The Melancholy of Race

Author(s): Anne Anlin Cheng

Source: The Kenyon Review , Winter, 1997, New Series, Vol. 19, No. 1, American
Memory / American Forgetfulness (Winter, 1997), pp. 49-61
Published by: Kenyon College

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4337463

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 ANNE ANLIN CHENG

THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE

If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only tha

which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.

NIETZSCHE, On the Genealogy of Morals

In grief the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego
itself.

FREUD, "Mourning and Melancholia"

s there any getting over race?

The answer would seem to be negative in light of the increasing frequency

with which the "race card" gets played. As the recent 0. J. Simpson trial and
its accompanying rhetoric suggest, racial rivalry is hardly over. Indeed, it has
acquired the peculiar status of a game where what constitutes a winning hand
has become identical with the handicap. Reappearing with the vagrancy of a
joker, the race card brings with it a host of haunting questions about the value
and perception of race and racial matters in America. What does it mean that
the deep wound of race in this country has come to be euphemized as a card,
a metaphor which acknowledges the rhetoric as such and yet simultaneously
materializes race into a finite object that can be dealt out, withheld, or trumped?
Why the singularity of a card? Who gets to play? And what would constitute
a "full deck"?
Holding a "full deck" may imply some idealized version of multi-
subjectivity (i.e., the potential to play the race card and the gender card and the
immigrant card, etc.), but it also implies a state of mental health and completion
that renders such playing unnecessary in the first place. After all, one would
"play" a card only because one is already outside the larger game, for to play a

49

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 50 THE KENYON REVIEW

card is to exercise the value of one's disadvantage, the liability that is asset.
The paradox doubles: the one who plays with a full deck not only need not
play at all, but indeed has no such "card" to play. Only those playing with less
than a full deck need apply.
Not only is liability transmuted to asset and reformed yet again as liability,
but the vocabulary of the card also reveals a conceptualization of health and
pathology which underlies our very perceptions of race and its abnormalities.
In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, the narrator, after a vexed
childhood full of racial and gender traumas, tells her mother, "I've found some
places in this country that are ghost-free . . . where I don't catch colds or use
my hospitalization insurance. Here I am sick so often, I can barely work." 1
In other words, I am most at home and fully myself when I am not at home
and not myself. The denigrated body gives rise to a hypochondriacal body, and
the way for that body to imagine health is displacement, unheimlich. Yet the
narrator's final deliverance can only play out its very impossibility. Her claim
for such a ghost-free and thriving America can only, within the context of
her "book of grievance," reveal itself as endlessly haunted. "Getting over" the
pathologies of her childhood and origin means, in a sense, never getting over
those memories, so that health and idealization turn out to be nothing more
than continual escape, and nothing less than the denial and pathologization of
what one is.
Meditating on grief and the recollection of the dead, Freud posits
a firm distinction between mourning and melancholia. His 1917 essay on
"Mourning and Melancholia" proposes melancholia as a pathological version
of mourning-pathological because, unlike the successful and finite work of
mourning, the melancholic cannot "get over" loss; rather, loss is denied as
loss and incorporated as part of the ego.2 In other words, the melancholic is
so persistent and excessive in the remembrance of loss that that remembrance
becomes part of the self. Thus the melancholic condition produces a peculiarly
ghostly form of ego formation. Moreover, that incorporation of loss still retains
the status of the original lost object as loss; consequently, as Freud reminds us,
by incorporating and identifying with the ghost of the lost one, the melancholic
takes on the emptiness of that ghostly presence and in this way participates in
his/her own self-denigration.
As a model of ego-formation (the incorporation as self of an excluded
other), melancholia provides a provocative metaphor for how race in America,
or more specifically how the act of racialization, works. While the formation
of American culture may be said to be a history of legalized exclusions
(Native Americans, African-Americans, Jews, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-
Americans . . . ), it is, however, also a history of misremembering those denials.
Because the American history of exclusions, imperialism, and colonization runs
so diametrically opposed to the equally and particularly American narrative of
liberty and individualism, cultural memory in America poses a continuously
vexing problem: how to remember those transgressions without impeding the

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 ANNE ANLIN CHENG 51

ethos of progress? How to bury the re

in the name of progress and the formation of an "American identity"?
Those subjected to abjection hover on the edges of the dominant progres-
sive narrative as objects at once ungrieved and unrelinquished. The invisible
but corporeal body of Ralph Ellison's protagonist in Invisible Man offers an
excellent dramatization of the minority as the object of white melancholia. In
the opening scene, his is the invisible body that the white man literally "bumps
into," a forgotten ghost who refuses forgetting, a lack-of-presence that chokes
the white man.3 One might say the latter ran into the bodily remnant of that
which he has killed. We recall the novel's figure of progress, Mr. Norton, a
white patron of the southern Negro college, who forgets the presence of the
Invisible Man next to him in order to monumentalize him, who cannot see the
young black man driving him but sees in the other's face his own "destiny." As
a sponsor of Negro education, Mr. Norton builds a monument to the "progress
of history as a mounting saga of triumphs"4 on the ghostly bodies of young
black men. With examples like this it is not difficult to conceive of dominant
white identity in America as melancholic. In addition, Toni Morrison has, with
a different vocabulary, suggested that the American literary canon itself is
a melancholic corpus, proposing "an examination and reinterpretation of the
American canon, the founding nineteenth-century works, for the 'unspeakable
things unspoken'; for the ways in which the presence of Afro-Americans has
shaped the choices, the language, the structure-the meaning of so much
American literature.' 5 The canon is a melancholic corpus because of what it
excludes but cannot forget. The Afro-American presence, Morrison concludes,
is "the ghost in the machine" (11).
But what about the minority? Can they be melancholic too? If so, who
and what are they forgetting in order to remember? If we were to exhume, as
Morrison suggests, the buried body in the heart of American literature, what
exactly is the nature of the "presence" that would be uncovered? What would
be the morphology of ghostliness?
Figuring the minority has its difficulties. We understand that reparative
and redemptive tendencies underlie much of the intellectual and material
interests in "the minority." Yet as both the "race card" and the Kingston
examples made clear, there is more than a little irony, if not downright
counterproductivity, in the effort to relabel as healthy a condition that has
been diagnosed, and kept, as sickly and aberrant. Melancholia can be quite
contagious. After all, it designates a condition of identity disorder where
subject and object become indistinguishable from one another. The melancholic
object, made neither dead nor fully alive, must experience its own subjectivity
as suspension, as excess and denigration-and in this way, replicate the
melancholic subject. With Kingston's narrator, we see the "good" cultural
melancholic par excellence: one who longs after a vision of herself that excludes
herself. This pathological euphoria, however, merely assents to the dream of
multiculturalism: a utopian no-place where the pathologies of race and gender

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52 THE KENYON REVIEW

miraculously heal themselves. The very idea of the melting pot serves to
celebrate assimilation while continually remarking difference. It is startling
how often in ethnic and immigrant narratives we find overidealization and
euphoria in place of injury.
In Flower Drum Song, a classically bad Hollywood representation of
ethnic conditions, we actually get to see the minority, and specifically the
immigrant, celebrated as illegality, that which came in but cannot be admitted.
Produced in the wake of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, this
movie (as well as its Broadway predecessor) aims to promote assimilation and
reflect a new, positive image of Chinatown across America.6 But what exactly
is the face of this new citizenship? In the opening sequence, we find the two
main characters, the young woman Mei Li and her father, stowed away on a
boat that docks in San Francisco. When Mei Li offers to sing a "traditional
Chinese song" (that Rodgers and Hammerstein creation "A Hundred Million
Miracles") on the streets of San Francisco for money, the father worries about
the propriety of such performance and warns, "It is unlucky to start in a
new country by breaking the law." The irony-that the old man is anxious
about breaking civic law when he has already flagrantly broken the larger law
of immigration-highlights a deeper double bind within "naturalization": to
survive, the stranger who has violated the law must also be an ideal citizen,
one who embodies the law. As he sails through San Francisco's Golden Gate,
the father simultaneously becomes both the illegal alien and the model minority.
Furthermore, illegal status turns out to be the very solution to this national
morality play. In the finale, after despair and frustration, Mei Li finally lights
upon a solution to free herself (and her real object of affection) from the binds
of an arranged marriage. On the threshold of that undesired marriage ceremony,
she announces to her newfound American friends: "I must confess ... my back
is wet!" She declares her own abject status with barely suppressed joy. In
other words, only by exposing herself as an object of prohibition can she
achieve the particularly American dream of the freedom of marrying for love;
only by assenting to illegality can she hope to acquire ideal citizenship. Her
public confession and self-indictment anticipates the naturalization process,
where one acquires citizenship in a rhetoric of rebirth predicated on self-
renunciation ("Do you swear to give up..."). In fact, the one character who
may be said to be an instance of "good" assimilation in the movie-Helen the
seamstress, who seems to weave effortlessly together both her Chinese heritage
and American style-is also the classic odd woman out, whose "just-rightness"
no one chooses. The choices of the "right" kind of love, the "right" kind of
beauty, and the "right" kind of girl in this movie turn out to be a lesson about
the right kind of citizenship. And those who finally attain this national ideal are
precisely those marked as prohibited by law. More than a haunting concept in
America, the "minority subject" presents a haunted subject. Minority identity
reveals an inscription marking the remembrance of absence. Denigration has
conditioned its formation and resuscitation. Not merely the object of dominant

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 ANNE ANLIN CHENG 53

melancholia, the minority (in this case, literally an impossible subject, the illegal
alien) is also a melancholic subject, except that what she renounces is herself.
In the landscape of grief, the boundary between subject and object, the
loser and the thing lost, poses a constant problem. Even Freud's idea of a
proper mourning begins to suffer from melancholic contamination. In order for
proper mourning to take place, one would have to be already, somehow, "over
it." For Freud, mourning entails, curiously enough, a forgetting: "...profound
mourning. . does not recall the dead one."7 Upon a closer look, the kind of
healthy "letting go" Freud delineates goes beyond mere forgetting to complete
eradication. The successful work of mourning does not only forget, it reinstates
the death sentence:

Just as the work of grief, by declaring the object dead and offering the ego the benefit
of continuing to live, impels the ego to give up the object, so each single conflict of
ambivalence, by disparaging the object, denigrating it, even as it were by slaying it, loosens
the fixation of the libido to it. (emphasis added)8

Mourning implies the second killing off of the lost object. The denigration
and murder of the beloved object fortifies the ego. Not only do we note that
"health" here means rekilling a loss already lost, but we have to ask also how
different is this in aim from the melancholic who hangs onto the lost object as
part of the ego in order to live? That is to say, although different in method
and technology (the mourner kills while the melancholic cannibalizes), the
production of denigration and rejection, however re-introjected is concomittant
with the production and survival of "self." The good mourner turns out to be
none other than an ultrasophisticated, and more lethal, melancholic.
In the landscape of racialization, such boundary confusion occurs on
multiple levels: physical, sexual, ontological, terminological. In Carolivia
Herron's disturbing novel Thereafter Johnnie, incest as a trauma of boundary is
offered as a curse of slavery; in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's experimental novel
Dicte6e, the body of the narrator often literally merges into the geography of
division that is modern Korea, while the voice of the autobiographical subject
remains indistinguishable from various forms of cultural dictation; in her well-
known essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston collapses
the question of race into the question of specularity (who is watching; who
is playing for whom). As James Clifford says, the question of boundary is
the ethnic predicament. The point here is not to repathologize the minority,
but to confront the more difficult question of what is a minority without
his/her injury. Contemporary political activities and rhetoric designed to set
matters right cannot really be effective, cannot escape relabeling those it aims
to liberate, until we recognize that our very conceptions of cultural health and
integrity are themselves preconditioned by what have been deemed abnormal or
broken. In the way of Freudian logic, pathology defines health. Racial identity,
as a moment of active self-perception, is almost always simultaneous with the

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54 THE KENYON REVIEW

racialization of another, an instance of oth

most colored when I am thrown against a
not only to the constitution of blackness,
the other's pathology.9 Or, as Nella Larsen's narrator in Passing knows all too
well, race is the company that you keep.
It should be clear by now that race itself lives in America as a melan-
cholic presence. More specifically, racialization-as an act of self-constitution
through denying and re-assimilating the Other-must be conceived of as a
wholly melancholic activity. The rhetoric of compensation, which attempts
to reverse discrimination through inversion, neglects the organization of the
activity that went into producing discrimination, nor can it accommodate the
physical effects of those wounds. There is a possibility that we may not be
able to retrieve an unmarked, unscathed subject under the dirty bandage of
racism. As we saw with Flower Drum Song, Mei Li's presence was always
marked as transgression, and re-marked as such in her final acquisition of a
new homeland. Similarly, we are all too painfully familiar with popular racial
fantasies that circulate within our public sphere, but rather than identifying those
stereotypes yet again or simply denying those clearly troublesome images ("We
aren't like that!"), it seems more fruitful and important to go on to the more
complex question of how melancholic racialization works. To propose that
the minority may have been profoundly affected by racial fantasies is not to
lock him/her back into the stereotypes, but to perform the more important task
of unraveling the deeper identificatory operations-and seductions-produced
by those projections.
If the melancholic minority is busy forgetting herself, with what is she
identifying? We have all heard the wisdom that women and minorities have
internalized dominant cultural demands, but do we really know what that
means? Where does desire come into this equation? It is a dangerous question
to ask what does a minority want. When it comes to political critique, it seems
as if desire itself may be what the minority has been enjoined to forget. In
David Henry Hwang's award-winning play M. Butterfly, the story of a French
diplomat (Gallimard) who after ten years discovers that his Chinese mistress
(Song Liling) was not only a spy but also a man, what remains glaringly missing
from the play is an entertainment of Song's desires. By now M. Butterfly has
become an almost-classic text of how racial fantasies facilitate sexual fantasies;
central to much critical attention has been the play's exposure of the consistent
emasculation of Asian males in white society. Indeed, the play's fundamental
assumption is that Song's sexual deception succeeded because of Gallimard's
racial stereotypes about "the East." Yet as an expose of sexual intrigue and racial
fantasy, M. Butterfly begs the question: aside from his professional objective to
seduce Gallimard, does Song have a personal investment in his disguise? And
what would it mean for the political agenda of the play if he did? In the three
moments of the play when we might have hints of Song's own private fantasies,
we are greeted with silences and deferrals: when Comrade Chin asks why Song

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 ANNE ANLIN CHENG 55

remains in disguise when alone; when the judge questions Song's incredible
acting ability; and when Gallimard questions Song's motivation. In all three
brief instances, Song's answer comes in the form of ellipses and pauses, as
though his desire can only be pronounced as unutterability. Significantly, the
play can see Song only as the object of Gallimard's desire or as the critic of
that desire. It is as though to articulate Song's desire would render him less
"cool" or jeopardize his position as a proper critic of Western racial fantasies.
In other words, Song must not want. His inauthentic performance must remain
inauthentic in order to guarantee the authenticity of his critique.
The notion that cultural assimilation always requires certain acts of
personal relinquishment and even disguise is a common one, easily and
conventionally understood as the price of "fitting in." Think, for example, of the
long literary alignment of "passing" with deception. Postcolonial theorist Homi
Bhabha offers us some insights into the connection between assimilation and
falsehood. He identifies "mimicry" as a colonial, disciplinary injunction and
device, one that is nonetheless doomed to fail. He explains, "colonial mimicry
is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference
that is almost the same, but not quite." 10 By this account, the colonized finds
him/herself in the position of melancholically echoing the master, incorporating
both the master and his own denigration. What we have been calling the
"internalization of the other," Bhabha attributes to authoritative injunction.
Such injunction to mime the dominant can be seen from images such as the
Indian servant dressed as the Englishman to the colonial institutionalization
of language itself. We see here sophisticated versions of the "price of fitting
in." To put it crudely, Bhabha has located the social injunction to assimilate
and that injunction's built-in failure. The colonized subject must be disguised,
mimed, as almost the same, but not quite. His/her incomplete imitation in turn
serves as a sign of assimilative failure, the failure of authenticity.
The concept of melancholic racialization, however, implies that assimi-
lation may be more intimately linked to identity than a mere consequence of
the dominant demand for sameness. In melancholia, assimilation ("acting liko
an internalized other") is a fait accompli, part and parcel of ego formation
for the dominant and the minority, except that with the latter, such doubling
is seen as something false ("acting like someone you're not"). The notion of
racial authenticity is thus finally a cultural judgment which itself disguises
the identificatory assimilation that has already taken place in melancholic
racialization: "I am constituted by an other who finally must, and must not, be
me." The story of M. Butterfly suggests that deception might be more deeply
affective than merely facilitating assimilation; rather, "passing" may share a
profoundly similar logic with the activity of identity itself. Near the end of the
play Song seems to have forgotten the terms of his own game. We see him
protest startlingly and tellingly, "So-you [Gillimard] never really loved me?
Only when I was playing a part?""l The blindness of that question reveals
Song as having been seduced by his own mise-en-scene. The failure of Song's

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 56 THE KENYON REVIEW

deception comes from this plunge into the reality of that deception. And that
failure of authenticity has the very specific effect of creating a sense of "the real
self": Song cries, "I'm your butterfly... it was always me." 12 The seduction
of authenticity turns out to promise nothing less than the possibility of a pure
self: ".. . it was always me."
In his introduction to Abraham and Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic Word
(itself a response to Freud on melancholia), Jacques Derrida similarly implies
that the disguise may be fundamental to an act of identification:

The first hypothesis of The Magic Word... supposes a redefinition of the Self (the systems
of introjections) and of the fantasy of incorporation....
The more the self keeps the foreign element as a foreigner inside itself, the more it
excludes it. The self mimes introjection. But this mimicry with its redoubtable logic depends
on clandestinity. Incorporation operates clandestinely with a prohibition it neither accepts
nor transgresses. (underlining added)'3

The "foreigner inside" lives as the "self." To racially assimilate (in the senses
of blending in and taking in) implies an act of public and subjective disguise:
not only the disguise of the self in the traditional sense of "taking it," but also
in the deeper sense of remaking the self through the other, a profoundly self-
constituting act. What I called the pure self that Song in M. Butterfy asserts is
figured after the master. Song does not come to power in the end nor assume
the success of his political critique by acquiring some authentic Chinese male
identity. On the contrary, he does so by donning an Armani suit and adopting
the colonial voice: "You think I could've pulled this off if I wasn't full of
pride? . . . It took arrogance, really -to believe you can will . . . the destiny of
another." 14 One might say Song has not only learned how to be with a white
man, but also how to be the white man. The difficult lesson of M. Butterfly
therefore is not the existence of fantasy stereotypes as the playwright himself
asserts in the Afterword, but the more disturbing idea that fantasy stereotypes
may be the very ways in which we come to know and love someone..., come
to know and love ourselves.

Melancholia has thus seeped into every corner of our landscape. Is there
any getting over it? First it seems more important than ever to recognize
that identity built on loss is symptomatic of both the dominant and the
marginalized. Second, at the risk of speaking like a true melancholic, perhaps
minority discourse might prove to be most powerful when it resides within
the consciousness of melancholia itself, when it can maintain a "negative
capability" between neither dismissing, nor sentimentalizing the minority. Let
us return to the hauntings of Invisible Man. Ellison's political critique in that
novel seems precisely the dramatization of a self-reflexive melancholia, a man
whose invisibility affects the margin as well as the center:

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 ANNE ANLIN CHENG 57

I am invisible.... Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as
though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me
they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination.... 15

In that hall of mirrors, who distorts whom? As much as racial blindness renders
the narrator invisible, his invisibility also reflects emptiness back on those
gazers as well. If he has been assimilated only through his invisibility, then
he also renders dissimilar and strange the status of their visibility. Here we
have the potential for a kind of subversive assimilation, a kind of mimetic
dissimulation inherent in, though differently inflected by, Bhabha's "discourse
of mimicry." The phantasm of the narrator's invisibility imitates the phantasm
that is mainstream society.
The character who embodies this strategy of imitation is of course the
phantasmatic figure of Rinehart. Literally the real invisible man in the text,
Rinehart never appears-except as pure appearance: Rinehart the runner,
Rine the gambler, Rine the briber, Rine the lover, pimp, and reverend. He
stands as the figure of a figure. To try to locate Rinehart's "true" identity
would be to miss the lesson of Rinehart: who you are depends on whom
you are talking to, which community you are in, and who is watching
your performance. Embodying dissimulative potentials, glaringly visible in
his invisibility, Rinehart operates and structures a network of connections in
Harlem from religion to prostitution to the law. A man defined by costumes and
props, he is at once the ultimate "outsider" and "insider," making visible the
contingency of identity and perverting the lines of power-or at least, exposing
power as positionality. As a parable for plurality, as a continually re-signifiable
sign, Rinehart critiques the mainstream ideal of an uncompromising indi-
viduality.
Rinehart as an event of visual performance demonstrates first that the act
of identification is dependent on representation, and thus draws our attention
to the power dynamics of viewer and spectatorship; second, that the act
of representation involves simultaneously, on a deeper level, an act of dis-
identification. To impersonate Rinehart is to become Rinehart: "Something was
working on me [the narrator], and profoundly... being mistaken for him .., my
entire body started to itch, as though I had just been removed from a plaster
cast ... you could actually make yourself anew." 16 Yet even as the narrator
celebrates a rebirth through his disguise, he suffers from a kind of identity
aphasia, asking repeatedly, "Who actually was who?" Becoming a re-signable
sign pays a price of its own. "It" is not just a costume, as Song in M. Butterfly
has found out. The site of identification is presented as difficult and ambivalent
precisely because there is a cost in every identity staging.
This liberation is thus provisional, if not downright shattering. By
impersonating Rinehart, the narrator arrives not at an identity, but the phantasm
that is the mode of identification. To follow Rinehartism is to plunge into the
very heart of racial melancholia:

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 58 THE KENYON REVIEW

So I'd accept it, I'd explore it, rine and heart. I'd plunge into it with both feet and they'd
gag. Oh, but wouldn't they gag.... Yes, and I'd let them swoller me until they vomited or
burst wide open. Let them gag on what they refuse to see.'7

"Gagging" literalizes the melancholic condition of race in America: we gag on

what we refuse to see. American culture is continually confronted by ghosts
it can neither spit out nor swallow. Rinehart, the "Spiritual Technologist,"
recommends a remedy for that social malady: "Behold the Invisible," 18
suggesting that only by recognizing invisibility can we begin to understand
the conditions of visibility. Earlier I asked what is the status of the "presence"
which Toni Morrison wants us to uncover. Is she referring to "real" African-
American presence or the phantasm of African-American presence? I propose
that the answer can only be the latter. The racialization and phantomization of
African-Americans exist to produce "American" presence. The always ghostly
presence of African-Americans in American literature implies that the entire
process of racialization, of configuring visibility (who is white, who is black;
who is visible, who is not), must be considered as itself melancholic. The
act of delineating absence preconditions presence. Race in America is thus
"stuck" within the Moebius strip of inclusion and exclusion: an identification
predicated on dis-identity. It is a fear of contamination that works itself out by
contamination, a remembering of a forgetting that cannot be remembered.
And nothing is more disturbing than being made to witness the simultane-
ity of that duality. This, to sidetrack for a moment, is perhaps why the theater of
Anna Deveare Smith holds such resonance. Each character is constituted, made
real for us, by his/her counterdefinition to another, and the table keeps turning.
Anyone who has partaken of Smith's performances understands the discomfort
of being made to watch the fine line between speaking for, speaking as, and
speaking against. In Smith's theater of incorporation, one sees on a single
stage the agon, the multifaceted, conflictual views between racialized peoples
(even within individuals), and the inconsolability of each of their positions. One
gets a feeling too that there will never be enough justice, enough reparation,
enough guilt, pain, or anger to make up for the racial wounds cleaved into the
American psyche-remembered by both the dominant and the marginalized as
incommensurability itself. With Smith's peculiar brand of impersonation, it is
as if only in imitation, in the bodily occupation of the other, that we come to see
paradoxically an alternative to the traps of representation. That is, representation
has frequently and rightly been criticized for its colonizing potentials. But
Smith's art suggests that representation, mimicry even, may be employed as
a form of performative counteroccupation, whereby the act of placing oneself
in the other's place exposes one's vulnerability to that performed other. More
profoundly, her paradoxical polyphonic monologue dramatizes the psychical
truth that to speak is to speak the other.
Invisible Man hints that the first solution to that melancholic condition is
not to recover a presence that never was, but to recognize the disembodiment

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 ANNE ANLIN CHENG 59

that is both the master and the slave. Rinehart's metaphoric disembodiment
becomes literalized in the narrator's own epiphanic hallucination, the scene of
castration. In a state of neither dreaming nor waking, he confronts the groups
that he has encountered and their particular brands of incorporative histories
and ideologies:

... I lay the prisoner of a group consisting of Jack and Emerson and Bledsoe and Norton
and Ras and the school superintendent.... they were demanding that I return to them and
were annoyed with my refusal.
"No," I said. "I am through with all your illusions and lies..."
But now they came forward with a knife... and I felt the bright red pain as they took the
two bloody blobs and cast them over the bridge, and out of my anguish I saw them curve
up and catch beneath the apex of the curving arch of the bridge, to hang there, dripping
down through the sunlight into the dark red water.
"Now you're free of illusions," Jack said, pointing to my seed wasting upon the air.
"How does it feel to be free of one's illusions?"
And now I answered, "Painful and empty... But look... there's your universe, and that
drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you've made, all you're going to
make...." 19

The narrator's dismemberment, his scattered, castrated ego becomes the resis-
tance against group consolidations and signifying processes. By trying to recruit
the narrator as a mirror image of themselves, by castrating him to do so, the
various social organizations incorporate the very loss that they instigate. If
history enacts denigration, then history will be structured by that brutalization.
This scene demonstrates that "to be free of illusions and lies" is viscerally
brutalizing, but it also imagines that freedom might occur in the very place
of that rupture.
This scene speculates that freedom comes not from historical or social lib-
eration, but specifically from the renouncement of individual identity ("painful
and empty"), because the vocabulary of freedom itself can be deployed by
the rhetoric of enslavement (as illustrated by the rhetoric of the Brotherhood).
"To be free of illusions" paradoxically and crucially means to be free of the
ideologies of authenticity. Throughout the book, the narrator has been searching
for visibility, individualism, as well as communal identification. The only vision
of individualism, however, comes from the state of disappearance, of pain
and emptiness-a shattered rather than reconstituted subject. In that scene of
castration and relinquishment, invisibility has been theorized as a condition
of disembodiment and abstraction, as an escape from "illusions." Ellison
locates identity, not in uncompromising individualism, but in intrasubjective
negotiations-negotiations that are experienced intersubjectively and violently.
The resolution of Invisible Man remains far from certain. What is the "socially
responsible role" that the narrator will play by the end of the novel? The
narrative has offered us more questions than any final affirmation or particular
course of action. The narrator informs us: "So it is now I denounce and

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 6o THE KENYON REVIEW

defend... I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no.... So
I approach it through division."20 Ellison's politics in this work offer us
description rather than prescription.
"Community" embodies its inverse: exclusion. Invisible Man remains
wary of the very group ideologies that "create" and isolate African-American
communities in the first place. As the enclave that protects but also marginal-
izes, Harlem is not free from that "soul-sickness." The narrator tells us that he
has been "as invisible to Mary [the nurturing 'mother' in the heart of Harlem]
as [he] had been to the Brotherhood." 2' When he asks of Clifton's death,
"Why did he choose to plunge into nothingness, into the void of faceless faces,
of soundless voices, laying outside history,"22 he anticipates his own falling
underground, significantly on the edge between Harlem and the mainstay of
the city. Invisible Man collapses the literal question of "where you stand" into
the metaphoric and political question of "where you stand," and exposes its
positionality. The discourse of identity fosters division and dis-identification as
well. Consequently, Ellison's political thesis has always seemed to me more
radical than minority politics find comfortable. It is radical in its profound
undermining of group ideology and of communal possibilities. The political
platform of Invisible Man, contrary to the appeal of the representative novel and
its ethnic bildung, relies not on identity-because the protagonist never arrives
at one-but on the nonexistence of identity, on invisibility with its assimilative
and dissimulative possibilities. Yet this place of political discomfort provides
the most intense examination of what it means to adopt a political stance.
Words from the invisible man remain to haunt us: "You carry part of
your sickness with you" (575). You carry the foreigner inside. This malady
of doubleness, I argue, is the melancholy of race, a dis-ease of location and
memory, a persistent fantasy of identification that cleaves and cleaves to the
marginalized and the master.

NOTES

'Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (N
York: Vintage, 1979) 108.

2Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," Collected Papers: Vol. IV (London: Hogarth,
1953).

3Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1990) 4.

4Ellison 36.

5Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American

Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Winter 1989): 11.

6Although the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, it was not until the Immigration Act
of 1965 that the national-quota system on Chinese immigrants was finally lifted. Thus Flower Drum

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 ANNE ANLIN CHENG 6I

Song was produced, significantly, at a time when Chinese immigration patterns to the U.S. were on
the brink of great changes.

7Freud 153.

'Freud 169.

9Zora Neale Hurston, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," I Love Myself When I Am Laugh-
ing... And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive (New York: The Feminist Press,
1979) 154.

l0Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October 28
(Spring 1984): 126.

"David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York: Penguin Books, 1986) 89.

12Hwang 89.

13Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans.
Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), xv, xvii.

14Hwang 85.

15Ellison 3.

16Ellison 498-99.

17Ellison 508.

18Ellison 495.

19Ellison 569-70.

20Ellison 580.

21Ellison 57 1.

22Ellison 441.

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