On mixture, identity,
and performance across the American literary landscape.
I have both
professional and personal stakes in a heightened national awareness of and
engagement with racial and cultural mixture, as I wrote in this
follow-up to my second book. But what really hit me for the first time this
semester, as my American Literature II (1865-present) sections moved through
our syllabus, is just how many of my favorite American novels focus on
characters engaging with their own mixed heritages: Janet Miller in The
Marrow of Tradition, Helga Crane in Quicksand
(and more subtly Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry in Passing), and Tayo in Ceremony
are all centrally connected to that kind of cross-cultural identity and experience.
Moreover,
because my Am Lit II syllabus pairs those works with another text from their
respective eras, I also thought a great deal this semester about the ways in
which other, more seemingly culturally unified American identities include
their share of mixture as well. Huck Finn, for
example, is (at least by his novel’s end) a mixture of Pap, Tom Sawyer, and
Jim; Jay Gatsby is a
mixture of that self-constructed identity with James Gatz, the identity into
which he was born; Gogol
Ganguli mixes his parents’ Bengali immigrant identities with his own
evolving ABCD (American-Born
Confused Desi) status. I’m not trying to equate any or all of these
characters—in the cases of Huck and Gatsby, at least, I would argue that their white privilege allows
them to choose when and how to perform in a way that differentiates them from
the others—but I saw, and appreciated, the parallels this spring.
Appreciating
those parallels also allows us to consider just how much any American identity,
whatever its internal elements, comprises at the same time an external
performance. Gatsby, of course, literally performs that identity, with James
Gatz always lurking somewhere underneath; but so too for example does Gogol
perform the identity of Nikhil, to which he legally changes his name the summer
before college (but which Lahiri’s narrator never calls him). Huck is constantly
performing various identities (as a girl to gain information, as a fictional
boy to navigate the feuding families, as Tom Sawyer in the closing section) in
order to survive, but so too does Tayo perform ceremonies—both more traditional
Laguna Pueblo rituals and Betonie’s more mixed ones—in order to bridge the
different sides to his heritage and experiences. Which is to say: when the
speaker of Plath’s “Lady
Lazarus” (which we also read in Am Lit II) describes her life and death as “an
art, like everything else,” she’s damn right.
Next semester
conclusion tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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