Dear class, (?)

While I was reading Pym I was struck by the moments of the text that pulled focus to, and juxtaposed, characteristics of 19th century American race dynamics and culture with the mores of contemporary American lit.  I’m writing in reference to a section where Johnson slips into a critical mode on page twenty-eight.  Johnson begins by offering a passage from Poe’s text that acts as description of the Tsalal people:

“They were about the ordinary stature of Europeans, but of a more muscular and brawny frame.  Their complexion a jet black, with thick and long woolly hair.  They were clothed in skins of an unknown black animal, shaggy and silky, and made to fit the body with some degree of skill, the hair being inside, except where turned out about the neck, wrists, and ankles.  Their arms consisted principally of clubs, of a dark, and apparently very heavy wood.”

This description is problematic for Johnson because, according to him, these beings who are exoticised and, in a way, demonised create tension because of the racial currents that run through Poe’s work.  Johnson then continues, “Not just skin of black, which is the classic European mythic negative, but woolly hair to match.”  Here, Johnson is situating the  characterization of these peoples within a larger historical narrative.  Then Johnson writes, “These brothers are black.  These brothers are so black they wear only the skins of animals that are black.”  The narrative voice shifts from a vantage point that is critical of Poe’s work into a contemporary vernacular that flies in two registers: a sardonic mode and an accusatory mode.

In this section, and many other sections, Johnson’s work can be evaluated under the unoriginal criticism that he is simply finding what he wants to see in Poe’s work.  Queer theorists, Gender theorists, and Race theorists are all highly accused of this.  At first, I felt as if Johnson could have been problematizing issues that weren’t present in Poe’s work, and that Johnson, furthermore, was manipulating the vernacular of an era to suit his criticism.  So!  I went to the OED and looked at the usage of the word “black” to describe people of African descent.  The usage at this time is history was present, but it doesn’t seem to have been used with as much frequency as other words.  This raised a few problems for me.  After that point, I chose to acknowledge Poe’s use of descriptors in two ways.  One could have been racist, but his passage here does not seem to be overtly so.  Moreover, the light and the dark has been typified throughout the entirety of literary history to have moral implications.  So, I guess what I’m saying is that in some places Johnson’s argument is bogus.

Also, his tendency to shift into contemporary vernacular makes me a little mad.  It seems as if he is creating a double standard between the vernacular used in Poe’s era—if viewed in racist terminology—and the accepted use of terms like “brother” by people existing within Johnson’s community.  It reminds me of the way that “fag” is, and has been, reclaimed by the LGBTQ community.  I don’t understand how a word can be reclaimed by, or for a community, but then this reclamation limits the usage further to the individuals who do not exist within the community.  To me, in this section of Johnson’s text, it seems as if he is precluding his ability to offer a critical argument on Poe’s text based in and upon his race, but at the same time, he is excluding other types of readings from readers by limiting his language.

This thought isn’t completely developed yet, but I’m sure it’ll have baked all the way through by class on Tuesday!

 

Best,

Sam