folk and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” as part of the discourse of humanity in African American literature and culture. 14 “Passing” is a fascinating topic that merits more extensive historical research. This chapter cannot delve into the complications of this social practice and their representations in literature; however, it is very relevant to the discussion here because The Autobiography profoundly shakes the foundations of Jim Crow by evincing the contradictions in discourse that enable one individual to be visibly white but legally black. Because of this, attempts to impede “passing for white” were at the core of the anti-miscegenation laws explored in the next chapter and were the most evident proof that legal definitions of racial lines are ultimately impossible and therefore absurd. On passing for white as a social practice, and in literature, see Williamson (1980, 1984); Michaels (1995); Sollors (1997); Bennett (1996); Wald (2000); Gallego Durán (2003); see also the less common cases of “passing for black” appearing in several Langston Hughes’s stories, and also in the fascinating historical research in Sandweiss (2009). For a post-segregation study of “passing” in US literature and media, see Nerad (2014). “Passing” in its performative aspect, seen less as historically anchored in segregation and more as a question of identity, has generated a lot of attention recently. For this broader concept, see Sánchez and Schlossberg (2001); Caughie (2005); Dawkins (2012); Ginsberg (1996); Camaiti Hostert (2007).

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  113 15 Johnson sent a copy of Brander Matthews’s review of his book, along with his renunciation of the consular post, to Wilbur Carr. As Goldsby notes, “In the process of revealing his authorial identity to Carr, Johnson forced his superior to recognize his departure as the unfair effect of cruel policy” (1998, 262). 16 There is an extensive bibliography on the mulatto, historically and legally defined as well as in its literary appearance, to which I will refer in the next chapter. For the mulatto crisis and the figure itself, see especially Sollors (1997); Berzon (1978); Williamson (1984); Talty (2003); Kinney (1985); and the contemporaneous Stonequist (1961). 17 In her essay “The Satire of Race in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” (1996), Wald reads the critics’ reactions of analyzing the narrator’s feelings and morality as the possible effects of the narrator’s mastery of the autobiographical form to such an extent that even its satire is able to manipulate his readers’ emotions and feelings, in a parallel effect to that of his mastery of classical music. 18 Among the multiple and varied studies of confessional narratives not cited in this chapter, see Gill (2006) and Sherwin (2011) for confession that is not linked to “biographical truth” but more related to narrative poetics and interdisciplinary relations of this narrative mode. Gill’s compilation deals with a wide interdisciplinary understanding of confession from the post-1950 boom of confessional narratives. See Sherwin specifically for an interesting analysis of the relations between confession and autobiography, between confessional poetry and narrative, and an analysis of the relevance of psychoanalysis, sexual politics, and gendered madness in US literature. See also Gallagher (2002) and Foster (1987). In order to distinguish confessional narratives from mere autobiographical narratives, Terrence Doody helpfully suggests that “[c]onfession is always an act of community, and the speaker’s intention to realize himself in community is the formal purpose that distinguishes confession from other modes of autobiography or self-expression” (1980, 4). Of course, confession is highly relevant to the literature of testimony in Holocaust studies and stories of genocides and totalitarian regimes as well. 19 Responding to the criticism of excessive sociological commentary, Andrade concludes that [w]e might then revise Thomas’s contention that ‘the drama of the narrative is severely muted’ because Johnson ‘chose reportage by way of fictive autobiography.’ Rather, we might assert that because Johnson ‘chose fictive autobiography’ to dramatize the psychological journey of an ­excolored–exman, ‘reportage’ served as his spiritual vehicle to infuse the ‘truths’ of his historical moment, even at the expense of ‘truths’ (Thomas’s ‘muted drama,’ Bell’s weakened integrity’) that one might anticipate from the fountain through which the confessional ushers forth. (2006, 269) 20 See her chapter “Lynching’s Mass Appeal and the ‘Terrible Real’: James Weldon Johnson” (Goldsby 2006, 164–213); for a view on the mass-­ consumption of the spectacle aspect of lynching, see also Grace Elizabeth Hale’s chapter “Deadly Amusements: Spectacle lynching and the contradictions of segregation as culture” (1998, 199–239). 21 For Bechtold, the irony is drawn by the double narrative produced through the minstrel mimicking that the narrative embraces, encompassed by the musical rhythms – both the nocturne and ragtime in an interracial combination. See also Sara Wilson in her chapter “James Weldon Johnson’s Integrationist Chameleonism” (2010, 91–127), where she interprets the shocking scene as a realization of the limits of the melting pot discourse emphasizing

114 Johnshon’s The Autobiography

22

23 24

25 26

27

28

29

possibilities of understanding and sharing that do not take into account extreme violence, a melting pot discourse which the ironic autobiography would be partially questioning. Carpio adds two other perhaps less common kinds of laughter: the superiority humor, which “posits that we laugh at other people’s misfortunes,” referring to the tradition of the signifying, and incongruity humor, in which we laugh at disturbed expectations (2008, 6). See Portelli (2001) for a revision of the tragic mulatto trope from its inextricable link to the multilayered joke in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. As it is argued by several critics in relation to The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the double perspective that irony inflicts in the novel correlates with Du Bois’s famous “double-consciousness,” by which African Americans have always a double perspective due to their social and political oppression. Du Bois describes a double consciousness that is a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. […] One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” (1926, 5). We could even see the problematization of narrative reliability, as a form of irony, as always producing double perspectives in the relationship between text and reader. Along the same lines, see Faulkner (1985). Irony is mostly acknowledged by Johnson’s critics but as we have seen, the final intentions/stance of the novel are still debated. Related to the adoption of white perspectives, for example, the coin necklace that the narrator’s father gives to his son, like Uncle Tom’s coin necklace, has been generally used as a sign of adopting whiteness but contested by the legacies of slavery that the narrator is trapped by (Miskolcze 2013). Daphne Lamothe focuses on the ambivalent attitude that does not let the protagonist embrace a black culture from an ethnographic perspective because of the interference of his class ambitions and status (2008, 69–90). Benjamin Sherwood Lawson (1989) argues that anonymity is reproduced in the fictional undermining of the “nobody” through the nameless, “ex-­ colored” character, to emphasize the fact that the text is the autobiography of somebody whose name is irrelevant. For an interesting explanation behind the publishing of modernist African American literature, and especially regarding Alfred A. Knopf’s publication of The Autobiography during the Harlem Renaissance as a vital part of the raising of New York to the role of a cosmopolitan national publishing center to rival Boston, see Hutchinson’s chapter “Black Writing and Modernist American Publishing” (1995, 342–386). It is interesting to note the difficulties caused by the differences between editions. While the 1927 edition has become the standard, authoritative text, most editions reprint the 1912 preface with accompanying notes – such as Penguin’s: The 1927 edition of the Autobiography, the only one to bear its author’s name, has since become the standard edition of the novel. The preface to the original edition is reprinted in this text, however, because it reflects almost verbatim the ideas and wording that Johnson recommended be used as a preface to his novel in a 2 February 1912, letter to his publisher (NY: Penguin, 1990) – or even without them, as in the Library of America authoritative edition. (Johnson 2004 [1912])

30 It seems that versions have been barely considered in narrative theory, and yet as we see, they pose a major problem to narratologists in considering

Johnshon’s The Autobiography  115

31

32

33

34 35

the analysis of narrative techniques and the relationships between texts. While versions or variants have been object of studies in the disciplines of folklore and oral literature, and also as transmedial versions of one story, how to address formally different editions and the relevant changes between them have probably been insufficiently studied. As Barbara ­Hernstein Smith suggested several decades ago in her provocative essay “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” versions pose the problem of regarding narratives as decontextualized since, as she noted, “no narrative version can be independent of a particular teller and occasion of telling and, therefore, that we may assume that every narrative version has been constructed in accord with some set of purposes or interests” (1980, 219). In a sense, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man forces us to consider the two editions as narrative versions both separately and interdependently, both in their formal aspects and in their dependence on the sociopolitical context that underlies the versions, thus reinforcing the argument of this book that formal aspects and historical aspects should be considered in their interrelation. Thus far, I have only detected Luc Herman and Bart Vervaek’s essay “Didn’t Know Any Better: Race and Unreliable Narration in ‘Low-Lands’ (1960)” (2008) tackling on the relationship between reliability, prefaces, and racial ideologies mentioned in the Introduction. An insightful essay, it does not rely that much on the textual unreliability but on the author’s invitation in a new preface to read it in that direction. While sharing the preoccupation with historical context and paratexts, it seems to me that The Autobiography aids in bringing the discussion further because the novel establishes a complex relation between the problematization of narrative reliability at the internal and external levels of the text. See Levy’s biography for a detailed account of Johnson as a leader and his chapter “James Weldon Johnson and the Development of the NAACP” for contextualized view on his leadership among other prominent leaders from Washington, to Garvey, to Malcom X. Added to all these ambivalences, it is interesting to note here that Carl Van Vechten was a polemic figure as well since he was a white patron fascinated with African American culture and whose novel Nigger Heaven (1926) was highly controversial. My historical approach in viewing the formal literary responses to the changing political debates has much to do with Kenneth Warren’s (2011) claim that African American literature was shaped by its historical circumstances. In Along This Way, Johnson reflects on Dunbar’s use of dialect, and Johnson’s own poetry also considers these uses of dialect. He writes the following: I got a sudden realization of the artificiality of conventionalized Negro dialect poetry; of its exaggerated geniality, childish optimism, forced mociality, and mawkish sentiment; of its imitation as an instrument of expression to but two emotions, pathos and humor, thereby making every poem able to break the mold in which dialect poetry had, long before him, been set by representations made of the Negro on the minstrel stage. I saw that he had cut away much of what was coarse and “niggerish,” but also I saw that, nevertheless, practically all of his work in dialect fitted into the traditional mold. (Johnson 2000 [1933], 158)

On the Modernist use of black dialect, see North (1994). For further discussions on black vernacular, see Baker (1984), Gates (1988), and Sundquist (1992).

116 Johnshon’s The Autobiography 36 See Dowling (2006) on urban development of black art in New York between the 1900s and 1920s. 37 The recuperation and interest for African American folklore was part of the cultural efforts. Eric Sundquist traces the interest and value of this recuperation in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, in which he concludes that African American culture as it was represented in the spirituals, as in folklore was paradoxically thriving and dying at the same time when Johnson wrote. Recorded and collected in significant quantities, it had nonetheless become scholarly, arranged, commercialized: as Hurston might have said, it was not being altogether suppressed or lost. In this novel that reflected on work behind him as a popular lyricist and work to come as an advocate of the spirituals, Johnson stood not quite on the color line, as did his happing alter ego, but on the culture line. (1992, 48) 38 As Shadi Neimneh argues, the aesthetization of racial propaganda, as enacted by the Harlem Renaissance texts, posed a challenge to the fight against stereotypes; The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man would be an example of this in that it suggests covert rather than an overt “propaganda.” See Neimneh’s discussion on the representation of interracial violence in the Harlem Renaissance for an overview of this debate, mostly initiated by Du Bois. 39 Ruth Blandón argues for a similar racial limbo, or third space created by the novel’s use of the Spanish language as a space for relief in a biracial society (2010, 209). 40 It is worth mentioning here Lawrence Hogue’s chapter “Finding Freedom in Sameness: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man” (2003, 67–92) in which he makes the interesting suggestion that the canonization of the novel in the 1970s and 1980s is linked to the African American elite’s acceptance of upper middle-class values at the core of the racial uplift project that was starting to gain an audience during the Harlem Renaissance, thus extending the ideological class alignment offered by the novel beyond its initial publication(s). 41 The perfect fit of the novel into the “passing” fictional literature is only evident when we consider the text as undoubtly a novel from the outset and establish an unproblematic fictional pact with it. For a reflection on passing in the novel as part of an African American literary theme, see Richard ­Kostelanetz (1969).

3 Degrees of Reliability, Miscegenation, and the New South Creed in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! “So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you can’t bear” ­(Faulkner 1990 [1936], 293) resolves the sustained enigma in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in a non-identifiable narrative voice that withholds certainty, even as it provides a plausible motive for the murder of Charles Bon by his supposed half-brother, Henry Sutpen. The plausibility of the motive rests on the fact that in cases such as that of the light-skinned Charles Bon, miscegenation is something you cannot determine unless you know. Thus, miscegenation is a matter of knowing somebody’s race. Yet even this is equivocal, because to know, one must presume that there are ways in which you can determine “race.” US state legislation certainly ensured that the boundaries that enabled the validation of “race” were defined as clearly as possible throughout the State Constitution reforms, from 1890s through to the 1910s, especially in the Southern states, and with multiple variations until the end of segregation in 1964. Legislation was not the only basis for this “knowledge of race,” but also social consent, which gave rise to the “one-drop” rule, much less present in legislation than it appears to be, yet which was so prominent in the social consensus regarding “knowledge of race” that it affected judicial cases and led some states to incorporate it in their legislation.1 In the US, these racial boundaries were particularly prominent in the mid-nineteenth century until the end of Jim Crow, in contrast to other historical and geographical contexts we have encountered, or will do so in this study. Racial boundaries were above all enforced by segregation laws – primarily shaped during the reformulation of the South as a region, and promoted by ideas of the New South – because they required a clear definition of races so that the new distribution of social privileges and civil and political rights could be effective. Nevertheless, as noted in the Introduction, those boundaries defined beliefs, not realities, and therefore their objective establishment was doomed to repeatedly fail, making evident the ideology behind legislation and social consent. As Teresa Zackodnik observes, While most states moved toward a ‘one-drop’ definition of blackness and a ‘pure blood’ definition of whiteness over time, a significant number vacillated in their definitions of race. Moreover,

118 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! while ­nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans generally adopted notions of race as blood ‘traceable’ through genealogy to fractional amounts, there remained states more concerned with blood’s ‘expression’. (2001, 443)2 In this context, storytelling became a valuable resource in the courts, when the definition of one’s “race” was unclear based on the current state legislation. Such was the case of Joe Kirby, who, in 1921 in Tucson, Arizona, requested an annulment of his marriage on the grounds that his wife was black. The process also involved proving Joe Kirby’s whiteness. The judge, having already consented to the problematic idea that “Spaniard” meant “white,” had the following exchange with Kirby when the latter was asked about his grandfather in order to determine whether his ancestors were white: Q. Who was your grandfather on your [mother’s] father side? A. He was a Spaniard […] Q. Where was he born? A. That I don’t know. He was my grandfather. Q. How do you know he was a [Spaniard] then? A. Because he told me ever since I had knowledge that he was a S­ paniard […] (qtd in Pascoe, What Comes Naturally 110) The case concluded with the determination that Joe Kirby was a Caucasian even if it was clear that this was founded on a knowledge strongly grounded in storytelling. It is because the grandfather told him he was a Spaniard that whiteness could be attributed to Joe Kirby. This recurring dynamic in the courts revealed the problematic definitions of race when faced with real circumstances and people. Consequently, in this struggle to define “races,” discourse and storytelling themselves, and their credibility, became once again necessary for the perpetuation of those definitions in society and in the courts, particularly when knowledge was not attainable. The unstable telling of the story in Absalom, Absalom! succeeds by enacting uncertainty about miscegenation in order to index the tenuousness of specific racial ideologies, and their fatal consequences in the history of the US South. Only a few authors, like Eric Sundquist (1983), Werner Sollors (1997), and Thadious Davis (1983), have directly targeted the issue of miscegenation in the novel. Their contributions are extremely valuable. We would need to go forward from those to see how the New South Creed treated miscegenation, and how Faulkner had deployed that specific political discourse in the formal development of the novel. No study that I am aware of has analyzed Faulkner’s novel with

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  119 the focus on narrative reliability from an updated narratological point of view. This chapter addresses the way in which Faulkner deploys pieces of the aforementioned historical discourses so as to interrogate narrative reliability. I argue that Faulkner discloses the contemporaneous legal, political, and social problem of miscegenation in the US during the segregation period as a problem of narrative reliability. Absalom, Absalom! reveals the contradictions inherent in the idea of miscegenation as key to understanding the ideological framework in which racial conflicts were occurring, a framework primarily established by the ideological tenets of what Paul Gaston named the “New South Creed,” after Henry Grady’s rebranding of the South as a region. In its contradictions and its force, miscegenation in the novel articulates the conflict at the same time that it challenges it through very ambivalent narration. Therefore, this chapter will contribute to criticism on Absalom, Absalom! with the idea that the New South discourse and the role of its arguments in the instauration of the segregation system are the historical codes that Faulkner uses in Absalom, Absalom! to define polyphony, the narrative enigma, and narrative progression, which are the textual components that in this novel act to interrogate narrative reliability. Similarly to what occurs in Lord Jim and in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the problems raised by miscegenation determine the narrative form of Absalom, Absalom! in that they provide a narrative enigma that questions narrative reliability. As I will show, the problem of narrative reliability is addressed through degrees of credibility with regard not only to Sutpen’s story but also to the racial discourses serving as the basis for segregation. This chapter argues that racial stereotypes inform the devices of narrative enigma, narrative progression, and polyphony that are responsible for the questioning of narrative reliability. It therefore demonstrates that racial stereotypes are being used in their formal narrative possibilities, and suggests that we should consider not only the more obvious polyphony, but also narrative enigmas and narrative progression, as essential devices in problematizing narrative reliability.

A House Divided: Miscegenation and the New South Only recently, some law historians, sociologists, and historians of the US, like Peggy Pascoe (2009), Julie Novkov (2008), and Joel ­Williamson (1984, 1980), have stressed the crucial importance of the anti-­miscegenation movement in the US for comprehending the nature and complexity of racial relations in the country, which were partially examined in the previous chapter. For several decades and before ­Williamson’s New People, miscegenation was considered mostly as a group of people from different racial backgrounds who nurtured the numbers of “blacks,” and who therefore did not have a separate significance as a community on their own. Only recently, law historians have

120 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! drawn attention to the political challenges that attempting to legislate miscegenation entailed for the system of segregation. In order to maintain races separated, state laws needed to contain clear definitions for the different races and to explicitly prohibit the blurring of the features that defined them through anti-miscegenation laws. To underline the importance of miscegenation, historians have moved the focus of attention from the number of mulattos and their own individual menace – which was in terms of numbers rather small – to the legal and social threats they represented to the system as a whole in making explicit the ideological construction of race upon which social, economic, and political privileges were drawn. Attention to miscegenation is crucial not only for a perspective on racial relations in the broad nationwide context of the mid-nineteenth to late twentieth century but particularly so for those regions where racial ideas were so influential that they entered legislation, making interracial marriage illegal. In the South, and in some Western states, anti-miscegenation laws were introduced into state constitutions, as a way of dealing with a variety of issues. In the South, it was mainly with relation to slavery, and in the West mainly because of problems with Asian immigration, as Pascoe (2009) has shown, although these two are not unrelated.3 Being among the most long-lasting racially discriminative laws in the US, anti-miscegenation laws in the Southern states can illuminate the development of ideologies behind the instauration of the segregation system. The first miscegenation laws in the Southern states were introduced in colonial Virginia and Maryland beginning in the late seventeenth century, although they did not spread any further until the end of the following century, becoming firmly established by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Antebellum miscegenation laws affected both sexual intercourse and intermarriage, and were implemented more regularly and with greater severity in punishment in cases of relationships between white women and black men than the other way round. In 1662, the state of Virginia decreed that the offspring of an interracial relationship would follow the condition of the mother. Other states adopted similar anti-miscegenation laws much later, leaving the door open for slave breeding after the slave trade was abolished in 1807. Labor, gender, and racial aspects are interlaced in these key laws. Undoubtedly, the fear of miscegenation was heightened from the 1830s onward because of the tensions that the slave system was generating not only in the US context but also from an international perspective. The tensions grew so acute that they became the basis for a campaign to discredit the election of president Lincoln in 1863, for which the very word “miscegenation” was coined in a hoax Democratic pamphlet.4 However important these laws had been for the slave system, most historians agree that after Emancipation, the urgent need to preserve economic, social, and political privileges made them much stricter. After the

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  121 interruption of their enforcement during Reconstruction years, the new State constitutions in the 1890s and 1900s reestablished and expanded the anti-miscegenation laws, as part of their institution of segregation, and secured the states’ right to regulate marriage over Federal legislation because, as Bardaglio explains “the judges concluded that marriage was a social right rather than a political or civil right, and as such, was subject to state intervention” (1999, 125).5 Since miscegenation laws were crucial for a biracial ideology which kept the races defined as clearly as possible, as we have seen with the problem of racial “passing,” they were also crucial for the development of the racial policies adopted by the architects of the newly emancipated South, aimed at reformulating social, economic, political, racial, and gender relations in the rapidly industrializing region. Miscegenation was a central component of this post-Reconstruction racial system because it was seen as a challenge to the biracial system – both because it meant the public interaction of two individuals who by law must live separately, and particularly because of the interbreeding of those individuals, and the problems that offspring such as James Weldon Johnson’s narrator would generate by complicating the distinctions between races, and by claiming rights to, among other things, inheritance or school attendance.6 More equivocal racial distinctions meant less circumscribed access to social, economic, and political rights.7

Absalom, Absalom! and the Historical Narrative Framework of the New South Indeed, it is not by chance that Absalom, Absalom! frames the story of Sutpen’s presumed miscegenation in a 1909–1910 reading of Mississippi in the years between 1830 and 1910, with ramifications in Virginia and New Orleans. A New South victorious reading – from the perspective of the first decade of the twentieth century – of the antebellum South and the Civil War, provides the basic historical discourse of Sutpen’s story, as well as enabling the story to function as a microhistory of the South as seen from 1910, meaningfully yet problematically recalled in 1936 when the book was published and segregation was still fully enforced. Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, a newcomer to Jefferson in 1833 and builds a mansion – Sutpen’s Hundred – and a 100-acre plantation. He marries a Jeffersonian named Ellen Coldfield, with whom he has two children – Henry and Judith. At an Oxford college, Henry meets the New Orleansian Charles Bon, whom he brings to ­Sutpen’s Hundred a few times, and who becomes Judith’s fiancé. Henry and Bon fight together for the four years of the Civil War, until they return and Henry shoots Bon dead at the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred. Henry flees, and, with Ellen deceased, Judith and Clyte – Sutpen’s mulatto daughter by a slave – remain in the house with Rosa Colfield, Ellen’s younger sister. Sutpen suggests breeding a male child to Rosa Coldfield, who, enraged

122 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! by the notion, refuses and leaves. Sutpen then gets his poor white servant Wash Jones’s daughter Milly pregnant. When the baby girl is born, and Sutpen rejects them both, Wash Jones kills him with a scythe. Charles Bon’s son by an octoroon, Charles Etienne Saint Valery Bon, is brought to the house and marries a dark-skinned black woman, and they have a son, Jim Bond. After many years of unrest, in September 1909, Rosa Coldfield with the help of Quentin Compson decides to go and see who is hiding in Sutpen’s Hundred. They find Henry on his deathbed. Rosa Coldfield’s mission motivates her telling of the story to Quentin, a story that is complemented by Mr. Compson, whose father, Grandfather Compson, was a friend of Thomas Sutpen. In turn, the news of Rosa’s death in January 1910 motivates Quentin and Shreve’s reconstruction of S­ utpen’s story in a freezing Harvard dormitory. The story is told by multiple and confusing narrative voices, who attempt to resolve the enigma of why Henry killed Bon by tracing all the details of Sutpen’s story, especially the scattered fragments of his mysterious past. Most critics of Absalom, Absalom! have overlooked the cruciality of the New South discourse in this novel. As I will argue in the following pages, the appellation to this historical discourse is clear and essential to understand the implications for its narrative form. It is not by chance that the story of Thomas Sutpen is retold in 1909, with the system of segregation well-established and developed, and the ideology of the New South Creed already in place. It is not a coincidence because the choice of the New South ideologues in their search for a new configuration of society and economic relations after the experiences of the Civil War (1860–1865) and Reconstruction (1865–1877) was, precisely, reconciliation with the advocates of the Lost Cause, as the historian James Cobb (2005) has documented. This ensured the perpetuation of nostalgic versions of what was newly labeled the “Old South,” which enabled Democrats to absorb part of the discontented Southern whites who had been defeated in the still relatively recent Civil War, at the same time making the Old South compatible with the demands of industrialization. Readers today might miss allusions to the New South discourse, but the allusions were very clear in the political context of the novel. The first clear allusion to this political discourse is the framing of the Southern past in terms of the Old South, which was a New South invention. Absalom, Absalom! emphatically frames the narrative, establishing itself within a historical perspective that connects the time of narration with the time of the story: It was a day of listening too – the listening, the hearing in 1909 even yet mostly that which he already knew since he had been born in and still breathed the same air in which the church bells had rung on that Sunday morning in 1833. (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 25)

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  123 It is a historical telling in that, as Quentin asserts, It’s because she wants it told. […] so that people whom she will never see and whose names she will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read it and know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth. (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 8) The novel establishes a relationship between Sutpen’s story and defeat in the Civil War, in a direct appeal to the Lost Cause perspective. Since Time has stopped in many ways, as the thirst for retelling reminds us, the feeling of community is reinforced and embodied in each of its members. Indeed, Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 9) In being used to inform the narrative framework, the New South discourse not only provides a background or setting to the novel but restricts from the outset the conflicts that the novel might target and preselects the historical arguments and racial stereotypes that narrators of Absalom, Absalom! might use for the development of the narrative of Sutpen’s story. The narrative framework clearly calls into the telling of Sutpen’s story the contemporary New South historical discourse, embracing its view of the Lost Cause. Over the course of the formation of what Paul ­Gaston (1976) labels the “New South Creed” – following Henry Grady’s ­designation – the adoption of the Lost Cause had been rejected by several New Southern figures such as Walter Hines Page, Atticus G. Haygood, and some prominent intellectuals independent from the New South creed ideologues, namely George Washington Cable, Booker T. Washington, and of course Charles W. Chesnutt and W. E. B. Du Bois. From divergent points of view, these reticent voices condemned slavery and continued to maintain that the New South had the opportunity to champion a more egalitarian treatment of African Americans – an ultimately futile hope. Supported by ideologues such as Henry Grady, Richard Hathaway ­Edmons, and Daniel Augustus Tompkins, among many others, the Lost Cause became one of the key adoptions of the New South discourse that significantly contributed to the ongoing transformation of race relations.8 Henry Grady’s Address “The South and Her Problems” at the

124 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Dallas State Fair in 1887 already made three ideas clear: (1) that “the South” as a unit had a raison d’être because the Southern States had for a century championed a governmental theory, but that, having triumphed in every forum, fell at last by the sword. […] They fought a war – but the prejudices of that war have died, its sympathies have broadened, and its memories are already priceless treasure of the republic that is cemented forever with its blood; (1969, 44–45) (2) that the South needed to address her two related problems: the question of race and the “unique and important industrial problem” (Grady 1969, 47); and (3) with regard to race issues in the South: This problem is to carry within her body politic two separate races, and nearly equal in numbers. She must carry these races in peace – for discord means ruin. She must carry them separately – for assimilation means debasement. She must carry them in equal justice – for to this she is pledged in honor and in gratitude. (Grady 1969, 46) However, this had a new objective that was, in fact, also part of the legacy of the Southerners as a people since he clearly states that the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards – because the white race is the superior race. This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided forever in the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds ­A nglo-Saxon hearts. (Grady 1969, 53) Therefore, “the white race must dominate forever in the South, because it is the white race, and superior to that race by which its supremacy is threatened” (Grady 1969, 55). Along with the “The New South” address, given before the New England Club in 1886, “The South and her problems” contains most of the arguments behind the New South Creed and clearly shows the path that led a figure like Grady from the defense of African American rights, including the right to vote, toward a “necessary” segregation, the legal institution of which would finally deprive blacks of their political and civil rights. By embracing the Lost Cause perspective of the Southern past, the New South discourse highlights from the very start of Absalom, Absalom! the justification of present circumstances through the unfair defeat of the South in the Civil War

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  125 and establishes racial relations as the latent focal aspect connecting the Lost Cause and the New South Creed. I should underline here that by talking about the New South Creed, I am not attempting to define “The South,” a rather general category that critics too frequently use to thematize in Absalom, Absalom! what I argue was as a specific political ideology. As a set of political arguments, this ideological discourse was a compound of multiple codes that were operative in the organization of social relations of power, at the same time that it elaborated an image some Southerners might have identified with, and therefore might have endorsed or even voted for. It is precisely in this sense that the New South Creed is linked, in its rhetorical element, to what has been traditionally labeled “the Southern myth.”9 This discourse of historical memory was central to the New South project, and it is the specific discourse Absalom, Absalom! targets and uses. As James Cobb observes: The symbolism of invented or reconfigured traditions is both purposeful and pragmatic. This was obviously true of racial segregation, which not only represented the triumph for white supremacy but, as John Cell has made clear was ‘nothing less than an organic component of the New South Creed.’ Legal segregation became one of the New South’s invented traditions in response not just to the destruction of slavery but also to the expansion of the region’s urban areas and industrial workplaces. All of these developments increased the likelihood that the two races would come in contact – and into conflict – without the controlling presence or influence of slavery. As racial tensions rose and violence flared, the wisdom of both the federal retreat from Reconstruction and the transfer of northern industrial capital to the South might well be called into question. (Cobb 2005, 87)10 In Absalom, Absalom! the preestablished narrative and historical frame­ work of the New South Creed provide an encoded development of the story along predictable racial lines, coming to a closure in which the very codification of the discourse is revealed – significantly so, in Shreve’s words: “Maybe I wouldn’t come from the South anyway, even if I could stay there. Wait. Listen. I’m not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I dont know how to say it better. Because it’s something my people haven’t got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now there aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers that lost?) and bullets in the

126 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! dinning room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget. What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your children’s children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett’s charge at Manassas?” “Gettysburg,” Quentin said. “You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 296) The plot’s mystery “Why did Henry kill Bon?” translates into “What are the reasons for Sutpen’s fall?,” which, in turn, translates into “What were the reasons for the Southern defeat?” The historical framework of the telling provides the means for this overlap of questions. The very nature of these questions is solved narratively by placing the enigma at the core of plot development. In the storytelling, it is dealt with by the narrators’ attempts to solve the enigma. Sutpen’s story provides a test case for the broader historical question. At the same time, historical arguments functioning in Southern society from the 1830s through to the New South discourse of the 1910s, some of them still current as late as 1936, are brought in to help with the difficulties in the story development, specifically, by filling in the factual gaps. This combination of fictional “facts” and historical arguments enriches Sutpen’s story by completing it with historically plausible developments, while simultaneously presenting it as a paradigmatic example, related to, as Shreve observes, the very development of Southern history in the years 1830–1910, following the readings of that history as produced by the New South Creed. The most prominent historical argument from the New South discourse that is used as a narrative strategy in Absalom, Absalom! is, not coincidentally, miscegenation. Miscegenation in Absalom, Absalom! enters the narrative as an amalgam of its historical significations over the period 1830–1910, similarly to its use in Light in August and in Mark Twain’s novels, particularly Puddn’head Wilson, as Eric Sundquist observes: Like Faulkner in the characterization of Joe Christmas, however, Twain fused the antebellum and modern worlds by dramatizing the essential reversal in meaning miscegenation underwent after emancipation, whereby the fact of slaveholding miscegenation by white masters and the feared potential for slave rebellion were together transformed into the new specter of black crime and ­contamination – the Negro as “beast.” (1987, 9)11

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  127 Absalom, Absalom! is set on understanding the enigmatic reason behind Henry’s murder of Bon, which precipitated Thomas Sutpen’s fall. Miscegenation as a motive does not appear until the penultimate chapter of the novel, and for this reason has been too often overlooked as the main axis of the narrative development. However, as I will show, even if it appears late, the narrative progression, buttressed by several cultural and historical indicators, especially racial stereotypes, has already paved the way for the element of miscegenation. In the Introduction, I argued that racial stereotypes can be understood as narrative forms. Considering racial stereotypes as narrative forms enables a clearer view of how historical and cultural aspects determine narrative technique. In Absalom, Absalom!, the gradual focus on miscegenation as the problem that precipitates Sutpen’s fall is developed narratively through increasing allusions to the mulatto as a codified character. The mulatto stereotype as elaborated in literature, images, and political arguments in the New South Creed and beyond it – such as those studied by Werner Sollors (1997) – not only contains traits that make his identification easier, but it also contains the codified story of his life, itself a structured narrative. This structured narrative very often tells the story of a boy that does not know his father until he discovers that he is a white man who raped or had intercourse outside marriage with his mother. This boy seeks his father or just comes across him mostly through a female family member whom he loves or marries. One way or the other, the mulatto son will expose or menace his father, or, alternatively, he will find a way to infiltrate into another white powerful family to engender a black child and expose the white male aristocrat sin of miscegenation. The narrators of Absalom, Absalom! implicitly import the traits and life narrative from the mulatto stereotype so as to resolve in their own telling the enigma of who Bon is and why Henry killed Bon. In other words, the narrators use the preestablished contemporaneous narrative of the mulatto to design Bon’s life, which in fact is an unsolvable mystery. In using a historically preestablished narrative contained in the stereotype, the novel uses this stereotype as a form of narration. In the contemporaneous context, defenders of segregation used the stereotype of the mulatto to spread a racial threat that would justify the political argument in support of anti-miscegenation laws. By introducing the stereotype of the mulatto, Absalom, Absalom! progressively racializes the narrative enigma at the same time that gradually uncovers the political conflict it targets. Several details function as hints of the silently unraveling racialization of the story. Race is gradually introduced by Rosa’s background references and depictions of slaves, referred to as “wild niggers” coming from the West Indies, by Sutpen’s Haitian past, which brings into the narrative an intimation of slave revolt, as Richard Godden (1997) has extensively analyzed, and by the strong construction of whiteness through

128 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! the figures of the Anglo-Saxon Southern gentlemen and of poor whites. Yet, in a move common to Southern literature beginning in the antebellum, race is mainly presented via the figures of mulatto secondary characters and their interaction with white people. The known mulatto characters in the novel are Clytie, Sutpen’s daughter by a slave mother; Charles Etienne Saint Valery Bon, Charles Bon’s son by a New Orleansian octoroon; and his son, Jim Bond. All three figures embody and foreshadow the centrality of miscegenation to the story. The most apparent way in which miscegenation slowly becomes the center of the narrative is the narrators’ increasing focus on Charles Bon as their narratives progress and follow each other. Bon’s gradual centrality in the novel deserves much more attention than critics have paid to it thus far. The following will only provide a few examples of Bon’s gradual centrality to the storytelling, and his character construction by Mr. Compson and Shreve, which drives the racialization of the mystery and therefore of the plot. It is worth noting that Charles Bon appears as an object of desire for a historical witness named Rosa Coldfield, who actually never saw Bon, and also that Mr. Compson gets interested in him primarily in order to understand Henry and his actions. This is part of Mr. Compson’s concern about Henry’s feelings and thoughts, and the characters’ reflections on other social behaviors and norms that set Mississippi apart from New Orleans, mainly with regard to racial and familial issues. Shreve will follow up Mr. Compson’s description of Bon by placing him as the focus of the story development and delving into this character. Charles Bon is developed to be Thomas Sutpen’s first son by a halfFrench half-Spanish woman – supposedly with “black blood” in her veins – his parentage and race only guessed at near the close of the novel. He meets Henry Sutpen at the University of Mississippi and goes to ­Jefferson on three occasions. It is made clear that none of the narrators or people closer to them had known him. His first appearances come from the townspeople and are described by Mr. Compson: Charles Bon of New Orleans, Henry’s friend who was not only some few years older than Henry but actually a little old to be still in college and certainly a little out of place in that one where he was  – a small new college in the Mississippi hinterland and even wilderness, three hundred miles from that worldly and even foreign city which was his home – a young man of a worldly elegance and assurance beyond his years, handsome, apparently wealthy and with for background the shadowy figure of a legal guardian rather than any ­parents – a personage who in the remote Mississippi of that time must have appeared almost phoenix-like, full-sprung from no childhood, born of no woman and impervious to time and, vanished, leaving no bones nor dust anywhere – a man with an ease of manner and a swaggering gallant air in comparison with which Sutpen’s

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  129 pompous arrogance was clumsy bluff and Henry actually a hobblede-hoy. Miss. Rosa never saw him; this was a picture, an image. (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 61) Charles Bon’s good looks, elegance, and distinct way of life are a vestige of the French environment he had known in New Orleans, and the French West Indies, and his French planter family. There is nothing unique in this description. But this description already introduces the conflict that historically arose between the mulatto or “colored” and the free African Americans in New Orleans and the Lower South over the different rights they had had when Louisiana was a French and then a Spanish colony. As Berzon notes, In certain places – New Orleans, Charleston, Atlanta, ­Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, among others – black middle- and ­upper-class communities have emphasized their rejection of the black proletariat and have embraced white middle-class values in which physical appearance, (white) ancestry, money, status, and conspicuous consumption play major roles. (1978, 6) In New Orleans in particular, this community is historical since “prior to the Civil War, New Orleans had the largest community of free Negroes anywhere in the South, and the wealth of this community was considerable” (Berzon 1978, 105). This issue highlights the contrast between free, bourgeois African Americans, and those still subjugated (both antebellum and postbellum), to the extent that Berzon dedicates a whole chapter to “The Mulatto as Black Bourgeois.” Thus, the specific stereotype being recalled here is that of the French Créole. This is highly remarkable because, although at first it seems that Charles Bon is a white créole, merely the fact that he is a créole in the South anticipates to the authorial reader what was a cliché in the reader’s own social context: the possibility of mixed blood, due to the legal and social differences between Mississippi and the former French Louisiana.12 Furthermore, Bon’s New Orleans origins, and his unknown parentage, denote to Jeffersonians that he is a parvenue, which becomes a conventional hint not only of his possible blackness, but also of his possible “passing for white.”13 The parvenue as a feature of the mulatto stereotype is brought out in the novel by a repeated technique of sedimenting the construction of Charles Bon as a “nigger,” as Thadious Davis describes it (1983, 218). The construction of Bon as black uses foreshadowing examples in surrounding secondary characters, which might invite racial doubt regarding Charles Bon.14 The obscured main character is actually constructed out of reflections of these secondary characters, a strategy critics have overlooked.

130 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! A great example of this process is evident in Mr. Compson’s telling of Charles Etienne Saint Valéry Bon’s story. Told before any speculation about Charles Bon’s race, Charles Etienne’s story suggests that the problem of the light-skinned parvenue passing for white might mirror that of his father, Charles Bon. When judged for a violent incident, the vital question posed to Charles Etienne turns out to be “What are you? Who and where did you come from?” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 168). Grandfather Compson advises Charles Etienne to “go away, disappear, giving him money to go on. (…) Whatever you are, once you are among strangers, people who dont know you, you can be whatever you will” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 169). Indeed, if the question already alludes to the common trait of the “passer” as an immigrant parvenue, as explained by Werner Sollors, and thus to the fact that unknown origins may indicate blackness – as ­Jefferson also fears might be the case with Joe ­Christmas in Light in August – the suspicion is only strengthened because he comes from New Orleans, which for Jefferson virtually confirms that Charles Etienne is very likely a mulatto. Sollors’s recognition that “New Orleans,” “creole,” and “orphan” are three categories that suggest the discovery of blackness in interracial literature clearly shows that Faulkner utilizes the arguments defining race that were operative at the time of writing, delineating a parallelism between Charles Bon and Charles Etienne Saint-Valéry Bon (1997, 500, n64). By introducing Charles Etienne’s story before the troubled revelation that Bon is black, the narrative anticipates what racial stereotype is at work also with regard to Charles Bon. Another working example of the strategic use of contemporaneous arguments in the novel’s plot development is the progressive attention given by the storytellers to questions of marriage, sexuality, and incest – ­traditionally and historically linked to miscegenation. Mr. C ­ ompson focuses his story on the question of marriage between two white people, Bon and Judith, and on the threat of bigamy due to Bon’s relationship with an octoroon with whom he has a child, Charles Etienne. Mr. ­Compson’s attempt to discover why Henry killed Bon examines the idea that it is Bon’s potential bigamy that prompted the murder. In this case, focus on marriage is a choice for narrative progression because it facilitates the telling to move toward miscegenation. The plot progresses along these lines in Quentin’s telling, which focuses on incest – a Quentin we know from The Sound and the Fury in love with his sister Caddy. Quentin’s telling brings in the doubtful information that Bon was Sutpen’s first son, introducing another brother into the triangular hetero- and homosexual relationships. Incest in Bon and Judith’s relationship would have therefore been a threat, and in fact an insurmountable impediment to their marriage. Indeed, as a literary construction, the menace of the free mulatto is first introduced in Bon not through miscegenation – which is not yet suggested in Quentin’s ­narrative – but through incest. Incest works as a parallel motif that first

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  131 appears as the real menace, and eventually allows the transference from the threat of endogamy to the threat of miscegenation, through a historical and cultural association of incest and miscegenation with a long tradition in racial ideology, drawing the reader into a singular perspective of a sinful Bon: he is initially a threat because of incest, and afterward, he is a threat because of miscegenation. This convergence of the two main taboos in Yoknapatawpha is by no means unique in Southern literature, as Sollors has shown, but, on the contrary, is part of the way in which cultural associations drive the construction of plot (Sollors 1997).15 Converging with the association between incest and miscegenation, discussion of marriage and the tolerance of bigamy, if the companion is not white, activate the readers’ knowledge that race is not confined to an individual but extends to their offspring.16 Again, the narrator’s telling of Charles Etienne’s tragic fate as an extremely light mulatto emphasizes his condition as an offspring. Offspring matter, whether white or black, or both. They matter because, as a 1932 article in The Philadelphia Tribune warned bigots: “Careful Lyncher! He May Be Your Brother!” (Larsen 2007, 124). Family and racial affiliations in miscegenated offspring, either unacknowledged or ambivalently assumed, as in Clytie’s case, were critical during the antebellum period, and prominently evident in the breeding of what were disturbingly called “white slaves.” In the postbellum period, as we have seen in historical terms, and as was illustrated by the figure of Charles Etienne, they are especially disturbing less for their labor status than for the fact that their “bleaching” was threatening to erase the color line. That is why “passing for white” was perceived as an actual threat to white supremacists, and why anti-­ miscegenation laws were at the heart of legal segregation, and the regulation of social relations, even in several Northern states. These two examples of the introduction of racial arguments and assumptions operative in New South society aim at demonstrating how racial arguments and racial stereotypes are pulled into the narrative to construct characters and to fill in the narrative enigma for the sake of narrative progression, as well as to construct the story of the South at the macrohistorical level by gradually revealing miscegenation as the racial conflict that the novel targets.

Elaborating Narrative Reliability and its Effects on the Problem of Miscegenation However clear the racialization of the mystery in Sutpen’s story is, Shreve’s words, quoted earlier, so overtly exhibit the codification of the New South historical discourse of memory that they point at the greater complexity through which Absalom, Absalom! addresses history. What Shreve’s exaggeration demonstrates is the crucial issue of credibility, as it exposes that codes function through presumption and attribution, which oversimplifies historical comprehension. Shreve’s gnomic comments,

132 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! a clear marker of his narrative discordance in Cohn’s term, display the ideological manipulation of history for the purposes reflected in the New South Creed. Furthermore, not only is credibility at stake, but uncertainty is the very foundation of everything since ideological arguments are being deployed to add the missing facts to the story, configuring a credibility that is only “credible” thanks to the beliefs that are part of the shared political discourse operative in the turn-of-the-century Southern society. The novel exposes the use of the New South Creed racial ideology in its contemporaneous context, specifically the manner in which it builds a history of the South that legitimizes the political and legal system of its day. More relevant to the aims of this book is that these specific ideological arguments operate in the same way at the level of narrative discourse, and therefore condition its narrative form, since the novel’s voices modulate reliability by appearing to construct a plausible story of Sutpen making use of historical assumptions, at the same time that their telling stands precariously upon unverified information. As is apparent, Absalom, Absalom! is a very complex narrative artifice that profoundly elaborates narrative reliability as a principle, that is, as a feature of discourse that needs to be modulated through a range of textual components, and that operates by importing information that is ideologically established in the social context, to enable the completion of an already unreachable tale from the past. Ideological arguments or beliefs are at the service of building a credibility that is, nonetheless, signaled as faulty, by its imposition of codes where what happened cannot be recovered. Thus, the novel’s treatment of reliability in relation to representations of racial conflicts is the crux of its narrative and its story. In this sense, Faulkner’s novel stretches the technique to its most extreme expressions in its interrogation of, and highly ambivalent participation in, the racial conflicts during the period of segregation. Absalom, Absalom! presents an unsolvable narrative enigma, which creates anxiety when the narrators and the reader attempt to understand Sutpen’s story, and which maintains the narrative tension at a high pitch. The unfolding of the narrative enigma is peculiar, as Joseph Reed notes, because if “narrative intensity, textual density and suspense mechanisms ought to underline crises or lead up to revelations – here they seem to heighten what leads up to crises, or anticlimactically, to draw out what leads away from them” (1973, 149). The problematic narrative progression is due to the lack of incoming information that would enable a more conventional development. Based to a great extent on what the novel presents as historical material, the intrigue resorts to imagination and fiction where there is a lack of information. To unfold the story, the novel articulates a series of narrators whose degree of narrative reliability varies. If it is obvious that from the outset the novel questions whether a fully reliable narrative voice is ever possible, it nonetheless makes reliability a governing problem of the narrative.

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  133 Different components define the problem of narrative reliability in Absalom, Absalom! The narrative enigma, which induces the desire to resolve and tell the story, generates the problems of polyphony, narrative authority, disjointedness between knowledge and language, and the relevance of truth as a governing principle of a narrative within a fictional world. Multiple narrators struggle to advance the narrative by developing a coherent story while making efforts to preserve their own credibility as storytellers, at the same time that the novel questions narrative reliability by eroding their narrative authority. The lack of information in the reconstruction of Sutpen’s story erodes the narrative authority inherently bestowed upon any storyteller. This problem of knowing makes narrators fallible from the outset. The characterization of the narrators in what within the fiction is intended as a story based on historical facts evinces that they do not possess the relevant information either from experience or from access to its possible bearers – mirroring the reader’s struggles with both the narrative and the story.17 The lack of knowledge is particularly remarkable in the case of Shreve who, by not being cautious regarding the unknown, ends up transgressing the barrier of knowledge, and therefore of Olson’s fallibility, thus becoming a clearly unreliable narrator. In fact, as we shall see, his narrative authority degrades as the story progresses, even though the reader may develop the contrary impression upon a first reading, left with the sense of Shreve’s being the most detached and complete version of Sutpen’s story. Thus, as Hugh Ruppersburg puts it, [a]s discrepancies and contradictions begin to multiply, as Quentin’s curiosity and emotional involvement mount, the reader expands his attention to include the characters who tell the story – primarily Miss Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve. This added concern with narrators as characters casts doubt on the credibility of what they say. (1983, 83) If the coexistence of contrasting narrative voices is particularly relevant to Conrad’s concerns with narrative reliability in Lord Jim, it is even more so the case in Absalom, Absalom!, where Faulkner heavily relies on the investment of different voices in the telling of Sutpen’s story. This allows Faulkner’s novel to reflect the fragile credibility of discourse as a means of conveying knowledge, by elaborating degrees of reliability in the narrators’ accounts, and allowing the subjective, ideological, and metafictional features of discourse to pervade and shape the relations of the voices to the story. Working at the same level of the diegesis, the four character-narrators produce a composite image in which, albeit under the direction of the frame narrator, the voices inform, overlap, contradict, comment, and absorb the others, blurring the lines that might have

134 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! distinguished the accounts. Polyphony aids in showing the various maladjustments between character-narration and story, through a repetitive mode by means of which each telling seems to speak of a different Sutpen story, as Jakob Lothe (1985) has convincingly argued.18 An overview of several of the storytellers will clarify how the voices build on each other and develop the narrative, showing an elaboration of narrative reliability that is modulated to different degrees with each narrator. The first narrator of Absalom, Absalom! is Miss Rosa, a fallible voice full of pain and contempt as a result of her outrageous experience of having Sutpen propose marriage to her only in the event that she gives birth to a son. She has privileged firsthand knowledge, yet she is a fallible narrator, as not everything she tells is directly trustworthy. Her perspective is limited due to her life experiences, and her lack of sufficient knowledge, rather than a deliberate manipulation of the story. Miss Rosa’s profoundly sensorial discourse is concerned with touch, sight, and emotions provoked by felt experiences: the weight of Charles Bon’s coffin, the touch of Clytie’s flesh, or the door barring her entrance to Judith’s bedroom. Since her tale narrates her personal experiences, her language is highly subjective and connoted, affected by a female and rather traditional admiration, as well as by personal outrage. She is at the center of the story of the harm inflicted by Sutpen upon her family, and so everything is told with relation to how it affected her isolated and wasted life; as Reed notes, “as participant she is the one least capable of selecting and organizing what has happened to her, the one most subject to the feelings and memories rather than the thoughts which might grow out of the story of Sutpen” (1973, 161). Yet at the same time, her narration has value as the novel’s only firsthand account of the story and is the least conjectural. In addition, despite being intensely personal, Rosa Coldfield’s narrative powerfully engages the historical and social views of the community of Jefferson. Aware of this, she tells Quentin that at home could have had the company of neighbors who were at least of my own kind who had known me all my life and even longer in the sense that they thought not only as I thought but as my forbears thought. (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 127) The town has nurtured her personal voice, which reflects the collective view: her storytelling, repeatedly endorsing the Lost Cause and the Daughters of the Confederacy, and echoing those other women in Flags in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun by reproducing a similar remembering, prevents forgetting while simultaneously reinforcing prejudices, thereby conforming to social and racial beliefs that were being incorporated into the New South discourse. The town is given a voice in the storytelling through Rosa’s narrative, which emanates from her intimate

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  135 space. When she narrates her return home from Sutpen’s Hundred, she constantly refers to what “they will have told you” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 139) in a complaint about “their” misunderstanding. She is able to provide reasons for what “they” say, and even affirms that she forgave Sutpen for his affront, although “[t]hey will tell you different, but I did” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 142). Nonetheless, Rosa assumes the town’s version of events in order to explain her pitiable circumstances and her multiple frustrations (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 139–142). As with Joe Christmas in Light in August, the town’s account becomes a source of authority because in the end, Rosa is unable to see herself differently.19 This explains why her views on historical, social, gender, and racial discourses conform so well to the New South Creed and how, through her utterance, the communal oratorical voice driven by the Southern oratory finds a projection in the intimacy of the individual, while her personal voice endows the collective discourse with authority. 20 Rosa does not posit the story as a mystery which she aims to solve, because she feels she knows its resolution. However, she certainly sets the tone for Mr. Compson’s rereading of the story as an enigma, with her obsession that Henry, having fled after murdering Bon, might be hiding at the house. More importantly, she establishes the narrative framework of the New South discourse and, specifically, the further connection between Sutpen’s story and the Southern defeat in the Civil War as the blamed factor. Following her, Mr. Compson contributes to the narrative with his interest in solving what he considers to be an enigma, and establishes a pattern for the search for explanations that would fill the gaps in the story. Through his addition of imagination and conjecture as the complements of (his) knowledge, he invites Quentin and the reader to believe that Henry’s problem with Charles Bon was bigamy. His voice elaborates narrative imagination as a way of providing missing information, in a tone of voice engaged in a process of persuasion, not dissimilar to that of Marlow in Lord Jim. This process of persuasion is underscored by the frequent appearance of signals merged with their narratives and detected through comparison to other voices. Mr. Compson initiates a process of legitimating imagination and conjecture that Shreve will later take to the extreme. If the factual story of the Sutpen family in Jefferson and their relation to the town and its p ­ eople ­ hapter 2 relies on the information of witnesses, which is the basis of C and part of Chapter 3, Mr. Compson’s accounts of Bon’s meeting at the University, and Henry’s visit to New Orleans, cannot rely on direct testimony, and are thus founded upon probability and imagination. Furthermore, Mr. Compson’s preoccupation with the psychological aspects of the story substitutes a witness testimony for a subjective one that is not based on the characters’ conversations with friends but on pure conjecture. This led Albert Guérard to explore what he labeled “narration by conjecture” in his brilliant The Triumph of the Novel (1976). 21 This perspective on the story grows in importance with Mr. Compson’s

136 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! tale, and reaches its peak when focused on the thoughts of the Sutpen children and Charles Bon. In an instance of his suspect credibility, Mr. Compson speculates about Bon, “So I can imagine him, the way he did it” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 91), “I can imagine how he did it – the calculation, the surgeon’s alertness” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 92), which contributes to his initial construction of Bon as a character. This faculty is crucial in this function since, as Ralph Flores suggests, Bon “can never be reported, exposed, told (exposé) as substance or subject, and is not even dissimulating or self-concealing […] in the occult of notknowing” (1984, 161). The imagination is extremely powerful and important in delineating the characters, as is evident when Mr. Compson speculates about the depth of Judith’s love for Bon: “I can imagine her if necessary even murdering the other woman. But she certainly would have made no investigation and then held a moral debate between what she wanted and what she thought was right” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 100). Later, also referring to Bon and Henry, Mr. Compson dares to introduce direct thoughts – given in italics – and words, which marks a step in the direction of the terrain of unreliability: Who knew Henry so much better than Henry knew him, and Henry not showing either, suppressing still that first cry of terror and grief, I will believe! I will! I will! Yes, that brief, before Henry had had time to know what he had seen, but not slowing: now would come the instant for which Bon had builded […]. (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 93) Yet Mr. Compson is aware that resorting to imagination very frequently relies on communal beliefs, as he observes: Have you noticed how so often when we try to reconstruct the causes which lead up to the actions of men and women, how with a sort of astonishment we find ourselves now and then reduced to the belief, the only possible belief, that they stemmed from some of the old virtues? (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 100) In the chapters that follow, the cautious yet fallible Quentin, due to his limited knowledge, offers a reflective halt in the narrative that allows the reader to consider prudence as a requirement for understanding the complexities of this profoundly Southern story. Quentin’s discourse is marked by impressively consistent reported speech that leaves little room for his own opinion and impressions, although the same cannot be said for repressions, as Richard Moreland (1990) has argued.22 The former, thus, are much more manifest in what Moreland qualifies as “ironic” silences, or in the frame narrator’s filtered indirect speech, than in Quentin’s “voice” proper.

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  137 Quentin’s conformation to the sections of the story that simply do not explain is also reflected in the fact that he does not employ the language of probability his father had used to explore the unknown psychological motives behind the characters’ behaviors. His scattered conjectures are less risky and are reported as part of Mr. Compson’s account ­(Faulkner 1990 [1936], 237, 239). Quentin does include a certain amount of the character’s thoughts and words, but they were either heard by ­Grandfather – Because he [Sutpen] said how the terrible part of it had not occurred to him yet, he just lay there while the two of them argued inside of him, speaking in orderly turn, both calm, even leaning backward to be calm and reasonable and unrancorous: But I can kill him. – No. That wouldn’t do no good – Then what shall we do about it? – I dont know – (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 196) or are Sutpen’s direct words: “[s]ent to school, ‘where,’ he told Grandfather, ‘I [Sutpen] learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 200); or are, once again, part of Mr. ­Compson’s speculations, as Quentin is careful to note each time. His voice is set in contrast to Shreve’s, with his repeated remarks about Shreve’s careless naming of Miss Rosa, as “Aunt Rosa,” and his complaints about Shreve’s interpretations of details, some of which are not even accurate according to the witnesses. Quentin repeatedly acknowledges the gaps of information, as when he says, for instance, that Sutpen himself “didn’t know, or remember, whether he had ever heard, been told, the reason or not. All he remembered was that” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 185). Overall, in his striving for objectivity, Quentin’s voice represents a contrast to both Mr. Compson’s and Shreve’s narratives. At the same time, however, he takes Mr. Compson’s openness to a wider context, which is not so much nurtured by the town’s collective memory and gossip as by local historical knowledge – references to the Civil War, to the postbellum period, to social classes such as the poor whites, or to the South as a region – which is made effective by his seeing in Sutpen’s story some of the region’s main problems. This opens the door above all to a much more complex understanding of the white planter, but also of the intricate class hierarchy that has been superimposed upon other hierarchies, such as the one based on racial differences. Quentin’s is both a language of subscription to the historical memory and a language of rejection, yet always exhibiting a serious personal commitment to Southern history. Quentin’s narrative, thus, works to introduce Shreve’s general view of the South and the particular historical problem of miscegenation that haunts it, as well as preparing the reader for Shreve’s more playful, and definitely unreliable voice. Shreve is the enthusiastic narrator who will offer the solution, but whose voice is misleading, for the information upon which he builds

138 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! the story is not available, and thus his telling offers a pretended-truth to resolve an indecipherable enigma. As Noel Polk speculates: [i]t has hardly occurred to anybody in or out of the novel to wonder whether perhaps Henry kills Bon for the same reason that Quentin in The Sound and the Fury wants to murder Dalton Ames: to save – i.e., control – his sister’s virginity, (2008, 45) which shows the wide room for speculation left by the fragmented story, and the logical yet uncertain racial factor. 23 Shreve acknowledges the need for a resolution of the narrative enigma, eager to participate in recounting Quentin’s story rather than his own. His second-person narrative and the eagerness of his request to Quentin, “you wait. Let me play a while now” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 231), indicate from the outset both his role as storyteller and his complex position as such. 24 In fact, the point at which Mr. Compson stops to raise awareness that “[i]t is just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know. […] Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 83) is the point where Shreve begins. Indeed, Mr.  ­Compson’s introduction of imagined words and thoughts is minimal in contrast to Shreve’s fervent and even excessive adoption of this strategy as his principal mode of narration. Bon’s thoughts are the very basis for the construction of Shreve’s Bon as a tragic mulatto, and a son abandoned by his father. In the crucial first and unwitnessed conversation between Sutpen and Henry in the library, Shreve posits incest as the first impediment that will compel Henry to flee with Bon, leaving room for the second definitive conversation in the war camp between father-Sutpen and son-Henry to reveal miscegenation, not incest, as the real cause. As Shreve observes in regard to this first unwitnessed conversation: “So the old man sent the nigger for Henry,” Shreve said. “And Henry came in and the old man said ‘They cannot marry because he is your brother’ and Henry said ‘You lie’ like that, that quick: no space, no interval, no nothing between like when you press the button and get light in the room. And the old man just sat there, didn’t even move and strike him and so Henry didn’t say ‘You lie’ again because he knew now it was so; he just said ‘It’s not true’, not ‘I dont believe it’ but ‘It’s not true’ because he could maybe see the old man’s face again now and demon or not […]. (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 242) Shreve’s powerful narration and appeal to the imagination are gradually displayed in his construction of Bon’s willingness to be acknowledged by

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  139 his father through what Bon might have thought and even what he might not have thought: maybe who could know how many times he looked at Henry’s face and thought, not there but for the intervening leaven of that blood which we do not have in common is my skull, my brow, sockets, shape and angle of jaw and chin and some of my thinking behind it, and which he could see in my face in his turn if he but knew to look as I know but there, just behind a little, obscured a little by that alien blood whose admixing was necessary in order that he exist is the face of the man who shaped us both out of that blind chancy darkness which we call the future; there – there – at any moment, second, I shall penetrate by something of will and intensity and dreadful need, and strip that alien leaving from it and look not on my brother’s face whom I did not know I possessed and hence never missed, but my father’s out of the shadow of whose absence my spirit’s posthumeity has never escaped […]. (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 261) Using direct speech, the Canadian narrator diligently develops the invented tension in Henry’s struggle to accept incest in order to allow for the marriage: But he [Sutpen] didn’t tell me. He just told you, sent me a message like you send a command by a nigger servant to a beggar or a tramp to clear out. Dont you see that? And Henry would say, ‘But Judith. Our sister. Think of her’ and Bon: ‘All right. Think of her. Then what? because they both knew what Judith would do when she found it out because they both knew that women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love, and Henry said, ‘Yes. I see. I understand. But you will have to give me time to get used to it. You are my older brother; you can do that little for me.’ (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 281) Embedded in Shreve’s discourse, and parallel to his own warnings about the codification of historical discourse, are his amendments to Quentin’s account of the story, an overt form of misreporting, which he justifies, arguing that Because why not? Because listen. What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe are and it don’t matter a damn whether they are or not? (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 266)

140 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! This liberty is corroborated by the frame narrator’s repeated alertness to Quentin and Shreve’s narrative developments, consisting of the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bobends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere, who, shadows, were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died but shadows in turn of what were (to one of them at least, to Shreve) shades too quiet as the visible murmur of their vaporizing breath. (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 250) A story in which drawing rooms and characters “Shreve and Quentin had likewise invented and which was likewise probably true enough” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 276). The frame narrator, much like in Lord Jim, in spite of not providing absolute narrative authority by either offering the missing information or closing the novel, raises awareness of the distance between the character-narrators and the story they tell. The enormous difficulties faced by the narrators in solving the enigma heighten the problems of knowledge and language. The narrators of ­Absalom, Absalom! have trouble accessing the relevant information, at the same time as they realize that language lacks precision as a tool for communication. Thus, the human reach of the facts and arguments found both in history and storytelling is radically questioned. Consequently, the novel resorts to unreliability as a way of dealing with the relative nature of the credibility of discourses, which finally locates truth on the margins: the story needs to be told and explained, that is what matters, regardless of whether it is true or not. Therein lies one of the most important ambivalences of the novel. The need to disregard the importance of truth is emphasized by the blurring of the narrative voice pronouncing the speech in the crucial camp episodes of the Civil War, in which Sutpen reveals to his son Henry that “[he] must not marry her, Henry. His mother’s father told me that her mother had been a Spanish woman. I believed him; it was not until after he was born that I found out his mother was part negro” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 292). Furthermore, Bon’s suspicious créolité is reinforced by his Spanish ancestry – supposedly revealed in the war e­ pisode – since, as Manuel Broncano explains “the Spanish ingredient in the novel emerges as synonymous with miscegenation, the ‘thing not named,’ the unspeakable truth that Sutpen tries in vain to erase from his fate” (2009, 109).25 Here, the episode draws out the historical frame described by the narrators and emphasized by Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve. The aforementioned episodes underline the dislocation of truth because they contain the solution to the enigma, which until that point had been developed by the most questionable narratives. Shreve later assumes this ambiguous revelation as truth, resuming his intervention in and interpretation of the story from that point. Faulkner criticism

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  141 has for decades delved into the narrative intricacy of these passages, interpreting them as non-narrated, narrated by Quentin, or Quentin and Shreve, or by the frame narrator. They are certainly the most unnatural episodes of the narrative, due to their permeable impossible narration. 26 In fact, determining the sources is impossible even if there are numerous speech hints that point to Shreve as the teller. What seems important to note, however, is that, their indeterminacy notwithstanding, they function in the novel at this point to ultimately dislocate the weighty question of truth, on the one hand; and to offer a source for the narrator’s continuation of the story, on the other hand. For these particular functions, it seems that only the absolute dislocation of truth can support a racial reading of the story and enable a conclusion – in fact, a narrative resolution of the idea that knowing racial difference is just a matter of storytelling, as we have seen. However, the novel resumes from that point to elaborate a yes-it-was-race conclusion to the enigma, transforming the murder into a racial murder, in an overall reading of the Sutpen story. Any attempt to pursue either truth or falsity in these episodes would inevitably lead to ambiguity, while the non-determination of voice leaves us as readers in a sort of limbo where conceptions of race seem to belong. Taken to the extreme, the aforementioned inscrutability of truth in Absalom, Absalom! culminates in the possibility of adopting race as the only plausible explanation for Charles Bon’s murder. In glimpsing the abyss between truth and language, and the crucial importance of plausibility over truth, Shreve mobilizes the power of the New South Creed in the cause of fiction. Invention in his discourse substitutes cautious conjecture and fiction replaces informed persuasion. Liberated by fiction and narrative creation based on current political arguments that can be easily assumed as plausible, Sutpen’s story thrives and has a continuity that provides it with a fullness that will finally allow for moral closure – and the closing of the novel itself. Seen from this angle, and certainly for the first-time reader, Shreve’s account offers the most complete version of Sutpen’s story. As Shreve resumes after the ambiguously narrated war episodes, clarifying the enigma: Henry Sutpen killed Charles Bon because he is “the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 294) and so, as Bon remarks to Henry, “it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you can’t bear” (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 293). In concluding with an unreliable narration that misreports and misregards, the gradual presentation of degrees of reliability in the narrations described earlier paradoxically leads the telling to the only solution offered. The polyphonic narrative progression is toward apparent clarification of the narrative enigma. Shreve makes the story much simpler and much more comprehensible in the context of the South, a simplification that is condensed in the final, deductive, and prophetic paragraphs of the novel, as we will see. If we disregard the importance of truth, as ­Absalom, Absalom! so vehemently suggests we should do, and we empower creative fiction and the pulling in of beliefs as the legitimate

142 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! response to everything in our world that we cannot answer from our limited human epistemology, Shreve’s creative Emancipation from the bonds of witnessing and the demands of accuracy offers a way out of the trap of an inapprehensible reality. However, while the juxtaposition of narrative voices graduates and exposes a variety of distances between narrator and story, providing contrasting accounts, their order in the narrative establishes a progression that moves in the other direction, toward the most extreme questioning of narrative credibility – unreliable narration. Although the reader is driven to engage in a process of persuasion that eventually forays into fiction to fulfill expectations in a convincing way, the presence of the other narrative voices – especially the frame narrator, and notably that of Quentin as a beholder and recipient of the whole process of n ­ arration – once again instills doubt over the resolution of the story and the credibility of the telling. It is hard to think of a more appropriate technical construction of the narrative for discussing the uncertainties behind the strict definitions of race presumed by segregation laws, and simultaneously challenged in the very problem of miscegenation. Elaboration of the principle of narrative reliability and the presentation of the problem of miscegenation at the heart of the US segregation system go hand in hand in Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner’s novel takes miscegenation as the final reason that seems to answer all the questions. Shreve reaches the popular conclusion of the novel: “And do you know what I think?” Now he did expect an answer, and now he got one: “No,” Quentin said. “Do you want to know what I think?” “No,” Quentin said. “Then I’ll tell you. I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?” “I don’t hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I don’t hate it,” he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it! (Faulkner 1990 [1936], 311) And yet the novel as a whole interrogates the validity of Shreve’s political conclusion by elaborating upon the principle of narrative reliability.

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  143 While the apparent conclusion aggressively points to anti-­miscegenation, in full agreement with the New South segregation policies, the novel’s gradual questioning of its narrators’ credibility in the exposition of ­Sutpen’s case might well support a contrary view, in which attributing a racial factor to the story may just be a coded argument that the historical reading of Southern history introduces, to impose a version of the story that wipes out uncertainty. Because the enigma both at the heart of the story and at the heart of miscegenation as established by in the segregation period (who is white/black?) is not solvable, there is an urgent need for arguments that can stabilize credibility, both at the story level and at the historical level, in fiction, town, and court. In conclusion, as this chapter reveals, the New South Creed as a racial ideology that developed the racial policies that instituted the system of segregation in the US Southern states is key in providing the political arguments and racial stereotypes that Absalom, Absalom! calls into the narrative through its different narrative voices in order to unlock the mystery in Sutpen’s story. Indeed, the problem of defining race that ­anti-miscegenation laws attempted to resolve during the US segregation period, and the separation of individuals based on that definition, fully determined the treatment of narrative reliability in Absalom, Absalom! The narrative deploys a racial mystery intrinsic to the State Laws division of races and works it into a narrative enigma that drives narrative progression. The narrators newly import the racial mystery in order to explain the downfall of Sutpen’s Hundred – and by extension of the slave society in the US South – in New South Creed terms, and thus resolve the story in the novel. Nevertheless, its resolution through polyphony that problematizes narrative reliability by shades, and that makes extensive and transparent use of stereotypes as narratives that supply the structured information that the sources of the story do not possess, encourages readers to question the uses of racial ideology in the contemporaneous historical and political conflicts. This chapter therefore invites us to consider the uses of active racial stereotypes and political arguments as drawn by the New South Creed in the generation of a racially segregated legal and political system of power, as conditioning polyphony, narrative enigmas, and narrative progression, in their innovative and unsolved elaboration of the problem of narrative reliability.

Notes 1 See an analysis of the weight of the “scientific” and social arguments in the establishment of race in the Southern courts in Zackodnik (2001). ­Zackodnik cites the states of North Carolina, Kentucky, and Louisiana for the legal inclusion of the “one-drop rule” in their statutes, though in several cases, these were contradictory or not applied equally to all segregation laws (2001, 442). See also for the concept and development of the “one-drop rule” Williamson (1980).

144 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! 2 Attempts to define race were marked by a constant struggle between biological conceptions and more cultural definitions, even though these boundaries were also not clear. The lawyer’s claims showed variation in this sense, and we find many cases in which racial views are contradictory or applied differently in each particular case. For the complex ramified development of the conceptions of race that move from pseudoscientific to a eugenics-influenced definition in the 1920s, as well as toward a more sociocultural definition, see the following studies and documents: Michaels (1995), Pascoe (1996), Bair (1999), and Watson (2011). See also the edition of Alain LeRoy Locke’s lectures, and the valuable introduction to them by Jeffrey C. Steward, in Locke (1992). They all show the subtle ways in which concepts of race developed and responded to the central question of miscegenation. 3 The most exhaustive recent study of miscegenation law is Pascoe (2009). See also the excellent compilation of articles on the history of interracial contacts and laws in M. E. Hodes (1999). 4 See a partial reprint of the pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro anonymously published by David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman on ­December 25, 1863 in Sollors (2004, 350–380). 5 For a comprehensive study of the development of miscegenation laws in the US South from their origins until 1900, see Bardaglio (1999). 6 The legal status of the children of a prohibited interracial marriage was a controversial issue and varied from state to state. As Bardaglio mentions, for example, if in North Carolina they could not be legitimized, in Virginia many offspring of such unions won inheritance suits (1999, 127). 7 For a detailed account of the historical development of the anti-­miscegenation laws and a broader perspective on the problem of miscegenation, see ­Williamson (1980); F. J. Davis (1991); Kinney (1985); and the historical debates compiled in Bernasconi and Dotson (2005), which is dedicated specifically to the topics “Josiah Nott and the Question of Hybridity” (vol. 1), “The Miscegenation Debate” (vol. 2), and “Race amalgamation and the ­Future American” (vol. 3). 8 See Cobb (2005, 62–98) for an extensive analysis of the relationships between the ideologies of the Lost Cause and the New South Creed; on the lost alternatives to the New South racial ideologies, see the chapters “Forgotten Alternatives” and “Capitulation to Racism” in Woodward (1955) and Paul M. Gaston’s chapters “The Innocent South” and “The Vital Nexus” (1976). 9 F. Garvin Davenport Jr. explains this and how he relates it to the national young Union’s project: But the myth of Southern history, while based on these facts of separateness, was also to be used by Southerners to seek resolution for the central contradictions of the national mythology – how Jefferson’s white yeomen could retain their innocence in a society that was being invaded by the machine and the city and in which there was already present the alien figure of the Negro. This myth suggested that the South, because of its experience of defeat and humiliation, had developed a vision of history, a strength of character and a sense of moral responsibility which made it alone of all the national regions strong enough to reconcile industrialism and the Negro with the Jeffersonian vision. Or, if reconciliation was impossible, the South would exile itself from the threatening forces and take its stand alone. (1970, 11) This idea sets the framework that will include Faulkner’s concerns in ­Absalom, Absalom!, and in most of his other work. Davenport documents

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  145 the different reactions that are somehow representative of this mythical perspective of the South after the Civil War. This documentation notes the crucial elements of the myths, as described by Davenport, of reconciliation and union, Southern uniqueness, the Southern burden, and the theme of the Southern mission in the works of Woodrow Wilson, William Garrott Brow (which the author says anticipates Faulkner’s perspective on the myth), ­Frederick Jackson Turner, and Thomas Dixon. Other important sources on the Myth of the South or ideologies of the New South, relevant for the elements appearing in Absalom, Absalom!, are Howe (1952); Pilkington (1981); J.  T.  Matthews (2009); Woodward (1968); and, in a counter-version of it, Polk (1997). For historical references to the building of the New South from the Civil War to the twentieth century, and with a focus on race relations, aside from the other sources mentioned in this chapter, see the indispensable H. N. Rabinowitz (1992), Williamson (1984), Foner (1988), Fredrickson (1981), and Hale (1998). For a brilliant study of the New South with a strong focus on labor history, see the crucial book on the New South, Ayers (1992). 10 Gaston also explains how the mythology of the Old South affected the definition of racial relations: The New South myth has been no exception. In race relations, it formed the intellectual and moral touchstone to which all discussion of the ­Negro’s role in Southern society was ineluctably referred for more than half of the present century. Influential in different ways, it has exerted its power over demagogues and racists as well as liberal reformers and well-meaning paternalists. Negroes and white Northerners have likewise responded to and been shaped by it, and much of foreign opinion has reflected its power. This is not to say that the dominant racial attitudes of the twentieth century all derived from the New South myth or that it was the first universally accepted conceptualization of racial sentiments. […] What is true is that the New South myth perfectly complemented the post-Reconstruction search for a new modus operandi in race relations and came to be the intellectual and moral foundation of the Jim Crow system of the twentieth century. (1976, 224) 11 See particularly for racial aspects in Faulkner’s novels, including miscegenation, Sundquist’s excellent Faulkner: The House Divided (1983). 12 Barbara Ladd explores the idea that since the purchase of Louisiana, creoles of color were considered “free men/women of color” and by 1820 began to be persecuted, as the issue of white purity was growing into an obsession. Creoles of color (and whites as well) were progressively associated with “the colonist site of slavery, miscegenation, and political and cultural degeneration” (1996, 25). These connections reinforced and maintained the idea that Creoles were a threat because they represented the connection between the slave revolutions in the West Indies and the South. In the particular case of Louisiana, the Louisiana Civil Code of 1808 already prohibited intermarriage between “free white persons with free persons of color,” and this persisted until 1857, when there were demands to make the intermarriage prohibitions harsher because the code assumed that a person was “colored” – different from slave in Louisiana’s tripartite legal ­distinctions – based on visibility. Thus, it was obvious that many mulattoes “who looked white but who could be shown to have ‘a touch of the tarbrush’ were marrying white persons.” In this, we see how the social and economic factors, along with the Spanish and French legacies, helped maintain some differences. For all the particularities of the racial distinctions in Louisiana, see

146 Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! the well-documented study, from which this information has been taken, Virginia R. Domínguez (1986, 25–26). 13 I already analyzed “passing” at length in Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August in Puxan-Oliva (2013). 14 See Towner’s (2000) work on detection of blackness in Faulkner’s later novels. 15 It is worth recalling here Henry Hughes’s words in his racist Treatise on Sociology, published in 1854 in which he says: Hybridism is heinous. Impurity of races is against the law of nature. ­Mulattoes are monsters. The law of nature is the law of God. The same law which forbids consanguineous amalgamation; forbids ethical amalgamation. Both are incestuous. Amalgamation is incest. (1968, 240) Christopher Peterson develops his perspective that the house divided is as a body divided. He sees in Henry, Bon, and Judith’s triangle “a tripartite transgression of the prohibitions on miscegenation, incest, and same-sex desire that in turn deconstructs the integrity of their bodies” (2004, 244). ­Similarly, Betina Entzminger discusses two of these issues in Entzminger (2011). 16 See Kennedy (2003) for an important exploration of miscegenation from several points of view, with special emphasis on the offspring, also revealing the problematic racial distinctions in adoption cases. 17 Estella Schoenberg analyzes the several errors committed by the narrator and the critics, who assume facts for which there is no reliable evidence (Schoenberg 1977). I cannot delve too deeply here into the effects on the reader of the limited access to relevant information in the novel. However, this is a crucial point since the reader is bewildered by the same problems as the narrator. In this sense, for example, Cleanth Brooks has studied the degrees of knowledge of the narrators and our problems as readers. Regarding the reader’s difficulties, he points out that: Like the earlier, the later provides a résumé, in Shreve’s cheerfully mockheroic style, of events evidently narrated to him earlier by Quentin, yet there is no place in the text of the novel where we are allowed to read the details of such a conversation between Quentin and Shreve. (Brooks 1990, 314)

18 19 20

21

The either elusive or silent strategy is also the argument for the “failure of language” in Floyd C. Watkins, “Thirteen Ways of Talking about a Blackbird” (1971, 216–233). For a close reading of each of the voices, see Parker (1991); Ragan (1987). See an analysis of this in McKinley (1997); Romine (1999). Excellent studies on the South as a community of values and on the role of Southern oratory in the creation and maintenance of that community are Romine (1999); S. M. Ross (1989). For the importance of oratory in the South, see the collections and study Braden (1979); Braden and Auer (1970); Braden (1983). Lothar Hönnighausen notes the interesting association between the narration by conjecture and the function of metaphor in the novel: The close interrelationship between metaphor and narration does not simply derive from the fact that the style of Absalom, Absalom! is richer in metaphors than that of Vanity Fair or Gone with the Wind. Rather, it lies in an essential affinity between the hypothetical or conjectural nature of the narrative in Absalom, Absalom! and the structure of the

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  147 metaphor. As the narrators of Absalom, Absalom! are always toying with several possibilities, the readers following them have also – as in metaphor – to negotiate among several interacting contexts. (1997, 168) Reed also analyzes this use of metaphor. 22 For a psychoanalytical approach to Faulkner’s novels, with a close look at Quentin, see Irwin (1975); Fowler (1997); and Polk (1996). 23 For a stronger comprehension of the crucial aspect of homosexuality in Quentin and Shreve’s relationship, which reflects also Bon and Henry’s, see his chapter “How Shreve Gets in to Quentin’s Pants.” 24 I cannot delve here in the technique of second-person narrative as a source for unreliability, which has been barely explored. The position of a narrator telling the story of another narrator that is his or her own narratee is a very puzzling narrative situation that can function, as does here with Quentin and Shreve, to erode narrative reliability. On second-person narrative, see F ­ ludernik (1994); Bal (1996); Morrissette (1965); Schofield (1997); Furrow (1988); Bonheim (1983); Richardson (1991); Reitan (2011). To understand more deeply the effects of this technique, refer to Émile Benveniste, “­L’antonyme et le pronom en français moderne” in volume 2 (Benveniste 1966). 25 The author makes the argument more complex by noting that Sutpen’s design is based both on exploitation and repudiation of the Spanish other: a dispossessed and exiled Southerner, Sutpen marries into the Haitian plantation, gaining thus access to class and wealth, but he repudiates wife and son on racial grounds. In exchange, he receives the slaves and the money that provide for his new beginning on the ­M ississippi frontier, and it is with Spanish gold that he sanctions his claim to the land. (Broncano 2009, 109) It is worth observing here that the relationship between the Spanish and miscegenation had been noted at least as early as 1724, when “Intendant Mithon raised the prospect that the French in Saint–Domingue would soon resemble a race of mixed bloods like their Spanish neighbors” (Garraway 2005, 211). 6 Works that discuss the narrative voice in the war episodes are numerous. 2 The more relevant interpretations are the following: for attribution to the frame narrator’s voice, see Kuyk (1990); for attribution to Quentin, see, for example, Ladd (1994); for attribution to Quentin and Shreve’s voices together, see Polk (1996), Ragan (1987), and Kartiganer (1979); for immediate vision or non-narrated interpretations, see Parker (1991), Pitavy (1984), and Bassett (1989); for attributing the voice to the reader, see P. Brooks (1982); for attributing the voice to a different unknown source, see Brodsky (1978) and Guérard (1976); for attributing the voice to Shreve, see Ruppersburg (1983) and Rimmon-Kenan (1996).

4 Estranging, Discordant Reliability, and French Colonial Algeria in Albert Camus’s L’étranger

If there is a novel that has formally and ideologically confused many ­readers for decades and over which there is no critical agreement yet, it is Albert Camus’s L’étranger (1942, The Stranger). This novel is ­challenging in its ideological uses of narrative voice. A first-­person ­narrative, L’étranger presents a homodiegetic narrator that does not take advantage of the possibility of displaying of affect or self-­reflection that this narrative technique offers. The narrator tells the death of his mother and the killing of an Arab in French Algeria with an indifferent attitude, which has become the point of contention in the interpretation of the novel. Narrative theorists are fully aware of this challenging case since Genette himself found it problematic in his classification of the i­ntersections between focalization and voice. In his Nouveau discours du récit, he concludes: Déclinons donc toute interprétation, et laissons ce récit à son indécision, dont la formule serait plutôt: ‘Meursault raconte ce qu’il fait et décrit ce qu’il perçoit, mais il ne dit pas […] s’il en pense quelque chose’. Cette “situation”, ou plutôt cette attitude narrative, c’est pour l’instant ce qui ressemble le miex, ou le moins mal, à une narration homodiégétique ‘neutre’, ou à focalisation externe. [Let us renounce all interpretation, and leave this story to its indecision, whose formula appears to be: ‘Meursault tells what he does, and describes what he perceives, but he does not say […] what he may think about it all’. This ‘situation,’ or rather this narrative ­attitude, seems for the moment to most closely resemble a ‘neutral’ homodiegetic narration, or external focalization.] (Genette 1983, 85) Genette leaves narrative voice in L’étranger to its own uncertainty. If we approach the text from the point of view of narrative reliability rather than “first-­person narrative” or even “homodiegetic narrative,” we might be better equipped to comprehend Meursault’s voice in L’étranger. In fact, as this chapter argues, Meursault’s non-­affective first-­ person narrative is an “estranging narrative” that uses underreporting

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  149 as an ideological strategy common in colonial discourse, which suggests that the narrative can be read as discordant. This brief statement requires some disentangling. To illustrate the root of the problem, the famous beginning of the novel clearly shows the indifferent first-­person narrative, Genette’s “­neutral” attitude: “Ajourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-­être hier, je ne sais pas. J’ai reçu un télégramme de l’asile: ‘Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués.’ Cela ne veut rien dire. C’était peut-­être hier” (Camus 2013b [1942], 9) [Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday (Camus 1989 [1942], 3)]. Although recounting scenes as appalling and disconcerting as the burnings in The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man and El reino de este mundo, in L’étranger the killing of an Arab formally reproduces a narrative in which the narrator reports physical, sensorial experience with scarcely a trace of emotion: Il m’a semblé que le ciel s’ouvrait sur toute son étendue pour laisser pleuvoir du feu. Tout mon être s’est tendu et j’ai crispé ma main sur le revolver. La gâchette a cédé, j’ai touché le ventre poli de la crosse et c’est là, dans le bruit à la fois sec et assourdissant, que tout a commencé. J’ai secoué la sueur et le soleil. J’ai compris que j’avais détruit l’équilibre du jour, le silence exceptionnel d’un plage où j’avais été heureux. Alors, j’ai tiré encore quatre fois sur un corps inerte òu les balles s’enfonçaient sans qu’il y parût. Et c’était comme quatre coups brefs que je frappais sur la porte du malheur. (Camus 2013b [1942], 92) [It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire. My shole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.] (Camus 1989 [1942], 59) Critics have long drawn attention to this perplexing voice. For instance, Cvetanka Conkinska argues that the character-­narrator Meursault “déstabilise […] la théorie béhavioriste: en plus de l’emploi du ‘je’ autodiégetique pour raconter une histoire extra-­hétérodiégétique, ils s’introduit dans une focalisation interne, voire omnisciente, confirmant ainsi un

150  Albert Camus’s L’étranger antibéhaviorisme” [unsettles […] behaviorist theory: in addition to the use of the autodiegetic ‘I’ to tell an extra-­heterodiegetic story, he adopts an internal focalization, an omniscient view, thus confirming an anti-­ behaviorism] (2001, 287). As she suggests, Meursault’s voice destabilizes the association between the autodiegetic narrative ‘I’ and its subjective perspective, as well as the association between behaviorist narration and extra-­heterodiegetic narration.1 The voice emerges from an ambivalent locus of enunciation since the narrative adoption of an internal focalization and voice that lacks subjective affect makes it ­resemble a behavioral narrative. 2 The second part of L’étranger engages in a rereading of Meursault’s narrative given in the first part, explicitly guiding the interpretation of Meursault’s character-­narrator as emotionally detached. While the first part of the novel tells the death of the mother and the killing of an Arab, the second tells his arrest, the trial, and his being sentenced to death. In the second part, the instructor judge who interrogates Meursault desperately concludes that “Je n’ai jamais vu d’âme aussi endurcie que la vôtre” (Camus 2013b [1942], 107) [I have never seen a soul as hardened as yours (Camus 1989 [1942], 69)], and explicitly exposes the problem of Meursault’s narrative attitude. Meursault’s unemotional narrative voice does not only produce a formal uncertainty but it also affects the ideological reading of the novel. As we will see later, critics range from qualifying L’étranger as an anticolonialist, a colonialist, and an ambivalent narrative. Published in 1942 in a still colonial French Algeria, and interpreted through the lenses of Camus’s own political position with regard to the Algerian War of independence, which started in 1954, L’étranger is caught in an unsolvable ideological debate. What makes the problem unsolvable is the ­ambivalence of Meursault’s narrative and, more specifically, the problem of narrative reliability whose elaboration is at the novel’s formal core. The critical problem raised by this novel is once again the interrelation between the technical developments of narrative distance that produces distrust, and the morally and ideologically contested readings of the novel, two problems that criticism has mostly treated as separate issues. The politics of form approach offers a better understanding of the ideological basis of the ambivalent reliability of the narrative voice, and this test case should demonstrate on a larger scale the specific ways in which ideology is being used to inform narrative reliability. The purpose of this chapter is to show that estranging and discordant narration mostly depends on ideological discourses that are being used to create the critical doubt and distance necessary to render a problematic narrative reliability. Specifically, I argue that only by attending to ­ ineteenth the colonial discourses present in French Algeria from the late n century to the 1940s can estranging and discordant narration be apprehended as the key device that informs the politics of form in L’étranger.

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  151 The discourses of Latin Africa and their subsequent developments in the Algerianist discourse and the Méditerranée of l’École d’Alger provide clues to the operation of the ambivalent narrative distance in the novel. Attention to the arguments of these discourses and their effects in French Algeria, as well as their uses in the shaping of this distance enables us to display the mechanisms through which narrative reliability is problematized.

Estranging and Discordant Narration as Forms of Ideological Disclosure As it has been argued in the preceding chapters, Phelan’s concepts of “estranging” and “bonding” unreliability are helpful in distinguishing the ways in which a narrative relates to the reader in ethical terms, that is, the extent to which an authorial audience (or the reader) ethically engages with a narrative. These notions partly relate to the narrative distancing effects that Cohn used to describe what she called “discordant narration.” Both forms of narrative create an evaluative distance between narration and reading. The concepts differ in their approach in that Phelan considers estranging and bonding unreliability as part of the ethical poetics, while Cohn considers discordant narration as the production and reception of an ideological distance. Both narrative theorists, however, approach narrative from a rhetorical, communicative perspective. These concepts are particularly interesting in light of the politics of form. As this chapter aims to show, estranging/bonding unreliability and discordant narration are the principal mechanisms through which the narratives appropriate ideological discourses and should therefore be the point of departure for narratologists aiming to study the uses of political and historical discourse in narrative. While “bonding unreliability” has been used to analyze The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man, the concept of “estranging unreliability” should be brought to bear. Phelan defines “estranging unreliability” as a narrative where “the discrepancies between the narrator’s reports, interpretations, or evaluations and the interferences about those things made by the authorial audience leave these two participants in the communicative exchange distant from one another – in a word, estranged” (Phelan 2007, 225). Phelan illustrates the functioning of bonding and estranging unreliability primarily through the analysis of Navokov’s ­Lolita, describing the dynamics through which the reader might feel that her ethical distance from the narrative voice decreases or increases. In line with the reformulation of the problem of narrative reliability put forward in this book, I propose a slight modification of the concept of “estranging/bonding unreliability” using it mostly as “estranging/­ bonding reliability” to show more clearly that the narration modulates reliability or credibility in the narrative through this important dynamics

152  Albert Camus’s L’étranger of bonding and estranging, so that, as Phelan’s concept also seems to suggest, the distance between narrative text and reader fluctuates along a spectrum between full reliability and unreliability at either extreme. While “estranging/bonding unreliability” are forms of this distance, novels such as those discussed in this book show that the distancing dynamics does not necessarily imply clear unreliability, although it certainly problematizes narrative reliability. As explained in the Introduction and seen in Lord Jim, in an effort to distinguish factual unreliability from judgmental unreliability, Cohn defines “discordant narration” as “an ideological kind that is attributed to a narrator who is biased or confused, inducing one to look, behind the story he or she tells, for a different meaning from the one he himself or she herself provides” (2000, 307). Cohn clearly defines the questioning of the reader’s trust in the narrative through an ideological disagreement that the text invites to take as such. She uses the examples of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to show that there are textual cues which the reader might or might not choose to read as indicators of discordance. One major contribution of Cohn’s ­article is to locate the factor measuring narrative credibility in ideology. Seen together, estranging/bonding reliability and discordant narration are comparable in the sense that they assume that distrust is built through judgment and, ultimately, I propose, through ideological judgment.3 Although this discussion properly pertains to philosophy rather than to literary studies and cannot be further developed here, the association of ethical codes with ideologies, mostly political ideologies, is nothing new. It is possible to go a step further. Arguably, estranging reliability is generally affected by ideological discourses that in appealing to specific ethics (historically, geographically, and in any case culturally based) can function in the interaction between context of production, text, and reading context. As we have seen, racial ideologies are outstanding in their definitions of moral values and ethical relations. While Phelan and Cohn acknowledge that ethical parameters change and readings vary historically and culturally, their arguments suggest that every given text engages with a particular ethics. This is also suggested by Alexander ­Bareis (2013), who claims that there is a need for a diachronization of narratology and who takes unreliable narration from an ethical perspective as a privileged site where the contextualization of a text might be most productive. However, he warns that the ethical standpoint from which the reliability of the text should be examined is the context contemporaneous to the production of the text rather than its reception, in order to avoid anachronistic readings. This ethical dimension should, in turn, be combined with a cultural dimension. It should be noted that the ethical codes upon which the narratives depend are undergirded by an ideological apparatus. With this, I am not claiming that all ethical perspectives or engagements of the texts with ethics need

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  153 to be necessarily observed from an explicitly ideological point of view. The ideology that supports one ethical parameter might not be of particular relevance to the text. Nonetheless, when looking at “estranging unreliability,” it might well be the case that the ideological discourse of a particular ethics is relevant. In The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man, the narrator’s choice to disregard the lynching, to stop fighting for racial uplift, and his extensive use of bonding reliability show that the ideology underlying that ethical behavior is the African American racial discourse contemporaneous to the novel, and that the novel invites the reader to interpret the text through that specific political framework. For these reasons, the mechanisms for the construction of an effective estranging/bonding reliability and a discordant narration most often depend on the reader’s apprehension of the politics of form, of the capacity and disposition to bring into the narrative those alluded discourses that destabilize the narrative. As we will see in this chapter, the politics of form is crucial in those categories of unreliability. Narratologists have not sufficiently attended to L’étranger, and critics of L’étranger have not paid enough attention to the latest developments in narrative theory. While criticism has mostly categorized Meursault as a reliable narrator, the novel amply develops estranging reliability. Indeed, as we have shown with reference to the beginning of the novel, and as argued in more detail later, the confusion that the novel has generated is paradigmatic of estranging narration. The reader is mainly surprised and estranged by two facts that are unemotionally narrated in the first part of the novel: the death of the mother and the killing of an Arab. Taken from a narratological point of view, there are several indicators that Meursault’s narrative is estranging and discordant. These mostly appear in the form of objections to and rereadings of Meursault’s accounts of facts during the interrogation and trial, and in the way in which they diverge from the narrative given in the first part. Critical analyses of L’étranger have thus far considered Meursault a reliable narrator because he speaks the truth and tells the facts as they are. In Albert Camus: The Algerian, Carroll argues that These are facts no one can dispute, whatever Meursault’s motives and whatever the extenuating circumstances might have been, since we learn these facts from Meursault himself. We have no reason not to believe him, since his honesty and directness have been well established in the novel long before the shooting is narrated. ­Meursault is as reliable a first-­person narrator as could be imagined, a trustworthy witness with no reason to lie about what happened. (2007, 27) Meursault’s trustworthiness is taken to affirm his relative innocence. Christiane Chaulet-­Achour thus takes this approach in arguing that

154  Albert Camus’s L’étranger since Meursault aims to explain himself, he constructs a narrative that through confession and display of his truthful relation to events leads to “constater que Meursault est l’homme de l’instant et qu’il ne peut être criminel puis-­qu’il ne prémédité rien” [conclude that Meursault is a man of the moment, and that he cannot be a criminal since he has not premeditated anything (Chaulet-­Achour 1998, 27)]. There is plenty of textual evidence that Meursault’s account does not distort facts. Meursault himself explicitly refuses to say anything false in his trial. In their first interview, when the defense lawyer asks Meursault whether he would say in the trial that he had dominated his natural feelings the day his mother died, he refuses by saying “Non, parce que c’est faux” (Camus 2013b [1942], 100) [No, because it is not true (Camus 1989 [1942], 65)]. As O’Brien (1970) and Hefferman (2014) have noted, however, the interpretation that Meursault’s narrative is reliable is partly due to the way in which Camus’s own comments oriented the criticism of the novel. In an amply quoted preface to a 1956 American edition, Camus wrote that society condemns Meursault because he does not play the game. He does that because “[h]e refuses to lie […] He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened” (Camus 1968, 336). From the point of view of narrative theory, it therefore seems reasonable to qualify Meursault’s narrative as a reliable report of facts, which he does not distort. While this has been the critical consensus, O’Brien objects that this is not entirely true since Meursault in fact lies to the police about Raymond’s beating of a woman. Meursault does admit the lie, but he thereby also shows that he is capable of distorting facts in his narration. To be sure, the rest of the narration does not provide further indications of narrative unreliability with regard to facts. Meursault’s narrative functions in the same way as those of the narrator of The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man or even Marlow in Lord Jim, who also relate the facts accurately. Their narrations do not contain cues that strongly encourage us to distrust the factual narration. However, both the narrator’s reliability in The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man and Marlow’s in Lord Jim are questioned with regard to the ideological perspective that they adopt in relation to their narratives. Similarly, in L’étranger, Meursault’s narrative accuracy in the telling of facts does not necessarily imply (as many critics assume) moral or ideological reliability. The nuanced narratological concepts of narrative unreliability are invaluable when dealing with a confusing narrative voice like the one in L’étranger. Formally, critics like Chaulet-­Achour have drawn attention to the explicit two-­part structure of his novel and the changes in the time of the narrative, as well as the evolution of Meursault from a position of guilt to a position of partial innocence. We can take the reflection on the binary structure of the novel a step further if we consider the several interrogations and the trial as polyphony, which questions narrative

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  155 reliability.4 Meursault’s account of his interlocutors enables us to see the second part as a rereading of Meursault’s narrative in the first. The second part corresponding to the detention, trial, and sentence sits in judgment of the first part. In its revision of the narrative, the trial confirms the estranging effect of Meursault’s narrative in the first part, while the trial’s exaggeration of the moral condemnation of Meursault contributes to restoring part of the narrative bond with his voice. The function of the trial, however, is even clearer when it reproduces the same colonial discourse strategies present in Meursault’s narration, which suggest a reading of the novel as a discordant narrative. Focus on the trial reveals it as a device that graduates the distance between Meursault’s narrative, the novel as a whole, and the reader.

Signs of Estranging and Discordant Narration in L’étranger: Meursault’s Trial The trial functions to both question and reproduce narrative reliability in the novel in ways that critics have not sufficiently examined. Yet the ideological discourses used in the production of those effects from a contemporaneous point of view have received even less scrutiny. On a basic level, the trial functions to show the estranging reliability of Meursault’s narrative. It works as a rereading of his narrative and suggests that the reader is correct in discerning estrangement in the way in which he behaves toward his mother’s death and the killing of an Arab. As cited earlier, the defense lawyer and the instructor judge’s interrogations already draw attention to Meursault’s insensitivity toward the death of his mother. This prepares the ground for the interrogations of Meursault and the witnesses during the trial. The trial opens by asking “des questions apparentment étrangères à mon affaire” (Camus 2013b [1942], 133) [some questions that might seem irrelevant to my case (Camus 1989 [1942], 87)], about the reasons why Meursault had put his mother in an asylum. Insisting on the same point, Meursault reports how the first witness, the director of the asylum, declared that “il avait été surpris de mon calme le jour de l’enterrament” [he had been surprised by my calm the day of the funeral] and that “je n’avais pas voulu voir maman, je n’avais pas pleuré une seule fois et j’étais parti aussitôt après l’enterrement sans me recueillir sur sa tombe” [I hadn’t wanted to see Maman, that I hadn’t cried once, and that I had left right after the funeral without paying my last respects at her grave]. He adds that “une chose encore l’avait surpris: un employé des pompes funèbres lui avait dit que je ne savais pas l’âge de maman” (Camus 2013b [1942], 135) [one thing had surprised him: one of the men who worked for the undertaker had told him I didn’t know how old Maman was (Camus 1989 [1942], 89)]. The trial reveals signs of Meursault’s insensitivity (and lack of respect for mourning) when Marie recollects the day following his mother’s

156  Albert Camus’s L’étranger death, summed up by the prosecutor: “le lendemain de la mort de sa mère, cet homme prenait des bains, commençait une liaison irrégulière, et allait rire devant un film comique” (Camus 2013b [1942], 142) [the day after his mother’s death, this man was out swimming, starting up a dubious liaison, and going to the movies, a comedy, for laughs (Camus 1989 [1942], 94)]. The prosecutor rereads Meursault’s narrative by putting emphasis on the “irregularity” of his relation with Marie and the “comic” genre of the film they watched. This reinterpretation, which will gain general acceptance in the trial, anchors a denunciatory reading of an immoral behavior that confirms the sense of estrangement that the first part of Meursault’s narrative might have produced in the reader. Meursault’s writing of the letter to his neighbor Raymond to justify his mistreatment of her and his hiding of that mistreatment from the police are also emphasized to demonstrate Meursault’s immorality and guilt, even before he kills the Arab. Similarly, the second part of L’étranger functions to indicate the estranging reliability of Meursault’s account of the killing of an Arab. Subject to far less questioning than the death of the mother, the interrogations and the trial emphasize Meursault’s arbitrary act of murder and his lack of remorse. When the instructor judge asks Meursault to explain his reasons for returning to the beach alone – following his denial that he had done so with the intention of killing the Arab – he replies that “c’était le hasard” (Camus 2013b [1942], 134) [It just happened that way (Camus 1989 [1942], 88)]. The prosecutor later scorns Meursault’s recourse to chance – not reflected in the English translation of the previous quote – by remarking that le hasard avait déjà beaucoup de méfaits sur la conscience dans cette histoire. Il a voulu savoir si c’était par hasard que je n’étais pas intervenu quand Raymond avait giflé sa maîtresse, par hasard que j’avais servi de témoin au commissariat, par hasard encore que mes déclarations lors de ce témoignage s’étaient révélées de pure complaisance. (Camus 2013b [1942], 144) [chance had already had a lot of misdeeds on its conscience in this case. He wanted to know if it was just by chance that I hadn’t intervened when Raymond had beaten up his girlfriend, just by chance that I had acted as a witness at the police station, and again just by chance that my statements on that occasion had acted as a witness at the police station, and again just by chance that my statements on that occasion had proved to be so convenient.] (Camus 1989 [1942], 95) Prior to the trial, when the judge asks Meursault if he regretted the killing, Meursault says that “j’ai dit que, plutôt que du regret véritable,

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  157 j’éprouvais un certain ennui” [[I] said that more than sorry I felt kind of annoyed] and he adds that he had “l’impression qu’il ne me comprenait pas” (Camus 2013b, 107) [the impression he didn’t understand (Camus 1989 [1942], 70)]. These interrogations lead the prosecutor to repeatedly highlight Meursault’s lack of sensitivity and immorality and to propose what is now presented as a more accurate report of facts, in what constitutes an alternative reading of Meursault’s first part of the narrative. Meursault reports the prosecutor’s account:5 Il a résumé les faits à partir de la mort de maman. Il a rappelé mon insensibilité, l’ignorance où j’étais de l’âge de maman, mon bain du lendemain, avec un femme, le cinéma, Fernandel et enfin la rentrée avec Marie. J’ai mis du temps à le comprendre, à ce moment, parce qu’il disait “la maîtresse” et pour moi, elle était Marie. Ensuite, il en est venu à l’histoire de Raymond. J’ai trouvé que sa façon de voir les événements ne manquait pas de clarté. Ce qu’il disait était plausible. J’avais écrit la lettre d’accord avec Raymond pour attirer sa maîtresse et la livrer aux mauvais traitements d’un homme “de moralité douteuse”. J’avais provoqué sur la plage les adversaires de ­R aymond. Celui-­ci avait été blessé. Je lui avais demandé son revolver. J’étais revenu seul pour m’en servir. J’avais attendu. Et “pour être sûr que la besogne était bien faite”, j’avais tiré encore quatre balles, posément, à coup sûr, d’un façon réfléchie en quelque sorte. Et voilà, messieurs, a dit l’avocat général. J’ai retracé devant vous le fil d’événements qui a conduit cet homme à tuer en pleine connaissance de cause. (Camus 2013b [1942], 150) [[He has briefed the events since Maman’s death.] He reminded the court of my insensitivity; of my ignorance when asked Maman’s age; of my swim the next day – with a woman; of the Fernandel movie; and finally of my taking Marie home with me. It took me a few minutes to understand the last part because he kept saying ‘his mistress’ and to me she was Marie. Then he came to the business with Raymond. I thought his way of viewing the events had a certain consistency. What he was saying was plausible. I had agreed with Raymond to write the letter in order to lure his mistress and submit her to mistreatment by a man ‘of doubtful morality.’ I had provoked Raymond’s adversaries at the beach. Raymond had been wounded. I had asked him to give me his gun. I had gone back alone intending to use it. I had shot the Arab as I planned. I had waited. And to make sure I had done the job right, I fired four more shots, calmly, point-­ blank – thoughtfully, as it were.

158  Albert Camus’s L’étranger ‘And there you have it, gentleman,’ said the prosecutor. ‘I have retraced for you the course of events which led this man to kill with full knowledge of his actions.] (Camus 1989 [1942], 99) This new account raises doubt in the reader about the implied judgments, such as Meursault’s use of connoted words like “maîtresse” [mistress] and assumptions of motives such as “pour être sûr que la besogne était bien faite” [to make sure I had done the job right]. This is part of an erosion of the trial’s authority, which is analyzed in more detail later. Nevertheless, the primary purpose served by the new reading is to offer a reevaluation of Meursault’s narrative that significantly enhances the estranging effect. To confirm the immorality of Meursault’s actions, the prosecutor appeals to the jury by asking “A-­t-il seulement exprimé des regrets? Jamais, messieurs” [Has he so much as expressed any remorse? Never, gentlemen]. To this, Meursault responds that “Sans doute, je ne pouvais pas m’empêcher de reconnaître qu’il avait raison. Je ne regrettais pas beaucoup mon acte” (Camus 2013b [1942], 152) [Of  course, I couldn’t help admitting that he was right. I didn’t feel much remorse for what I’d done (Camus 1989 [1942], 100)]. He thereby provides another confirmation of the prosecutor’s reasoning and an invitation to the reader to generate an ethical distance from Meursault and his narrative. Meursault says that “J’aurais voulu essayer de lui expliquer cordialement, presque avec affection, que je n’avais jamais pu regretter vraiment quelque chose. J’étais toujours pris par ce qui allait arriver, par aujourd’hui ou par demain” (Camus 2013b [1942], 153) [I would have liked to have tried explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything. My mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow (Camus 1989 [1942], 100)]. Furthermore, when Meursault claims that “je n’avais pas eu l’intention de tuer l’Arabe” (Camus 2013b [1942], 156) [I never intended to kill the Arab (Camus 1989, 102)] and the president of the jury wants to know the reasons for the murder, he reports having responded that “J’ai dit rapidement, en mêlant un peu les mots et en me rendant compte de mon ridicule, que c’était à cause du soleil. Il y a eu des rires dans la salle” (Camus 2013b [1942], 156) [Fumbling a little with my words and realizing how ridiculous I sounded, I blurted out that it was because of the sun. People laughed (Camus 1989 [1942], 103)]. As these passages show, the second part of L’étranger faces the reader with a set of questions (in the audacious form of a judicial interrogation) that explicitly invite the reader to review the presentation of events as told by Meursault in the first part. This “je polyphonique” [­polyphonic I] as Conkiska calls it, enables a new “fil des événements” [thread of events] and new readings, and functions not only to suggest but to fully justify (or claim from the prosecutor’s part) the estrangedness of

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  159 Meursault’s narrative, by formulating specific questions and providing answers to them, many of them Meursault’s own. In this sense, the polyphony around the trial internal to Meursault’s narrative provides the formal grounds for questioning his narrative reliability and supports the general critical idea that what is unstable in Meursault’s voice is the fact that his narration is “estranging”; it creates an ethical distance between the narrator’s account and his readers. Reliability works in this case through the lens of morality: the character is socially unacceptable, or socially unreliable, because of his moral behavior. Paradoxically, the trial also works to the very opposite effect. Despite the trial’s strong suggestion that Meursault’s narrative is estranging, criticism has rightly reached a certain consensus on the reading of the trial as an absurd distortion in its perverse decentering of Meursault’s actual crime, the killing of an Arab. Rather than building narrative authority, the trial ultimately reveals a similarly unreliable rhetorical strategy grounded in ideological discourse. The trial’s revision of Meursault’s previous narrative draws attention to the pied-­noir mother by disregarding the killing of an Algerian Arab. As Grigg (2011), Chetouani (1992), Carroll (2007), and Girard (1964), among others, have observed, this deflection of attention discredits the French Algerian judicial system and redounds to Meursault’s innocence.6 By producing the new “fil des événements” and rhetorically diverting attention to the mother scenes, the trial omits the real crime and its colonial foundations. The course of the trial insists so much on Meursault’s inappropriate emotional responses that it reaches the point of absurdity when the defense lawyer levels the question: “Enfin, est-­il accusé d’avoir enterré sa mère ou d’avoir tué un homme?” (Camus 2013b [1942], 145) [Come now, is my client on trial for burying his mother or for killing a man? (Camus 1989 [1942], 96)] and the prosecutor later accuses Meursault of “d’avoir enterré une mère avec un coeur de criminel” (Camus 2013b [1942], 146) [of burying his mother with crime in his heart (Camus 1989 [1942], 96)]. This has led critics such as Chaulet-­Achour or Carroll to the arguments, outlined earlier, that Meursault is reliable because he is telling the truth, even if his attitude and behavior while committing the crime may be questionable. The trial also suggests Meursault’s innocence by evincing that the French colonial legal system has sentenced him by placing absurd weight on the morality of his behavior toward his mother. Formally, his condition as a victim of an injustice redeems part of his narrative guilt, restoring a relative narrative bond with the reader. The decentering function performed by the trial in diverting attention to the death of the mother rather than the crime for which Meursault is prosecuted deserves more consideration from a technical point of view than it has been given so far. As we will see, the trial as a decentering device highlights the importance of underreporting in L’étranger. This is the main device employed in the creation of discordant narration in

160  Albert Camus’s L’étranger this novel. The novel uses underreporting to gloss over or downplay the importance of the murder and the Arab, an episode that should occupy a central place in the narrative. The overlooking and decentering of the murder (which is in fact the focus of the case) and the Arab (which involves a colonial conflict, analyzed below) function as the main signs of narrative discordance. To be more precise, Phelan and Martin distinguish between three axes of unreliability which the narration might “under”-present or “miss”-present: the axes of report, perception, and evaluation. Underreporting “occurs when the narrator tells us less that s/he knows” (Phelan and Martin 1999, 95). That is, the narrative indicates that the narrator is holding something back. Meursault’s narrative is replete with evidence that he is not willing to tell more about the events or about his own feelings about them: “C’est que je n’ai jamais grand-­chose à dire. Alors je me tais” (Camus 2013b [1942], 102) [It’s just that I don’t have much to say. So I keep quiet (Camus 1989 [1942], 66)]. He is not forthcoming enough, often due to “paresse” (Camus 2013b [1942], 101) [laziness (Camus 1989 [1942], 66)], driving his interrogators to despair. From the beginning, the narrative acknowledges the existence of the unsaid, marking the silence, and inscribing “la présence d’un manque” [the presence of an absence] (Cornille 1976, 54) around which the discourse develops. The trial’s overstatement (one could even say “overreporting”) of Meursault’s behavior with regard to the death of his mother, in turn, reveals the underreporting – or absence/omission/disregard – of the killing of an Arab in the narrative. It is obvious that this disregard occurs in Meursault’s narrative, because he never stops to reflect or comment on the murder. However, it is also evident in the fact that the trial does not focus on the prosecution of the murder of an Arab (its ostensible objective) but on the mother’s death. This clear underreporting raises the question: what is the relevance of the Arabs in the narrative? The answer to this question, in turn, calls to mind other key questions that the novel has been suggesting: is “Arab” only relevant in terms of the narrative function as a secondary, subordinate character, or is “Arab” charged with a historical meaning and connotations (perhaps if one were to adopt a cognitive perspective, we would appeal to schemata here) that may affect our formal apprehension of the novel? This is an especially challenging question for narratologists. As it has been shown for the cases discussed in the other chapters, these are ideological markers that are not indifferent to the historical connotations they bring into the narrative. In the case of L’étranger, the questioning of narrative reliability and the suggestion of a possible discordant narration are greatly dependent on the ideological connotations of “Arab” as part of the colonial discourses in French Algeria, examined later. Any understanding of how

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  161 this underreporting operates as an indicator of a discordant narration is incomplete without recourse to political ideologies.

L’étranger: Postcolonial Debates and Colonial Discourses in French Algeria The decentering and even elision of the Arab from the narrative have generated heated debate on the stand of L’étranger in relation to the colonial situation in French Algeria when the novel was published in 1942. Indeed, it has become a major argument in the larger discussion of Camus’s controversial position with regard to Algerian independence and the Algerian War.7 At one end of the spectrum, some critics have argued that Camus’s work is a denunciation of French colonialism. For instance, Chetouani states a common observation that “dans le roman, l’Arabe est anonyme, dépersonnalisé, rabaissé, vu selon des clichés racistes” [in the novel, the Arab is anonymous, depersonalized, debased, seen in terms of racist clichés] and that his political statements “représentent une dénonciation des idées toutes faites de la société coloniale sur les Arabes et constituent un travail de démystification en leur faveur” [represent a denunciation of the colonial society’s ready-­made ideas about Arabs, and constitute a labor of demystification in their favor] to conclude that “L’étranger participe de cette démystification” [The Stranger partakes of this demystification] (Chetouani 1992, 51). On the other hand, one of the earliest critics to claim that Camus’s position was in fact embedded in colonialist discourses was Connor Cruise O’Brien. In his book Camus (O’Brien 1970), he argued that L’étranger contributes to the construction of a colonial myth by partaking in contemporary discourses of a colonial French Algeria, addressed chiefly to the pied-­noir and the French community. Partly agreeing with O’Brien’s perspective, Said in his influential Culture and Imperialism (1993) shows that Camus’s narrative ambivalence is the product of a shared ideological perspective of the pied-­noir community in French Algeria at the time of writing.8 Critics such as Roger Quillot (1962), Mangesh Kulkarni (1997), or more recently James D. Le Sueur (2014) have weighed in somewhere roughly between these two extremes, by examining Camus’s relation to the Communist party and taking into account his articles to situate Camus and L’étranger in the ambiguous terrain first indicated by Said. The debate over Albert Camus, the writer, and his work in relation to colonialism is greatly indebted to the equivocal decentering strategy discussed earlier. Many critics, such as Carroll, O’Brien, Said, El Houssi, or Chetouani, have further highlighted the anonymity of Arabs in general in the novel.9 In Meursault’s narrative, the Algerian-­Muslim secondary characters do not have proper names, unlike the Europeans or pied-­ noirs, but are referred to generically as “Arabes.” Meursault even calls

162  Albert Camus’s L’étranger the individual Arabs, one of which he will kill: “nos deux Arabes” (87). Summing up many of these arguments, Georges Fréris observes that Dans l’ouvre romanesque d’Albert Camus (L’Étranger et La Peste) – un des représentants de ce mouvement littéraire – on remarque cette ‘barrière’ infranchissable entre colons et indigènes. Ces derniers apparaissent comme de simples figurants passifs, absents de la trame romanesque, ne fournissant qu’un cadre exotique aux angoisses existentielles des colons: dans L’étranger, Meursault tue un Arabe, qui n’est pas nommé, qui semble ne pas avoir de passé, ni de parents, ni de famille. (2003, 49) [In the novels of Albert Camus (The Stranger and The Plague)  – representative of this literary movement  –  one notes this impassable ‘barrier’ between the settlers and the natives. The latter appear as mere passive figures, absent from the fictional frame, providing only an exotic framework for the settlers’ existential angst: in The Stranger, Meursault kills an Arab, who is unnamed, does not seem to have a past, parents, or family.] As this postcolonial criticism suggests, the elision strategies are given a French national dimension in the second part of the novel, through the trial and the reading of Meursault’s story and narrative in national terms. This dimension is explicitly invoked when the judge himself discloses that Meursault’s sentence would have “la tête tranchée sur une place publique au nom du peuple français” (Camus 2013b [1942], 162) [my head cut off in a public square in the name of the French people (Camus 1989 [1942], 107)], or in the name of “the mother country France,” as Barbara Harlow argues (1983, 51).10 As a representative institution of the “peuple français,” the court frames the trial more broadly in terms of national interests. As O’Brien observes, The court is presented as if it were a court in a European town dealing with an incident involving members of a homogeneous population. […] But the presentation in this way of a court in Algeria trying a crime of this kind involves the novelist in the presentation of a myth: the myth of French Algeria. (1970, 23) The decentering and underreporting strategies in the trial section deploy these colonial discourses that enable O’Brien to argue that what is being presented is the European French Algeria, rather than contemporaneous Algeria as a whole. While I will not pursue the idea of the myth, O’Brien rightly observes that L’étranger constructs a hypothetical trial that

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  163 imagines French Algeria as it was defined by French colonial discourse. This point can be further supported through the historical implications that are being invoked in the novel in order to present both Meursault and the trial narratives as discordant, rather than just necessarily colonialist. Ultimately, discordant narration is based not only on Meursault’s amoral behavior toward his mother but, even more importantly, on the ideological discrimination against Arabs in French Algeria, reproduced by the trial narrative itself. Camus uses a variety of colonial discourses on French Algeria to restate the rhetorical discrimination against the ­A rabs. Two main discourses are invoked in L’étranger that give a political significance to the killing of an “Arab” that configures the overall discordance of the narrative. The first is the discrimination against Arabs in French Algerian society as part of a historical, political, and discursive practice, and the second is the discourse of the Méditerranée orchestrated by the École d’Alger, which shapes Meursault’s sensorial narrative and which keeps most of the trial’s attention. The exclusion of the Arab population from French Algerian society and political power dates from the very beginning of the colony. In contrast to other overseas and Southern African colonies, Algeria was intended since its occupation in 1830s as a settlement colony, that is a territory where many Europeans were sent to (not only French) as a means of maintaining control, and where French citizenship was quickly defined in terms of European origins and Republicanism. At various points between the 1860s and the 1930s, citizenship was offered to select groups of Arab Algerians under the condition that they renounce their legal status as Muslims, a policy of assimilation that repeatedly failed.11 In Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria, historian Patricia Lorcin summarizes these efforts to assimilate the Arabs through naturalization: With regard to naturalization, the first attempt at establishing guidelines was made by the Senatus Consulte of 1865. Foreign immigrants, Jews and Muslims were included and conditions for their naturalization were laid down. The later benefited from the protection of France in all circumstances, but should they want to take French citizenship they had to place themselves under the jurisdiction of French law, that is to say renounce their personal stature (statutory rights) under Islamic law, an act equivalent to apostasy. For the Muslim population the 1865 Senatus Consulte remained a dead letter. The 1870 Crémieux Laws naturalized the Jews of ­A lgeria en masse but excluded the Muslims. The question of personal statute was to remain the stumbling-­block to naturalization of the Muslims. In the twentieth century the situation did not improve, and naturalization remained piecemeal as, for example, in 1919 when citizenship was granted to those who had served in the War.

164  Albert Camus’s L’étranger Naturalization was again debated at the time of the 1930 Blum-­ Violette bill, but it was centered around the évolués. Violette, who canvased fervently in 1930 for naturalization without renunciation of the personal stature, was unsuccessful and his bill was shelved. (1995, 8) This legal limitation was buttressed by a racialization of the Arabs and Berbers, which legitimized the French colonization of Algeria from the 1870s to the 1960s. Patricia Lorcin in Imperial Identities and George Trumbull in An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge and Islam in Algeria, 1870–1914 offer detailed studies of the political construction of an ethnographic colonial discourse. As Lorcin explains, from the 1840s to the 1880s, the French tended to portray the Berbers in Kabylia as the native, once-­noble population that had gone astray but who were nevertheless indigenous to Algeria, and could act as a bridge between Arabs and the Europeans, and therefore serve the assimilationist objective. Critics like Chetouani and Kulkarni might have overlooked the French racial instrumentalization of the Berbers as distinct from the Arabs in their conclusions that Camus’s series of articles “Misère de la Kabylie” (published in the Alger Républicain newspaper in June 1939) – on the Kabylia crisis, denouncing the starvation of their ­population  –  constitute evidence of his denunciation of the discrimination of Arabs in Algeria.12 In any case, what is important to note here is that from the 1870s, the Arabs were seen as racially distinct within an ethnographic discourse traced by Trumbull that elaborated on the ­Muslim religion and the sexuality of Arabs. As Trumbull argues, “[t]hrough narratives about popular religion, ethnographers opposed Islam to the values of republican France. Rituals appeared in ethnographers as the intrusion of religion into politics, contesting secularism and marking the backwardness of Algeria, and hence justifying the civilizing mission” (2009, 147).13 This discourse was further reinforced by the rising fear of Pan-­Islamism in the 1910s. The growing disparagement of the native population of Algeria and the corollary idea that the territory was a French province were the basis for Mitterrand’s famous declaration in 1954 that “L’Algerie, c’est la France” [Algeria is France].14 The construction of Algeria as a settlement colony, therefore, involved seeing the Arab population not as natives of the territory, but, as Chetouani argues, as invaders, as “étrangère,” foreign to Algeria. Meursault’s narrative arguably legitimizes racial (and gender) violence against the Arabs.15 When Raymond Sintès beats his “mauresque” lover, Meursault reports his indifferent reaction: “La femme criait toujours et Raymond frappait toujours. Marie m’a dit que c’était terrible et je n’ai rien répondu. Elle m’a demandé d’aller chercher un agent, mais je lui ai dit que je n’aimais pas les agents” (Camus 2013b [1942], 58) [The woman was still shrieking and Raymond was still hitting her. Marie said

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  165 it was terrible and I didn’t say anything. She asked me to go find a policeman, but I told her that I didn’t like cops (Camus 1989 [1942], 36)]. The Arabs are often a menacing presence in Meursault’s narration: “Je lui ai dit que c’étaient des Arabes qui en voulaient à Raymond,” [I told her that they were Arabs who had it in for Raymond] even when they stare each other in silence: “Ils nous regardaient en silence, mais à leur manière, ni plus ni moins que si nous étions des pierres ou des arbres morts” (Camus 2013b [1942], 77) [They were staring at us in silence, but in that way of theirs, as if we were nothing but stones or dead trees (Camus 1989 [1942], 48)]. The silent tension leads to a confrontation on the beach that leaves Raymond and at least one of the Arabs wounded. In their second encounter, Meursault remarks that the Arabs do not address them so they do not have a reason for shooting them: Là nous avons trouvé nos deux Arabes. Ils étaient couchés dans leurs bleus de chauffe graisseux. Ils avaient l’air tout à fait calmes et presque contents. Notre venue n’a rien changé. Celui qui avait frappé Raymond le regardait sans rien dire. L’autre soufflait dans un petit roseau et répétait sans cesse, en nous regardant du coin de l’oeil, les trois notes qu’il obtenait de son instrument. (Camus 2013b [1942], 87) [There we found our two Arabs. They were lying down, in their greasy overalls. They seemed perfectly calm and almost content. Our coming changed nothing. The one who had attacked Raymond was looking at him without saying anything. The other one was blowing through a little reed over and over again, watching us out of the corner of his eye. He kept repeating the only three notes he could get out of his instrument.] (Camus 1989 [1942], 55) The Arabs in L’étranger do not speak or, when they do, Meursault does not report their speech. They are a silent, yet menacing presence. In a publication context where the Algerian Arabs were beginning to organize and voice opposition to colonization, Meursault’s narrative lacks any reference to this reality that would seem immediately relevant to the killing of an Arab by a European settler. When the crime is reviewed following his detention, Meursault’s mentions the Arabs only insofar as to note that the prison was full of them. Yet there is no reflection on the reasons for the large number of Arabs among the prisoners in Algiers, not even in a publishing moment when the resistance was growing, and the colonization had already been denounced by Messali Hadj, who had been arrested in 1937, tried in Vichy in 1941, and sentenced to 16 years of hard labor. Resistance to the colonial regime of exclusion and oppression had been growing over the previous decades

166  Albert Camus’s L’étranger and manifested in the foundation of the Étoile nord-­africaine in 1926, which was dissolved in 1929, refounded in 1933, newly dissolved by the government in 1937, and subsequently transformed into the Parti du Peuple Algerien; the foundation and division of the Parti Communiste Algérien in 1936, which was banned in 1939, and his leader Messali, imprisoned. Meursault never mentions this Arab political resistance to French colonialism.16 In the judicial review of Meursault’s case, the indifference to the colonial context is absolute. There is no political reference that would make the killing of the Arab ideologically, racially, or politically relevant. The lawyers, the jury, and the judge completely ignore the strong connotations of killing an Arab in twentieth-­century French Algeria. This is pursued through what Vincent Grégoire calls “omissions,” which when used in the service of questioning narrative reliability can be read in terms of “underreporting.” The first “omission” at the level of the story is the fact that the Arab witnesses are not called upon to testify. Grégoire argues that “De manière à ce qu’il soit accusé d’immoralité, il faut écarter le sujet de l’homicide de l’Arabe: d’ou l’absence de la maîtresse ‘mauresque’ et du compagnon arabe du défunt pendant le procès” [For the accusation of immoral conduct to stick, the issue of the murder of the Arab must be cast aside: hence the absence of the ‘Moorish’ mistress and the dead man’s Arab companion during the trial] (2000, 101). Meursault, however, never reports the fact of the exclusion of Arab witnesses from the trial. The only mention of “Arabs” in the trial is in reference to the victim, as, for example, when the president of the trial asks Meursault whether he had returned to the spot on the beach “avec l’intention de tuer l’Arabe” (Camus 2013b [1942], 134). The encounters between Raymond, Meursault, Masson, and the Arabs that led to the crime are not even examined in the trial, and the victim’s perspective is never given in any form. This elision of the Arab appears to be the result of the decentering strategy of the trial, which does not investigate the crime and its circumstances but rather Meursault’s moral behavior with regard to his mother’s death. The erasure of the presence of the Arab is even more striking in the second part of the novel, and the underreporting even clearer. In this sense, it is not only that the Arabs are marginalized or excluded from the events of the story but that at the level of narration itself (that which the trial fabricates, and that Meursault narrates), the Arab is negated, despite being the victim of the murder. The discourse of the Méditerranée, on the other hand, is deployed in L’étranger to decenter Meursault’s narrative, as this ideology is used to decenter the Arab in French Algeria. The 1930s discourse of the Méditerranée was a reelaboration of an older ethnographical discourse that considered the origins of Northern African culture and civilization, and especially that of Algeria, as Latin and Christian, part of a wider Mediterranean

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  167 culture that allowed Europeans – and the French in particular – to claim kinship with (historical) native Northern Africans. Elaborated by the École d’Alger, the discourse of the Méditerranée attempted to downplay the distinctions between Arab and French, by constructing an all-­embracing “Mediterranean man.” As we will see, the disclosure of this discourse as a guide for Meursault’s narrative and the trial’s eagerness to contest it by condemning its underlying values reveal the uses of the Méditerranée for the decentering of the narrative to remove focus from the killing of an Arab. This use is appropriate because, as Peter Dunwoodie argues, in refusing to address directly and adopt a position with regard to the problem of the Arab in the contemporaneous cultural context, the discourse of the Méditerranée contributed to the set of colonial discourses that permitted and even legitimized the continuation of a French colonial system. The racialist discourses elaborated in the late nineteenth-­century Algeria considered the Mediterranean as a unified cultural space that would legitimize a settler colony by minimizing the distinctions between the invaders and the Berber and Arab, conflated in the idea of a hitherto unacknowledged “Mediterranean” race. One of the first and most influential Algerian writers and author of the novel Le sang des races (1899) and the study Le sens de l’ennemi (1917), Louis Bertrand advocated the Latin, Christian, Mediterranean origins of Algeria, which justified the French presence in what he called Latin Africa. Bertrand argued that the French were merely recovering a province lost to Latinity, and that French Africa was “a continuation of the Latin tradition” (Lorcin 1995, 198), that the “colon” had a noble lineage which the native Berber population in Algeria had lost following its conversion to Islam, and that Latin Africa was a “school of energy from which French civilization, weary and enfeebled, could draw fresh vitality” (Lorcin 1995, 198). Bertrand developed a theory of “rebarbarization,” according to which the French Algerians – meaning only those of European origin – gained vitality and energy, and formed an athletic, vigorous, and hot-­blooded race by living side by side with the “enemi,” the Arabs, who had brought “poverty, endemic warfare and barbarity” to the Berbers and had led them astray from their noble Latin origins (Lorcin 1995, 202). Lorcin argues that the greatest impact of Bertrand’s theory was that he had brushed aside, as he put it, the Islamic, pseudo-­A rab décor which so fascinated superficial onlookers and exposed, from under this shallow display, a living Africa which hardly differed from the other Latin countries of the Mediterranean. Bertrand’s marginalization of Islam and hence the indigenous population, his Sens de L’Ennemi as he was to put it, was the ideological expression of primal racial animosity among the settlers. (Lorcin 1995, 198)

168  Albert Camus’s L’étranger Later on, this discourse was developed in different directions by the ­A lgerianists in the 1920s and the so-­called École d’Alger in the 1930s and 1940s. At the beginning of the 1920s, several writers and intellectuals, fully acknowledging Bertrand’s legacy, founded the literary movement of the “Algerianistes,” and published their manifesto “Le movement littéraire français d’Algérie” [The French Literary Movement in Algeria] (La Grande Revue, June 1923). They particularly elaborated on the idea that the “Algeriens” were a new race increasingly distant from French metropolitan people, with a Latin root, spiritual and physical features derived from North African culture and the mixture of mainly European origins, with a dominant French component. Led by authors like Robert Randau, Louis Lecoq, and Jean Pomier, the Algerianists focused on the writing of the “colonial novel,” which they claimed benefited from their own experience and knowledge of the Algerian colonial context, and through which they were able to display an Algerian identity – yet a very ambivalent one, simultaneously Algerian and French (Gosnell 2002, 187). The Algerianists deliberately excluded the Arab population from this Algerian race, which was an impediment to Arab writers who would engage with the idea and the identity of the Algerian, as Nacer Khelouz (2011) explains.17 The Algerianist colonial novel, steeped in a naturalist aesthetics, elaborated a racial explanation that insisted on a “sadomasochist display of savagery” to depict the Arab population, which became a dominant feature of the genre (Dunwoodie 1998, 144). Partly in response to the Algerianists, in the late 1930s, a group of writers, including Gabriel Audisio, Albert Camus, and Émmanuel ­Robles, came together to form what became known as École d’Alger, a more progressive and culturally more broadly oriented group that dissociated the Mediterranean culture and identity from their exclusive association with Algeria and the alleged Europeanist racial discourse of the Algerianists. As Gosnell explains: Writers such as Gabriel Audisio and Jean Mélia, the founders of the humanist école d’Alger, described an identity that was more Mediterranean than tied to any particular country or identity. It linked persons of numerous nationalities, ethnicities, and religions. Audisio stated that the veritable ‘patrie’ to which North African populations were devoted was neither France nor Algeria, but the Mediterranean Sea. (2002, 209) The École d’Alger created a “Mediterranean Man” who “revered the sun, sea and wind as primary elements of the region. He descended from no one race nor did any one nation hold its allegiance” (Gosnell 2002, 209). Their discourse of the Mediterranean man claimed his Greek roots in opposition to his Latin ones and was “grounded in the sea

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  169 (ports, islands, fishermen…), the sun, happiness (boating, swimming, games…), joie de vivre, physical beauty, and pleasure” (Dunwoodie 1998, 177). It is not by chance that the founding texts of d’École d’Alger by Gabriel Audisio are eloquently entitled Hommes au soleil (1923), and ­Héliotrophe (1928), and the one considered key in the movement, La jeunesse de la Méditerranée (1935). In his inaugural lecture at the “Maison de culture” d’Algiers, “La culture indigène. La nouvelle culture méditerranéenne” [The indigenous culture. The new Mediterranean culture], delivered on February 1937, Camus articulated the task of what would become the École d’Alger as taking the Mediterranean culture out of the hands of the Algerianists and returning it to its real values.18 For him, “La Méditerranée qui nos entoure est au contraire un pays vivant, plein de jeux et de sourires” (Camus 1965 [1937], 1321) [[o]ur Mediterranean is something else: a vibrant region, a realm of joy and smiles (Camus 2013a [1937], 188)]. He describes “ce goût triomphant de la vie, ce sens de l’écrassement et de l’ennui, les places désertes à midi en Espagne, la sieste, voilà a vraie Méditerranée et c’est de l’Orient qu’elle se rapproche” (Camus 1965 [1937], 1325) [[t]he triumphant zest for life, the sense of oppression and boredom, the deserted squares of Spain at noontime, the siesta – that is the true Mediterranean, and it is closer to the East than to the Latin West (Camus 2013a [1937], 192)], and he emphasizes the living presentism of a culture that one feels is shared by the peoples of the Mediterranean, surrounded “de sourires, de soleil et de mer” (Camus 1965 [1937], 1326) [by laughter, sun, and the sea], and that is grounded in the senses: “La Méditerranée, c’est cela, cette odeur ou ce parfum qu’il est inutile d’exprimer: nous le sentons tous avec notre peau.” (Camus 1965 [1937], 1326) [The Mediterranean is a certain smell, a fragrance that can’t be put into words. We feel it in our skin (Camus 2013a [1937], 189)].19 The overwhelming presence of these Mediterranean values and characteristics rooted in the North African shores of Algeria nurtures the sensorial style of Meursault’s narrative in L’étranger. Part of the estrangedness that Meursault’s narrative produces is due to the pervasiveness of this sensorial reality rather than to emotional reflection on his relations with people or a moral assessment of his reality. Meursault’s narrative is overloaded with the telling of the sensorial. The most intense presence is that of the sun and the heat, the blinding effect of which was the excuse for the murder. The blinding, debilitating force of the sun is especially present in the episodes of his mother’s funeral and the killing. 20 When they leave the asylum heading for the church, Meursault tells that Le ciel était déjà plein de soleil. Il commençait à peser sur la terre et la chaleur augmentait rapidement. Je ne sais pas pourquoi nous avons attendu assez longtemps avant de nous mettre en marche. J’avais chaud sous mes vêtements sombres. […] Aujourd’hui, le soleil

170  Albert Camus’s L’étranger débordant qui faisait tressaillir le paysage le rendait inhumain et déprimant. (Camus 2013b [1942], 27) [The sky was already filled with light. The sun was beginning to bear down on the earth and it was getting hotter by the minute. I don’t know why we waited so long before getting under way. I was hot in my dark clothes […] But today, with the sun bearing down, making the whole landscape shimmer with heat, it was inhuman and oppressive.] (Camus 1989 [1942], 15) The impact of the sun in the narrative intensity and durée is even greater in the beach episode where the killing takes place: [j]e sentais mon front se gonfler sous le soleil. Toute cette chaleur s’appuyait sur moi et s’opposait à mon avance. Et chaque fois que je sentais son grand souffle chaud sur mon visage, je serrais les dents, je fermais les poings dans les poches de mon pantalon, je tendais tout entier pour triompher du soleil et de cette ivresse opaque qu’il me déversait. À chaque épée de lumière jaillie du sable, d’un coquillage blanchi ou d’un débris de verre, mes mâchoires se crispaient. (Camus 2013b [1942], 89) [I could feel my forehead swelling under the sun. All that heat was pressing down on me and making it hard for me to go on. And every time I felt a blast of its hot breath strike my face, I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists in my trouser pockets, and strained every nerve in order to overcome the sun and the thick drunkenness it was spilling over me. With every blade of light that flashed off the sand, from a bleached shell or a piece of broken glass, my jaws tightened.] (Camus 1989 [1942], 57) The sun is at once an invigorating force and a source of peril, strength-­ sapping, in an echo of Bertrand’s sense of the North African climate and the proximity of the Arab “enemi” as the forces of the “rebarbarization” of French Algerians. When Meursault approaches the Arab immediately before killing him, most of the narration is taken up by the intolerable sun: La brûlure du soleil gagnait mes joues et j’ai senti des gouttes de sueur s’amasser dans mes sourcils. C’était le même soleil que le jour òu j’avais enterré maman et, comme alors, le front surtout me faisait mal et toutes ses veines battaient ensemble sous la peau. À cause de cette brûlure que je ne pouvais pas supporter, j’ai fait un mouvement

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  171 en avant. Je savait que c’était stupide, que je ne me débarrasserais pas du soleil en me déplaçant d’un pas. Mais j’ai fait un pas, un seul pas en avant. Et cette fois, sans se soulever, l’Arabe a tiré son couteau qu’il m’a présenté dans le soleil. La lumière a giclé sur l’acier et c’était comme une longue lame étincelante qui m’atteignait au front. Au même instant, la sueur amassé dans mes sourcils a coulé d’un coup sur les paupières et les a recouvertes d’un voile tiède et épais. Mes yeux étaient aveuglés derrière ce rideau de larmes et de sel. Je ne sentais plus que les cymbales du soleil sur mon front et, indistinctement, le glaive éclatant jailli du couteau toujours en face de moi. Cette épée brûlante rongeait mes cils et fouillait mes yeux douloureux. C’est alors que tout a vacillé. (Camus 2013b [1942], 92) [The sun was starting to burn my cheeks, and I could feel drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows. The sun was the same as it had been the day I’d buried Maman, and like then, my forehead especially was hurting me, all the veins in it throbbing under the skin. It was this burning, which I couldn’t stand anymore, that made me move forward. I knew that it was stupid, that I wouldn’t get the sun off me by stepping forward. But I took a step, one step, forward. And this time, without getting up, the Arab drew his knife and held it up to me in the sun. The light shot off the steel and it was like a long flashing blade cutting at my forehead. At the same instant the sweat in my eyebrows dripped down over my eyelids all at once and covered them with a warm, thick film. My eyes were blinded behind a curtain of tears and salt. All I could feel were the cymbals of sunlight crashing on my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear flying up from the knife in front of me. The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes and stabbed at my stinging eyes. That’s when everything began to reel.] (Camus 1989 [1949], 58) While the motif of the sun is not a positive one in L’étranger, it is present as a central element in the Mediterranean discourse. The effect of the sun on Meursault permeates and in fact drives his narrative, decentering the actions that take place while the sun beats down so hard, namely the mother’s funeral and the killing of an Arab. 21 Meursault’s preoccupation with the physical effect of the Algerian Mediterranean climate and the natural surroundings ultimately result in the underreporting of the actions, and the emotional and moral engagement with them. The sensorial Mediterranean narrative envelops not only the key, terrible moments in Meursault’s story but it is a dominant feature of the narration, especially in the first part. The backbone elements of the sea, the sky, youth, pleasure, and sensuality all contribute to weaving together Meursault’s

172  Albert Camus’s L’étranger narrative. A passage on the day after his mother’s death will suffice to provide the youthful and sensorial tone of his narrative: Pendant que je me rasais, je me suis demandé ce que j’aillais faire et j’ai décidé d’aller me baigner. J’ai pris le tram pour aller à l’éta­ blissement de bains du port. Là, j’ai plongé dans la passe. Il y avait beaucoup de jeunes gens. J’ai retrouvé dans l’eau Marie Cardona […]. Je l’ai aidée à amonter sur une bouée et, dans ce mouvement, j’ai éffleuré ses seins. J’étais encore dans l’eau quand elle était déjà à plat ventre sur la bouée. Elle s’est retournée vers moi. Elle avait les cheveux dans les yeux et elle riait. (Camus 2013b [1942], 32) [While I was shaving, I wondered what I was going to do and I decided to go for a swim. I caught the streetcar to go to the public beach down at the harbor. Once there, I drove into the channel. There were lots of young people. In the water I ran into Marie ­Cardona […]. I helped her onto a float and as I did, I brushed against her breasts. I was still in the water when she was already lying flat on her stomach on the float. She turned toward me. Her hair was in her eyes and she was laughing.] (Camus 1989 [1942], 19) Meursault’s sexual encounters with Marie are narrated in a casual manner that conveys the joie de vivre exalted by the Méditerranée, such as when Meursault tells that after Marie leaves “je me suis retourné dans mon lit, j’ai cherché dans le traversin l’odeur de sel que les cheveux de Marie y avaient laissée et j’ai dormi jusqu’à 10 heures” (Camus 2013b [1942], 34) [I rolled over, tried to find the salty smell Marie’s hair had left on the pillow, and slept until ten (Camus 1989 [1942], 21)]. The narrated environment highlights liveliness, youth, and laughter that the writers in l’École d’Alger emphasized. Thus, Meursault narrates how La journée a tourné encore un peu. Audessus des toits, le ciel est devenu reougeâtre et, avec le soir naissant, les rues se sont animées. Les promeneurs revenaient peu à peu. J’ai reconnu le monsieur distingué au milieu d’autres. Les enfants pleuraient ou se laissent traîner. Pres­ que aussitôt, les cinémas du quartier ont déversé dans la rue un flot de spectateurs. Parmi eux, les jeunes gens avaient des gestes plus décidés que d’habitude et j’ai pensé qu’ils avaient vu un film d’aventures. Ceux qui revenaient des cinémas de la ville arrivèrent un peu plus tard. Ils semblaient plus graves. Ils riaient encore, mais de temps en temps, ils paraissaient fatigués et songeurs. Ils sont restés dans la rue, allant et venant sur le trottoir d’en face. Les jeunes filles du quartier, en cheveux, se tenaient par le bras. Les jeunes gens s’étaient

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  173 arrangés pour les croiser et ils lançaient des plaisanteries don’t elles riaient en détournant la tête. Plusieurs d’entre elles, que je connaissais, m’on fait des signes. (Camus 2013b [1942], 38) [The sky changed again. Above the rooftops the sky had taken on a reddish glow, and with evening coming on the streets came to life. People were strangling back from their walks. I recognized the distinguished little man among the others. Children were either crying or lagging behind. Almost all at once moviegoers spilled out of the neighborhood theaters into the street. The young men among them were gesturing more excitedly than usual and I thought they must have seen and adventure film. The ones who had gone to the movies in town came back a little later. They looked more serious. They were still laughing, but only now and then, and they seemed tired and dreamy. But they hung around anyway, walking up and down the sidewalk across the street. The local girls, bareheaded, were walking arm in arm. The young men had made sure they would have to bump right into them and then they would make cracks. The girls giggled and turned their heads away. Several of the girls, whom I knew, waved to me.] (Camus 1989 [1942], 23) Many passages address the pleasure of the sea, the sun, and their sensuality, such as, for instance, the morning of the murder, when Raymond, Meursault, and Marie are invited to Masson’s cottage overlooking the sea: Lui est entré dans l’eau doucement et s’est jeté quand il a perdu pied. Il nageait à la brasse et assez mal, de sorte que je l’ai laissé pour rejoindre Marie. L’eau était froide et j’étais content de nager. Avec Marie, nous nous sommes éloignés et nous nous sentions d’accord dans nos gestes et dans notre contentement. Au large, nous avons fait la planche et sur mon visage tourné vers le ciel le soleil écartait les derniers voiles d’eau qui me coulaient dans la bouche. Nous avons vu que Masson regagnait la plage pour s’étendre au soleil. De loin, il paraissait énorme. Marie a voulu que nous nagions ensemble. Je me suis mis derrière elle pour la prendre par la taille et elle avançait à la force des bras pendant que je l’aidais en battant des pieds. […] Alors j’ai laissé Marie et je suis rentré en nageant régulièrement et en respirant bien. Sur la plage, je me suis étendu à plat ventre près de Masson et j’ai mis ma figure dans le sable. Je lui ai dit que “c’était bon” et il était de cet avis. Peu après, Marie est venue. Je me suis retourné pour la regarder avancer. Elle était toute visqueuse d’eau salée et elle tenait ses cheveux en arrière.

174  Albert Camus’s L’étranger Elle s’est allongée flanc à flanc avec moi et les deux chaleurs de son corps et du soleil m’ont un peu endormi. (Camus 2013b [1942], 81) [He waded in slowly and started swimming only when he couldn’t touch bottom anymore. He did the breast stroke, and not too well, either, so I left him and joined Marie. The water was cold and I was glad to be swimming. Together again, Marie and I swam out a ways, and we felt a closeness as we moved in unison and were happy. Out in deeper water we floated on our backs and the sun on my upturned face was drying the last of the water trickling into my mouth. We saw Masson making his way back to the beach to stretch out in the sun. From far away he looked huge. Marie wanted us to swim together. I got behind her to hold her around the waist. She used her arms to move us forward and I did the kicking. […] I left Marie and headed back, swimming smoothly and breathing easily. On the beach I stretched out on my stomach alongside Masson and put my face on the sand. I said it was nice and he agreed. Soon afterwards Marie came back. I rolled over to watch her coming. She was glistening all over with salty water and holding her hair back. She lay down right next to me and the combined warmth from her body and from the sun made me doze off.] (Camus 1989 [1942], 50) This sensorial discourse, the backbone of the discourse of the Méditerranée (Dunwoodie 203), emplots the narrative. Emphasis on experientiality and the somatic component of the narrative certainly invites a reading of L’étranger along the lines of embodiment traced by cognitive narratology, especially as proposed by Marco Caracciolo. In “Tell-­Tale Rhythms: Embodiment and Narrative Discourses” (Caracciolo 2014), Caracciolo suggests that we can find rhythm in plot (at a discursive level) through the evocation of embodied experiences in the narrative. He uses the examples of the heart beating in Poe’s “Tell-­Tale Heart” and the kinetic energy of running in Tom Tykwer’s film Run Lola Run. An analysis of Camus’s novel in this vein would be particularly productive. While not directly relevant to the argument here, Caracciolo’s claim that thematic embodiment might result in the discursive embodiment of plot rhythm and patterns seems particularly useful for explaining the fact that the sensorial narration of L’étranger determines the slow pace in which the plot develops. Furthermore, the sensorial narration not only marks the slow pace of the first part by lingering in the physical and affective sensations, but it is the main device that diverts the plot from what seem to be its central events, judging from the content matter of the story. To clarify, the sensorial narrative lingers over the moments of pleasure and the experience of the senses (underscored by the presentism

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  175 of the narrative and the uses of the passé composé, as noted by Sartre or Adam and Noël) so as to slow down the narrative, or at least to ensure that everyday pleasure and daily life overshadow the stark and isolated events such as death of the mother and, even more, the killing of a man. 22 Most importantly, the sensorial narration serves to downplay those events by decentering the narrative toward the peculiar sensitivity of the “Mediterranean man.” In this process of decentering what is left out in the first part of Meursault’s narration is precisely the death of the mother and the killing of an Arab, which are arguably displaced by means of blatant underreporting and a strong estranging narrative, compensated for by the overuse of sensorial narration. As analyzed earlier, the trial highlights Meursault’s estranging narrative by restoring the centrality of his mother’s death, and indicating the lack of emotional reaction and moral reflection. Ideologically speaking, the trial condemns “au nom du peuple français” the joie de vivre and the moral values behind it, and in doing so rejects the Mediterranean discourse of l’École d’Alger. Nevertheless, the trial also produces a decentering narrative itself with regard to the reporting and the evaluation of the crime against one Arab. The trial narratives only restore one of the salient events in Meursault’s story. Furthermore, they only restore centrality to the one event that is not the subject of the judicial proceedings. As revealed by the question “Enfin, est-­il accusé d’avoir enterré sa mère ou d’avoir tué un homme?” (Camus 2013b [1942], 145), the crime is left out of the discussion, and the foundations of the colonial violence against the Arabs, erased. Meursault’s resort to a Mediterranean sensorial narrative is in fact part of the decentering narrative strategy that is common to French colonial discourses. Dunwoodie has shown that, while the discourse of the Méditarrenée did not postulate the Arabs as enemies, it perpetuated the historical exclusion of the Arabs from the discursive construction of French Algeria. In theory, in the Méditerranée “racial purity, the underlying fear of miscegenation and the ethos of exclusion it fostered were rejected as fallacious, and authenticity was grounded in dynamic inclusion, and mutual enrichment” (Dunwoodie 1998, 189). However, the discourse is ambivalent in this regard because it harkens not only to the pre-­Latin European expansion to North Africa but to a pre-­Islamic one as well, renouncing the military, heroic component of Bertrand’s discourse, yet reinforcing the argument that Arabs were not to be considered as the native population, in what was the primary legitimating argument of the French settlement colony in Algeria. While the writers of the l’École d’Alger did not contribute to the openly racist literary representation of Arabs in the colonial novel written by the Algerianists, they nonetheless mostly opted for excluding them from their narratives, preferring to emphasize the vaguely sketched “Mediterranean man,” thereby obviating the contemporaneous resistance movements and claims leveled

176  Albert Camus’s L’étranger by the Muslim and Berber populations in Algeria in the late 1930s and 1940s. 23 As noted earlier, the ideologically motivated exclusion of the Arab in French colonial discourses was simultaneously a legitimation and a result of the sociopolitical segregation in Algeria: In general, segregation, spatial separation such as the distinction ville europénne/ville indigène, or explicitly racist exclusions such as the infamous signpost ‘Interdit aux mandiants, aux chiens et aux Arabes’ were always perceived by the European as both necessary (to ensure native invisibility) and threatened (because constantly transversed by the Other). And it is the aggressiveness born of instability in this colonial power relationship-­hence the attempted denial of the Arab presence in a social formation in which earlier policies of integration or assimilation failed. (Dunwoodie 1998, 229) It is in this sense that Aicha Kassoul and Mohamed-­Lakhdar Maougal refer to “the world of Camus” as “a Mediterranean ghetto, where the Arab has no place. A sun-­bathed ghetto, established on the basis of race” (2006, 6). Similarly, in his seminal postcolonial book The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon takes the Mediterranean discourse as an expression of colonial violence, claiming that you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Graeco-­ Latin pedestal. Now it so happens that during the struggle for independence, at the moment that the native intellectual cues into touch again with his people, this artificial sentinel is turned into dust. All the Mediterranean values  –  the triumph of the human individual, of clarity and of beauty – become lifeless, colourless knick-­knacks. All those speeches seem like collections of dead words; those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which people is engaged. (2001, 36) Relying above all on underreporting, the Méditerranée as an ideological discourse reproduced the historical exclusion of Arabs in a colony where French aspirations of assimilation had undoubtedly failed. As attention to the French colonial discourses in Algeria shows, the claim that the trial sets Meursault against the wider French colonial project seems at least questionable. 24 Grigg, for example, argues that in the second part of the novel, Meursault is “reduced to the status of an Arab” and that it “gives a sympathetic portrayal of someone who is the victim of perverse French colonial ‘justice’” (2011, 601). From a similar perspective, Carroll argues that

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  177 Through a tragic twist of colonialist fate, Meursault’s destiny and that of the nameless Arab he murdered on the beach are inextricably intertwined at the end of the novel. For to be condemned to die in the name of the French people for what he is, no matter what crime he actually committed, is in fact, to be judged and to die in colonial Algeria not as a French citizen but as an indigenous Arab subject. Meursault thus dies not for the truth and as the fictional embodiment of the absurd antihero who refuses to play society’s games, but because he is judged to have no soul, to be not fully human. (2007, 37) What is overlooked here is that the decentering narrative that produces our distance from the trial revaluation of Meursault’s narrative and utterance of an odd sentence is actually a shared strategy of exclusion and elision of the Arabs and the colonialist context that surrounds both Meursault’s and the trial narratives. Seen from the perspective of the uses of the Méditerranée discourse and the decentering discourse strategies that the narrative reproduces might provide a different interpretation of L’étranger in terms of its composition, but also in terms of its interrelated involvement with the colonial discourses contemporaneous to the novel. The trial proceedings ultimately follow Meursault’s lead in the disregard of the colonial context. In fact, the trial evinces that the colonial institutions reproduce the same discursive strategy used in Meursault’s narrative by deflecting attention from the colonial context to the killing of the mother. While in terms of estranging the trial questions ­Meursault’s narrative reliability from a moral and emotional point of view in order to expose his narrative as estranging, the trial also joins him in skirting the same ideological question that his own narrative as well as contemporaneous discourses elide: is it relevant that Meursault has killed an Arab? The deployment of colonial discourses indicates that it is indeed relevant. The underreporting of the killing of an Arab is so blatant that it acts as a sign of distrust of the narrative. The reader is invited to question the ways in which Meursault’s story is narrated both in his own narrative and in the trial rereading. The French Algerian colonial discourses are deployed not only in terms of content (the Arab menace, the “Mediterranean man,” and value of the sun, youth, or the sea) but also in rhetorical terms, in their rhetorical underrepresentation of the Arabs. The underreporting of the Arab through deployment of ideological discourse suggests a discordant narration that affects both Meursault’s narrative and the embedded trial narrative that he reports in the second part. As it has been shown, the decentering narrative is ideological since what is being decentered is the killing of an Arab in French Algeria, and the exclusion of the Arab was an essential element in the legitimizing discourses of colonialism. The reliability of the narrative is therefore questioned in terms of ideological

178  Albert Camus’s L’étranger judgment, and Meursault’s and the trial narratives might be considered as discordant. Without the ideological frame of specific French Argelian discourses contemporaneous to the novel, it is virtually impossible for a reader to perceive any narrative discordance. It is in the politics of form where the questioning of reliability takes place in this novel. In conclusion, L’étranger uses the colonial discourse and practice of excluding the Arabs from the telling of the French Argelian context in order to interrogate narrative reliability through two main procedures. It uses the reproof of the moral values associated with the Méditerranée to produce an effect of estranging narration in Meursault’s narrative in the first part. In turn, the novel uses the disparaging of the Arab common to colonial discourses in French Algeria in order to rhetorically and ideologically elide the “narration of the Arab” in an underreporting that produces the effect of narrative discordance. In this sense, the ideological grounds of the narrative discordance in this novel depend on the contemporaneous context without which readers would be unable to read the decentered Arab and the uses of the discourse of the Méditerranée as the key factors in the questioning of narrative reliability in L’étranger. We cannot conceive narrative reliability in L’étranger without the racial and colonial arguments, and the context that is being elided, that is being undermined, and that creates ambivalence in the narrative distance between text and reader. It is the underreporting of the Arab in a combustible French Algerian context that is shared by both narratives (Meursault’s and the trial’s) and which constitutes the core of the unsolved problem of narrative reliability in the novel, both from the point of view of narrative form and from an ideological perspective. Neither Meursault as a character-­narrator nor the novel as a whole takes a clear stand with regard to the ideological strategies through which Arabs are rhetorically and factually being excluded. Narrative reliability (discordant and estranging) is thus problematic though unresolved: Meursault might be morally reprehensible or not; ideologically, the novel might suggest distrust due to the blatant exclusion of the Algerian Arab, or it might just be endorsing colonial discourses. The novel opens the door to estranging unreliability and to narrative discordance, but remains ambivalent. What is clear, though, is that this narrative ambivalence in the novel is only fully graspable in light of the politics of form that gives it sense and shape. As the case of Albert Camus’s L’étranger demonstrates, the politics of form is an effective way of understanding how ideological discourse affects narrative form, and discordant and estranging reliability is a good starting point to the study of the politics of form.

Notes 1 The quotes use Genettian vocabulary that is used sparingly in this book. A reminder of some of the terms might be useful here. By “focalization,”

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  179 Genette understands a restriction of the “champ,” a selective reporting of narrative information. By “internal focalization,” the situated focus (from which this information is reported) coincides with a character (1983, 49). Genette distinguished between the extradiegetic (first narrative frame, outside of the diegesis or story told) and intradiegetic (second or diegetic frame) narrative levels. In Figures III and Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Genette distinguishes between heterodiegetic narrative, being a narrative “with the narrator absent from the story he tells” (Genette 1980, 244), and “homodiegetic narrative,” being a narrative “with the narrator present as character in the story he tells” (Genette 1980, 245) – although the distinction was later presented as less sharply defined in Noveau discours du roman. Within homodiegetic narrative, there are degrees of presence of the narrator in the story. Genette calls “autodiegetic narrative” those most common cases in which “the narrator is the hero of his narrative” (1980, 245). This distinction is not necessary at this point because Meursault’s is at the same time an autodiegetic/homodiegetic and an intradiegetic narration (voice in relation to story, location in the narrative levels), so there is no disagreement or shift between them (as we will find in El reino de este mundo). In this case, what is problematic is that while Meursault’s narrative is auto/ homodiegetic, his narration distances itself from the discourse and the story in a manner common to an extra/heterodiegetic narrative. 2 Jean-­M ichel Adam and Mireille Noël argue in the same vein that Renonçant au ‘décor parfaitement conventionnel’ de la troisième personne, Camus n’opte pas pour autant pour la subjectivité déclarée du diariste. Refusant de parler de subjectivité, il constestait même le terme de ‘subjectivité objective’ qui avait été avancé par les Temps Modernes. [[r]enouncing the ‘perfectly conventional terrain’ of the third person, Camus does not opt for the declared subjectivity of the diarist. Refusing to speak of subjectivity, he even invoked the term ‘objective subjectivity’ that had been promoted by les Temps Modernes.] (Adam and Noël 1995, 74) They locate the origin of this technique in US writers such as Steinbeck. From a Genettian perspective, Nils Soelberg (1985) delves into the temporal ambiguity arising from the distinction of narrative character and narrative I. 3 Caracciolo (2016) interestingly examines “strangeness” in first-­person narrators from the point of view of cognitive distance and character experience in contemporary fiction. 4 It is interesting to note here that the polyphonic effect I refer to are the voices that are embedded in Meursault’s discourse in the second part of the novel, as reported speech. In contrast to Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, there is no polyphony corresponding to narrators at the same level of the diegesis, but the voices are embedded in a more Bakhtian sense of the word. 5 I cannot delve into the particular uses of the reported speech, but as Arnaud Aizier argues, the uses of free indirect discourse are especially effective in the second part of the novel in reinforcing what Aizier calls “dissonance” between Meursault’s voice and the voices that he reports. That is, he reports the voices that revise his own narrative as if he was just reporting and was absent or indifferent to them. The critic argues that la plus grande originalité de l’emploi que fait Camus du DIL réside dans le fait que Meursault en vient, en raison même du mode de discours rapporté choisi, à dire lui- ­même à son sujet les qualités, les défauts, les sentiments, bref, la psychologie, évidemment fausse, que lui prêtent les

180  Albert Camus’s L’étranger gens de justice, donnant par là l’impression de souscrire à ces jugements psychologiques, de s’y reconnaître, ce qui, à l’évidence, n’est pas le cas. Précisons: l’ambiguïté du DIL vient de ce que le ‘je’ employé alors résulté d’un ‘il’ de DD devenu ‘je’ par transposition. [The greatest originality of Camus’s use of FID lies in the fact that Meursault, by reason of his chosen form of reporting, comes to express himself the qualities, the faults, the feelings, in short, the psychology, evidently false, that the justice officials attribute to him, thus giving the impression that he subscribes to these psychological judgments, that he also recognizes them, which is not the case. A clarification: the ambiguity of the FID comes from the fact that the ‘I’ used then results from a ‘he’ of DD turned into an ‘I’ by transposition.] (Aizier 2001, 44) 6 In reflecting on the relation between violence and ethics in Camus, Colin Davis argues that the novel “suggests a preference for a system which judges and condemns, however unjustly, over a sustained exposure of the Absurd in which no overarching authority or values can be discerned” (2007, 110). 7 Camus died in 1960 in the middle of the war, so he did not witness the final emancipation of Algeria and the return of the pied-­noir population. 8 See also a thorough analysis of Camus’s colonial discourses in Ansel (2012). 9 See also Grimaud (1992) on the anonymity and Jan Rigaud (1992) on the relationship between the portrayal of Arab characters and the Algerian political and social contexts. 10 Alistair Rolls (2011) also shows the poetics of modernity in the metaphorical connection between Algiers and Paris, the motherland. 11 A more complete explanation of the assimilation process is given in Bouchène et al. (2012) from a historical perspective, and in Lorcin (1995); Trumbull (2009) from an ethnological one. See also the history of Muslim citizenship in French Algeria up to independence, in Todd Shepard’s The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (2006), especially Chapter I “Muslim French Citizens from Algeria. A Short History.” 12 Camus published the articles “Misère de la Kabylie” on 5–15 June 1939, in Alger républicain. These were reprinted in Croniques algériennes (1939– 1958). See them reprinted in Camus (1965, 903–938). See also a review of Camus’s position on these issues in Temime (2004) and Brée (1988), based on these articles. Martin Crowley considers these articles in the framework of Camus’s radical and rather abstract notion of justice (2007). For a pied-­noir testimony, contemporaneous to and supportive of Camus, see Ryf (2007). 13 Trumbull includes analyses of Edmond Doutté (especially his book Magie et religion dans l’Afrique du Nord, 1908), Alfred Bel, and Auguste Pomel, as those responsible for the primitivist reading of Arabs on the basis of race and religion. 14 On 7 November 1954, after the so-­called “Touissant sanglante,” a night where the Front de Libération National committed 66 attacks that marked the beginning of the independence war, François Mitterrand made a public radiocast declaration in which he announced that France was not going to recognize any attempt at secession because Algeria was France and the French state had an obligation to defend it. 15 This gender violence is also tied to colonial sexuality. As Margerrison (2001) argues, the novel adheres to colonial gender and sexual stereotypes with the notion of sexual purity associated with Marie and sexual threat with an Arab woman. 16 Somewhat later, in 1943 and with the landing of Anglo-­A merican troops in Maghreb, Argelian Arabs led by the moderate Ferhat Abbas drafted the

Albert Camus’s L’étranger  181 “Manifesto of the Algerian People” which proclaimed the end of the colonization, the right of all peoples to self-­determination, a new Algerian constitution, the participation of Algerian Muslims in the government of their country, and the liberation of political prisoners (2007, 188–189). For the development of Algerian resistance to French colonization in an international context especially after 1942 and through the independence war, see Connelly (2002), and on the relationship between metropolitan France and Algeria during and after colonization, see Naylor (2000). 17 In “The Ethnographic Novel and Ethnography in Colonial Algeria,” Thomas Lyons (2003) analyzes what he calls the Muslim Algerian ethnographic novel contemporaneous to the Algerianist and the École d’Alger discourses and extended to the 1950s, and shows its points of convergence with as well as differences from the ethnographic writings, with reference to Kateb Yacine, Rachid Boudjedra, Mouloud Feraoun, Mohammed Dib, and Mouloud Mammeri, and Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnographic writings on Algeria. 18 Edmond Charlot, Camus’s editor in Algeria, when asked in an interview in 2002 whether there is a Mediterranean culture, responded that [e]s una manera de pensar y de ver el mundo, sin ninguna duda. Afecta los instintos del hombre y de la vida, y se extiende por toda la cuenca mediterránea […] [S]in duda la revuelta está vinculada al espíritu mediterráneo, y un hombre se rebela para defender la libertad. Quizá el mar mediterráneo sea el elemento que cohesiona estas revueltas. [It is a way of thinking and seeing the world, without any doubt. It affects man’s instincts and all of life, and it extends throughout the Mediterranean basin […] [w]ithout doubt the revolt is linked to this Mediterranean spirit, and the man rebels in defense of liberty. The Mediterranean Sea is perhaps the element that ties together these revolts.] When asked whether the “algerianisme” is a new Mediterranean culture, he answers that “¡[e]sto son naderías! Sí que Louis Bertrand y otros evocan un decorado, retratando de lleno al colonialismo” [This is nothing! Louis Bertrand and others merely evoke a setting, giving a complete picture of colonialism] (Rufat 2003, 62–63). 19 On a detailed development and representation of the Mediterranean culture, see Émile Temime Un réve méditerranée (2002) and Neil Foxlee, Albert Camus’s ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’: A text and its contexts (2010). For a nonpolitically oriented examination of the Mediterranean culture in Camus, see Rufat (2011) and a comparison between Albert Camus and ­Malika Mokeddem, Van der Poel (2007). 20 See a reflection on the uses of the sun as metaphor in Peter Schofer (1992). John Erickson (1988) interestingly suggests that the Mediterranean landscape fuses with the Arab, and dissolves their representation. 21 Majid El Houssi argues that the novel uses the “Algerian space” to almost supplant the importance of the Arab, and draws attention to the natural elements that, taken from a colonial situation and from literature, become more present than the human landscape (1992, 65–110). 22 Sartre already noted this feature of what he called Camus’s “new technique”: The sentences in The Stranger are islands. We bounce from sentence to sentence, from void to void. It was in order to emphasize the isolation of each sentence unit that Camus chose to tell his story in the present perfect tense. (1962, 119)

182  Albert Camus’s L’étranger Sartre ties this to his famous and enduringly relevant reading of L’étranger from the almost only angle of the “absurd,” which mostly obscured the political implications of the novel. Cabillau (1971) downplays the passé composé as the dominant tense to highlight the importance of its combination with the imparfait. Balibar (1972) analyzes the passé composé from the point of view of its uses in composition in French schools. 23 Arthur Goldhammer points out that this Mediterranean man is built on notions of vigor and simplicity, “a sort of Rousseauian pre-­social, pre-­ political, and therefore prelapsarian humanity, uncorrupted by civilization” (2014, 67). 24 See claims that the “stranger” is in fact the excluded Arab, or a Meursault in the shoes of the excluded Arabs in Carroll (2007); Quinney (2014); Chetouani (1992).

5 Narrative Perspective and the Lights and Shadows of the Haitian Revolution in Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo In an essay entitled “La independencia de Haití” (1952. “The independence of Haiti”), the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier wrote about the Haitian Revolution that it was una de las sublevaciones más importantes de la Historia de América, por cuanto no se trata de una mera revuelta para lograr una inmediata victoria sobre ciertos abusos, impuestos, gabelas o privilegios, guardándose fidelidad a la Metrópoli – como pudo ocurrir antes en la Nueva Granada, o, después, en México – sino porque constituye una auténtica insurrección popular, orientada concretamente hacia el ideal de independencia [one of the most important uprisings in the History of America, insofar as it was more than a mere revolt seeking the redress of particular abuses, taxes, imposts, or privileges, while maintaining loyalty to the metropole – such as that which had taken place before in New Granada, or would do so later, in Mexico – but constitutes a genuine popular insurrection, with the concrete aim of achieving independence]. (Carpentier 2012 [1952], 219) He referred to “aquel heroico año 1803” [that heroic year of 1803] in which a small group of rebels won their independence in what became “la primera del ciclo de nuestras guerras de independencia americanas” [the first in a series of our American wars of independence] (­Carpentier 2012 [1952], 219, 210). For Carpentier, Haiti was representative of the liberation from European colonialism and the affirmation of territorial self-government and self-identity, an unsurprising perspective for a ­Cuban writing in 1952, with the island still in the shackles of US ­neocolonialism – as Haiti itself. As such, Haiti was inextricably bound in Carpentier’s mind with the American independences and the origins of an American identity that so many Luso-Hispanic American intellectuals and artists had been trying to articulate at least since the appearance of revolutionary Cuban writer José Martí’s celebrated essay, “Nuestra América” (“Our America,” 1891).

184  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo However, Alejo Carpentier’s classic novel El reino de este mundo [1949, The Kingdom of this World] provides a much more complex narrative of the Haitian Revolution, bringing to it his author’s contemporary postcolonial perspective, which shows very problematic in his reading of the historical event. El reino de este mundo’s take is at the very least surprising, given the transcendental importance of the Revolution, which had hitherto been almost unanimously acknowledged as a success, for better or worse. In contrast to the emphatic support for the Haitian Revolution expressed by Carpentier himself, the slave Ti Noel finds that, after the oppression of “los mayorales de Lenormand de Mezy, los guardias de Christophe, los mulatos de ahora,” “comenzaba a desesperarse ante ese inacabable retoñar de cadenas, ese renacer de grillos, esa proliferación de miserias, que los más resignados acababan por aceptar como prueba de la inutilidad de toda rebeldía” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 147) [“Lenormand de Mézy’s overseers, Henri Christophe’s guards, and the mulattoes of today,” he “began to lose heart at this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering, which the more resigned began to accept as proof of the uselessness of all revolt” (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 173, 172)]. This dissonance encapsulates the multiple struggles of that conflict and its complex legacies in the Caribbean and beyond, around which is centered the novel’s revisionist account of the Haitian Revolution. Indeed, El reino de este mundo represents the Haitian Revolution not so much as the only successful slave/ black revolt in history – as it was characterized almost immediately in historical narratives and in the cultural imaginary – but rather questions both its success as a “revolution” and the role played by “race” in it, seeing it as an unfinished process that called for some form of political action in the present. The novel introduces a new technique of narrative perspective that builds upon the expression of a contemporaneous racial conflict that results in the questioning of narrative reliability. This chapter will demonstrate that the narrative and political ambivalence of El reino de este mundo are inextricable from the contemporary Cuban and Latin American context and its contradictions – a central feature that has been scarcely addressed by critics. In 1949, the sense of the Haitian Revolution as a foundational element of the Cuban national culture was still very much alive, reinforced by the Russian Revolution as a more recent model for social equality and justice, and resistance against dictatorial regimes – especially that of Gerardo Machado – as a remedy for chronic political instability that plagued Cuba in the 1930s, as well as a bulwark against US occupation and neocolonialist policies in the Caribbean during the first decades of the twentieth century. This socialist-revolutionary anti-imperialism, however, stood in uneasy tension with the idea of racial liberation and emancipation. The search for a distinctly Cuban identity was still ongoing in the 1940s, and showed a tendency to be conflated with a broader Caribbean or Latin

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  185 American criollo identity. However, the ambitious ethnographic efforts dedicated to defining this identity that in the 1920s and 1930s had been focused mainly on Afro-Cubans, or peoples of African descent in the ­Caribbean, had by the 1940s begun to put less emphasis on the racial element, not least because of the broader pan-Africanist movements in the ­Caribbean and elsewhere. I argue that Carpentier’s revisionist ac­ aitian Revolution at this point seems caught between the count of the H need to emphasize its original achievement and status as the model for independence of American countries, the need to rewrite the event from a non-­colonialist more autochthonous perspective by foregrounding the voices of the oppressed and the marginalized, and the problematics of seeing the Haitian Revolution as a racial rather than a social revolution. El reino de este mundo produces these ambiguities by questioning once again received social and historical wisdom through the interrogation of narrative reliability, expanding the uses of narrative perspective through the narrative technique of the “real maravilloso,” as an element of narrative reliability. El reino de este mundo therefore expands the discussion on the role of narrative perspective in its relation to voice in the problematization of narrative reliability. What is of interest for our argument on the interdependence of narrative technique and history in the present book is that Carpentier created one technique of narrative perspective that was interdependent with the historical debate that it had emerged from. This technique demonstrates the great extent to which the ideological factor distinguished by Wolf Schmid (2010, 101) – here built mostly in historical and political ­discourse – shapes narrative perspective.1 Indeed, Carpentier found in “lo real maravilloso,” almost first epitomized in El reino de este mundo, a narrative technique to explore and express the “authentic American,” responding to a contemporary search for a national culture that was in the making. As Anke Birkenmaier observes, [e]l deseo de una revolución que combinara el cambio social con uno en la cultura nacional marcó la época de los años cuarenta en Cuba, Haití, y otros ámbitos caribeños. En Cuba, las propuestas para una nueva cultura cubana fueron por lo menos dos: la del grupo nucleado alrededor de José Lezama Lima, que empezó a publicar su revista Orígenes en 1944, y la propuesta de los que habían vuelto recientemente de Europa a Cuba, sobre todo Carpentier y el pintor Wifredo Lam. Los últimos se valieron de categorías surrealistas del arte revolucionario para desarrollar una estética propiamente latinoamericana [The desire for a revolution that combined social change with a change in the national culture marked the era of the 1940s in Cuba, Haiti, and the rest of Caribbean. In Cuba, there were at least two proposals put forward for a new Cuban culture: that of a group that coalesced around José Lezama Lima, who started publishing

186  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo his journal Orígenes in 1944, and the proposal of those who had recently returned from Europe to Cuba, especially Carpentier and the painter Wilfredo Lam. The latter used surrealist categories of revolutionary art to develop a genuinely Latin American aesthetic]. (Birkenmaier 2006, 116)2 In the prologue to El reino de este mundo, Carpentier offers a fully developed idea of “lo real maravilloso.” This aesthetic finds its most prominent expression in this particular novel, and its prologue became almost an aesthetic and cultural manifesto.3 Rejecting the superficiality of the surrealist “maravilloso” as a kind of trompe l’oeil, the Cuban author argues that muchos se olvidan, con disfrazarse de magos a poco costo, que lo maravilloso comienza a serlo de manera equívoca cuando surge una inesperada alteración de la realidad (el milagro), de una revelación privilegiada de la realidad, de una iluminación inhabitual o singularmente favorecedora de las inadvertidas riquezas de la realidad, de una ampliación de las escalas y categorías de la realidad, percibidas con particular intensidad en virtud de una exaltación del espíritu que lo conduce a un modo de ‘estado límite’ [what many forget, in disguising themselves as cheap magicians, is that the marvelous becomes unequivocally marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (a miracle), a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed or singularly favorable illumination of the previously unremarked riches of reality, an amplification of the measures and categories of reality, perceived with peculiar intensity due to an exaltation of the spirit which elevates it to a kind of ‘limit state’]. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 8) The author states that it was precisely on his visit to Haiti in 1943 that [a] cada paso hallaba lo real maravilloso. Pero pensaba, además, que esa presencia y vigencia de lo real maravilloso no era un privilegio único de Haití, sino patrimonio de la América entera, donde todavía no se ha terminado de establecer, por ejemplo, un recuento de cosmogonías [[a]t every step I encountered the marvelous in the real. But I also thought that the presence and prevalence of this marvelous reality was not a privilege unique to Haiti, but the patrimony of the whole of America, where there has yet to be drawn up, for example, a complete list of cosmogonies]. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 9) Alejo Carpentier took what he called “lo real maravilloso” as a genuine American aesthetic that was not signaling superficial shifts in the perception of reality but rather those aspects of reality that remained hidden for most.4

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  187 Despite the fact that Carpentier claims “lo real maravilloso” as the expression of the autochthonous American, its origins are not ­A merican. What makes it American is its adoption by a few Latin American writers whose purpose was the subversion or rejection of European culture and literary tradition. Carpentier, along with other Central and South ­A merican writers, like Ulse Prieti in Venezuela and Miguel Ángel ­Asturias in Guatemala, returned to Latin America after having spent some time in Paris, where they absorbed and in some measure participated in Surrealism and its obsession with the primitivism of other cultures that could suggest a nonrational, intuitive aesthetics. As Birkenmaier has shown, they found in Surrealism a first step toward distinguishing and creating aesthetics of their own, which aimed to discover the autochthonous American. To achieve this, they finally separated themselves from Breton and from what they considered a superficial ­European Surrealism in Europe in decline; yet they still preserved some relation with the unexpected and the magical that was a focal interest of Surrealism ­(Barroso 1977; Birkenmaier 2006; Bravo 1988; Chiampi 2007; ­Rodríguez ­Monegal 1971). Carpentier’s “real maravilloso” should not be confused with its later development into the World Literature-dimension concept of “magic realism.” As Mariano Siskind, and Roberto González Echevarría to a lesser ­ arpentier extent, has explained, “magic realism” appeared before Alejo C coined the term “real maravilloso” – its progenitor in Germany had been Franz Roh, it was disseminated by Massimo Bontempelli, and it arrived in Paris in the late 1920s. By then, the term, already associated with primitivism, was conceived as ahistorical. Siskind remarks that it was a discourse whose universality was determined by an epochal antipositivist exploration of the limits of rational approaches to the real. Only in its later displacement to the Caribbean does ­Carpentier conceptualize it as the aesthetic particularity of Latin America, opening the theoretical horizon to include its relation to marginality, subalternity, and postcolonialism. (2014, 65) It is precisely in this complex historical context in which Carpentier anchors the term, where the “real maravilloso” expresses both the possibilities and the challenges of reconsidering Latin American, Caribbean, Haitian, and Cuban histories and identities. 5 The “real maravilloso” as a narrative strategy enables Carpentier to look at the Haitian Revolution from within, from a Caribbean perspective of it in its most radical form, the slave point of view, claimed at some points to provide a genuine Caribbean point of view. Vodou is seen as a marvel, one of those American cosmologies – an association already made by Pierre Mabille, as Irlemar Chiampi demonstrated. By proposing a reading of reality from within Vodou beliefs, El reino de este mundo

188  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo elaborates another version of the Haitian Revolution distinct from that of the colonialists, while at the same time preserving the r­ acialization of the historical event. This point of view from within, from its most radical perspective, shapes both one slave perspective and an entire historical perspective. It relates to “race” to the extent that both the slave/ black and the black/Vodou associations were profoundly ingrained in the myth of the Haitian Revolution, in its discursive representation as a cultural/political/historical construct. And yet El reino de este mundo offers an altogether different historical perspective on that myth, one characterized mainly by an ambivalence that questions both its racial aspect and its success in overcoming colonialist systems of power. In this chapter, I argue that the “real maravilloso” in El reino de este mundo is used to provide an innovative perspective that builds a narrative reliability that is nevertheless interrogated by the very historicity that shapes the technique, that is, its use in a 1940s Cuban exploration of the Haitian Revolution as a simultaneously racial and social conflict. It is my claim that the coexistence of specific cultural and narrative uses of perspective clustered in the “real maravilloso” produces the ambivalences essential to the contemporary discourses of national emancipation and identity in Cuba and the Caribbean, which surface in the inspection of this thick representation of the Haitian Revolution, producing a new and yet problematic account. The novel adds the interrelations between perspective and voice seen also in Camus’s L’étranger to the factors pertaining to the problem of narrative reliability. A brief summary of the novel will facilitate its discussion. El reino de este mundo tells the story of Ti Noel, the slave of a French planter, Monsieur Lenormand de Mezy, over the course of the Haitian Revolution. The novel opens with Ti Noel accompanying his master to Le Cap to buy cattle and horses, and to visit a barber, while he recalls in his mind the mandinga Mackandal and his stories about the Ogun Vodou gods of “the Other Shore.” The following chapters focus on how Mackandal loses an arm in a cane mill and is assigned to cattle herding. He collects various plants to concoct a poison that ends up killing not only most of the cattle but also a great number of the French masters and colonists. Mackandal is eventually apprehended and burned alive in public, although the spectacle fails as the slaves see Mackandal metamorphosed into an insect and fly away, instead of being executed. Some years later, Boukman celebrates the Vodou ceremony of the Pacto de Mayor in the Haitian woods, where Mackandal’s reappearance sets off the Haitian revolution. Various episodes of the Haitian revolution follow, including Ti Noel’s rape of his master’s new wife. De Mezy takes Ti Noel to Cuba, where he is sold to another master, from whom, in turn, the slave buys his freedom and returns to Haiti. Meanwhile, Pauline Bonaparte journeys to Haiti with the Napoleonic expedition led by her husband General Leclerc, and during the voyage indulges in the exotic life of the Tropics

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  189 along with Leclerc’s personal servant, the black Solimán. Leclerc dies of yellow fever, after which Paulina is initiated into Vodou to avoid infection, and returns to Paris. When Ti Noel returns to Haiti a few years later, the northern part of the island is ruled by King Henri Christophe, who exploits his black subjects in the construction of the Sans-Souci palace and a massive Citadel, La Ferriere. King Christophe’s Catholicism and dismissal of Vodou will lead to a people’s revolt marked by the sounds of the drums. As a free man, Ti Noel makes a home on the ruins of his old plantation, making use of some of C ­ hristophe’s looted furniture and Napoleonic dress coat. Another invasion follows by the mulattoes Agrimensores who also use forced labor. Ti Noel starts talking to nature and experimenting with metamorphoses that will eventually allow him to comprehend his role as a mandinga in helping to fight against social injustices in the “Kingdom of this World.”

El reino de este mundo, a Challenge to the Myth of the Haitian Revolution The impact of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1803) in the neighboring countries and in the colonial metropolis was huge. The effect was partly material, measurable in both economic terms and by the migration of people – even if Seymour Drescher (2001) has questioned the extent of these. The regions that profited most were Cuba and Louisiana which experienced a manifold increase in demand for their cane sugar – with Cuba becoming the most important sugar-growing colony thereafter. But its most lasting impact was in the sphere of the imagination and politics, setting a precedent that would inspire and terrify in almost equal measure. David Geggus has given a succinct summary of what became the historical legacy of the Haitian Revolution: The slave uprising that began in August 1791 and transformed the immensely wealthy colony was probably the largest and most dramatically successful one there has ever been. It produced the world’s first examples of wholesale emancipation in a major slaveowning society (1793), and of full racial equality in an American colony (1792). Of all the American struggles for colonial independence it surely involved the greatest degree of mass mobilization, and brought warfare – much of it guerrilla warfare, a decade before the term was coined – left the most productive colony of the day in ruins, its ruling class entirely eliminated. Haiti became Latin ­A merica’s first independent country, the first modern state in the Tropics. (2001, ix) The Haitian Revolution indeed inspired slave revolts in Cuba and in the US, the fear of which even led Thomas Jefferson to ban immigration

190  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo from Saint-Domingue following the French Louisiana purchase in 1802, and to adopt the view of US slavery as the “peculiar institution,” differentiated from others, and especially the savage Haitian slavery.6 Almost immediately, the Haitian Revolution found its way into fictional narratives by Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Heinrich von Kleist, followed by those of numerous African American writers and artists, such as Fredrick Douglass, Langston Hughes, James ­Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison, Jakob Lawrence, Zora Neale Hurston, and other American writers, such as William Faulkner and Eugene O’Neil, as well as the Caribbean Arna Bontemps, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott, among many others. Indeed, the Revolution has been used to support the full gamut of political ideologies, from radical leftist to conservative, catalogued by Philip Kaisari in The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination (2014).7 Yet even if late twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary works tend to be more critical of the revolution’s outcome and legacy, as Kaisary argues, the most common tendency is to see it largely as a success, as shown by the edited volumes of respected historians such as David Geggus. The general emphasis is on the Haitian Revolution as a successful independence struggle and its abolition of slavery in the early age of imperialism. Part of the literature on the event has also focused on the cultural particularities of slaves, with a special emphasis on their African roots – such as Zora Neale Hurston’s writings on Haitian Vodou – and on their historical and political significance and potential, as in C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins. In 1949, when Alejo Carpentier published El reino de este mundo, the aim of representing this historical event from another perspective, from within, that would illuminate some aspects of its authentic American reality hitherto ignored, was certainly innovative. From the very beginning of the novel, Carpentier adopts a slave’s perspective of the revolution, something that, as Figueroa notes, not even Bontemps had attempted in his novel Drums at Dusk (1939). At the level of the story, El reino de este mundo innovates in offering the experience of a slave who is a believer and eventually a mandinga of Vodou. His perspective is therefore shaped by his beliefs, which are not shared with the French colonialists. However, Carpentier’s new perspective is above all a result of his use of the “real maravilloso,” a form of expression which differs from realistic, third-person, historical perspectives, enabling him to downplay the myth of the Haitian revolution as it had been elaborated in the slave colonies, metropoles, and elsewhere. The narrative technique of “real maravilloso” allows Carpentier to embody an internal perspective that, since it evokes “la sensación de lo maravilloso,” “presupone una fe” [“the sense of the marvelous,” “it presupposes a faith”] (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 8). It is my argument that the central role of faith in the conception of the “real maravilloso” is what makes it a strategy of narrative reliability, although a problematic one. The technique is not a simple “return to the real,” as he claims in the

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  191 prologue, but rather an assumption of belief as a way of apprehending the real. While “lo maravilloso invocado en el descubrimiento – como lo hicieron los surrealistas durante tantos años – nunca fue sino una artimaña literaria” [the marvelous invoked in the discovery – as in the long years of Surrealism – was never more than a literary ruse] (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 8), this is, on the contrary, a discovery of the marvelous founded on “credibility,” on taking the belief at face value. In this sense, the perspective shaped by the “real maravilloso” is one of authority, one of enforcing narrative reliability. In adopting the perspective of Vodou, the novel’s conception of the real is not grounded in the rational but on specific forms of belief. As Carpentier observed in his earlier novel, Ecué-Yamba-Ó, “[b]asta tener una concepción del mundo distinta a la generalmente inculcada para que los prodigios dejen de serlo y se situen dentro del orden de acontecimientos normalmente verificables” [[i]t is enough to have a conception of the world different from the one generally inculcated for marvels to cease to be such, and to be placed within the order of normally verifiable events] (Carpentier 1982 [1933], 72). In its invitation to look at the Haitian revolution from the authentically American point of view of the slave, El reino de este mundo makes it possible to understand that land “donde millares de hombres ansiosos de libertad creyeron en los poderes licantrópicos de Mackandal, a punto de que esa fe colectiva produjera un milagro el día de su ejecución” [where thousands of men anxious for freedom had believed in the lycanthropic powers of Mackandal, to the point where this collective faith produced a miracle on the day of his execution] (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 9)]. Arguably, the formulation of the “real maravilloso” is a cultural particularization of narrative perspective, using historical and cultural discourses to develop narrative technique. That is, Carpentier deploys the “real maravilloso” in his elaboration of narrative perspective or focalization. A reminder of the concept of focalization should make this argument much clearer. Even if much criticized, Genette’s differentiation between focalization and voice is still helpful in recognizing the space created between narrative voice and narrative focalization in El reino de este mundo, which is precisely where narrative reliability is problematized in the novel, as we will see later. Based on Genette’s definition but adding a postclassical gloss, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory defines focalization as the perspectival restriction and orientation of narrative information relative to somebody’s (usually a character’s) perception, imagination, knowledge, or point of view. Hence, focalization theory covers the various means of regulating selecting, and channeling narrative information, particularly of seeing events from somebody’s point of view, no matter how subjective or fallible this point of view might turn out to be. (Herman, Jahn, and Ryan 2005, 173)

192  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo In contrast to what one could expect from Carpentier’s definition of the “real maravilloso,” in El reino de este mundo, the narrative mode of an extraordinary reality is not so much a feature of voice, speaking in a first-person homodiegetic narration, but is rather a feature of focalization/ narrative perspective – I use the terms “focalization” and “narrative perspective” as synonyms here.8 Seeing the “real maravilloso” as a focalization strategy makes the ideological and historical implications of this technical aspect of narrative absolutely clear. Carpentier’s use of narrative perspective invokes ­A nsgar Nünning’s understanding of narrative perspective as going beyond its merely linguistic feature to endow it with a contextual dimension in understanding narrative perspective as a “character’s or a narrator’s subjective worldview” (2001, 207). Seeing narrative perspective as a way of seeing in the narrative through a subjective worldview enables us to better identify the uses of historical discourse in narrative technique. The case of the “real maravilloso” is especially illuminating because of its specific cultural target. El reino de este mundo elaborates a narrative perspective from these premises through the use of free indirect style and liberating the text from contextual explanations that might distort belief. This enables the presentation of the events from the character perspective of the slave and enables the expression of Vodou from within, that is, from reality as seen by the Vodou believer. A couple of examples will serve to show the general use of narrative perspective in the novel. The novel opens with Ti Noel’s perspective in a well-known episode where Ti Noel is waiting for his master in front of the barbershop.9 He notices the white wax figures holding wigs in the barbershop next to calf heads in the neighboring store, about which “Ti Noel se divertía pensando que, al lado de las cabezas descoloridas de los terneros, se servían cabezas de blancos señores en el mantel de la misma mesa” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 18) [amused Ti Noël to think that alongside the pale calves’ heads, heads of white men were served on the same tablecloth (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 5)].10 A portrait of the French king reminds Ti Noel of the tales of African rulers told by the slave mandinga Mackandal, and the narrative launches into the recollection of those stories: Allá, en cambio – en Gran Allá – , había príncipes duros como el yunque, y príncipes que eran el leopardo, y príncipes que conocían el lenguaje de los árboles, y príncipes que mandaban sobre los cuatro puntos cardinales, dueños de la nube, de la semilla, del bronce y del fuego. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 21) [Whereas Back There there were princes as hard as anvils, and princes who were leopards, and princes who knew the language of

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  193 the forest, and princes who ruled the four points of the compass, lords of the clouds, of the seed, of bronze, of fire.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 9)11 These musings merge seamlessly with Ti Noel’s reflections on the moment: Ti Noel oyó la voz del amo que salía de la peluquería con las mejillas demasiado empolvadas. Su cara se parecía sorprendentemente, ahora, a las cuatro caras de cera empañada que se alineaban en el estante, sonriendo de modo estúpido. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 21) [Ti Noël heard the voice of his master, who emerged from the barber’s with heavily powdered cheeks. His face now bore a startling resemblance to the four dull wax faces that stood in a row along the counter, smiling stupidly.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 9) Not only is there no break in the perspective here, but that continuity is precisely what enacts the “real maravilloso” because Ti Noel’s thoughts are given the same degree of credibility when remembering the Vodou gods and their African origins as when hearing the master’s voice. In addition, and quite contrary to his own earlier novel ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó!, there are no explanatory incursions or appendixes clarifying specific references for a non-Vodou believer.12 Part of the cultural discourse that the novel calls the reader to supply is, precisely, Vodou. The novel also includes songs of the Vodou in its original créole as part of ceremonies witnessed or recalled by Ti Noel, contributing to the building of narrative credibility and authenticity. Indeed, as Speratti-Piñero notes, “[l]os cantos vudú constituyen así una prueba de autenticidad, porque son piezas coleccionadas por un etnólogo y publicadas en el marco de una investigación seria” [the Vodou chants thus constitute proof of authenticity, because they are pieces collected by an ethnologist and published in a serious scholarly work] since they appear in Jean PriceMars’s Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928) (Speratti-Piñero 1981, 108) and a collection of songs by Harold Courlander published in 1939 (Birkenmaier 2006, 106). The “real maravilloso” in El reino de este mundo innovates in two ways in comparison to other literary accounts of the Haitian Revolution. On the one hand, it privileges the slave perspective and thought, bringing the experience of the slave to the forefront of the narration, thus breaking with historical perspectives told from the external perspective and those that were generated by colonial literature. On the other hand, Ti Noel’s life does not improve as a result of the revolution and he remains subject to new forms of economic and political power. He ends by

194  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo realizing his mandinga powers, which would encourage him to continue fighting for real freedom. These innovations at the story level, channeled through the technique of “lo real maravilloso,” in turn, shape the new historical perspective on the Haitian Revolution in El reino de este mundo: (1) the novel deploys Vodou as the lenses of the narrative perspective, giving it the authority of narration by introducing its particular views directly and by dedicating most of the narrative to these worldviews. In this way, the novel legitimizes the racialization of the story, and links it to the contemporary interest in Afro-Antillean and Afro-Cuban cultures. (2) The novel innovates in representing the Haitian Revolution problematically: the Revolution did not bring an immediate end to labor exploitation or political tyranny, nor did it dismantle colonial structures of power, and thus there was a need for a more complex presentation that acknowledged the conflict and the struggle. El reino de este mundo uses the cultural assumptions of the dominant historical and fictional narratives of the Haitian Revolution – which celebrated its success without empowering Vodou and the slave perspective – in order to build authority for the new presentation of the revolution through the technique of the “real maravilloso,” as a strategy that demands narrative belief from the reader. Widely disseminated historical discourses around the Haitian Revolution are therefore necessary for enacting the internal perspective called for by the “real maravilloso.” By showing Vodou from within, the novel naturalizes the revolution by describing an atmosphere full of signs and portents of Mackandal’s metamorphoses that pave the way to revolt, from the slaves’ point of view. The novel empowers Vodou as the narrative engine driving narrative progression in that Vodou provides the logic of sequencing and functions as foreshadowing, as the following paragraph illustrates: Todos sabían que la iguana verde, la mariposa nocturna, el perro desconocido, el alcatraz inverosímil, no eran sino simples disfraces. Dotado del poder de transformarse en animal de pezuña, en ave, pez o insecto, Mackandal visitaba continuamente las haciendas de la llanura para vigilar a sus fieles y saber si todavía confiaban en su regreso. De metamorfosis en metamorfosis, el manco estaba en todas partes, habiendo recobrado su integridad corpórea al vestir trajes de animales. Con alas un día, con agallas al otro, galopando o reptando, se había adueñado del curso de los ríos subterráneos, de las cavernas de la costa, de las copas de los árboles, y reinaba ya sobre la isla entera. Ahora, sus poderes eran ilimitados. Lo mismo podía cubrir una yegua que descansar en el frescor de un aljibe, posarse en las ramas ligeras de un aromo o colarse por el ojo de una cerradura. Los perros no le labraban; mudaba de sombra según le conviniera. Por obra suya, una negra parió un niño con cara de jabalí. De noche

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  195 solía aparecerse en los caminos bajo el pelo de un chivo negro con ascuas en los cuernos. Un día daría la señal del gran levantamiento, y los Señores de Allá, encabezados por Damballah, por el Amo de los Caminos, y por Ogún de los Hierros, traerían el rayo y el trueno, para desencadenar el ciclón que completaría la obra de los hombres. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 41) [They all knew that the green lizard, the night moth, the strange dog, the incredible gannet, were nothing but disguises. As he had the power to take the shape of hoofed animal, bird, fish, or insect, Macandal continually visited the plantations of the Plaine to watch over his faithful and find out if they still had faith in his return. In one metamorphosis or another, the one-armed was everywhere, having recovered his corporeal integrity in animal guise. With wings one day, spurs another, galloping or crawling, he had made himself master of the courses of the underground streams, the caverns of the seacoast, and the treetops, and now ruled the whole island. His powers were boundless. He could as easily cover a mare as rest in the cool of a cistern, swing on the swaying branches of a huisache, or slip through a key-hole. The dogs did not bark at him; he changed his shadow at will. It was because of him that a Negress gave birth to a child with a wild boar’s face. At night he appeared on the roads in the skin of a black goat with fire-tipped horns. One day he would give the sign for the great uprising, and the Lords of Back There, headed by Damballah, the Master of the Roads, and Ogoun, Master of the Swords, would bring the thunder and lightning and unleash the cyclone that would round out the work of men’s hands.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 35) Non-Vodou-believer characters have climatic moments in which they realize that dreadful events in the revolution had already been anticipated by the signs of Vodou. These predictions reinforce Vodou as a reliable source of narrative and historical perspective. Lenormand de Mezy ignores the sounds of the drums, realizing too late that “podía significar, en ciertos casos, algo más que una piel de chivo tensa sobre un tronco ahuecado,” and therefore “[l]os esclavos tenían, pues, una religión secreta que los alentaba y solidarizaba en sus rebeldías” (­Carpentier 1983 [1949], 70) [“a drum might be more than just a goatskin stretched across a hollow log,” and therefore “[t]he slaves evidently had a secret religion that upheld and united them in their revolts” (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 72)]. The ignorance or disavowal of Vodou by a French planter like Lenormand de Mezy contributes to naturalizing the power of Vodou beliefs in their ability to perceive reality. And yet it is not only the French colonists who deny the power of Vodou but also other historical characters like King Henri Christophe, who, upon hearing the drums calling

196  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo for rebellion against him, realizes that he has ignored Vodou by embracing Catholicism: Christophe, el reformador, había querido ignorar el Vodú, formando, a fustazos, una casta de señores católicos. Ahora comprendía que los verdaderos traidores a su causa, aquella noche, eran San Pedro con su llave, los capuchinos de San Francisco y el negro San Benito, con la Virgen de semblante oscuro y manto azul, y los Evangelistas, cuyos libros había hecho besar en cada juramento de fidelidad. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 122) [Henri Christophe, the reformer, had attempted to ignore Voodoo, molding with a whiplash a caste of Catholic gentlemen. Now he realized that the real traitors to his cause that night were St. Peter with his keys, the Capuchins of St. Francis, the blackmoor St. ­B enedict along with the dark-faced Virgin in her blue cloak, and the Evangelists whose books he had ordered kissed each time the oath of loyalty was sworn.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 142) By bestowing narrative reliability on Vodou, El reino de este mundo gives legitimacy to one of the most emblematic aspects of racial distinction in the Caribbean. From the 1920s on, the development of ethnography and the cultural conception of races led to renewed interest in Vodou and related practices in Haiti and the other Antillean islands, such as Santería in Cuba or Obeah in Jamaica. By studying Vodou, ethnographers hoped to recover and understand the process of syncretism with African cultures, the fruit of the massive enslavement of Africans brought to the Caribbean, and especially focused on the original Yoruba gods and religious practices. Prominent – yet not for that less racist – anthropologists, such as Fernando Ortiz and Pierre Mabille, founded research institutions, such as the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos (1937) in Cuba, and the Boureau d’Ethnologie Haitienne in Haiti, in the late 1930s.13 In addition, a rapidly spread fascination with zombies and Vodou in general was reflected in popular books such as William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929). By giving credibility to the Vodou reality through the use of perspective associated with the “real maravilloso,” Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo proposes a view that diverges from that of ethnographic research, which relies on observation with an anthropological eye, the observant participation of the discipline. In doing so, the Cuban author develops the narrative strategy first essayed in his earlier novel ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó!, which, as Carpentier himself suggested, only touches on the exotic superficiality of Santería – the Cuban version of Vodou – in a primitivist fashion that does not delve into its hidden essence, changes in narrative

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  197 technique that have been analyzed by Tomás Barreda (1972), Jeremy Cass (2009), Emily Maguire (2011, Chapter 3), and Antonio Melis (2007). In many ways, the use of an internal perspective depends on the reader’s ability to experience the “real maravilloso,” and therefore to adopt the syncretic perspective of Vodou and related religions, such as the Cuban Santería – specifically the ñañigo or Abakuá group, already portrayed in ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó!14 This perspective largely represents a return to seeing reality from forms that are perceived as fading in post-­independent Cuba and Haiti under the influence of US neocolonialism, made explicit in ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó!: Sólo los negros, Menegildo, Longina, Salomé y su prole ­conservaban celosamente un carácter y una tradición antillana. ¡El bongó, antídoto de Wall Street! ¡El Espíritu Santo, venerado por los Cué, no admitía salchichas yanquis dentro de sus panecillos votivos…! ¡Nada de hot-dogs con los santos de Mayeya! [Only the blacks, ­Menegildo, Longina, Salomé and their offspring zealously conserved an Antillean character and tradition. The bongó, an antidote to Wall Street! The Holy Spirit, venerated by the Cué, did not permit Yankee sausages amongst their votive rolls…! No hot dogs with the saints of Mayeya!] (Carpentier 1982 [1933], 132) By seeing post-emancipation blacks in Cuba as the custodians of the original Antillean traditions, liberated from the influence of colonial powers, Afro-Cubanism considered the cultures of African descendants to be the basic cultural element, and their already syncretic religions, the most visible legacy of their African roots. Since, as Emily Maguire notes, like its fellow Caribbean islands, Cuba had no significant indigenous population from which it could borrow; as most of the existing Taíno (Arawak) population had been nearly obliterated in the early years of the Spanish conquest […] Afro-Cuban culture was the only thing that might occupy the place of a ‘folk’ in the Cuban context. (2011, 14) Afro-Cubans were therefore anointed in the 1920s and 1930s as the most authentic criollos, the Cuban “folk” – and frequently also Caribbean or Latin American more generally – whose cultures had to be studied and conserved as national patrimony.15 González Echevarría sums up this process of designating Afro-Cubanism as an essential part of a Latin American culture and identity: Cuando Carpentier comenzó a escribir, tres asuntos preocupaban a los intelectuales en Cuba: el problema político de la reciente república

198  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (independiente desde 1902), la vanguardia europea, y, mediados ya los veinte, el movimiento afrocubano, el cual surgió en parte como respuesta a los dos asuntos anteriores. Estas cuestiones tenían al menos un denominador común: el problema de cómo asimilar una enorme y empobrecida población negra, que constituía el espinazo de la fuerza laboral en la industria del azúcar, al centro de la vida política, social y cultural. […] Pero lo que se convirtió en un rasgo particularmente latinoamericano fue la conciencia o el deseo de que debido a su corta historia y a la presencia de culturas no europeas, Latinoamérica ya era ese nuevo comienzo; en Cuba esto significó abrazar de lleno la herencia cultural de los afrocubanos [When Carpentier was at the beginning of his writing career, three issues preoccupied Cuban intellectuals: the political problems of the fledgling republic (independent since 1902), the European avant garde, and, by the mid-1920s, the Afro-Cuban movement, which emerged partly in response to the first two. These issues had at least one common denominator: the problem of assimilating a large and impoverished black population, which formed the backbone of the labour force in the sugar industry, into the mainstream of political, social, and cultural life […]. But what became a particularly Latin American trait was the sense or the desire that due to its short history and the presence of non-European cultures, Latin America was already that new beginning. In Cuba, this meant embracing wholeheartedly the Afro-Cuban cultural heritage]. (González Echevarría 2004, 82) In displacing the historical setting from contemporary Cuba to the Haitian Revolution, in El reino de este mundo, Carpentier avoids tackling directly the problem with the political dimension of Afro-Cubanism as it had emerged in ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó!, but it is implicit in the use of Vodou as a central racial and cultural factor in his narrative.16 The racialization to which Carpentier subsumes the narrative technique of the “real maravilloso” has a similar effect to Du Bois’s double consciousness, that double take of reality that the narrator of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was constantly aware of in passing for white. It can be conceived in that sense because this narrative perspective illuminates both the oppressors’ conventional view of their subjects and the marvelous or, simply put, the reality of the American Other that is there but it is often missed or dismissed, like the insects that are in fact incarnations of Mackandal or the fateful disregard of the slaves’ political organization. In imposing the slaves’ perspective and their awareness that the colonizers are oblivious to the realities and political strategies being pursued right in front of their eyes, the novel empowers a double perspective that is only accessible through Otherness, through the eyes of those oppressed, Vodou working in a manner similar to Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899).

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  199 As in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, reliability in El reino de este mundo is already anchored in the preface. In this case, claims of narrative credibility are based on the novel’s respect for the “historical truth” since the prologue warns that in the text that follows se narra una sucesión de hechos extraordinarios, ocurridos en la isla de Santo Domingo, en determinada época que no alcanza el lapso de una vida humana, dejándose que lo maravilloso fluya libremente de una realidad estrictamente seguida en todos sus detalles [is narrated a sequence of extraordinary happenings which took place on the island of Santo Domingo (Hispaniola, divided into Haiti and The Dominican Republic), in the space of a period which does not equal the span of a man’s life, allowing the marvelous to flow freely from a reality precise in all its details]. These details are plainly historical since, as the author continues, es menester advertir que el relato que va a leerse ha sido establecido sobre una documentación extremadamente rigurosa que no solamente respeta la verdad histórica de los acontecimientos, nombres de los personajes – incluso secundarios –, de lugares y hasta de calles, sino que oculta, bajo su aparente intemporalidad, un minucioso cotejo de fechas y cronologías [it must be stressed that the ensuing story is based on the most rigorous documentation, which not only respects the historical truth of events, the names of ­characters – ­including secondary ones – places and even streets, but which conceals, beneath its apparent intemporality, a meticulous collation of dates and chronologies]. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 11) Although many critics have looked to Spengler’s cyclical conception of history from a rather philosophical point of view, and the symbolic or mythological uses of time correspondences, like those of the days of the week established by González Echevarría,17 others, like Emma Susana Speratti-Piñero and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, have been able to uncover many of the historical materials that Carpentier used to compose his novel. Along with the already mentioned portrayal of Vodou gods and rituals, in its historical endeavor, El reino de este mundo traces the events of the Haitian Revolution from the first stirrings of slave revolt, with the poisoning of cattle and slave-owners in 1757 – ­Chapters III–V, Part I; Mackandal’s execution in 1758 – Chapter VIII; the ritual inaugu­ rating the revolt in Bois Caïman by the Jamaican Bouckman in 1791 – Chapters II–IV, Part II; the flight of planters to Cuba – Chapter V, Part II; Napoleon’s attempt to recover the colony by sending the expeditionary force under general Leclerc, accompanied by his sister Pauline Bonaparte (1801–1803) – Chapters VI and VII, Part II ; Rouchambeau’s

200  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo campaign of terror, including the use of dogs, in 1803 – Chapter VII; the kingdom of Henri Christophe in the Northern part of the already independent Republic, 1807–1820 – Chapters II–VII, Part III; and the conquest of the southern provinces and the occupation of the North by Jean-Pierre Boyer after Christophe’s suicide – Chapter III, Part IV (Paravisini-­Gebert 2004, 116).18 While the events are recounted in detail, recognizable historical references abound – though not exact years or dates, except for the “15 de agosto,” when a priest buried between two walls by Christophe appears to him. Well-known historical references are brought into the narrative to buttress the novel’s claim to historical truth, and to elaborate a divergent account of the Haitian revolution. For instance, the novel tells that “[o]n holidays Rochambeau began to throw Negroes to his dogs […]. On the assumption that this would keep the Negroes in their place, the Governor had sent to Cuba for hundreds of mastiffs” (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 97); or, referring to the construction of the Citadel La Ferriere, ordered by Henri Christophe, “Ti Noël soon learned that this had been going on for more than twelve years, and that the entire population of the North had been drafted for this incredible task” (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 116); and even makes reference to historical documents, like the journal of the Haitian revolution mentioned when Lenormand de Mezy recalls, “that ruddy, pleasure-loving lawyer of the Cap, Moreau de Saint-Méry,” who “had collected considerable information on the salvage practices of the witch doctors in the hills, bringing out the fact that some of the Negroes were snake-worshippers” (Carpentier 2006 [1949],  72).19 Furthermore, Saint-Méry’s historical journal has been used extensively by some of the most prominent scholars in the field as an important firsthand account of the revolt: for instance, by Laurent Dubois in his excellent study The Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004).

The Ambivalence of the “Real Maravilloso”: Questioning Reliability Nonetheless, as we have seen, narrative strategies that have their foundation in double perspectives become highly problematic and often very ambivalent with regard to narrative reliability. In El reino de este mundo, the “real maravilloso” is presented in the prologue as an innovation that builds credibility in the narrative, an authentic, reliable approach from within a system of belief that had been historically discredited and defamed, and taken as a prominent example of primitivism. And yet ­Carpentier wavers from the exclusive perspective of the slave, emphasizing in a shifting perspective the double perspective/double consciousness that makes the marvel appear as such in light of the contrast produced against a conventional rationalist perception of reality. Technically

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  201 similar to Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, where the Vodou tales of Uncle Julius stand in contrast to the condescending skepticism of his master, El reino de este mundo does not render exclusiveness in narrative perspective or focalization to the “real maravilloso.” Focalization is multiple, going from Ti Noel and Lenormand de Mezy to Paulina, Henri Christophe, the slaves as a group, the French colonists as a group, and to Solimán. Throughout the narrative, Ti Noel’s is the dominant perspective as an individual and as part of the slave collective view, a sustained focalization that is justified because the story covers his life cycle, starting and ending with his perspective in a circular narrative. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of perspectives, many of them not corresponding to the “real maravilloso” but rather oblivious to it, produces an ambivalence in the narrative perspective that affects the reliability of the narrative taken as a whole. In El reino de este mundo, ­Carpentier elaborates focalization through fragmentation, multiple perspective and its composition in an open perspective structure, and a third-­person non-characterized voice speaking in a free indirect style in order to problematize narrative reliability. At this point, El reino de este mundo displays the problem of narrative reliability in one of its most complex articulations, the realm of perspective as a factor for narrative reliability, and the possibility of a third-person narrative voice as a potential bearer of narrative unreliability or questioned reliability. In what follows, I will argue that the problem of reliability in El reino de este mundo occurs in the narrative disjuncture produced between a third-person narrative voice and the characters’ perspectives. The call to the reader to supply contextual information that constitutes the working method of the “real maravilloso” is what reveals the disjuncture wherein the problem of narrative reliability is located in this novel. Once again, only the importation of historical information makes it possible to discern the extent to which all perspectives are being questioned, including the slave’s. Furthermore, the problem of reliability does not only rest on the characters but rather on the disjuncture in the novel between narrative perspective and narrative voice, the space where the reliability of the “real maravilloso” is ultimately questioned, displaying both the possibilities and the challenges of this narrative technique. El reino de este mundo elaborates narrative focalization on the basis of the already defined “real maravilloso,” that is, a perspective of reality that discovers other dimensions that are viewed from within different cosmologies. Distinguished from “fantasy,” the “real maravilloso” is not an elaboration of focalization as an unnatural technique but, on the contrary, a natural one that lends credibility and is based on a trusted reality. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, focalization is nuanced through fragmentation, through multiple perspective, and through the free indirect style, which problematize reliability within narrative

202  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo discourse, expanding it to historical discourse, as in the other novels studied in this book. In El reino de este mundo, fragmentation affects narrative perspective because the narration progresses through sketches in which observation takes up a great part of the narrative, leaving many gaps between the episodes and focusing mostly on impressions and thoughts rather than on actions, one trait that is constant in Carpentier’s works. In a short novel that claims historicity, the narration of the story is surprisingly devoid of action and strangely infused by a strong lyricism in the dilated sentences. It is almost as if the action is told indirectly because of the privileging of observation and perception. As a counterpoint to the dilatation of scenes and thoughts, the action itself is narrated in relatively brief passages of short, fragmentary sentences. One example of dilated scenes is the chapter “Lo que hallaba la mano,” where Mackandal begins to discover new plants: Recostado a la sombra de un algarrobo, apoyándose en el codo de su brazo entero, forrejeaba con su única mano entre las yerbas co­ nocidas en busca de todos los engendros de la tierra cuya existencia hubiera desdeñado hasta entonces. Descubría, con sorpresa, la vida secreta de especies singulares, afectas al disfraz, la confusión, el verde verde, y amigas de las pequeña gente acorazada que esqui­ vaba los caminos de hormigas. La mano traía alpistes sin nombres, alcaparras de azufre, ajíes minúsculos, bejucos que tejían redes entre las piedras; matas solitarias, de hojas velludas, que sudaban en la noche; sensitivas que se doblaban al mero sonido de la voz humana; cápsulas que estallaban, a mediodía, con chasquido de uñas aplastando una pulga; lianas rastreras, que se trababan, lejos del sol, en babeantes marañas. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 28) [Stretched out in the shade of a carob tree, resting on the elbow of his sound arm, he foraged with his only hand among the familiar grasses for those spurned growths to which he had given no thought before. To his surprise he discovered the secret life of strange species given to disguise, confusion, and camouflage, protectors of the little armored beings that avoid the pathways of the ants. His hand gathered anonymous seeds, salphury capers, diminutive hot peppers; vines that wove nets among the stones; solitary bushes with furry leaves that sweated at night; sensitive plants that closed at the mere sound of the human voice; pods that burst at midday with the pop of a flea cracked under the nail; creepers that plaited themselves in slimy tangles far from the sun.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 17)

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  203 On the other hand, a swift-flowing paragraph provides the contrast: Un día agarraron un perro en celo que pertenecía a las jaurías de Lenormand de Mezy. Mientras Ti Noel, a horcajadas sobre él, le sujetaba la cabeza por las orejas, Mackandal le frotó el hocico con una piedra que el zumo de un hongo había teñido de amarillo claro. El perro contrajo los músculos. Su cuerpo fue sacudido, en seguida, por violenas convulsiones, cayendo sobre el lomo, con las patas tiesas y los colmillos de fuera. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 29) [One day they caught in heat a dog of the packs of Lenormand de Mezy. While Ti Noël, sitting astride the animal, held his head by the ears, Macandal rubbed its muzzle with a stone that the juice of a fungus had colored a light yellow. The dog’s muscles contracted, its body jerked in violent convulsions, and it rolled over on its back, legs stiff and teeth bared.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 20) Fragmentation of plot and the duration of the scenes downplay the importance of action in the novel. This “metonymic and metaphoric narration” (Sokoloff 1986) is what mainly determines the presentation of Ti Noel’s life, leaving the narrative quite divorced from what happens to him to concentrate on his observations and impressions. Finally, fragmentation is perceived in the shifting of perspective, most of the time double, in the portrayal of daily scenes that are viewed differently by colonists and slaves, evincing the contrast between two worldviews, but also downplaying the importance of the grand historical events that are taking place, which had been at the center of heroic literary representations of the Haitian Revolution (see, for example, the chapters “La hija de Minos y de Pasífae” and “Santiago de Cuba”). 20 Ansgar Nünning’s concept of “perspective structure” is especially helpful in comprehending how multiple narrative perspective contributes to problematizing narrative reliability. Nünning highlights the importance of considering the combination of narrative perspectives in a text as part of his proposed concept of “perspective structure.” The term is meant to “refer to the relationships between the various individual perspectives projected in a text” (Nünning 2001, 209). This concept brings into focus the degree of emphasis given to perspectives, the hierarchy of perspectives, their arrangement, their degree of homogeneity or intersubjectivity, and their directionality, aspects that have all been considered in the development of narrative voice in this book as well – a development that should deserve an essay on its own. While Nünning sees the perspective worldview from a cognitive point of view that blends

204  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo the cognitive, emotional, epistemological, and ideological aspects of this technique, I make a distinction here and focus only on the historical and ideological implications of narrative perspective in the “real maravilloso.” This should help reveal the contribution made by this book to the study of narrative perspective, that is, the need to consider how historical and cultural discourses actively build the characters’ and narrators’ focalization rather than function as passive reflectors of historical context. Because the multiplicity of perspectives does not authorize or privilege one worldview over the other, El reino de este mundo offers what Nünning calls an open perspective structure, that is, a dialogical perspective that grows out of ideological irresolution. In this light, multiple focalization complicates narrative reliability even more since what has been presented as the privileged perspective of the “real maravilloso” happens to be only partially represented in a novel where other characters are also focalizers. In this sense, the novel emphasizes the double perspective that presents alternative takes on the events and judgments thereof, and this combination of perspectives is what ultimately configures the novel’s actual “perspective structure.” However, while several chapters are organized around a double take, this double perspective is not always the same since the views are not straightforwardly those of colonists or slaves but are complicated by focalizers such as Henri Christophe, whose ambition to emulate the French is mitigated by his leadership role in the Haitian Revolution, his blackness, and his knowledge of Vodou. More than simply a double perspective that would provide a counterpoint to the slave’s vision characterized as the “real maravilloso,” multiple focalization suggests a broader spectrum in a perspective structure that ultimately undermines full authority of Vodou. Paradoxically, because focalization may not be reduced to the “real maravilloso,” the marvelous can be actually preserved as such, and thus wrapped in the sense of “faith” that is its condition of possibility. Acknowledgment of “faith” at the core of the “maravilloso” in fact requires a distance that foregrounds the need for it to be credible in order for the perspective to function – not far from Jim, Marlow, or Shreve’s conscious “need to believe.” Because the “real maravilloso” has been conceived as a way to recover what is genuinely American, the “real maravilloso” intrinsically questions the credibility of this unraveled reality in the narrative as well as in the historical discourses. As González Echevarría observes: Suponer que lo maravilloso existe en América es adoptar una (falsa) perspectiva europea, porque sólo desde otra perspectiva podemos descubrir la alteridad, la diferencia – lo mismo visto desde dentro es homogéneo, liso, sin aristas, sin diferencias. Toda maravilla es una distanciación, una separación. […] Tal vez una de esas características sea precisamente la de que escritores como Carpentier, Asturias,

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  205 o Uslar Pietri, hayan declarado que la magia estaba aquí, para evadir la alienación del europeo para quien la magia siempre está allá. Pero en esta tentativa hay una doble o meta-alienación; la magia puede que esté en esta orilla, pero tenemos que verla desde la otra para verla como tal. La peculiaridad hispanoamericana será entonces esa doblez, esa atopía suspendida entre un aquí y un allá – viaje perpetuo, ruta en busca de una Antilla siempre elusiva. (2004, 180) [To suppose that the marvelous resides in America is to adopt a (false) European perspective, because alterity, or difference can only be discovered from another perspective – the same seen from within appears homogenous, uniform, without fringes, without differences. All wonder is a distancing, a separation […]. Perhaps one of its characteristics is precisely that writers like Carpentier, Asturias, or Uslar Pietri have declared that the magical is here, to prevent the alienation of the European for whom the magical is always [necessarily] over there. But in this venture there is in fact a double or meta-alienation; it is possible that the magical is always on this shore, but to see it as such we must observe it from over there. The Hispano-American peculiarity then is that duality, that atopy of being suspended between a here and a there – a perpetual journey, a route in search of an always elusive Antilles.] Because the “real maravilloso” implies a revelation, and therefore a double vision that needs more than one perspective to be recognized as such and avoid becoming fully naturalized, the focalization it requires cannot be completely legitimate. In fact, the perspective proposed by the “real maravilloso” is intrinsically ambivalent, because it can never stand on its own. Multiple perspective occurs in several crucial moments in the narrative, where the same event is seen in completely different terms. Critics have long signaled the episode of the execution of Mackandal, in “El Gran Vuelo,” in which the burning of the mandinga is seen from both the slaves’ and the colonists’ points of view, as a salvation and as a real burning (Chanady 1988; Melis 2007; Webb 1992). The perspectival shift is clear in this paragraph, when a bound Mackandal is brought to the burning stage: Los amos interrogaron las caras de sus esclavos con la mirada. Pero los negros mostraban una despechante indiferencia. ¿Qué sabían los blancos de cosas de negros? En sus ciclos de metamorfosis, ­Mackandal se había adentrado muchas veces en el mundo arcano de los insectos, desquitándose de la falta de un brazo humano con la posesión de varias patas, de cuatro élitros o de largas antenas […]. Eso era lo que

206  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo ignoraban los amos; por ello habían despilfarrado tanto dinero en organizar aquel espectáculo inútil, que revelaría su total impotencia para luchar contra un hombre ungido por los grandes Loas. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 48) [The masters’ eyes questioned the faces of the slaves. But the Negroes showed spiteful indifference. What did the whites know of Negro matters? In his cycle of metamorphoses, Macandal had often entered the mysterious world of the insects, making up for the lack of his human arm with the possession of several feet, four wings, or long antennae […]. This was what their masters did not know; for that reason they had squandered so much money putting on this useless show, which would prove how completely helpless they were against a man chrismed by the great Loas.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 44) The ideological aspect of this episode deserves closer attention – and I will return to it later – but the passage makes clear the antagonistic reading of events, seen also in the change of perspective on the origins of the poisoning campaign, when a slave confesses that the plan had been hatched by Mackandal (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 37), or when ­L enormand de Mezy’s second wife declaims a passage of Racine’s Phèdre, to which estupefactos, sin entender nada, pero informados por ciertas pala­ bras que también en créole se referían a faltas cuyo castigo iba de una simple paliza a la decapitación, los negros habían llegado a creer que aquella señora debería haber cometido muchos delitos en otros tiempos y que estaba probablemente en la colonia por escapar a la policía de París, como tantas prostitutas del Cabo, que tenían cuentas pendientes en la metrópoli. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 56) [[a]gape with amazement, at a loss to know what it was all about, but gathering from certain words that in Creole, too, referred to misdemeanors whose punishment ranged from a thrashing to having one’s head chopped off, the Negroes came to the conclusion that the lady must have committed many crimes in days gone by, and that she was probably in the colony to get away from the police in Paris, like so many of the prostitutes in the Cap, who had unsettled accounts with the metropolis.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 55) By providing alternative and shifting perspectives on the same reality, El reino de este mundo does not commit to either side, thus to some

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  207 extent disavowing the faith that is required to fully embrace the “real maravilloso.” To make focalization more complex, it relies mostly on a free indirect discourse – especially in the case of Ti Noel – in order to achieve the alleged internal perception that would enable the grasping of the “real maravilloso.” Indeed, the narrative mode of the “real maravilloso” works through a narrative perspective that speaks in free indirect discourse, that is, a focalization close to the character that results in a segment of the narrator’s discourse that reproduces the words, thoughts, feelings, perceptions or the evaluative position of a character, whereby the reproduction of the CT [character’s text] is not marked, neither graphically nor by any kind of explicit indicator. (Schmid 2010, 157) This allows the character’s experience to get through, conveying feelings and reported thoughts, while at the same time naturalizing the nonexplanatory expression of the “maravilloso.” Ti Noel’s focalization in free indirect discourse in the following passage exemplifies this general strategy: Pero lo que más asombraba a Ti Noel era el descubrimiento de que ese mundo prodigioso, como no lo habían conocido los gobernadores franceses del Cabo, era un mundo de negros. Porque negras eran aquellas hermosas señoras, de firme nalgatorio, que ahora bailaban la rueda en torno a una fuente de tritones; negros aquellos dos ministros de medias blancas, que descendían, con la cartera de becerro debajo del brazo. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 98) [But what surprised Ti Noël most was the discovery that this marvelous world, the like of which the French governors of the Cap had never known, was a world of Negroes. Because those handsome, firm-buttocked ladies circling in a dance around the fountain of ­Tritons were Negresses; those two white-hosed ministers descending the main stairway with leather dispatch cases under their arms were Negroes.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 108) While free indirect discourse allows access to the inner perspective that can perceive the “maravilloso,” it also creates a distance from the character’s perspective that becomes more apparent when the narrative voice uses it as the space of irony. In El reino de este mundo, irony applies to all perspectives. It applies, in the first place, to the French colonizers, like Lenormand de Mezy, for example, in the moment where, during the

208  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo revolt of 1791 and after finding his plantation destroyed and his wife killed, the narrator ironizes him: Las noticias, dadas a gritos, sacaron a Monsieur Lenormand de Mezy de su estupor. La horda estaba vencida. […] Sin poder demorarse en dar sepultura al cadáver de su esposa, Monsieur Lenormand de Mezy se montó en la grupa del caballo del mensajero. (Carpentier 1983, 68) [His news, bellowed out, aroused M. Lenormand de Mézy from his stupor. The horde had been defeated. […] Without taking time to bury his wife, M. Lenormand de Mézy jumped up behind the messenger.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 73) The irony in the thoughts of Lenormand de Mezy in the Spanish original is even clearer since the narrator literally reports his neglect for his wife as he leaves “[w]ithout being able to linger in the burial.” When free indirect discourse focalizes Paulina, this irony often turns into sarcasm, as when, during her voyage to Saint Domingue, she surrenders to her eroticized and exotic vision of the colony: Sabía que cuando los faroles se mecían en lo alto de los mástiles, en las noches cada vez más estrelladas, centenares de hombres soñaban con ella en los camarotes, castillos y sollados. Por eso era tan aficionada a fingir que meditaba, cada mañana, en la proa de la fragata, junto a la armadura del triquete, dejándose despeinar por un viento que le pegaba el vestido al cuerpo, revelando la soberbia apostura de sus senos. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 79) [She knew that when the lanterns rocked on the masts in the ever more brilliantly starred nights, hundreds of men were dreaming of her in starerooms, forecastle, and hold. For this reason she was so given to feigned meditations each morning, standing alongside the foresail, letting the wind ruffle her hair and play with her clothes, revealing the superb grace of her breasts.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 86) However, El reino de este mundo does not reserve irony only for the French colonizers. It is also applied to the colonist ambitions of Henri Christophe, as when he realizes that a mutiny against him has started, he looks at his five remaining loyal servants and, in a tragic irony, “sintió que los amaba. Eran los Bombones Reales; eran Délivrance, Valentín, Couronne, John, Bien Aimé, los africanos que el rey había comprado

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  209 a un mercader de esclavos para darles la libertad y hacerles enseñar el lindo oficio de pajes” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 120) [felt a surge of love for them. They were the Royal Bonbons, Délivrance, Valentin, La ­Couronne, John, and Bien-Aimé, Africans whom the King had brought from a slavetrader to give them their freedom and have them trained as pages (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 139)]. Even Ti Noel is an object of irony, albeit in a more subtle manner, especially toward the end of the novel, when he builds his home from the rubble of the old plantation, using some of the remains of the Sans-Souci palace. In a passage where the narrative adopts Ti Noel’s perspective, he notes that “cuando las mujeres lo veían aparecer en un sendero, agitaban paños claros, en señal de reverencia, como las palmas que un domingo habían festejado a Jesús” [[w]hen the women saw him approaching, they waved bright cloths in sign of reverence, like the palms spread before Jesus one Sunday]; and after being possessed by the king of Angola, through his perspective, we learn that “luego habían nacido rebaños sobre sus tierras” [herds had appeared on his lands], which is followed by the ironic internal comment, “Porque aquellas nuevas reses que tris­ caban entre las ruinas eran, indudablemente, presentes de sus súbditos” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 143) [Those new animals that grazed among the ruins were undoubtedly gifts from his subjects (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 165)]. The irony becomes more evident as the voice narrates Ti Noel as a Quixotic figure: Instalado en su butaca, entreabierta la casaca, bien calado el sombrero de paja y rascándose la barriga desnuda con gesto lento, Ti Noel dictaba órdenes al viento. Pero eran adictos de un gobierno apacible, puesto que ninguna tiranía de blancos ni de negros parecía amenazar su libertad. El anciano llenaba de cosas hermosas los vacíos dejados entre los restos de las paredes, haciendo de cualquier transeúnte ministro, de cualquier cortador de yerbas general, otorgando baronías, regalando guirnaldas, bendeciendo a las niñas, imponiendo flores por servicios prestados. Así habían nacido la Orden de la Escoba Amarga, la Orden del Aguinaldo, la Orden del Mar Pacífico y la Orden del Galán de Noche. Pero la más requerida de todas era la Orden del Girasol, por lo vistosa. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 143) [Seated in his armchair, his coat unbuttoned, his straw hat pulled down to his ears, slowly scratching his bare belly, Ti Nöel issued orders to the wind. But they were the edicts of a peaceable government, inasmuch as no tyranny of whites or Negroes seemed to offer a threat to his liberty. The old man filled the gaps in the tumbledown walls with fine things, appointed any passer-by a minister, any hay-gatherer a general, distributing baronetcies, presenting wreaths,

210  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo blessing the little girls, and awarding flowers for services rendered. It was thus the Order of the Bitter Broom had come into being, the Order of the Christmas Gift, the Order of the Pacific Ocean, and the Order of the Nightshade. But the most sought after was the Order of the Sunflower, which was the most decorative.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 166) Although, as seen earlier, free indirect discourse becomes the technique that makes perception of the “marvelous” that Carpentier claims for the “real maravilloso” possible, it also creates the space for an irony that discredits the internal perspective, hindering narrative reliability. 21 The potential for irony in the free indirect discourse strongly suggests that the disjunction between non-characterized third-person narrative voice and narrative perspective can problematize narrative reliability. In this case, it is not the specific ideologically charged worldview identified with one character that is being questioned, but rather the very voice that opens up the space for irony, that space of disjunction between third-­ person narrative voice and character’s perspective revealed through the free indirect discourse. The ambivalent trust in the character’s perspective is what makes third-person narrative voice, in its connection with an irony that is shaped in this case by external historical discourses, problematic in terms of narrative reliability. 22 Shaping narrative focalization through free indirect discourse exposes the complex and critically overlooked relation between focalization and voice with regard to narrative reliability. The disjunction between voice and eye generates the space for the questioning of narrative reliability through irony. In adopting free indirect discourse as its mode of focalization, the voice remains authorial in terms of its capability of ironizing the character’s worldview. Notwithstanding, that same voice is questionable in its own simultaneous trust in and disavowal of that perspective, in its own narrative ambivalence. Once again, this kind of questioning of reliability does not necessarily constitute outright narrative unreliability, but it certainly manifests the problem of narrative reliability as redefined in this book. Such an elaborated perspective in El reino de este mundo reveals the problem of narrative reliability as located in the interstices between voice and focalization in texts in which these are not coincident.

Ideological and Historical Shadows of the Haitian Revolution in El reino de este mundo What is particular to the narrative use that El reino de este mundo makes of the “real maravilloso” is that it cannot be dissociated from the contextual problem from which it emerges as a narrative technique.

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  211 The  combined narrative uses of focalization and voice just mentioned call into the narrative elements of the contemporary context that determine the problem of reliability not only as a formal one but as an ideological one as well. The questioning of narrative reliability in this novel results from and simultaneously brings into question the credibility of historical discourses and conflicts, and, more precisely, the Haitian Revolution, a conflict with a problematic discursive focus on race. While fragmentation offers a new historical take on the Haitian Revolution, it also suggests a reading of the event that, by showing significant gaps, problematizes the very historical reliability that it claims both in its prologue and the passages meant to provide historical context. The novel presents a version of the Haitian Revolution that does not stop with Dessalines’s proclamation of the independent Republic of Haiti in 1803, as in the standard narratives on the revolt, but extends the event to include the subsequent periods of repression, especially the Kingdom of Henri Christophe (1806–1820) and Boyer’s regime (1818–1843). In doing so, El reino de este mundo casts doubt on the bulk of historical and literary narratives that view the Revolution as a success, instead drawing closer to other accounts, like those emerging from the southern US plantation-region, in which Haiti is an island of chaos, the result of a barbarous revolution. And yet, in pointing out the unfinished nature of the struggle and the revolution, not in terms of emancipation but social equality, the novel embraces contemporary Caribbean critiques of the Revolution, based on the conditions in Haiti in 1949, which seemed to suggest that the independence had failed to produce the positive social change it had been given credit for. However, the fragmented perspective in El reino de este mundo also underlines its historical gaps, questioning narrative reliability. Critics such as Fornet (2006) and even González Echevarría (2004) drew attention to these gaps long ago, often in order to emphasize a mythical rather than historical interest in the novel, a mythical, dialectical, or cosmic view of history that voluntarily transcends particular events in their specific contexts. 23 And yet a more specific use of historical context is at stake. Recent criticism has reexamined those historical gaps and considered Carpentier’s historical sources, incorporations, elisions, and effects of those more deeply. Gaps play an important part here as an ingredient of narrative suspicion. They do so by signaling what the contemporaneous reader would expect from an account of the Haitian Revolution, based on common historical knowledge. The historical gaps are particularly blatant in this case, because left out of Carpentier’s novel is none other than Toussaint Louverture, generally considered to have been the heroic leader of the Haitian Revolution. Toussaint is only mentioned in passing – which serves only to emphasize his absence from the main

212  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo narrative – before the Revolution takes place, and then only in his role as a craftsman, something that he is not historically known for: Toussaint, el ebanista, había tallado unos reyes magos, en madera, demasiado grandes para el conjunto, que nunca acababan de colocarse, sobre todo a causa de de las terribles córneas blancas de ­Baltasar – particularmente realzado a pincel –, que parecían emerger de la noche del ébano con tremebundas acusaciones del ahogado. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 43) [Toussaint, the cabinetmaker, had carved the Three Wise Men in wood, but they were too big for the Nativity, and in the end were not set up, mainly because of the terrible whites of Balthasar’s eyes, which had been painted with special care, and gave the impression of emerging from a night of ebony with the terrible reproach of a drowned man.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 39) Given that in most narratives and accounts of the Haitian Revolution Toussaint Louverture occupies a central place, his absence from El reino de este mundo would appear to be an outrageous omission to the reader. But he is not the only one missing. Another character conspicuous by his absence is Dessalines, the general who followed in Toussaint’s wake and declared the independence of the black Republic of Haiti in 1803. He is mentioned only briefly in Ti Noel’s reflections: [p]orque él sabía – lo sabían todos los negros franceses de Santiago de Cuba – que el triunfo de Dessalines se debía a una preparación tremenda, en la que habían intervenido Loco, Petro, Ogún Ferraille, Brise-Pimba, Caplaou-Pimba, Marinette Bois-Cheche y todas las divinidades de la pólvora y del fuego, en una serie de caídas en posesión de una violencia tan terrible que ciertos hombres habían sido lanzados al aire o golpeados contra el suelo por los conjuros. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 93) [For he knew – and all the French Negroes of Santiago de Cuba knew – that Dessalines’s victory was the result of a vast coalition entered into by Loco, Petro, Ogoun Ferraille, Brise-Pimba, ­Caplaou-Pimba, Marinette Bois-Chèche, and all the deities of powder and fire, a coalition marked by a series of seizures of a violence so fearful that certain men had been thrown into the air or dashed against the ground by the spells.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 104) Several arguments have been put forward to explain these significant omissions. In an interview with the French Radio-Television in 1963,

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  213 Carpentier explained that “Toussaint Louverture tenía el defecto de ser un personaje demasiado conocido, en mi opinión, y que ya había sido objeto de una serie de poemas, de estudios, hasta de dramas e incluso novelas” [Toussaint Loverture had the disadvantage of being, in my opinion, too well known as a character who had already been the focus of a series of poems, papers, plays and even novels] (Carpentier 1985 [1963], 91). Víctor Figueroa, for his part, argues that [a]s a defender of the ideals of the French Revolution, and as a devout Catholic who in fact forbids the popular practice of Vodou, Toussaint simply does not fit into Carpentier’s ‘marvelous-real’ presentation of history and the cosmos in his novel. (2015, 47)24 In a similar vein, Toussaint’s absence could be understood as being due to his efforts to preserve the island’s link with France, eschewing the independence of Saint Domingue in exchange for the abolition of slavery – as historian Laurent Dubois (2004, Chapter 8) has argued. Regardless of the real motives for the exclusion of these important historical figures, its effect on narrative reliability is clear. Within the narrative, these major historical gaps erode narrative reliability formally and ideologically. As Paravisini-Gebert argues, “[t]hese interstices and shadows – these parts of the tale that Carpentier does not address – ­problematize Carpentier’s presentation of history, further undermining the ‘truth’ to which his claim to historical ‘verifiability’ aspires” (2004, 119). Readers and critics alike are puzzled to learn that the historical Ti Noel, rather than a passive slave in the Haitian Revolution, was of “one of the most prominent leaders among the maroons – the armed bands of nearly a thousand insurgents from the hills led by Ti Nöel, Sans Souci, Macaya, Cacapoule, Jean Zéclé, and others” (Paravisini-Gebert 2004, 120) – a historical elision no less surprising than the skipping over of the leadership role of Dessalines. Paravisini-Gebert observes that Carpentier’s novel “erases the other aspects of this communion with gods – his [Dessalines] role in trying to assure Haiti’s would-be peasantry access to a family plot of land – a heritage – that could serve as a foundation for a new society and offer a home for the familial Iwas” (Paravisini-­Gebert 2004, 124).25 These remarkable and deliberate omissions or merely passing mentions of some of the iconic figures of the Haitian Revolution function in the novel as markers of unreliability. This effect is reinforced by Carpentier’s attention to other aspects of the revolt that had been widely dismissed by other literary accounts, producing a narrative of the Haitian Revolution that is both refreshingly different and more realistic, while at the same time being sketchy and elusive. Multiple focalization also affects the credibility of the discourse of the “real maravilloso” because, while it provides more comprehensive

214  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo coverage of the events from a wider historical perspective, embracing more and more varied elements to draw a larger picture, it also to some extent legitimizes colonialism by seeming to give equal weight to the different discourses and views on the Revolution. While the dominance of Ti Noel’s perspective and experience, and the use of irony in depicting Pauline, Lenormand de Mezy, the French colonizers, and those like Christophe who mimicked them, seems to tilt the balance of trust toward the slave’s account of the revolt, the formal use of multiple focalization in the popular scene of Mackandal’s burning raises doubts about the extent of alignment with the slaves’ worldview. The scene reads as follows: El fuego comenzó a subir hacia el manco, sollamándole las piernas. En ese momento Mackandal agitó su muñón que no habían podido atar, en un gesto conminatorio que no por menguado era menos terrible, aullando conjuros desconocidos y echando violentamente el torso hacia adelante. Sus ataduras cayeron, y el cuerpo del negro se espigó en el aire, volando por sobre las cabezas, antes de hundirse en las ondas negras de la casa de esclavos. Un solo grito llenó la plaza: -Mackandal sauvé! Y fue la confusión y el estruendo. Los guardias se lanzaron, a culatazos, sobre la negrada aullante, que ya no parecía caber entre las casas y trepaba hacia los balcones. Y a tanto llegó el estrépito y la grita y la turbamulta, que muy pocos vieron que Mackandal, agarrado por diez soldados, era metido de cabeza en el fuego, y que una llama crecida por el pelo encendido ahogaba su último grito. Cuando las dotaciones se aplacaron, la hoguera ardía normalmente, como cualquier hoguera de buena leña y la brisa venida del mar levantaba un buen humo hacia los balcones donde más de una señora desmayada volvía en sí. Ya no había nada que ver. Aquella noche los esclavos regresaron a sus haciendas riendo por todo el camino. Mackandal había cumplido su promesa permaneciendo en el reino de este mundo. Una vez más eran burlados los blancos por los Altos Poderes de la Otra Orilla. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 49) [The fire began to rise toward the Mandingue, licking his legs. At that moment Macandal moved the stump of his arm, which they had been unable to tie up, in a threatening gesture which was none the less terrible for being partial, howling unknown spells and violently thrusting his torso forward. The bonds fell off and the body of the Negro rose in the air, flying overhead, until it plunged into the black waves of the sea of slaves. A single cry filled the square: “Macandal saved!” Pandemonium followed. The guards fell with rifle butts on the howling blacks, who now seemed to overflow the streets, climbing

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  215 toward the windows. And the noise and screaming and uproar were such that very few saw that Macandal, held by ten soldiers, had been thrust head first into the fire, and that a flame fed by his burning hair had drowned his last cry. When the slaves were restored to order, the fire was burning normally like any fire of good wood, and the breeze blowing from the sea was lifting the smoke toward the windows where more than one lady who had fainted had recovered consciousness. There was no longer anything more to see. That afternoon the slaves returned to their plantations laughing all the way. Macandal had kept his word, remaining in the Kingdom of This World. Once more the whites had been outwitted by the Mighty Powers of the Other Shore.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 45) The narrator’s shift in perspective in the comment that “very few saw that Macandal, held by ten soldiers, had been thrust head first into the fire” renders authority to the colonists who actually saw Mackandal being burned, suggesting that the slaves’ belief that they have fooled the whites once more thanks to their Vodou beliefs might just have to be reconsidered. Even the most benevolent assessment of multiple perspective in the novel should admit that the novel exhibits a greater balance than is suggested in the prologue, which embraces the “real maravilloso” as a genuinely American feature overlooked by Europeans. The novel is, at the very most, a set of perspectives that “le permite ahondar en los sistemas de pensamientos diferentes de los que dominan, sin tacharlos de mentirosos, sino tratando de comprender su racionalidad alternativa” [allows it to examine systems of thought other than the dominant ones, not dismissing them as false, but rather making an effort to understand their alternative rationality] (Melis 2007, 100). Furthermore, while empowered by this newly claimed narrative technique, the “real maravilloso” is not the only way of perceiving reality, nor the most valid one, as revealed in this scene. In fact, the authorial intrusion in the middle of this crucial episode has prompted critics like González ­E chevarría (2004, 178), Siskind (2014, 79), and Eduardo San José Vázquez (2009, 560) to point out the contradiction that the discourse aiming to be the expression of the subaltern and the oppressed is here overshadowed by Carpentier’s European-influenced education and perceptions, which ultimately discredits the slave’s point of view by seemingly narrating “what really happened” (Siskind 2014, 79). The space of ambiguity that the free indirect style leaves between perspective and voice noted earlier particularly affects the working of colonial stereotypes in the novel. Stereotypes do not work in Carpentier’s novel as generators of the plot as they do in Lord Jim or, to an even greater extent, in Absalom, Absalom!, but they rather work as fixed images that contribute to setting up opposing views. The free indirect style

216  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo enables the effects of an ambiguous bi-textuality, as noted by Schmid (2010, 172), that when using colonial discourse produces the effects of Bhabha’s colonial mimicry since characters enact their opposite stereotypes, unconsciously performing them in what to an external eye is perfect colonial mimicry. 26 Stereotypes of the mimicking colonial subject are evident in Henri Christophe’s kingdom that is a mirror of its French counterpart, while on the other hand mimicking also uses the stereotypes of the exotic to parody Paulina’s desire to become a criolla and her grotesque imitations of Vodou rituals. 27 Such reversals make heavy use of the stereotypes in order to challenge them, yet at the expense of constructing characters that are rather flat and caricaturesque. In addition, the inner focalization of characters that dominate the novel is constantly punctuated by moments in which the narrative voice distances itself through statements that very often revert to heavy stereotyping, frequently targeting blacks. Over the course of Ti Noel’s recollections of the Vodou stories that he has learned from Mackandal, the narrative voice disparages Ti Noel’s intelligence (“aunque sus luces fueran pocas,” 21/ ill-translated as “Although Ti Noël had little learning,” 8), and he reports in passing that he had several children but makes sure to mention that he rapes Mademoiselle Floridor, which he had dreamt of doing for a long time (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 65). Sexuality, violence, and lack of intelligence are common elements of racist stereotypes. Solimán is the object of similar kinds of references, beginning with the portrayal of his obsessive desire for Paulina, which he recalls when he finds the sculpture of her naked body, and “palpó el marmol ansiosamente, con el olfato y la vista metidos en el tacto. Sopesó los senos. Paseó una de sus palmas, en redondo, sobre el vientre, deteniendo el meñique en la marca del ombligo” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 137) [[h]e touched the marble with eager hands, his sense of smell and sight in his fingers. He felt the breasts. He ran a curved palm over the belly, letting his little finger rest in the depression of the navel (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 159)]. While stereotyping helps in keeping the traditional colonial and slave point of view opposed, it also contributes to deflate the slave’s perspective, the dignity and validity of which had ostensibly been defended in the prologue. In that sense, free indirect discourse certainly seems to support the fact that those flat associations – Ti Noel as a Vodou-­practicing slave, Lenormand de Mezy as the oblivious rich French planter, and Christophe and Paulina as the parodic characters of colonialism – are indeed given narrative authority because they are practically naked, arising from the characters’ assumed real feelings and thoughts. On the other hand, free indirect discourse leaves room for the introduction – within that internal focalization – of stereotypical racial punctuations that diminish the seriousness that the slaves or former slaves’ view seemed to have merited as representative of the “real maravilloso.”28 In simultaneously adopting an internal and external perspective, free indirect discourse preserves an

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  217 ambivalence that is, ideologically and historically speaking, very significant. Free indirect discourse creates a space in the disjuncture between voice and perspective, through which this novel interrogates both the narrator’s voice and the characters’ perspectives, questioning reliability in narrative and historical discourses.

Questioning Reliability and Changing Perspectives on the Haitian Revolution, Afro-Cubanism, and Latin American Identity in El reino de este mundo Critics have overlooked the critique of Afro-Cubanism in El reino de este mundo, and have therefore overlooked the key importance of this cluster of associated historical discourses for the questioning of narrative reliability. In this novel, the questioning of narrative reliability that finally emerges from the use of the “real maravilloso” along with other narrative perspectives is used to express the novel’s ambivalent stance in regards to Afro-Caribbean cultures. That is, most critics have failed to notice that the formulation and legitimation of an autochthonous ­A merican perspective – expressed through the “real maravilloso” – are in fact in conflict with the simultaneously invoked contemporary Cuban racial, national, and social perspectives. Because critics have missed this essential ideological incompatibility at the heart of the identity discourse embodied by the “realismo maravilloso,” critical studies of Carpentier’s novel have overlooked the fact that the struggle to incorporate Afro-­ Cubanism into the contemporary Cuban identity is the actual historical discourse that shapes the ambivalent narrative perspective resulting from the narrative adoption of the “real maravilloso.” As we have seen, Vodou is taken as an epitome of the marvelous real, which had been obscured by European rationalist thought, even when slaves were using it as an instrument of political revolt. Vodou is both a racial feature, with a strong emphasis on African origins and African cultures that shaped both scientific and cultural racism, and a political agent. Nevertheless, its reliability is partially disavowed by the novel’s use of narrative focalization. In deploying Vodou, El reino de este mundo brings into the narrative remnants of the contemporary European negrophilia championed by the avant-garde and ethnography. Most remarkably, and going beyond mere ethnographic racism, because the author offers a new contemporary American reading of Vodou – ­attempting to rewrite a primitivist conception of it – he also introduces the debate on Afro-Caribbean peoples, and especially on Afro-Cubanism. Since the interests of ethnographers such as Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera had been so focused, like Carpentier himself, on the religious pantheon and rituals of Santería from the late 1920s and the 1930s, and because Carpentier himself had written a novel, poems, plays, and essays where those had a prominent role, the context of its publication meant that the presence of Vodou in

218  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo El reino de este mundo was intimately connected with discussions of Afro-Cubanism. As Julia Cuervo Hewitt shows in her detailed study of Vodou and ñáñigo allusions in the novel, to a Caribbean reader, the novel does not possess the exoticism that it would for a foreign reader, because Vodou had already been reclaimed for two decades and because its status as an essential part of the criollo culture, and what is more, as its most authentic element, was already secure. What was not in place was the presentation of Vodou through a narrative perspective that rested on credibility from within rather than through an ethnographic eye, and its inclusion in the rereading of such a fundamental historical event as the Haitian Revolution. Intimately connected to Afro-Cubanism, the ambivalence exerted by the combination of narrative voice and narrative perspective that ultimately relativizes narrative credibility also relativizes the centrality of African cultures in the emancipated countries in the Caribbean, leaving them as cultural components of those countries but not fully so. It is my claim that, in fact, El reino de este mundo deals with the problem that a nascent Cuban national culture encountered with Afro-­ Cubanism, and that the novel uses this historical conflict for an innovative elaboration of the problem of narrative reliability. Although the contradictions between race and nation inherent in Afro-Cubanism only became fully apparent later, by the time Carpentier was writing El reino de este mundo, the subsequent tensions were already discernible. Afro-Cubanism grew out of anthropological claims based on the methods and assumptions of scientific racism in Cuba, specifically Fernando Ortiz’s studies – influenced by Lombroso’s criminology – which later developed into a more cultural approach to Afro-Cuban folklore in his own work and in the work of his disciples or younger writers who were close to him, such as Lydia Cabrera or Alejo Carpentier. 29 By the late 1930s, the movement had grown and had been institutionalized in centers of study and journals such as the Archivos del Folklore Cubano (1924–1930) and Estudios Afrocubanos (1939–1945), and the adherence of writers from neighboring islands, such as José Palés Matos, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, or Jean Roumain, transformed it into a movement for a broader Afro-Caribbean culture, emphasizing the kinship with other populations in the Caribbean, less Cuban and more négre, more obviously tied to Négritude than to Cubanness exclusively. Their connections with Pan-Africanism, the Négritude movement, and the Harlem Renaissance – mainly through Langston Hughes – brought to the forefront the sense of “race” and racial pride that was key in the fight for social and political equalities elsewhere, such as the US context, which we have analyzed in the chapter on James Weldon Johnson (Figueroa 2015; Valdés 2000).30 The Cuban case was certainly peculiar in terms of racial conflict. Despite the pervasive racism in social practices, which was on the rise in the 1930s, the young Cuban Republic was willing to consider race a racist category that needed to be eradicated from any national identity. Prominent early examples already point at the discomfort with “race” in

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  219 Cuba. It appears in José Martí’s famous statement in “Nuestra América” that “[n]o hay odio de razas, porque no hay razas” [There is no racial hatred, because there are no races] (1968, 34), and in the suppression and subsequent massacre of the members of the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) in 1912, as well as the repression of an armed protest against the illegal creation of parties based on race because of “their separatist ‘racism’” (Triana 2006, 109).31 The rise of an Afro-Cuban movement determined to recover cultural traditions of African origin that had been long ignored, marginalized, and considered primitive would have to face the problem that its definition was inseparable from the idea of race. As Maguire suggests, the seeds of the problem were already present in the seminal work of Fernando Ortiz, whose “desire to create a coherent national narrative creates a conflict in his work between subsuming the question of blackness to an idea of racial hybridity and recognizing and understanding the uniqueness of Afro-Cuban culture itself” (2011, 35), especially because it might run the risk that Afro-Cubanism would aspire to be “parte de un proyecto político” [part of a political project] (Birkenmaier 2006, 59). In the 1920s and 1930s, the criollo was defined in opposition to the colonial European legacy and US neocolonialism, and a new identity was sought in the cultural traditions of people of African descent, while simultaneously claiming an identity that would progressively shed all racial distinctions. 32 As the socialist ideals became stronger, the importance of racial distinctions became a source of conflict since they were thought of as antithetical to the ideals of the Cuban Republic. Later, the Cuban Revolution in 1959 had as one of its goals to end racial inequality, as part of its political program, closing all the institutions and centers that were racially defined. 33 Following efforts designed to end racial discrimination and segregation, a “racial democracy” was proclaimed, which did ultimately ensure that “race” would not become the basis of official discrimination – allowing a degree of social mobility that De la Fuente has demonstrated – but which also inhibited any discussion of race relations and racism, which did not disappear, justified on the basis of supposed official color blindness (De la Fuente 2001, 1999; Fernández Robaina 2012; Maguire 2011; Triana 2006). The debate over racial discrimination and the ways in which the 1959 Cuban Revolution had dealt with the racial factor was critically revived in 2013 by Roberto Zurbano’s protest article published in The New York Times, which gave rise to a heated discussion brought together in the Afro-Hispanic Review that evinces the still problematic compatibility of race, national, and revolutionary claims. These contradictions are evident, for example, in the claims of a “Ser negro de la R ­ evolución” or the difficulties encountered by the ARAAC (Articulación Regional de Afrodescendientes de Lationamérica y el Caribe, born in 2012) in its broader Latin American and Caribbean scope when it has to act against racial discrimination in Cuba, claims examined by Antonio José Ponte in his article “¿‘Ser negro de la Revolución?’”34

220  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo Carpentier found himself entangled in this problem. He was a defender of and a significant contributor to the development of Afro-Cubanism as part of his concern with inequality and his desire to understand cultures that were also his own and that did not fit European standards. And yet his position on Afro-Cubanism gradually shifted from his initial identification to progressively emphasizing the criollo as a mix of cultures that creates a new, authentically American one rather than singling out ­A frican descendants as the most representative of American culture. Several decades after the publication of El reino de este mundo, in an essay entitled “Cómo el negro se volvió criollo: la huella de África en todo un continente” (1977), Carpentier claimed that De este modo, en el mundo de las Antillas de habla española, y también en las anglófonas y francófonas, se producen actualmente una literatura y una pintura de marcadas características criollas, sin que nos pongamos a medir aquí la proporción de los ingredientes raciales malaxados en el conjunto. Por ello, la aportación del negro al mundo a donde fue llevado, muy a pesar suyo, no consiste en lo que ha dado en llamarse erró­ neamente negritud (¿por qué no hablar, en tal caso, de una ‘blanquitud’?) sino en algo mucho más transcendental: una sensibilidad que vino a enriquecer la de los hombres con quienes se le había obligado a convivir. (Carpentier 2012 [1977], 406)35 [Thus, in the world of the Spanish-speaking Antilles, as well as in the Anglophone and French-speaking countries, a literature and a painting with marked criollo characteristics are currently produced, without the need to measure here the exact proportion of the racial ingredients mixed into the whole. Therefore, the contribution of the black to the world to which he was brought, much to his sorrow, does not consist in what has been erroneously called blackness, or negritud (why not also speak of ‘whiteness’ in that case?) but in something much more transcendental: a sensibility that came to enrich that of the men with whom he had been forced to coexist.] This essay clearly disagrees with the racial claims proposed by the Négritude movement, arguing instead that a mixture of races had long since brought forth a people, the criollos, for whom racial distinctions were no longer relevant.36 El reino de este mundo does not make this later claim about identity. But it already embodies the problem in adopting an ambivalent stance on the articulation of race, class, and the authentically American in its reading of the Haitian Revolution. Despite the importance of racial epitomes

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  221 such as the Vodou, the novel seems to underline the need for social rather than racial revolution. This is suggested by Henri ­Christophe’s continued exploitation of blacks in the postrevolutionary context, which leads Ti Noel to reflect that this was una esclavitud tan abominable como la que había conocido en la hacienda de Monsieur Lenormand de Mezy. Peor aún, puesto que había una infinita miseria en lo de verse apaleado por un negro, tan negro como uno, tan belfudo y pelicrespo, tan narizñato como uno, tan mal nacido, tan marcado a hierro, posiblemente, como uno. Era como si en una misma casa los hijos pegaran a los padres. (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 104) [a slavery as abominable as that he had known on the plantation of M. Lenormand de Mézy. Even worse, for there was a limitless affront in being beaten by a Negro as black as oneself, as thick-lipped and wooly-headed, as flat-nosed; as low-born; perhaps branded, too. It was as though, in the same family, the children were to beat the parents.] (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 116) While singing an anti-monarchist colonial song, Ti Noel realizes that this is “una canción en la que se decían groserías a un rey. Eso era lo importante: a un rey” [[a] song that was all insults to a king. That was the important thing: to a king], so he continues “insultando a Henri Christophe, cansándose de imaginarias exoneraciones en su corona y su prosapia” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 111) [unburdening himself of every insult he could think up to Henri Christophe, his crown, and his progeny (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 126)]. As José Gomáriz has suggested, “[s]i bien la emancipación racial fue de vital importancia en la lucha por la independencia, durante la república, o en el caso del reino de Christophe, con la monarquía, las relaciones sociales alcanzan mayor relevancia” [even if racial emancipation was of vital importance in the struggle for independence, during the republic, or in the case of the kingdom of Christophe, with the monarchy, social relations become more important] (2004, 101). The plot skips over Toussaint and Dessalines to linger in Christophe’s kingdom, a narrative of the Haitian Revolution in which race recedes to the background in the face of unremitting slavery and oppression, that “inacabable retoñar de cadenas, ese renacer de grillos, esa proliferación de miserias” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 147) [endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering ­(Carpentier 2006 [1949], 171)]. The struggle against social injustice, rather than racial oppression, is the foremost struggle in the kingdom of this world. More significantly, critics of this novel have largely overlooked the fact that it already anticipates the problem of conflating a racial uprising,

222  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo an independence struggle, and a social revolt. Even if they have been historically and culturally seen together in the narratives of the Haitian Revolution, these are not one and the same, and therefore any unified account of the event is necessarily much more problematic. Its outcome was undoubtedly independence – Haiti became the first American country to be decolonized – but to see it also as a successful racial or social revolt is highly problematic. Critics have yet to recognize that in El reino de este mundo, Carpentier’s choice of Vodou as the privileged “real maravilloso” is analogous to the fallacious metonymic choice of taking Afro-Cubanism as the source of the autochthonous American criollo. It was culturally problematic from the outset and it served Carpentier to problematize narrative reliability. In making those choices, race effectively served as the most salient distinction in the creation of an American identity differentiated from that of the European colonizers. But it was a problematic choice as well, because on the one hand “race” as a category implied the exclusion of many from the new national identity, while on the other, the privileging of social revolution over a struggle against racial inequality relegated racial identity to the background. Similarly, Vodou is chosen in the novel as the most radical expression of the “real maravilloso” but it is also diminished because, although giving voice to the marginalized and subaltern, its racial specificity might overshadow its function as a political strategy. In a contemporaneous Cuban context that emphasizes social justice and assertion of an American culture – rather than pan-­African American identity and fight for racial equality – the choice of race and Vodou is at times constraining. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, the problem of assuming Vodou and Afro-Cubanism in El reino de este mundo and the Cuban contemporary context as totalizing emerges in the ambivalence that is intrinsic to the perspective of the “real maravilloso” when taken as the most effective representation of the criollo, of the genuine American. The historical anchoring of the “real maravilloso” as a technique of focalization that can unravel the autochthonous American searched for in several Caribbean countries – Cuba among them – transfers the historical ambivalence of the unsuitability of national and racial distinctions to the narrative. This historical ambivalence in the formation of a Cuban national identity propels the questioning of reliability in the narrative and the contextual ideologies, thereby discrediting the very purpose of credibility that the “real maravilloso” was meant to establish. Bringing together the fundamental questions addressed in this book, my analysis has shown that Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo not only represents contemporaneous racial and historical discourses, but it uses them to determine the simultaneous construction and erosion of narrative credibility. As this chapter has argued, in conceiving narrative focalization in terms of the “real maravilloso,” the novel assumes information about the Haitian Revolution and the social and racial readings of its historical legacy and Vodou beliefs. By appropriating these discourses, focalization can

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  223 act as an autochthonous perspective that sees the history of the Haitian Revolution and Vodou from within, helping to shape this newly asserted American identity as well as an alternative narrative of the Haitian Revolution. In using these discourses, the novel builds the credibility of narrative focalization. Therefore, this focalization technique can only work insofar as the novel assumes these specific historical aspects and cosmogony and deploys them to configure the “real maravilloso” as a narrative technique. Simultaneously, the novel makes extensive use of elision and associations within the aforementioned historical and cultural discourses in order to erode narrative credibility. The historical knowledge of the ­Haitian Revolution and its legacy enables the readers’ participation in identifying the flagrant gaps in this version of the historical narrative. In turn, restricting the “real maravilloso” to the Vodou strongly brings into the narrative the shortcomings of discourses of race, and specifically those related to Afro-Cubanism, especially insofar as they appear incompatible with the ideals of social equality in the definition of a young and revolutionary Cuban national culture. This tension emerges in the novel in the partial endorsement of the Vodou beliefs of the slave protagonist in free indirect discourse, through which the “real maravilloso” functions. In brief, El reino de este mundo elaborates the problem of narrative reliability by adopting a key historically specific modulation of focalization through the “real maravilloso.” This particular modulation of focalization explores the technical aspects of fragmentation and multiple perspective, and the ironic space in the maladjustment between voice and perspective, which use the discourse of the Haitian Revolution and Vodou within the context of the formation of a Cuban national culture in order to explore the problem of narrative reliability and to reveal historical discourses as fully determining narrative reliability.

Notes 1 As Schmid defines it: The difference in comprehension of the happenings can namely be down to a difference in ideological viewpoints. The ideological perspective encompasses various factors that determine the subjective relationship of the observer to an occurrence: knowledge, way of thinking, evaluative position and intellectual horizons. (2010, 101) Schmid notes that this ideological factor in point of view conflates with other factors as, for example, the linguistic factor. As we have seen and this chapter leaves clear, evaluative language is often directly imported from contemporary ideologies to shape perspective and voice in narrative. 2 Nora Catelli (1997) explains the cultural proposal of Lezama Lima in relation to miscegenation or “mestizaje.” As Catelli explains, in opposition to Carpentier and other writers, Lezama Lima rejected the idea that the ­Cuban culture should be built around miscegenation and looked instead at the Spanish past of the conquistadores as an alternative reference point to build an American cultural aesthetics.

224  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo 3 The English translation published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux does not include this crucial original prologue to the novel, which defines the “real maravilloso” as a technique, acts almost as a defining identity statement, and renders this technique narrative authority and its experimental dimension. A new edition should make up for this omission. 4 Alexis Márquez Rodríguez (1983) offers further arguments for justifying an authentic American reality as real-marvelous. 5 See a detailed account of the origins of the “real maravilloso” in González Echevarría (2004); Birkenmaier (2006). See also a critical overview on the distinctions and similarities of “magic realism” and “lo real maravilloso” and their relation to Carpentier’s works in Barroso (1977, 54–65). 6 For a Cuban case, see in the same volume by Geggus (2001): Matt D. Childs, “‘A Black French General Arrived to Conquer the Island’: Images of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba’s 1812 Aponte Rebellion” (135–156); on the freed slave community in Philadelphia and its complex process of integration, see Susan Branson and Leslie Patrick “Étrangers dans un Pays Étrange: Saint-Domingan Refugees of Color in Philadelphia” (193–208); see also Paul Lachance “Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Louisiana” (209–230). Some critics and historians have emphasized, on the other hand, how the Haitian Revolution was disavowed and removed from official histories, especially Fischer (2004). 7 For literary representations of the Haitian Revolution, see, for the ­Caribbean, the excellent recent Figueroa (2015); Kaisary (2014); and on cultural/historical aspects in general, see Munro and Walcott-Hackshaw (2008), which also covers literature. 8 Stanzel, Genette, Bal, and Chatman use the term focalization, but postclassical narratology has mainly adopted a narrative perspective. See Stanzel (1984); Genette (1980); Bal (2009); Chatman (1978) for the definition of focalization in narrative theory, and Peer and Chatman (2001) for a revision of this category with special attention to cognitive sciences and to the reader. 9 See detailed analyses of the heads scene in Barroso (1977, 76) and B ­ irkenmaier (2006, 98). Julio Vélez-Sanz (2005) uses the scene to argue that the representation of the body in grotesque images relates to ironic representations of the political body. Maria Orozco (2008) analyzes the influence of the French city of Le Cap, where the scene takes place, on Port-au-Prince and Santiago de Cuba in relation to the novel. 10 Note that writing of names has changed in the English translation, from Ti Noel, Mackandal, and Lenormand de Mezy in the original, to the translation’s Ti Noël, Macandal, and Lenormand de Mézy. 11 Note that the original emphasizes the sacred dimension. 12 Paute (2008) interestingly uses paratexts in this novel to expose an essential ambivalence in the representation of black Cubans in Carpentier’s first novel. 13 On Fernando Ortiz and his early relation with criminology and spiritism, see Díaz-Quiñones (1997); for Pierre Mabille, see Chiampi (2007) for his relation to Carpentier, and Birkenmaier (2006, 100) for his contribution to Haitian ethnography. 14 For an analysis of the presence of Vodou indicators, such as twins, crossroads (in counterpoint), heads, or hurricanes and winds from the philosophical Hegelian and Spenglerian perspectives of history, present in the novel, see Cuervo Hewitt (2009). Cuervo Hewitt interestingly traces Carpentier’s work on and interest in Afro-Cubanism, connecting it to El reino de este mundo, though she does not suggest the Cuban national/racial conflict that I argue is at the crux of the ambiguity in El reino de este mundo. For an analysis of santería in ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó! and of Vodou in El reino de este mundo as configuring a mythico-historical perspective, see Miampika (2005); and for syncretism in both novels, Maturo and Mazziotti (1972).

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  225 15 As Emily Maguire notes, Thanks to the Spanish practice of permitting slaves to form cabildos, cultural organizations for Africans (often from the same tribe or region) that also served as mutual aid societies (and semi-clandestine religious centers), many African cultural and linguistic traditions survived into the post-Independence period. These included both religious practices –Regla de Ochá (also known as Santería), Palo Monte, and Abakuá ­traditions – as well as African languages such as Lucumí (Yoruba) or Congó (Bantu in origin), which were still spoken in both religious and secular contexts, in addition to the bozal, an African influenced Spanish Creole. (2011, 8) For an overview of the origins of Afro-Cubanism in a larger Caribbean and Brazilian, or pan-American comparative framework, see Valdés (2000). For a recent call for an Afro-Latin American perspective, see G. R. Andrews (2004). 16 In more general sense, Louis Philippe Dalmbert (2007) also establishes a relationship between the presentation of blacks and “americanidad” in ­Carpentier’s novels. 17 According to González Echevarría, Carpentier subjects history to a numerical interpretation that structures the narrative: Lo significativo, sin embargo, es que Carpentier ha sometido la historia a una alteriación ritual de domingos y lunes, y ha montado el texto del relato en una armazón numérica cuya sutileza y complejidad, me temo, sólo he comenzado a vislumbrar, porque de seguro hay más concordancias [The significant thing, however, is that Carpentier has reduced history to a ritual alternation of Sundays and Mondays, and has placed the text of the narrative within a numerical framework the subtleness and complexity of which, I fear, we have only begun to glimpse, since there are surely many more correspondences than hitherto uncovered]. (González Echevarría 2004, 195) 18 For excellent and detailed histories of the Haitian Revolution that refer at length to the episodes portrayed in El reino de este mundo, see Geggus and Fiering (2009) and Dubois (2004). On the key events of the Haitian Revolution, the latter is especially useful for its full and detailed account that even includes Pauline Bonaparte. For a study of the colonial period that also covers the ­Haitian Revolution, see Ghachem (2012). For a cultural and political account on the Revolution and its historical disavowal, see Fischer (2004); for an overview of Haiti up to the present day that deals with postrevolutionary Haiti, including the regimes of Henri Christophe and Jean Pierre-Boyer, see Popkin (2012). 19 “[l]os días de fiesta, Rochembeau comenzó a hacer devorar negros por sus perros […]. Estimando que con ello los negros se estarían quietos, el gobernador había mandado a buscar centenares de mastines a Cuba” (­Carpentier 1983 [1949], 87) [On holidays Rochambeau began to throw Negroes to his dogs […] On the assumption that this would keep the Negroes in their place, the Governor had sent to Cuba for hundreds of mastiffs (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 96)]; “pronto supo Ti Noel que esto duraba ya desde hacía más de doce años y que toda la población del Norte había sido movilizada por la fuerza para trabajar en aquella obra inverosímil” (Carpentier 1983 [1949], 103) [Ti Noël soon learned that this had been going on for more than twelve years, and that the entire population of the North had been drafted for this incredible task (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 116)]; “aquel rubicundo y voluptuoso abogado del Cabo que era Moreau de Saint-Méry,” who “había recogido algunos datos sobre las prácticas salvajes de los hechiceros de las montañas, apuntando que algunos negros eran ofidiólatras” (Carpentier

226  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo

20

21

22

23 24 25

26

27

1983 [1949], 69) [that ruddy, pleasure-loving lawyer of the Cap, Moreau de Saint-Méry, had collected considerable information on the savage practices of the witch doctors in the hills, bringing out the fact that some of the ­Negroes were snake-workshippers (Carpentier 2006 [1949], 72)]. Fragmentation is so prominent that Bravo indicates a number of critics who have treated this novel as a group of interrelated stories (1988, 106). The play of double perspectives is also reflected in the play of European and ­A fro-Cuban music, as Paul B. Miller (2001) argues. I disagree with Webb’s argument that irony here just highlights how slaves perceive and use the Enlightment (1992, 38), and, for the historical and narrative reasons I have detailed, I claim that irony is also directed toward Ti Noel himself and what he represents through the use of free indirect style. Heterodiegetic unreliability, related to voice, has been problematic for studies of narrative unreliability because of the non-characterized aspect of this voice. However, it is quite plausible in cases where official historical discourses are introduced: for instance, in Conrad’s Nostromo or Faulkner’s Light in August, or through the historically determined uses of historical discourses filtered through ironic free indirect discourse in novels such as El reino de este mundo. See discussions on heterodiegetic unreliability in Martens (2008); Meindl (2004); Cohn (2000); Zipfel (2011); Köppe and Kindt (2011). For a general discussion of history and El reino de este mundo, see Allsopp (1992). See also the discussion of historical gaps in Verity Smith (1984). Speratti-Piñero (1981) has analyzed the historical events and the sources on which Carpentier based even the minutest detail in his novel. Although she does not identify the historical Ti Nöel, she documents many historical figures, including Mackandal, Paulina, and Christophe. She traces the historical references to Vodou and its Cuban connections. Thoroughly researched, her study demonstrates the novel’s striving for historical precision, and its use of common knowledge. On commenting bi-textuality, Schmid remarks that “[W]ith the development of a distance between the evaluative positions of narrator and character, this bi-textuality takes on the character of an ideological double-voicedness, a double-accentuation” (2010, 172). Paravisini-Gebert argues that This caricaturesque metamorphosis of Pauline into a Vodou serviteur is indeed more significant that her surrender to indolence and sensuality in the tropics. Inspired by terror and not by faith, it speaks of the practices of Vodou as superstitious mumbo jumbo, practiced – with positive results as much as she survives – by the harebraided coquette and her manipulative servant. […] It inverts and subverts the alliance of Makandal, Boukman, Dessalines, and Henri Christophe with the Iwas that had come to their aid in turning the tide of colonial rule, fetishizing the rituals of possession and communion with the gods into an inane version of a danse macabre that titillates the reader with images of a naked white woman prostrate in abjection before her loin-clothed black savior brandishing a bleeding chicken. It is a fantasy of barbaric otherness worthy of Seabrook’s Magic Island that sabotages Carpentier’s intended privileging of the connection between history and faith in his account of the Haitian Revolution. (Paravisini-Gebert 2004, 126) Sylvia Carrullo (1990), on the other hand, takes the depiction of Solimán and the dances at face value, uncritical with regard to the irony that the narrative mode entails, and argues for the identification of Vodou with African

Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo  227

28 29

30

31

in general, and Carpentier with négritude, which, as we will see, is a problematic identification. Also exploring that terrain of ambiguity in Carpentier’s depictions of ­Afro-Caribbean characters, Jason Frydman sees the portrayal of Mackandal as a scrivener as an instance of counter stereotyping (2014, 73). For the origins and early development of Afro-Cubanism in the 1920–1930s, referring especially to Ortiz, see Díaz-Quiñones (1997); Chapter 1, “Locating Afro-Cuban religion: Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera” in Maguire (2011); González Echevarría (2004); and Cass (2009). Tomás Fernández Robaina draws on Gustavo E. Urrutia, and his analysis of Puntos de vista del nuevo negro (1937) points to connections between Afro-Cubanism and the Harlem Renaissance, and a recognition of a New Negro beyond national frontiers (2012, 81–86). For the relation between Langston Hughes and Afro-Cubanism, see Hughes’s translations of Nicolás Guillén’s poems (1977). Robaina argues that the PIC was a party that muestra el nivel al cual llegó el movimiento social del negro en Cuba, único en la historia de América, y, por lo tanto, inaceptable para el ra­ cismo criollo y mucho menos para la política imperial estadounidense, que sí conocía los nobles objetivos de los independientes, por lo que no sería sorprendente especular, como dijera Víctor Fowler, que desde el Norte se dictara la orden de exterminio, pero no tanto para evitar la tercera, definitiva y deseada ocupación y anexión posterior de nuestra Isla, sino para impedir el gran ejemplo que se hubiera dado para los propios negros de Estados Unidos y de otras partes de nuestro continente [demonstrates the success of the black social movement in Cuba, unique in the history of America, and as such unacceptable for the criollo racists and even less from the perspective of the imperial policy of the United States, which was certainly aware of the noble objectives of the independents, and so it is easy to suppose, as Victor Fowler put it, that the North gave the order for [their] extermination, not so much in order to avoid a third, definitive, and much desired occupation and annexation of our Island, but rather so as to forestal the setting of an example that might have been followed by blacks in the United States, and in other parts of our continent]. (Fernández Robaina 2012, 76)

32 Several critics have attempted to comprehend the discord between an initial interest in Afro-Cubanism from an eugenic ethnographic perspective and a notion of “transculturation” that attempted to dilute the hierarchy of races. For this puzzling aspect of the work of Fernando Ortiz, see Rodrigo L. De Barros (2012). 33 De la Fuente assesses the impact of socialism on race relations as one in which the revolutionary government dismantled the old structures of segregation and discrimination. […] The socialization of the previously segregated spaces was not achieved without resistance, and eventually black clubs and societies were dismantled as well. It could not be otherwise: the very existence of these clubs defied the revolution’s vision of a color-blind society and symbolized the survival of the past. Not only were Afro-Cuban organizations eliminated, however, some Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies were temporarily banned and race itself was erased from public discourse. By the early 1960s authorities referred to racial discrimination in the past tense, so any attempt to incorporate race into the political

228  Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo agenda was deemed to be counterrevolutionary – a divisionist act. Race surfaced only in the relatively safe area of culture, or as a political issue in the international arena. (De la Fuente 2001, 17) The historian argues that the official preclusion of race as a dividing category, even if the claim of color blindness was belied by reality, did in fact enable greater racial mobility. In contrast, Tania Triana (2006) points to the historical neglect of Afro-Cubanism and argues that the “myth of racial democracy” in fact obscured the reality of racism in Cuba. 4 Ponte poses the question: 3 La fórmula aportada por Víctor Fowler – “Ser negro de la Revolución” – deja fuera a aquellos que no firmen y renueven el pacto con el régimen. ¿Procederá de este punto la ARAAC como una cabal organización no gubernamental, o antepondrá la pertenencia revolucionaria a cualquier otro desvelo? ¿Estará obligada esa organización a sacrificar su independencia para tener cabida en Cuba? [The formula adopted by Victor Fowler – ‘To be a black Revolutionary’ – excludes those who refuse to sign or renew their compact with the regime. Would the ARAAC transform itself into a fully-fledged non-governmental organization, or would it privilege remaining a part of the revolution over everything else? Is the organization obliged to sacrifice its independence in order to have a place in Cuba?] (Ponte 2014, 215) 35 A more complete quotation runs: Por ser criollo y a la vez nutrido por las mejores tradiciones clásicas, un poeta como Nicolás Guillén pudo escribir poesía que, tomando como base escansional los ritmos del son cubano (género musical de por sí tremendamente acriollado), revelaba unas raíces hincadas no ya en el suelo del África, sino en tierras muy cultas, roturadas siglos atrás por Lope de Vega y Góngora, así como por la mexicana Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, cuando esos autores se dieron a escribir lo que llamaban ‘poemas de negros’ […] De este modo, en el mundo de las Antillas de habla española, y también en las anglófonas y francófonas, se producen actualmente una literatura y una pintura de marcadas características criollas, sin que nos pongamos a medir aquí la proporción de los ingredientes raciales malaxados en el conjunto. Por ello, la aportación del negro al mundo a donde fue llevado, muy a pesar suyo, no consiste en lo que ha dado en llamarse erróneamente negritud (¿por qué no hablar, en tal caso, de una ‘blanquitud’?) sino en algo mucho más transcendental: una sensibilidad que vino a enriquecer la de los hombres con quienes se le había obligado a convivir, comunicándole una nueva energía para manifestarse en dimensión mayor, tanto en lo artístico como en lo histórico, puesto que el criollo de indio y europeo no alcanzó la edad adulta, en América, mientras no contó con la sensibilidad del negro. (Carpentier 2012 [1977], 406) In fact, Duany (1988) sees the renewed interest in Afro-Cuban studies in Cuba after the Cuban Revolution as a progressive interest in tradition and folklore that was not seen to be in conflict with the definition of a Cuban national character or claims of a “racial democracy.” 6 We still lack a comprehensive critical study on the ideological evolution of 3 Alejo Carpentier. For a general overview on his career and work, see Velayos Zurdo (1985).

6 Conclusions

The reader of this book has undertaken a great effort in getting deeply into fields and topics that she or he may have been somewhat or wholly unfamiliar with. If that was indeed the case, it is something to be ­grateful for. The combination of historical explanations of specific problems – including discussions of racial conflicts ranging widely across time and space, and the analyses of racial ideologies underlying these conflicts – alongside the close reading of the narrative techniques deployed in the novels makes this a very dense and challenging book. Yet it is to be hoped that readers will ultimately find it a rewarding exercise. As I have argued, the chosen novels have served as test cases to propose a reformulation of the debate on narrative unreliability and to address the problem of the politics of form in relation to narrative reliability. These concluding remarks are thus intended to restate that broader argument in light of the specific case studies. The concept of narrative unreliability has become very sophisticated in postclassical narratology. Narrative theorists have emphasized the different effects of unreliability along the axes of values, ethics, and facts (Phelan, Olson, Cohn, Margolin, Shen); distinctions in the ways in which readers interpret texts and the surrounding contextual and cognitive factors through which they do so (Ansgar Nünning, Zerwek, Vera Nünning, Fludernik, Yacobi); the nuanced unnatural forms which challenge the idea that unreliability is only possible in mimetic narratives (Richardson); the possibilities of unreliability in homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narratives (Köppe and Kindt, D’hoker and Martens, Cohn, Behrendt); the possibility of unreliability in other media (Vera Nünning, Koch, Richardson, Laass, Ensslin); and new ideological insights and claims (Olson, Bareis, Herman and Vervaeck). These refinements of the concept of narrative unreliability put us in a position from which we are ready to go beyond this form to reframe it as the problem of narrative reliability. As I have suggested, we might want to leave aside the tendency to dualism between reliable/unreliable narration as it has been developed since Booth first proposed his definition and move toward a more broadly encompassing view of the problem of credibility in narrative as an elaboration of the principle of narrative reliability in discourse.

230 Conclusions Novels that address the problem of narrative reliability more or less directly, albeit leaving it unresolved, constitute especially fecund material for discussion. Many narratives could be newly brought to attention with this reformulation, especially those that may have been set aside because there is no way to determine clear unreliability, simply because – while the interrogation of narrative reliability is at their core – they do not attempt to build clear unreliability. Since narrative reliability has to do with belief and trust, and there is no ultimate correspondence between language and the referred reality that exists outside of it, there is no solution to the fact, as Marlow reminds us – before Derrida coined the illuminating term différance – that reality is accessible only at second hand. And yet, since the novels all use the political discourses and historical circumstances that center discussions on racial relations and conflicts, their narrative language cannot, and does not, dispense with the necessary illusion that a narrative – and therefore its language – bears a strong bond with its factual referent. Furthermore, the political novels addressing the problem of narrative reliability are mostly concerned with the paradox of this bond. The ideological beliefs explicitly invoked and/or implied in the narratives are understood as discourse, but they are also fully dependent on their strong referential bond in order to accomplish their narrative functions. Furthermore, that referential bond is finally responsible for the participation in and production of political and historical meanings and controversy. That historical or political participation of the narratives differs in condition from historical discourses, as I have argued in the Introduction in line with Lubomir Dolezel and Dorrit Cohn, but it shares with them a basic link with the referential world in the discursive construction of credibility. The studied cases show that the novels deploy the problem of belief in racial discourses – especially at critical moments like all those addressed here – so as to elaborate on the problem of narrative reliability in fiction. This is clear, for example, in Absalom, Absalom! in the ways in which Shreve uses the beliefs about the mulatto in the US South – particularly trenchant during segregation – to fallaciously infer that Bon is a ­mulatto, which would, in turn, solve the narrative enigma. This places the novel in an ambivalent position, because the reader is left with one interpretation of the story without the benefit of the information supplied by its own fictional world, and that must be completed with contemporaneous racial assumptions. Likewise, the ambivalent function of Vodou in the construction of an emancipated Cuba underlies the production of narrative distance between the focalization of Ti Noel and that of the reader, shifting from a slave narrative to a colonialist one, and taking an ambivalent stance with regard to narrative reliability, where the reader is not sure whether to believe the slaves’ perspective of the Haitian revolution or not.

Conclusions  231 This approach to narrative reliability demonstrates the need for paying attention to the politics of form and the claims of contextualist or cultural narratology. For all of these reasons, there is an evident need to historicize narrative theory, not only as a history of the reception and changes in critical interpretations of texts – which has already been initiated by Vera Nünning and Bruno Zerwek – but with regard to the uses that texts make of their contemporary historical contexts. This new approach is essential in observing the ways in which the exploration of and innovation in narrative technique use external arguments and material in order to produce the formal effects of narrative distance between text and reader that are central to the questioning of narrative reliability. Marlow’s borrowing of the stereotype of the English gentleman to persuade the reader to side with him (and Jim) in Conrad’s Lord Jim draws on the contemporary discussions of the paradigm of the English gentleman and its role in the governance of the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. This broader examination of reliability as a narrative problem has revealed several interactions with other narrative components that add to voice as the principal locus of narrative reliability. These other components include narrative enigmas in Lord Jim and Absalom, Absalom!; polyphony in Absalom, Absalom!; paratexts, such as prefaces, titles, or signatures, in The Autobiography of an Ex-Color Man; the use of narrative levels, as in Lord Jim; first-, second-, and third-person nar­ rative voices in combination with discordant narrative perspectives in El rei­no de este mundo, L’étranger, and Absalom, Absalom!; and the uses of genre in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Lord Jim; they have been shown as crucial elements in the questioning of narrative reliability. Attention to these aspects and their interactions should lead the way toward a more nuanced approach to this narrative technique. Narrative enigmas produce the effects observed by Piglia that narrative gaps invite narrative by conjecture (Guérard), which is one of the most effective modes of questioning narrative reliability. As in the case of Absalom, Absalom!, these often invite polyphony since it helps compare and contrast accounts, and produces degrees of reliability in the different voices. Paratexts are another one of the hitherto neglected narrative components in relation to reliability. They have recently come under scrutiny, but there is still much work to be done on how they condition the limits of narrative texts as defined by narratology. As The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man shows, the prefaces question or establish the genre and the referential status of the narrative in relation to the historical context in which it was published. The problem of narrative reliability addressed in the fictional text in the 1912 edition is already evident in the preface, in contrast to where narrative theorists have tended to locate the discussion, that is, within the fictional text. Analyses of paratexts

232 Conclusions comprehensively interrogate the limits of fiction and the transitions or transactions between fiction and the factual world, offering new paths to the interpretation of form. A disframed narrative in which the narrative levels are not firmly bounded or are subject to change contributes to undermining the reader’s trust because there is no framing narrator that can authorize or deauthorize the embedded narrative. In the case of Lord Jim, as Lothe and Phelan have noted, the heterodiegetic narrator does not close Marlow’s embedded narrative, which grants him the narrative authority of having the last word, and so the novel closes with the ambivalence of Marlow’s narrative. Conventions and experiments with first-, second-, and third-person narratives also contribute to the interrogation of reliability. Second-­ person narrative, for example, might create the odd effect of having one ­ bsalom, narrator telling the story of his or her narratee. This occurs in A Absalom!, where Shreve’s enthusiasm leads him to tell Quentin ­Quentin’s own story. Quentin corrects Shreve repeatedly, but on some occasions, he stops listening, and thus Shreve’s voice narrates without restriction, despite the fact that he does not know everything that he tells as a fact. First-person narrative is used in L’étranger in combination with a non-­ affective narration, which has the effect of a third-person heterodiegetic perspective in what Genette called a “neutral attitude.” Meursault’s voice uses underreporting and a sensorious – yet emotionally detached – narrative to decenter the main act of this story, for which he is sentenced to death: the killing of an Arab in French colonial Algeria. This experimentation with the conventions of first-person narrative produces an “estranging narrative.” Third-person narratives combined with changing narrative focalization and free indirect discourse serve to counterpose narrative interpretations of the fictional world, which create uncertainty regarding a given character’s understanding and interpretation, enabling the ironic distance, which is one possible effect of the free indirect discourse technique. El reino de este mundo modulates that ironic distance to erode the credibility of Ti Noel’s experience and reading of the Haitian revolution, in a very subtle distancing that produces a narrative ambivalence with regard to the reliability of the characters’ perspective. Genres are also used for the purpose of complicating narrative reliability. First, the genre conventions are used to establish a certain authority as, for example, the genre of autobiography, which was well established in the African American tradition, is deployed in the title and the first anonymous edition of The Autobiography of an ­E x-­C olored Man to endow the text with narrative authority. In other cases, genre conventions help to introduce fixed or recognizable plots or characters. In Lord Jim, the adventure novel genre helps Marlow persuade his readers that, in fact, Jim is like the hero of an adventure

Conclusions  233 novel, structurally placing narrative progression and character building in agreement with the conventions of the genre, and rendering a clear racial bias to the story. The effects produced by these technical combinations intensify the interrogation of narrative reliability in forms that range from discordant narration, estranging reliability, bonding reliability, factual unreliability, and forms of underreporting. This book is mainly focused on modulations that question narrative reliability from the point of view of judgment or ethics, that is, they graduate narrative distance and trust based on moral values and ideological interpretations. As I have shown, the novels all use racial discourses to indicate that the narratives may not be trustworthy. If we are to claim that judgments based on values and ideology are the means through which a text might invite skepticism and distance with regard to narrative reliability, it follows that one must thoroughly examine the political context introduced as the object of controversy, and the political discourses active at the time of the production of the texts that would make those invocations effective. To clarify with one example, it is practically impossible to display the full use of underreporting in L’étranger without understanding that Meursault’s sensorial narrative borrows the rhetorical strategy of the exclusion of Arabs by overreporting a sensorial Mediterranean racial worldview that is at the core of the French Algerian colonial discourse of the Méditerranée. Likewise, there is no way for a reader to engage with Jim as an English gentleman if she or he is unable to identify all those textual features of his character and his life that set his behavior at odds with that of the model English gentleman. If the reader misses that social and political reference point, it becomes highly likely that Marlow’s doubts and persuasive narration would also mostly elude her or him. Narrative theorists of unreliability have made a key distinction between narratives that are mostly questioned through misreporting or underreporting of facts, and those that base their erosion of narrative authority on ideological bias. But what precisely does it mean to say that a narrative can be discordant? How do narratives actually use ideologies in their technical artifice to achieve narrative discordance? I hope that in addressing this question, this book has offered at least some answers. And yet this is probably one of the first books to directly engage with this question and should therefore be taken as an invitation to further study in relation to other kinds of ideologies or contexts. It is obvious by now that narratology finds itself at a crossroads, simply because the tendency to restrict analysis of narrative form to the text, severed from the external components that give it meaning and life, has so far been absolutely dominant. Maybe now that post-structuralist trends advocating a return to the historical and political contexts have got hold of the study of literature – especially cultural studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies – we are better equipped to deal with

234 Conclusions those aspects that narratologists have hitherto excluded from the analysis of narrative form. Postclassical demands for a cultural narratology, for the politics of form, or any other voice that suggests a historicizing of narrative study not on the grounds of mere theoretical borrowings and frameworks but rather the study of social, political, and cultural contexts that are relevant to the construction of form, constitute an important new direction for narratology, a venture into uncharted territory. New syntheses of formal studies with historical approaches to narrative should greatly improve our ways of understanding narrative form. Reluctant as many narratologists may be to adopt other nontheoretical, historical approaches to narrative, these syntheses can in fact benefit not only narratology but also these other historical perspectives on literature by drawing attention to form as a key instrument in the construction of ideology. It is in form that we find what Raymond Williams devoted his life’s work to, namely the structure of the sentiments of a society in which novels are not merely repositories of ideologies and worldviews, but are involved in the production of these ideologies. It would be extremely hard to claim today that narrative form is not relevant in that production of ideology. After all, structuralism and deconstruction have been fully incorporated for a reason, and post-structuralist approaches, in turn, have benefited from the linguistic construction of ideological discourse. In any case, what I want to underline here is that the construction of ideology in narrative is fully dependent on narrative form, and the elaboration of ideological belief is essential for rendering an ideology operative in society. The problem of narrative reliability in fiction parallels that of the rhetorical construction of ideological belief in political discourse. For this reason, the precariousness or the blind spots of ideologies are being deployed in the narratives to reveal the precariousness of narrative reliability in fiction. These are intimately related problems. Therefore, the examination of the rhetorical modes in which the problem of narrative reliability is elaborated is also relevant to the rhetorical modes in ideological credibility. Understanding how racial ideologies managed to dictate discriminatory practices and policies, such as slavery, exclusion from citizenship, or disenfranchisement, and understanding how these were also fallacious, requires a formal analysis that can unravel the ways in which, in different spheres and with different effects, the principle of reliability is elaborated in linguistic discourse. As narratologists and as literary critics, we have an opportunity to examine the texts for the ways in which history in-forms narrative, as well as an opportunity to put forward our discussions of narrative reliability so as to delve into the ways in which literature participates in the construction and the interrogation of ideology.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abakuá group 197 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 4, 27, 29, 49, 73, 95, 117, 119, 121–34, 140–3, 144n9, 145n9, 146–7n21, 179n4, 215, 230–2 “act of passing” 87, 89, 92, 110 Adam, Jean-Michel 179n2 “aesthetization of violence” 99 African American community 100, 103 African American culture 1, 83, 115n33, 116n37 African American intellectual tradition 81 African American racial discourse 153 Afro-Antillism 30 Afro-Caribbean culture 218 Afro-Cuban culture 197; uniqueness of 219 Afro-Cubanism 30, 198; development of 220; questioning reliability and changing perspectives on 217–23 Afro-Cuban movement 198, 219 Afro-Cubans 185, 197 Afro-Hispanic Review 219 Ainsi parla l’oncle (Price-Mars) 193 Aizier, Arnaud 179n5 Algeria 163, 168; court in 162; French colonial discourses in 176; French colonization of 164; French settlement colony in 175; Muslim and Berber populations in 167, 176; in 1930s and1940s 35n23; sociopolitical segregation in 176 Algerian Arabs 24, 165 “algerianisme” 181n18 Algerian-Muslim secondary characters 161

Algerian War 150, 161 Almayer’s Folly (Conrad) 42, 62 Along This Way (Johnson) 79, 82, 109, 115n35 American identity 183, 222, 223 American independences 183 Ames, Dalton 138 Amossy, Ruth 36n26 Andrade, Heather Russell 113n19 Anglo-Saxon identities 62 Antebellum miscegenation laws 120 Antillean traditions 197 anti-miscegenation laws 27, 112n14, 120, 121, 127, 131, 143, 144n7 Arabs 161, 168; Argelian 180n16; in French Algeria 163, 177; in French colonial discourses 176; in L’étranger 165; population from French Algerian society 163; underreporting of the killing of 177 Arnold, Thomas 41 Asian immigration 120 Audisio, Gabriel 168, 169 “autobiographical space” 90, 112n11 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Johnson) 1, 3, 29, 79, 83, 119, 153, 198–9, 231; anonymity, autobiography and African American literary tradition in 84–7; genre, anonymity and questioning of truth 87–90; questioning reliability within fiction 92–102; thresholds of narrative reliability 90–2 autodiegetic narrative 150, 179n1 Baker, Huston 95 Bareis, Alexander 17, 34n16, 152 Baroni, Raphaël 35n25

262 Index Barreda, Tomás 197 Barthes, Roland 4 Battaglia, Diana 34n20 Bechtold, Rebeccah 99, 113n21 Bender, Todd K. 78n37 Berberich, Christine 39 Bertrand, Louis 167, 168, 181n18 Berzon, Judith 129 Bhabha, Homi 24, 25, 80 Birkenmaier, Anke 185 bi-textuality 216, 226n26 Blandón, Ruth 116n39 Blum-Violette bill 164 Boas, Franz 80 bonding reliability 54–5, 151–3 bonding unreliability 17, 38, 95, 151 Bontempelli, Massimo 187 Booth, Wayne C. 9, 14, 32n8, 229 Brantlinger, Patrick 45 British Civil Service 26, 41; reforms 28 British imperialism 26, 37, 38 British informal dominions 37, 48 British Merchant Marine 43, 48, 56, 76n17 Broncano, Manuel 140 Brooks, Cleanth 146n17 Brooks, Gwendolyn 100 Brooks, Peter 96, 98 Brown, Sterling 105 Cabrera, Lydia 217, 218 Caham, Abraham 112n12 Camus, Albert 148, 154, 161, 162, 169, 178, 179n2, 180n7, 180n12, 181n22 Caracciolo, Marco 174 Caribbean islands 197 Carpentier, Alejo 2, 30, 183, 185, 197–8, 200–2, 211, 213, 215, 217, 220–2; Ecué-Yamba-O 191; El reino de este mundo see El reino de este mundo; Haitian Revolution see Haitian Revolution; “lo real maravilloso” 187; narrative perspective use 192; “real maravilloso” 187; visit to Haiti 186 Carpio, Glenda 100, 114n22 Carroll, David 153, 159, 176 Carrullo, Sylvia 226n27 Carr, Wilbur 113n15 Cass, Jeremy 197 Catelli, Nora 90, 223n2

Catholicism 196 Cell, John 125 Charlot, Edmond 181n18 Chaulet-Achour, Christiane 153, 154, 159 Chesnutt, Charles W. 100, 105, 106, 198 Chetouani, Lamria 161, 164 Christmas, Joe 126, 130, 135 chronic political instability 184 Civil Rights movement 29 Civil Service Reform 40–1, 45 Civil War 121–3, 137, 140, 145n9 Clifford, Hugh 63, 75n6 Cobb, James 122, 125 Cohn, Dorrit 4, 15–16, 49, 93, 151, 152, 230 colonial racial stereotypes 66, 67 The Conjure Woman (Chesnutt) 105, 198, 201 Conkinska, Cvetanka 149 Conrad, Joseph 26, 28 Conroy, Mark 51 “contextualist narratology” 6, 7, 31 “contradictory narrators” 21 Copland, Sarah 8, 91 Crémieux Laws 163 critical reliability 48–58 Cuba: chronic political instability in 184; to Haitian Revolution 198; post-emancipation blacks in 197; scientific racism in 218; slave revolts in 189–90 Cuban national culture 30, 184 Cuban Revolution (1959) 219 Cuban Santería 197 Cuervo Hewitt, Julia 218, 224n14 cultural discourses 7, 193, 204; see also historical discourses cultural racial identity 81 d’Alger, École 168, 172, 175 Davis, Colin 180n6 Davis, Thadious 118, 129 De la Fuente, Alejandro 227n33 de Man, Paul 96, 98, 112n11 Dewey, John 80 D’Hoker, Elke 13 discordant narration 15–16, 30, 99, 101, 150–3, 163, 177, 233; in L’étranger 155–61 disframed narrative and narrators 21, 50, 232

Index  263 Dolezel, Lubomir 4, 5, 230 Donovan, Stephen 78n36 Doody, Terrence 95, 113n18 Drescher, Seymour 189 Dryden, Linda 59, 67 Dubois, Laurent 200, 213 Du Bois, W. E. B. 82, 87, 94, 97, 103, 105, 107, 114n24, 198 Dufays, Jean-Louis 36n26 Dunbar, Paul 105 Dunwoodie, Peter 167, 175 Eldridge, Colin C. 52 El Houssi, Majid 181n21 Ellison, Ralph 95, 110n6 emancipation 120, 126, 142, 189, 211 English gentleman 73; contemporaneous stereotype of 26; embodiment on 37; identification of 25; in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim see Lord Jim (Conrad); stereotype of 28 Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna 57 estranging unreliability 17, 151, 153, 178 Etienne, Charles 130, 131 European colonialism 183 European French Algeria 162 European origins, French Algerians 163, 168 Fanon, Frantz 176 Faulkner, William 29, 117–19, 133, 140, 144 Fauset, Jessie 85, 88 Federal legislation 121 Ferhat Abbas 180n16 fictional narrative discourse 4, 5 Firchow, Peter Edgerly 78n37 first-person narrative 29, 148, 232; see also L’étranger (Camus) Fleming, Robert E. 98 Flores, Ralph 136 Fludernik, Monika 6, 17 focalization: definition 191; in free indirect discourse 207; internal 150, 178n1; multiple 204, 213; through fragmentation 201, 210, 232; and voice 191, 210–11 Fornet, Ambrosio 211 fragmentation 202, 203, 211, 226n20 François, Cécile 78n38 “fraudulent narrators” 21

free indirect discourse and style 207–9, 215–17, 232 French Algeria 30, 160; Arab in 148; postcolonial debates and colonial discourses in 161–78; “rebarbarization” of 170 French Algerian judicial system 159 French citizenship 163 French colonial discourses in Algeria 163, 175 176, 177, 178 French national dimension 162 Fréris, Georges 162 Gaston, Paul 119, 123, 145n10 Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 23 Geggus, David 189, 190 Gekoski, R. A. 76n17 Genette, Gérard 33n9, 90, 91, 102, 103, 191, 232 Genettian vocabulary 178n1 genres 31n4, 35n25, 232 Ginfray, Denise 77n29 Glissant, Édouard 24 Godden, Richard 127 Goellnicht, Donald C. 86–7, 89 Goldhammer, Arthur 182n23 Goldsby, Jacqueline 86, 99, 113n15 Goldsmith, Oliver 17 González Echevarría, Roberto 187, 199, 204‑5, 211, 215, 229n17 Gosnell, Jonathan K. 168 Grady, Henry 119, 123 Grégoire, Vincent 166 Griffiths, Frederick 87 Grigg, Russell 176 Guérard, Albert 135 guerrilla warfare 189 Gymnich, Marion 6 Haitian Revolution 2–3, 30, 183; challenge to myth of 189–200; Cuba to 198; divergent account of 200; dominant historical and fictional narratives of 194; events of 199; historical legacy of 189; historical perspective on 194; ideological and historical shadows of 210–17; impact of 189; literary accounts of 193; literary representations of 203; narrative of 184; questioning reliability and changing perspectives on 217–23; “real maravilloso” 187, 188;

264 Index revisionist account of 185; slave revolts in Cuba and USA 189–90; version of 187–8, 211 Haitian Vodou 190 Hamner, Robert D. 78n37 Hampson, Robert 59, 76n18 Hansen, Per Krogh 13–14, 33n12 Harlem Renaissance 23, 29, 82, 97, 103, 106, 114n28, 116n38, 116n40 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 46, 49, 76n17, 78n37, 152 Herman, David 32n8 Herman, Luc 18, 115n31 heterodiegetic unreliability 226n22 historical discourses 226n22; credibility of 211; fictional and 4, 5; on Haitian Revolution 3, 30, 194; in narrative 151, 192; New South 123, 131; reliability in 3, 101; of Sutpen’s story 121; see also cultural discourses Hobson, J. A. 47 homodiegetic narrative 178, 179n1 Hönnighausen, Lothar 146n21 The House behind the Cedars (Chesnutt) 107 Hughes, Langston 106, 107, 218 Hughes, Linda K. 78n36 Hugo, Victor 190 Hurston, Zora Neale 190 Hutchinson, George 23, 24, 80, 81–2 hybridity concept 24, 219 The Illustrated London News 59 Imperial Federation League 47 Imperialism: A Study (Hobson) 47–8 “incommensurate narrators” 21 Indian Civil Service 41 Jahn, Manfred 32n8 James, C. L. R. 190 James, Henry 9, 95 Jameson, Fredric 76n16 James, William 80 Jefferson, Thomas 189–90 Johnson, James Weldon 1, 29, 79, 82, 102, 218 Kaisari, Philip 190 Kassoul, Aicha 176 Khelouz, Nacer 168 Kirby, Joe 118 Kleist, Heinrich von 190

Kulkarni, Mangesh 161, 164 Kutzinski, Vera 110n5 Ladd, Barbara 145n12 de Lamartine, Alphonse 190 Lamothe, Daphne 114n26 Lam, Wilfredo 186 Lanser, Susan Sniader 5, 33n8 Latin Africa 151, 167 Latin America: culture and identity 197–8; questioning reliability and changing perspectives on 217–23 Lawson, Benjamin Sherwood 114n27 Leavis, F. R. 48 Lejeune, Philippe 86, 90, 110n7, 112n11 L’étranger (Camus) 29–30, 109, 148, 150, 153, 178, 231–3; postcolonial debates and colonial discourses in French Algeria 161–78; signs of estranging and discordant narration in 155–61 Levy, Eugene D 87 Lima, José Lezama 185–6 Lingard, James 42 Lingard, William 42 Locke, Alain 103 Lolita (Navokov) 151 Lorcin, Patricia 163, 164 Lord Jim (Conrad) 10, 26, 28, 154, 231, 232; “bonding unreliability” 38; British imperialism 37; British informal dominions 48; British Merchant Marine 43; Civil Service Reform 40–1; critical reliability 48–58; critics of 37, 40, 76n16; “Gentleman Brown” 39; Imperial Federation League 47; Indian Civil Service 41; English gentleman in see English gentleman; Malay territories 42; narrative reliability in 38; Patusan portion of 58–74; problem of reliability in 38, 53 “lo real maravilloso” 185–7, 194 Lorimer, Douglas 24, 35n23, 43, 44 Lothe, Jakob 9, 50, 63, 72, 134 Louisiana Civil Code 145n12 Louverture, Toussaint 211–13 Lund, Michael 78n36 Mabille, Pierre 187, 196 Machado, Gerardo 184 MacKenzie, John 62

Index  265 Maftei, Micaela 88–9 “magic realism” 187 Maguire, Emily 197, 219 “Malay novels” 42, 77n31 Malaysia: Conrad’s choice of 42–3; Hampson’s definition of 74n3 Malay stereotypes 67 Malay territories 42, 43 Malchow, H. L. 70 “Manifesto of the Algerian People” 181n16 Maougal, Mohamed-Lakhdar 176 Margolin, Uri 32n7, 57 Martens, Gunther 13 Martí, José 183, 219 Martin, Mary Patricia 9, 14, 15, 93 Matikkala, Mira 47, 75n4 Matthew, Brander 86, 88, 89, 113n15 Mediterranean culture 168, 169, 181n18 Mediterranean race 167 Mediterranean Sea 168, 181n18 Mélia, Jean 168 Melis, Antonio 197 “metonymic and metaphoric narration” 203 Meursault (L’étranger) 30, 148, 150, 153–4, 164–5, 169, 171, 232, 233; amoral behavior toward his mother 163; case 166; narration in 175, 178; narrative reliability 177; sensorial narrative 233; sexual encounters 172; story and narrative in national terms 162; trial 155–61 Michaels, Walter Benn 80–1 miscegenation laws 120, 121 miscegenation, problem of 131–43 Misra, Maria 41 Mongia, Padmini 57 Moreland, Richard 136 Morrison, Toni 25 “The Mulatto as Black Bourgeois” 129 mulatto stereotype 127, 129 multiple focalization 204, 213–14 narrative authority 9, 14, 53, 65, 74, 92; complications in 10; construction and erosion of 101; defined 32n8; restoration of 98 narrative conventions 63 narrative credibility 3, 10, 11, 33n9, 74 narrative enigmas 230, 231

narrative focalization 191, 201, 209, 210, 217, 222, 223 narrative perspectives 184, 185, 191, 192, 194, 198, 201–4, 207, 210, 217, 218 narrative reflexivity 93 narrative reliability 8, 11, 14, 19, 21, 23, 33n13, 66, 73, 80, 92, 108–10, 184, 185, 188, 190, 191, 196, 200, 201, 203, 204, 210, 211, 213, 217, 218, 222, 223, 231; genres use 232; interrogation of 233; precariousness of 234; problem of 230, 234; questioning of 211 narrative theory 18, 22, 31n4, 80, 114n30; distinct approaches to 13; historicizing 4–8; politics in 19 narrative unreliability 8, 93, 95, 229; bonding unreliability 17; “contradictory narrators” 21; discordant narration 15–16; narrative authority 9, 14; narrative credibility 10, 11; narrative reliability 19; narrative theory 13, 18, 22 narrative voice 9, 10, 15, 16, 33n9, 49, 50, 71, 83, 92, 102, 108; credibility of 11; discordant 93; gradual questioning of 110; human qualities to 32n8; juxtaposition of 14; in Lord Jim 26; and narrative perspective 30 national culture, Cuba 184, 185, 218, 223 nativism 81 nativist pluralism 81 naturalization 163, 164 natural narratology critics 21 Négritude movement 218, 220 Negro audience 104 Negro life 104, 106 Negro psychology 83, 104, 108 Negro race 81, 99, 100, 103, 104 Negro stereotypes 105 Neimneh, Shadi 116n38 “neutral attitude” 149, 232 New South Creed: in Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 117–47; political discourse of 27, 29 Noël, Mireille 179n2 non-Vodou-believer characters 195 Novkov, Julie 119 Nownes, Nicholas L. 98, 99

266 Index Nünning, Ansgar 9, 17, 30, 192, 203–4 Nünning, Vera 17, 231 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 154, 161–2 Olson, Greta 8, 14, 15, 22 “one-drop” rule 117, 143n1 Ortiz, Fernando 196, 217–19, 224n13 An Outcast of the Islands (Conrad) 42, 62 pan-Africanist movement 185 Pan-Islamism 164 paratexts 231–2 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth 199, 213, 226n27 Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) 219, 227n31 Pascoe, Peggy 119 Paute, Jean-Pierre 224n12 permeable narrators 21 “perspective structure” concept 203–4 Peters, John 77n24 Peterson, Christopher 146n15 Pfeiffer, Kathleen 111n8 Phelan, James 9, 14–15, 17–18, 38, 50, 93, 95, 152, 160; “estranging” and “bonding” unreliability 151 The Philadelphia Tribune 131 Piglia, Ricardo 49, 77n19, 231 “politics of form” approach 8, 22, 31 Polk, Noel 138 polyphony aids 134 Ponte, Antonio José 219, 228n34 Porter, Bernard 75n4 postclassical demands 234 postcolonial narratology 6, 7 postmodernism 4 post-Reconstruction racial system 121 Pratt, Mary Louise 24 Price-Mars, Jean 193 Prince, Gerald 32n8 “problem of narrative reliability” 3, 22, 27, 39, 40, 48, 49, 51, 61, 62, 74, 79, 80, 92, 93, 94, 95, 102; ambivalent elaboration of 38; complex irony and 110; complexities of 83; Conrad’s elaboration of 38; emphasizing 83; on Haitian Revolution, Afro-Cubanism, and Latin American Identity 217–23; formal configuration of 103; importance of 10; in Lord Jim 53; modulation of

28; narrative 61; in narrative fiction 3; “real maravilloso” ambivalence 200–10; reframing narrative unreliability as see narrative unreliability; theorizations of 92; transcribing 108; treatment of 108 progressive racism 81 Qui s’accuse s’excuse 98 Rabinowitz, Peter 19, 36n27 racial boundaries 81, 117 racial conflicts 229; and ideologies, narrating 22–8 racial discourses 233 racial discrimination 219 racial identity 27, 81, 106 racial ideologies 3, 4, 18, 22–4, 30, 35n22, 62, 229 radical cynicism 95 Rajah Allang 67, 68 Raval, Suresh 57 Ray, Martin 55 “real maravilloso” 185, 187, 188, 190–4, 196–8, 213, 215–17, 222, 223; ambivalence of 200–10; “realismo maravilloso” 217 re-barbarization 48 Reed, Adolph Jr. 22 Reed, Joseph 132, 134 El reino de este mundo (Carpentier) 2, 3, 25, 30; fragmented perspective in 211; Haitian Revolution see Haitian Revolution; “lo real maravilloso” 186, 187; narrative and political ambivalence of 184–5; narrative perspective 192; narrative reliability 201–2; racial distinction in Caribbean 196; “real maravilloso” in 193 reliability within fiction, questioning: “aesthetization of violence” 99; African American community 100; “bonding unreliability” 95; de Man, Paul 96; “discordant narration” 101; Harlem Renaissance 97; narrative authority 92, 98; narrative unreliability 93; narrative voice 102; problem of reliability 94 reliable narration 9, 13, 32n7, 62 The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid) 22 Renaissance, Harlem 23 Rhen, Andrea 78n33

Index  267 Richardson, Brian 20, 21, 50, 77n23 Robaina, Tomás Fernández 227n30, 227n31 Roberts, Brian Russell 111n9 Rodríguez, Alexis Márquez 224n4 Roh, Franz 187 Rolls, Alistair 180n10 Ruppersburg, Hugh 133 Russell, Heather 98 Russian Revolution 184 Ryan, Marie-Laure 32n8 Said, Edward 24, 56 Saint-Méry, Moreau de 200 Sandweiss, Martha A. 112n14 Schmid, Wolf 185, 223n1 Schoenberg, Estella 146n17 Schulz, Jennifer 111n8 Schuyler, George 100, 107 Seabrook, William 196 second-person narrative 21, 138, 147n24, 232 Senatus Consulte of 1865 163 sensorial narrative 233 Shelby, Tom 23, 34n21, 35n22 Shen, Dan 31n3, 112n11 Sherry, Norman 75n10 Simmons, Allan 57, 77n29 Siskind, Mariano 187, 215 Skerrett, Joseph 87 slave perspective 188, 190, 193, 194, 198, 216 slave revolts, in Cuba and USA 189–90 slave system 120 Smith, Barbara Hernstein 115n30 Smith, Valerie 85 Sollors, Werner 23, 118, 130 Sommer, Roy 6 Speratti-Piñero, Emma Susana 193, 199, 226n25 State Constitution reforms 117 stereotypes: colonial racial 66, 67; definition of 25, 35n25; of English gentleman 28; Malay 67; Negro 105; racial 25–7, 66–8, 74 Stohler, Vincent 36 Stromberg, David 32n7 structuralism 234 Sugimori, Masami 111n8 Sundquist, Eric 23, 116n37, 118 Surrealism 187, 191 syncretism 196

‘thematic narratology’ 6 third-person narrative 232 Tidrick, Kathryn 42, 60, 75n6 “Touissant sanglante” 180n7 Trumbull, George 164, 180n13 Tykwer, Tom 174 United States: African Americans in 97, 109; anti-miscegenation movement in see antimiscegenation laws; imperialism 111n9; neocolonialism 183, 197, 219; racial segregation 24, 29, 80, 143; slave revolts in 189–90; slavery in 190; state legislation 117 unreliable narration 9, 11, 12; critics of 33n8; elaboration of 53; historicizing 17; reliable and 32n7; theoretical design of 34n16 Urrutia, Gustavo E. 227n30 Van Vechten, Carl 102–4, 115n33 Vauthier, Simone 90 Vázquez, Eduardo 215 Vervaek, Bart 18, 115n31 Victory (Conrad) 42, 62 Vodou 187–99, 201, 204, 213, 215–18, 221–3; ambivalent function of 230; culture 3; indicators 224n14; tradition 2 Wald, Gayle 113n17 Wall, Kathleen 12 Warren, Kenneth 115n34 Washington, Booker T. 87, 94, 105 Weldon, James 121 Weld, Sir Frederick 41 White, Andrea 59, 63 White, Hayden 4, 5 Williams, Jeffrey 93 Williamson, Joel 119 Williams, Raymond 234 Wright, Richard 110n6 Xu, Dejin 112n11 Yacobi, Tamar 9, 10 Zackodnik, Teresa 117, 143n1 Zerweck, Bruno 17, 231 Zurbano, Roberto 219