We were the end of the line. We were the children of the immigrants who had camped at the city's back door … we were Brownsville—Brunsvil, as the old folks said—the dust of the earth to all Jews with money, and notoriously a place that measured success by our skill in getting away from it. So that when poor Jews left, even Negroes, as we said, found it easy to settle on the margins of Brownsville.

—Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City

These were the poorest people of the South, who poured into New York City during the decade following the Great Depression. … They felt as the Pilgrims must have felt when they were coming to America. But these descendants of Ham must have been twice as happy as the Pilgrims, because they had been catching twice the hell. … The children of these disillusioned colored pioneers inherited the total lot of their parents—the disappointments, the anger. To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he's already in the promised land?

—Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

Certain pairings of texts from different literary or cultural traditions—say, Conrad's Nostromo and García Márquez's Hundred Years of Solitude, or Gogol's story “The Overcoat” and Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener”—make a natural kind of sense, marriages, if you will, born of more than just creative matchmaking. But Saul Bellow and Chester Himes? A high-cultural Nobelist and an equally driven, willful ex-convict, the one a testament to the ideology of literary man as thinker and of Jew as “humanist,” the other to that of writer as raw force and Black man as art—“my form, myself”?¹

Imagine a line extending from the totemic fiction of Malamud's Tenants at one end to the polemic friction between Blacks and Jews, as replayed by Harold Cruse and Cynthia Ozick, at the other.² Call it a single narrative of blackjewishrelations (which I spell as one word to emphasize the inflated quality of this particular piece of symbolic capital)—a literary history of sorts, short but bitter. Haven't the organizing structures of fiction and journalism, then, already beaten literary criticism to the punch? Where, in other words, is there space on that “line” for another “point,” another story?

With its hypertrophied Jew and its elemental Black, Malamud's novel alone would seem to consign the unlikely conjunction of real-life writers like Bellow and Himes to the twilight zone of the uncanny. Ozick's and Cruse's (albeit dated) analyses of the cultural politics pitting Black intellectuals against Jewish undercut the very idea. No doubt Bellow (and Himes, were he still alive) would chafe at being so associated even on the accessory, ad hoc plane of “representational thematics,” the interpretative school to which my “thematics of recognition” belongs.

Nevertheless, of all possible paired texts by American Black and Jewish authors, If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Victim seem to me one of the most apropos, for in conjunction they uncannily convert exegesis into political, and ethical, exigency, into an ethical-politics of recognition. If we regard literary history and criticism alike as venues of “social space,” a space formed by the ligatures, the binding ties, which interventive readings forge or create, then “intertextuality” signifies a critical task as much as a property of texts themselves.³

Whether the lived realities of anti-Semitism and racism can be doubletracked (and I do not gainsay the need to do so, if I do not feel sanguine about the outcome), an identity politics which cordons off these texts from one another or backlights them against the separate horizons of “African American” and “Jewish American” literature makes for a pinched and hamstrung criticism. A dynamic of engagement, however, places these novels in a relationship of genuine tension, facing off in a textual encounter. Such “dialogizing” of literary invention by Blacks and Jews does not necessarily carry over into public discourse or Lebenswelt. (Gloss, not glass, best describes representation's relation to the Real anyway, as Brecht knew when he endorsed cigarette smoke interposed before his aesthetic “mirrors.”⁴) But neither is literary criticism merely academic with recognition as the shared optic for reading these texts, bending their combined light toward a critically engineered public space. To the degree that “the public” is the vector generated by points, or acts, of ethical encounter, literary analysis of this sort should have genuine ethical force.

Accordingly, the term “face,” a recurrent motif in these texts, functions as part of a “thematics of recognition,” a representational grammar internal to the texts themselves. But as a metaphor for staging ethical encounter, it also serves as an external hinge between their African American and Jewish American imaginaries, hence facing Black and Jew. “Face” functions in a frankly Levinassian mode here as well, with the role assigned to ethics in my formulation “an ethical-politics of recognition.” With the qualifying adjective supervening in the phrase, “politics” becomes the more dependent and anchored term. “Ethical-politics” thus signifies a politicizing of specifically Levinassian themes and categories here, and the “politics of recognition” consequently undergoes a certain skewing, at least so far as its terms have been defined by Charles Taylor and others.⁵

If we take the title of Emmanuel Levinas's essay “Politics After!” at face value, “politics” becomes the supervening term in an already ethical formulation; the political moment, while crucial, arrives late (or prematurely, as the case may be). Even if we grant, with Roger Simon, that the politics of recognition is “based on the assumption that the public assertion of the collective history to which one belongs is supposed to serve as a corrective to some deficit in self-esteem,”⁶ selfhood's esteem already labors under a deficit incurred vis-à-vis the Other. To put it another way, before victimization becomes badge, flag, or redoubt, it is grasping hand and seeing eye, the phenomenal constitutiveness of human encounter. “The articulation of identities,” as Simon notes, “cannot be reduced to a personal desire for cultural acknowledgment. What's at stake must be written in different terms.”⁷

Asa Leventhal, one of several candidates for the titular condition of Bellow's Victim, comes not from Brownsville but from Hartford, Connecticut, that is, from one of those “middle class districts that showed the way to New York” rather than from somewhere truly impoverished. Still, having for a time drifted on New York's Lower East Side, “starved and thin,” he has learned that Kazin's “getting away from it” can also mean getting away with it: “He had almost fallen in with that part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful (he never forgot the hotel on lower Broadway), the part that did not get away with it—the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.”⁸ In Kazin's terms, Bellow's protagonist has come to mark a division between a “they” and a “we,” and we must conclude with him that “to settle on the margins” promises a less than happy ending, tantamount as it is to being set apart, singled out, enclosed.

“Even,” pace Kazin, for “Negroes.” Take, for instance, Bob Jones, the titular—though elided—“nigger” in Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go. Conversant, like Leventhal, with the dilemmas of marginality, of the “end of the line,” of they and we, Jones too learns hard lessons of mis-placement. And, in a sense, he also knows what getting away from/with it means. But his fate remains far more penumbral than Asa's, and he catches “twice the hell,” since for Bob place rhymes much more than accidentally with race. Framed for rape at the end of the novel (a trumped-up charge in which the court colludes), he is given “a break” by the judge and allowed to enlist in the army rather than be incarcerated:

“If I let you join the armed forces—any branch you want—will you give me your word you'll stay away from white women and keep out of trouble?” I wanted to just break out and laugh like the Marine in my dream, laugh and keep on laughing. 'Cause all I ever wanted was just a little thing—just to be a man. But I kept a straight face, got the words through my oversized lips. “Yes sir, I promise.” … Two hours later I was in the Army.⁹

That is how Himes's novel ends, and a similar mood of éminence grise and scene of escort occurs in the last paragraph of The Victim:

“Wait a minute, what's your idea of who runs things?” said Leventhal. But he heard Mary's voice at his back. Allbee ran in and sprang up the stairs. The bell continued its dinning, and Leventhal and Mary were still in the aisle when the houselights went off. An usher showed them to their seats.¹⁰

How it feels to be “Colored” (or Jewishme/Jewish) or (Black) like me: we, in contradistinction to you, in relation to they—that most durable of tropes in the literature of ethnic auto/biography. Kazin and Brown sketch it in my epigraphs as the difference between identity's home and its beyond. Bellow's and Himes's texts, however, begin in situ, taking the otherness of place for granted as merely laying the ground for the otherness of person—or of self. Even a matter as ostensibly benign as pronominal deixis—the marking out of you or your, those or my, “people”—in these novels demonstrates an equally underlying politics and poetics; indeed, pronouns and proper nouns could, in a way, be considered their twin “theme”—the discursive machinery, the “attack-words,” in Elias Canetti's phrase, of anti-Semitism and racism.¹¹

A related but even more embodied thematic pattern in these two novels, however, propels The Victim and If He Hollers Let Him Go from their very first pages: a persistent, even obsessive, concern with the human face as subject and object, as tenor and vehicle, ultimately as field for recognition. Bellow's novel begins with two epigraphs, a parable of accountability from The 1001 Nights and the following quotation from Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater: “Be that as it may, now it was upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to reveal itself; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens, faces imploring, wrathful, despairing; faces that surged upward by thousands, by myriads, by generations.” In the case of Himes's text, the novel proper opens with a series of hallucinatory visages. In the first of five dream-set pieces corresponding to the five days of the story's action and telescoping the novel's propulsive anatomy of racial animosity, Jones dreams of a Black man given the task of “look[ing] at the dead body of Frankie Childs in the face.” Jones then turns over in his sleep and conjures up a second tableau of humiliation, a dream which centers on his own excruciated fascination with two white faces persistently laughing at his own. Upon waking, Jones laments that he has been recently greeting the day with fear and trembling, which he correlates with the “handicap” of race, now brought home to him all the more powerfully by recalling “the look of people's faces when you asked them about a job.”¹²

In fact, the differentia specifica of figure, physiognomy, and hue runs absolutely riot in Himes's novel, an obsessive feature of the text's descriptive field:

The first to be called was a medium-sized, well built, fast walking dark brown man of about thirty-five.

She was a full-bodied, slow-motioned home girl with a big broad flat face, flat nosed and thick-lipped; yellow but not bright.

He was a thin, wiry nervous Irishman with a blood-red, beaked face and close set bright blue eyes.

[I] straightened up, face to face, with a tall white girl in a leather welder's suit … a peroxide blonde with a large-featured, overly made-up face, and she had a large, bright-painted fleshy mouth, kidney shaped.

A short, dumpy, brown-skinned girl with slow-rolling eyes and a tiny pouting mouth let us in.

A light-complexioned, simple-looking girl with a pretty face and dangling hair sat on the arm of an empty chair. … A slim, good-looking fellow about her colour with conked yellow hair and a hairline mustache sat on the middle of the davenport.¹³

At the same time, the novel compulsively stages scenes of face-to-face “recognition”:

Something drew her gaze and she looked up into my eyes. We held gazes until I stopped just in front of her.

Looking up, I caught a young captain's eye. He didn't turn away when our gazes met; he didn't change expression; he just watched us with the intent stare of the analyst.

The white woman next to me stopped talking and looked around. I could feel her gaze on me. … Our eyes met. … She looked away after a moment and I looked into the mirror and met the eyes of the man on the other side of her.

We both jumped back from pure reflex. Then recognition came into his eyes and his face turned greenish white. It froze him, nailed him to the spot. For a moment I was stunned. I'd never seen a white man scared before, not craven, not until you couldn't see the white for the scare.¹⁴

In the case of Bellow's novel, albeit less blatantly than Himes's, the entire narrative and its imagistic tension follow, one could say, from the looks traded by and the prolonged mutual “studying” of two faces—Leventhal's and his nemesis, Allbee's—a Jewish and a non-Jewish face, the one delineated as such, the other through implicit contrast (we are told mainly that Allbee is tall and blonde):

Some such vague thing was in Leventhal's mind while he waited his turn at the drinking spout, when suddenly he had a feeling that he was not merely looked at but watched. Unless he was greatly mistaken a man was scrutinizing him, pacing slowly with him as the line moved.

Well, now you've found out that I still exist and you're going home, is that it? … I mean that you just wanted to have a look at me … wanted to see me.

But now and then, moving from cage to cage, gazing at the animals, Leventhal, in speaking to Philip, or smoking, or smiling, was so conscious of Allbee, so certain he was of being scrutinized, that he was able to see himself as if through a strange pair of eyes: the side of his face, the palpitation of his throat. … Changed in this way into his own observer, he was able to see Allbee, too … his raggedly overgrown neck, the bulge of his cheeks, the color of blood in his ear.

He had a particularly vivid recollection of the explicit recognition in Allbee's eyes which he could not doubt was the double of his own.¹⁵

While these passages may suggest merely descriptive contours for a thematics of “face,” Levinas's phenomenological ethics can provide more elaborate exegetical possibilities. Extending “face and recognition” in Levinassian ethics to the thematics of ethnic literature also politicizes Levinas's work in turn, thereby allowing us to trace one path from exegesis to ethics and back again, “from ethics to exegesis,” in Levinas's terms.¹⁶

In Levinas's philosophy, “ethics” means more than an account of norms for human sociality; it is first philosophy (and therefore prior to ontology) because it marks the very ground of being, its power lying precisely in its ab-original character. Levinassian ethics sees “in justice and injustice a primordial access to the other beyond all ontology.”¹⁷ This is not justice as fairness, as Rawls has defined it.¹⁸ The “original position” for Levinas is not predicated upon a veil of ignorance which guarantees each person a similarity of position to, but not vis-à-vis with, all the others; neither is it the rationally willed categorical imperative of a Kantian moral agent vis-à-vis objective norms of social relation. Nor, finally, is it the communitarian ideal of a society rooted in attachments, hydra-headed in its collective vis-à-vis. Instead, this “original position” is simply, and radically, vis-à-vis: the intersubjective drama of face-to-face encounter, the independent self “unseated” from selfhood by the moral claim posed by the other person in his/her alterity. As lived obligation, as relatedness “undergone,” ethics, then, is featured and bodied forth by visage. Ethics is presystematic because it stands above all as manifested, that is, as directly experienced through the concrete, immanent, and sensuous encounter with the Other. And it is the human face, a primordial “upsurge,” which marks the site of such encounter. “Even when he does not regard me,” Levinas fondly quotes the Song of Songs, “he regards me.”

Along with its power to show forth—its phenomenal character—the face is defined for Levinas by its capacity for language. The face as primordial manifestation speaks, and in so doing enjoins responsibility; it says, “You will not kill.” As Levinas explains,

“Thou shalt not kill” or “Thou shalt love thy neighbor” not only forbids the violence of murder: it also concerns all the slow and invisible killing committed in our desires and our vices, in all the innocent cruelties of natural life, in our indifference of “good conscience” to what is far and what is near, even in the haughty obstinacy of our objectifying and our thematizing, in all the consecrated injustices due to our atomic weight of individuals and the equilibrium of our social orders.¹⁹

The biblical topos here is not incidental to the argument, for Levinas has particularized the metaphysical thrust of all his work—independent of his philosophical writings—in a series of essays on Jewish identity and in Talmudic commentary.²⁰ But particularity serves as both problem and problematic here. On the one hand, Levinas typically identifies it with privileged (i.e., “seated”) positions of autonomy, a positionality that he castigates:

The original perseverance of being in its being, of the individualism of being, the persistence or insistence of beings in the guise of individuals jealous for their part, this particularism of the inert, substantivized into things, particularism of the enrooted vegetable being, of the wild animal fighting for its existence, and of the soul, the “owner and interested party” Bossuet speaks of, this particularism exacerbated into egoism or into political “totalities,” ready or readying themselves for war, is reversed into “Thou shalt not kill,” into the care of one being for another being, into non-in-difference of one toward the other.²¹

Or, to put it another way, the “narcissism of little differences” (Freud) simply picks up where primary narcissism leaves off. Yet, on the other hand, Levinas just as consistently privileges the specific textual and prophetic traditions of Jewish peoplehood as uniquely embedded particulars grounding a universal drive toward justice: Israel as “a figure in which a primordial mode of the human is revealed.”²² Elsewhere, he explicates “Judaism” as follows:

As a prophetic moment of human reason where every man—and all of man—end[s] up redefining one another, Judaism would not mean simply a nationality, a species in a type and contingency of History. Judaism, rather, is a rupture of the natural and the historical … as if Jewish destiny were a crack in the shell of imperturbable being and the awakening to an insomnia in which the inhuman is no longer covered up and hidden by the political necessities which it shapes, and no longer excused by their universality.²³

A similar argument can be—and has been—made about race, such as Frantz Fanon's analysis of hypostatized Blackness: “[The Jew] and I may be separated by the sexual question, but we have one point in question. Both of us stand for evil.”²⁴ As even the sexual distinction drawn here is debatable, the unifying point, I think, is symbolic capital, the capacity to “stand for,” to represent both particularly and universally. And indeed, Levinas expressly concerns himself with the presymbolic, or what we might call the precultural—ethics as a dimension of height which arrests and contests the laterality, or mutual translatability, of independent realms and nationhoods.²⁵ Height is ascribed to ethics but also, more vexedly, to “Judaism”—a singular witness to the irruption of ethics into being and, more concretely, of what Levinas calls “Holy History” into the ongoing formation and dissolution of cultures.²⁶

Now, reckoning seriously with such an emphatic defense of exceptionality as the “formation and expression of the universal”—and Jewish exceptionality, at that—would seem to upend the very question of a pluralism of texts and of peoples; even to juxtapose culturally specific documents, as I do here, would be to incur Levinas's punning and double-edged charge of “disorientation”: a distracting “saraband” of contrived diversity.²⁷ Moreover, his solution—the specificity of Judaism—offers, it seems, no wider interpretative applicability, not least in the domain of secular, culturally particular literatures. Longitude, not latitude, plots the always prior place of Jewish particularity for Levinas.

Indeed, both of our texts here may be read as fortuitously dramatizing Levinas's metaphor of “awakening to an insomnia”: each of the five days which comprise the action of If He Hollers Let Him Go, for example, begins with Bob Jones's awakening from disturbed sleep to the greater nightmare of everyday racism; and throughout The Victim Asa Leventhal either has his sleep interrupted by visits from his nemesis or has felt “threatened by something while he slept.” Even so, neither novel develops its particular, ethnically specific “case” after the fashion of Levinas's paradoxically transcendental/exceptionalist model.

Or does it? Is there any approach that would both unify the texts and extend, perhaps challenge, Levinas's work? Two obstacles in Levinas's thought seem to hamper its usefulness for a criticism-as-ethical-politics: (1) “face” is identified not with culturally marked features but with “abstract man disengaged from all culture”;²⁸ and (2) “particularity” signifies not difference but uniqueness (the particularity of goi echad, of a “unique nation,” as in the petitionary [Tachanun] prayer of the Jewish daily service). The second is admittedly the thornier difficulty, as Levinas plainly demonstrates in a section of “Judaism and Revolution” entitled “Politics and Violence”: “We [the people of Israel] are a vineyard more complicated than a plot of land that is cultivated; only its owner, sublime particularism, is equal to the task of removing the thorns.”²⁹ That is, G-d acts singularly, and redemptively, in Jewish history. This is not the place to assess such a claim, but certainly other grand narratives of cultural and ethnic misfortune can claim the identical privilege of defining collective identity through the particularist removal of historically contingent thorns. More succinctly and pointedly, a universal moral indemnity vibrates through, and rescues, human history.

The other obstacle (and the more relevant one here) has already been extensively redressed in Narrative Ethics, where I argue for the constitutive “dress” of what appear to metaphysicians' eyes, perhaps, to be subsidiary accoutrements of identity. Thus in Stephen Crane's story “The Monster,” Melville's Benito Cereno, and Richard Wright's Native Son, ethical homicide, in Levinas's sense—“the indifference of ‘good conscience’ to what is near and what is far”—means the murder done to Black faces by White eyes. The failure, or abrogation, of recognition in these texts devolves upon an impaired moral faculty which perceives (and dehumanizes) faces that are racially and culturally particular. If “violence can aim only at a face” (in Levinas's memorable phrase), at the emblem and core of humanity, the exterior feature of interiority par excellence, then (in homage to Ralph Ellison) violence aimed at Black or Jewish faces would limn Black or Jewish masks.³⁰

We often process physiognomic information in fiction as simply the establishing material of vraisemblance; this, the text is telling us, is a fully featured “character.” And yet, in The Victim, Bellow renders faces and face-to-faces with an exactitude unremarkable in itself perhaps, but which gathers piquancy in light of the ambient air of mystification hovering about the plotted circumstances of recognition.³¹Something here is flagging our attention:

Leventhal's figure was burly, his head large, his nose, too, was large. He had black hair, coarse waves of it, and his eyes under their intergrown brows were intensely black and of a size unusual in adult faces. … They seemed to disclose an intelligence not greatly interested in its own powers, as if preferring not to be bothered by them, indifferent; and this indifference appeared to be extended to others. He did not look sullen but rather unaccommodating, impassive.³²

Bellow's eye for the discrete particular notwithstanding, this text (whose burden is being “summoned” to account) works in particular by soliciting us directly to look at its dynamics of looking:

The park was even more crowded than before, and noisy. There was another revivalist band on the corner, and the blare of the two joined confusingly above the other sounds. The lamps were yellowed, covered with flies and moths. On one of the paths an old man, sunburned, sinewy, in a linencap, was shining shoes. The fountain ran with a green, leaden glint. Children in their underclothing waded and rolled in the spray, the parents looking on. Eyes seemed softer than by day, and larger, and gazed at one longer, as though in the dark heat some interspace of reserve had been crossed and strangers might approach one another with a kind of recognition. You looked and thought, at least, that you knew whom you had seen.³³

Immediately after this description, Kirby Allbee (Leventhal's antagonist in the full classical sense) accosts him. Leventhal muses, “My god, my god, what kind of fish is this? One of those guys who wants you to think they can see to the bottom of your soul.” A dance of eyes, faces, and recognitive looks fills out the episode, reaching a pitch in the following passage:

Leventhal grimly looked at him in the light that came through the leaves. He [Allbee] had been spying on him, and the mystery was why! How long had he been keeping watch on him and for what reason—what grotesque reason? Allbee returned his look, examining him as he was examined, in concentration and seriousness. … And in the loom of these eyes and with the warmth of the man's breath on his face, for they were crowded together on the beach, Leventhal suddenly felt that he had been singled out to be the object of some freakish, insane process, and for an instant he was filled with dread.³⁴

Now, certainly, alternative phenomenologies of “the look” can be brought to bear here, as plausibly from, say, Hegel or Sartre, or even Erving Goffman, as from Levinas. But, in the context of the idea that “strangers might approach one another with a kind of recognition” (what Levinas will call l'approche du prochain) and a sensation of being “singled out” (what Levinas will call “the subject … unseated by a wordless accusation”), the recognition scene at this juncture in the text seems nothing short of uncanny—as, in truth, it does to Leventhal himself:

Any derelict panhandler or bum might buttonhole you on the street and say, “The world wasn't made for you any more than it was for me, was it?” The error was to forget that neither man had made the arrangements, and so it was perfectly right to say, “Why pick on me? I didn't set this up any more than you did.” Admittedly there was a wrong, a general wrong. Allbee, on the other hand, came along and said, “You!” and that was so meaningless. For you might feel that something was owing to the panhandler, but to be directly blamed was entirely different.³⁵

In fact, the plot progressively indicates to Leventhal and readers alike that he does bear a certain irrecusable responsibility—that the unfamiliar betrays more than a little familiarity through one of life's inveterate unheimlich maneuvers—direct “blame” or not.

Face-to-face interactions in If He Hollers Let Him Go are more flagrantly polarized, and in that sense perhaps more “political,” than those in The Victim, but they really illustrate only another—and analogous—kind of existential harrowing:

The red light caught me at Manchester; and that made me warm. It never failed; every time I got in a hurry I got caught by every light. … When the light turned green it caught a white couple in the middle of the street. … But when they looked up and saw we were coloured they just took their time, giving us a look of cold hatred. … I sat there looking at the white couple until they had crossed the sidewalk giving them stare for stare, hate for hate. … My arms were rubbery and my fingers numb; I was weak as if I'd been heaving sacks of cement all day in the sun.³⁶

I am struck here especially by the ambient pressure of arrest—the “light caught me”; “it caught a white couple”—the absorption into the body of the pained weight of scrutiny (something Bellow's text also features—or better, figures), and, of course, the charged and contestatory gazing itself. As in Fanon's repeated motif of specular aversion in “The Fact of Blackness”—“Look, a Negro!; Mama, see the Negro!”³⁷—being Black in this novel means fundamentally to be seen. And while Levinas's favored trope may marshal its power from the ethical urgency of speech and vision conjoined in the human face, each signifying both entreaty and command, its peculiar relevance for this novel, it seems to me, centers on the way in which faces act as either weapons or targets of racism's negative proof (or political corrective) for the ethics of encounter. That is, in the concrete, physiognomic facts of Blackness (or Jewishness, or any particularized humanity, for that matter), Levinas's transcendental ethics may find its political objective correlative.³⁸

Now, it should be evident that I have been invoking Levinas thematically here, borrowing against the rich and capacious pledge of image and figure that valorizes his argumentation throughout, taking his ever-more intense drive toward the material content of ethical encounter as legitimation for my own restricted focus on trope and image. Or (to remotivate a distinction drawn earlier), in thus bending it, I get demonstrably away from—though not “with”—strict Levinassian ethics. (Clearly, my critical approach responds to Levinas, as witness the noninterchangeable and asymmetric facing of texts which guides my readings here.)

Levinas often adverts to the biblical formula hineni (“here I am”) in its French translation—me voici—in order to emphasize what he cleverly terms the “accusative” aspect of subjectivity; selves assume a place already marked out by obligatedness and thus occupy, as it were, an ethical terminus ad quem. Instead of the “merely” ethical deixis expressed by here I am, however, the racialized subjects of Himes's and Bellow's novels might be said to exclaim let me go, a quite different trope of accusation, but one which has its biblical precedent too—in an archetypal narrative of bondage and culturally legitimated persecution. To be the protagonist of such a text means to be literally agonized—the victim of unreasonable and yet unaccountably personalized prejudices.³⁹ Not classical, but rather the most modern subjects of cultural tragedies, American Jews and Blacks in these respective novels are the objectified subjects in the unreconstructed grammar of racism: trapped (“let him go”), outraged (“if he hollers”), ontologically slotted (“victims”).

That both novels traffic in victimization does not necessarily make them congruent anatomies of race-hatred (nor does it align them with the more recent, simpleminded agitprop of “victimese,” the rhetoric of injury). They tell different stories, regardless of any points of contact I might instigate here. Bellow's title names no referent, so it could just as plausibly designate Allbee, the novel's putative malignity, the subplot of Leventhal's sister and dying nephew, or the assorted urban anonyms who fail to “get away with it”—a bum, a peddler, a dishwasher, a Filipino busboy, a dying man on the subway tracks.⁴⁰ By contrast, the anonymous third-person pronoun “captured” by the doggerel title of If He Hollers Let Him Go draws ironic attention to Bob Jones's singular nonperson double bind as both first-person narrator and second-person “phobogenic object”⁴¹—in either case, the only and unequivocal victim of his story. To paraphrase Mikhail Bakhtin, since Bob Jones cannot simply be himself, he must cite himself—with a vengeance, which is as much a self-catching as a letting-go:

I wanted to tell him I didn't want to go to bed with her, I wanted to black her eyes; but just the idea of her being a white woman stopped me. I felt flustered, caught guilty. I couldn't realize what was happening to me myself. It was funny in a way. I couldn't tell him that I didn't want her because she was a white woman and he was a white man, and something somewhere way back in my mind said that that would be an insult. And I couldn't tell him that I did want her, because the same thing said that that would be an insult.

Every white person I come into contact with, every one I have to speak to, even those I pass on the street—every goddamn one of them has the power of some kind of control over my own behavior. Not only that but they use it—in every way.⁴²

While the second passage above arguably describes another textual dilemma—the seizurelike quality of Jones's narration—the first conveys a communicative paradox from which his narrative is not exempt. Does the narrator's “penning” (in Stanley Cavell's aperçu) spell release or just another kind of incarceration?⁴³ I think the novel's answer to that question is finally equivocal, but of the two texts If He Hollers certainly draws a far bleaker picture of the racialized subject-as-prison-house.

Bellow seems to work off of the more broadly Levinassian premise that a kind of indefeasible guilt attaches to selfhood ab initio, even though Allbee assuredly aims his violence at Leventhal's specifically Jewish face; despite being singled out through—or better perhaps, along with—anti-Semitism, Leventhal meets it, face to face, with an excessive obligatedness and answerability. Indeed, this very polarity of surpluses—the “remainder” of selfhood which is ethnic particularity and the extra weight which is the Other—defines the thematic tension between both novels and Levinas's philosophy which is the “politics of recognition”—the self alienated from within by its own exorbitant otherness, while still pledged outward.⁴⁴

It is closer to the pole of “ethical responsibility,” then, that The Victim's sequence of events seems to cluster. (The Victim taps long-patent metaphysical and allegorical veins of American fiction, especially in its play with figures of substitution and doubling; my interpretative recourse to the “transcendental” is, accordingly, not outside the purview of either this novel or Bellow's work generally.) The very first time Allbee descends upon Leventhal, for example, the two initially fail to make contact—conspicuously so: “He had already taken off his shirt and was sitting on the bed unlacing his shoes when there was a short ring of the bell. Eagerly he pulled open the door and shouted, ‘Who is it?’ The flat was unbearably empty. … There was no response below. He called out again, impatiently.”⁴⁵ If there is a kerygmatic text that stands behind this scene (using “kerygmatic” in Levinas's sense of the summoning quality of encounter), it is less likely existentialist than biblical—Song of Songs (5:2-6): “I was asleep, but my heart was awake; hark my beloved is knocking. … I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned away, had gone. … I sought him, but I could not find him. I called him, but he did not answer me.” Whether Bellow intended the allusion or not, the point is the ritualized staging of encounter. Indeed, Levinas uses this very same trope of (mis)recognition to evoke the way in which the other person intrudes unbidden on the complacencies of selfhood, arresting it in its pouvoir de pouvoir,⁴⁶ or, perhaps more appositely in this case, its boudoir de pouvoir.

When Leventhal and Allbee finally meet in the park shortly afterwards, the vector from summoning to facing is drawn and scored with Asa's “feeling that he was not merely being looked at but watched.” Allbee's second visit even more obviously lays bare the metaphysic of “intrusion” on which the novel can be said to turn:

“Now who in the name of hell would ring like that?” he said. But he already knew who it was. It was Allbee. … He knew that he had come in; nevertheless he controlled his desire to turn. … To enter without a knock or invitation was an intrusion. Of course the door was open, but it was taking too much for granted all the same not to knock. “I owe him hospitality, that's how he behaves,” passed through his mind.⁴⁷

Now, if “intrusion” is understood as a cognate of “recognition,” interpreted in the double sense of “facings” within and between texts, what The Victim rehearses is precisely Leventhal's indemnity, irrespective of any actual impact he may have had on Allbee's life; and the latter's anti-Semitism is ultimately formulated as “something very mysterious, namely a conviction or illusion that at the start of life, and perhaps even before a promise had been made.”⁴⁸

But what has happened to the politics of recognition? What of the pole of ethnic/racial/religious surplus, of “particularity”? Surely, Allbee's anti-Semitism—its content and motivation—is not incidental to The Victim's “metaphysic of intrusion,” its recognitive plot of target, pursuit, and capture:

“Why do you sing such songs?” he said. “You can't sing them. … You have to be bred to them. … Sing one of the psalms. I'd love to hear it … [or] any Jewish song. Something you've really got feeling for. Sing us the one about the mother.”

She has that proud look that's proud without being hard. You know what I mean. It's a serious look. You see it in Asiatic sculpture. … It's apparent enough; it doesn't need any investigating. Russia, Poland, I can see at a glance. … I've lived in New York for a long time. It's a very Jewish city, and a person would have to be a pretty sloppy observer not to learn about Jews here.

“And try to imagine how New York affects me. Isn't it preposterous? It's really as if the children of Caliban were running everything. … I go into the library once in a while to look around, and last week I saw a book about Thoreau and Emerson by a man named Lipschitz. … A name like that?” Allbee said this with great earnestness. “After all, it seems to me that people of such background simply couldn't understand.”

You people, by and large—and this is only an observation, nothing else, take it for what it's worth—you can only tolerate feelings like your own.⁴⁹

Allbee (is the name portentously “ontological” or simply an exclamation of surprise?) bears down on Leventhal throughout The Victim, both as the imagined cause of all his misfortune and as a Jew—two contingent facts—the accidentally particular and the peculiarly particular—that intertwine. Allbee never approaches or reproaches Leventhal on any basis apart from the “stain” of “you people-hood.” But does the text? What weight does it assign to ethnic difference in its own discomfiting of Leventhal's subjectivity?

Looking for an answer, I turn again to Himes. The crux of If He Hollers Let Him Go is what can only be called an extended face-off between Bob Jones and Madge, his White co-worker at the wartime shipyard, the “tall white girl in a leather welder's suit” with whom Jones comes “face to face”:

We stood there for an instant, our eyes locked, before either of us moved; then she deliberately put on a frightened, wide-eyed look and backed away from me as if she was scared stiff, as if she was a naked virgin and I was King Kong. It wasn't the first time she had done that. I'd run into her on board a half-dozen times during the past couple of weeks and each time she'd put on that scared-to-death act. … But now it sent a blinding fury through my brain. Blood rushed to my head like gales of rain and I felt my face burn white-hot. It came up in my eyes and burned at her; she caught it and kept staring at me with that wide-eyed phoney look. Something about her mouth touched it off, a quirk made the curves change as if she got a sexual thrill, and her mascaraed eyelashes fluttered. Lust shook me like an electric shock; it came up in my mouth, filling it with tongue, and drained my whole stomach down into my groin. And it poured out of my eyes in a sticky rush and spurted over her from head to foot. The frightened look went out of her eyes and she blushed right down her face and out of sight beneath the collar of her leather jacket, and I could imagine it going down over her over-ripe breasts and spreading out over her milky-white stomach. When she turned out of my stare I went sick to the stomach and felt like vomiting. I had started toward the ladder going to the upper deck, but instead I turned past her, slowing down and brushing her. She didn't move. I kept on going, circling.⁵⁰

Behind the lurid and hard- (or pot-) boiled style (though the sexualization of racial difference is hardly unimportant here), Himes has skewed Levinas's “rectitude” of the face-to-face relation in a very interesting way: the face becomes the look as the rules of engagement yield to the rules of performance. The scene of recognition, in other words, has been overtly dramatized, its inherent potential for theatricality realized.

Several pages later, the narrator and his new nemesis square off once again: “She had her back to me and her hood up so it covered her hair, so I didn't recognize her right off. … I saw that she was the big, peroxide blonde I'd run into on the third deck earlier; and I knew the instant I recognized her that she was going to perform then—we would both perform.” And, needless to say, the ensuing story-length, full-cast performance follows the familiar script to the letter. Madge says the magic words which expressly countermand the Torah injunction against murder (even when such homicide is “ethical” or “merely” discursive): “‘I ain't gonna work with no nigger!’ she said in a harsh, flat voice.”⁵¹

The novel's deliberately, extravagantly potboiling plot boils over, with Jones eventually arrested for a non-rape that he and Madge “perform” through several acts. (As Fanon, an obvious admirer of the novel, puts it, “So it is with the character in If He Hollers Let Him Go—who does precisely what he did not want to do.”⁵²) And institutionality, finally, plays its part in the denouement as Bob Jones gets “escorted” from dockside labor to armed service—the more sinister sense of being “let go.” In fact, this last development is anticipated at the very beginning of the novel, when Jones, reflecting on the recent internment of Japanese Americans, says, “It was taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance. Without a trial. Without a charge. Without even giving him a chance to say one word. It was thinking about if they ever did that to me, Robert Jones, Mrs. Jones's dark son, that started to get me scared.”⁵³ Thus even the novel's narrative thrust knowingly performs itself, telegraphing, predicting, always driving toward its inevitable ending. Written on the heels of Native Son (Bob Jones even refers to Wright's novel), If He Hollers Let Him Go flaunts a whole repertoire of signifyin(g), sending itself up as it brings its “hero” down. No wonder, then, that each of the plot's five units of action begins with dreamwork, the hard realities of racial prejudice literaturized, fictioned from within and from the start.

“Good acting is what is exactly human,” says a character in The Victim. (Later, Leventhal reapplies this maxim to the exigencies of his own situation: “He liked to think ‘human’ meant accountable in spite of many weaknesses—at the last moment, tough enough to hold.”⁵⁴) Indeed, Bellow's novel trades as often as Himes's does on metaphors of acting and performance. (A subplot involves Leventhal's attempt to get Allbee hired by a talent scout; an ensemble discussion of acting takes place at the dead center of The Victim; and it ends with a recognition scene in a theater, where Leventhal reencounters Allbee on the arm of a “famous actress.”) And much like the coupled characters of If He Hollers, Leventhal and Allbee subtend degrees of facing with angles of masking—all of it intensely physicalized:

Leventhal remarked to himself that there was an element of performance in all that he [Allbee] was doing. But suddenly he had a strange, close consciousness of Allbee, of his face and body, a feeling of intimate nearness. … He could nearly feel the weight of his body and the contact of his clothes. Even more, the actuality of his face, loose in the cheeks, firm in the forehead and jaws, struck him, the distinctness of it; and the look of recognition Allbee bent on him duplicated the look in his own.⁵⁵

I alluded earlier to Erving Goffman, whose treatment of face-to-face interaction is, of course, relevant to the thematics of recognition in both Levinas's work and the two novels at hand.⁵⁶ Faces—and especially those distinguished by, say, racial or ethnoreligious characteristics—to the degree that they are “presented,” could be said to perform rather than simply manifest themselves. In Goffman's more pragmatic model of social phenomenology, “frame analysis” is applied to precisely those particularized features of human encounter which Levinas's philosophy would bracket: the “antiethical” devices (Levinas might say) of self-masking that cushion and keep at bay the proximity and approach of “the neighbor.” Thus, in an important essay entitled “Reality and Its Shadow,” Levinas speaks of the doubled, shadowed, even “caricatured,” relationship that continually haunts personal identity: “A being is that which reveals itself in its truth, and, at the same time, resembles itself, is its own image.”⁵⁷ In other words, an external veneer of semblance (i.e., of both resemblance and dissembling) glosses the baseline level of signification—selfhood which is answerable, prima facie, to others—what Levinas calls the “nudité” of the face, in a companion essay to “Reality and Its Shadow”:

The absolute nakedness of a face, the absolutely defenseless face, without covering, clothing, or mask, is what opposes my power over it, my violence, and opposes it in an absolute way, with an opposition which is opposition in itself. The being that expresses itself, that faces me, says no to me by his very expression. … The face is the fact that a being affects us not in the indicative, but in the imperative, and is thus outside all categories.⁵⁸

All of Levinas's philosophy is devoted to the ethical epiphany of unmasking, of showing forth, of facing. If exposure defines contact with the Other, then, conversely, a sort of double exposure describes the ambiguous nature of identity left to its own devices. And yet here again we encounter the “faces that we meet” in Himes's and Bellow's novels as political object lessons of ethical transcendence in human relations. For in The Victim and If He Hollers Let Him Go, to be seen or addressed or pursued as a “Jew” or a “nigger” is to be ineluctably double-exposed. Levinas's ethics of imperative intersubjectivity does not always (or perhaps can never fully) transcend the specificity of this or that person who is “culturally” singled-out—the person, in other words, whose face will lend itself involuntarily to the indicative mode of “an Asiatic” cast or a “flat-nosed, thick-lipped” mien. In being a “Black” or “Jewish” face, in other words, Bob Jones's or Asa Leventhal's face is thematized, allegorized, from within.

Double exposure, double-talk, double consciousness: these represent the shadow-graphs that limn a politics of recognition. When James Weldon Johnson referred, in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, to the “free-masonry of race,”⁵⁹ he was adumbrating the masque or performance which (in Levinas's sense) turns the ethnic or racial subject into an allegory of itself, into its own image, into the “remainder of selfhood” described above. To put it another way (paraphrasing The Victim), in the literature of ethnic entrapment, acting—good or bad, willed or forced—is what is exactly Black or Jewish.

In his analysis of contemporary French Jewish identity, Alain Finkielkraut says that for a certain segment of “Jewish romantics these days … the word ‘Jew’ is worn like a brooch on a dark gray suit.”⁶⁰ I appreciate this conceit not only because of its wonderful turn on identity as adornment, but also for the way it resonates with the same sort of recognitive bric-a-brac that crams the texts (and glosses the faces) of The Victim and If He Hollers Let Him Go like so much theatrical makeup:

[Leventhal] was on a boardwalk. … On his left, there was an amusement park with ticket booths. … He entered a place that resembled a hotel … but proved to be a department store. He was here to buy some rouge for Mary. The salesgirl demonstrated various shades on her own face, wiping each off in turn with a soiled hand towel and bending to the round mirror on the counter to draw a new spot. There was a great, empty glitter of glass and metal around them. What could this possibly be about? Leventhal wondered.⁶¹

Or, as Himes renders it in the climactic rape-charade:

“Help! Help! My God, help me! Some white man, help me! I'm being raped.” I saw the stretch and pop of her lips, the tautening of her throat muscles, the distortion and constriction of her face … as if her face were ten feet high. … My eyes felt as if they were five times their natural size; as if they were bursting in their sockets, popping out of my head. “Stop, nigger! Don't, nigger. Nigger, don't. Oh, please don't kill me, nigger.”⁶²

Like a brooch on a dark gray suit.

At the end of The Victim, Leventhal is redescribed: “His obstinately unrevealing expression had softened. His face was paler and there were some gray hairs in his hair, in spite of which he looked years younger.” In this same chapter, the assignment of one's place in life is called a “promise” which is either a “conviction or [an] illusion”:

In thinking of this promise, Leventhal compared it to a ticket, a theater ticket. And with his ticket, a man entitled to an average seat might feel too shabby for the dress circle or sit in it defiantly or arrogantly; another, entitled to the best in the house, might cry in rage to the usher who led him to the third balcony. And how many more stood disconsolately in the rain and snow, in the long line of those who could only expect to be turned away? But no, this was incorrect. The reality was different. For why should tickets, mere tickets, be promised if promises were being made—tickets to desirable and undesirable places? There were more important things to be promised. Possibly there was a promise, since so many felt it. He himself was almost ready to affirm that there was. But it was misunderstood.⁶³

Inflecting this metaphor—already grounded in the theatrical—toward the Levinassian renders tickets the “illusion” that is the necessary obverse of “conviction.” Tickets operate as the evidence-checkpoint of objectified surface which interrupts otherwise unimpeded passage, thereby forcing a kind of occlusion of depth—“a glass darkly” anterior to any promise of “face-to-face” encounter. Pop-eyes, thick lips, and big noses are “mere” features that “thematize” the “absolute nakedness of a face without covering, clothing, or mask.” For Levinas, the face speaks, and says, “NO.” But it more typically says, “Kick me, Kike me,”⁶⁴ or “catch a nigger by the toe,” or “you people.” As with Kazin's “even Negroes” and Claude Brown's “scrubbing ‘Goldberg's’ floor,” language, too, fails the test of transparency, always clutching the tickets to, and thereby carrying with it, the places it has been.

“Recognition” in Bellow's and Himes's novels shows how and where the ostensibly transcendent encounter between two human faces trips over particularity. In Levinas's terms, while the ethnic or racial face may indeed affect us in the imperative, it does so within, not outside of, categories—categories which are as often linguistic as they are visual. Hence, finally, the paradox of transcendent visage “sealed in blackness” (Fanon's phrase)—or Jewishness—reaching its logical conclusion at the end of If He Hollers Let Him Go, where hollering—the cry of the victim—means, precisely, being caught.

“Wait, I'll let you in,” I shouted above the din. “Wait, this woman is crazy!” A guy leaned over the hole and swung at my head with a ballpeen hammer. … I saw the guy's face, not particularly malevolent, just disfigured, a white man hitting at a nigger running by. I hadn't even tried to rape her. I'd been trying to get away from her. … She'd kept me there, cornered me, hadn't let me go.⁶⁵

Notes

1. My quotation is from Bernard Malamud's novel The Tenants (New York, 1971), 68, and, perhaps needless to say, my characterization is meant ironically: once fiction becomes a gloss for life, reflexivity cannot be far behind. In his autobiography The Quality of Hurt (New York, 1972), Himes himself reflexively calls his first novel “my bitter novel of protest” (75), a description echoed two pages later in a broadside against his publisher's less than enthusiastic marketing: “The whole episode left me very bitter” (77). A contemporary “review” of If He Hollers Let Him Go from an editorial in Ebony (November 1947), however, makes “bitter” an understatement: “an invidious, shocking, incendiary … virulent, malicious book full of venom and rancor [that] substitutes emotions for intelligence, dictates thinking with the skin rather than the brains” (44). The reception for Bellow's 1947 novel, on the other hand, was highly favorable, although Bellow presumably regards The Victim as an “early” effort that still holds up.

2. See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, 1967), especially “Negroes and Jews—The Two Nationalisms and the Bloc(ked) Plurality” (476-97); and Cynthia Ozick, “Literary Blacks and Jews” (her updated reflections on Malamud's “fiction of blows”), in Paul Berman, Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York, 1994), 43-75.

3. See Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge, 1995), especially the introductory discussion of Levinas in “‘Creating the Uncreated Features of His Face’: Face and Monstration in Crane, Melville, and Wright,” 179-235; and Facing Black and Jew: Re-Imagining American Literary History (forthcoming). See also Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford, 1992); cf. the introduction to Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca, 1988), for a concise genealogy of this critical imperative.

4. Bertolt Brecht, Shriften zum Theater (Frankfurt, 1957), 1: 165.

5. See Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition”: An Essay (Princeton, 1992). Taylor explicitly concerns himself here with the competing claims of disparate constituencies and the institutional structures that govern or mediate responses to them—hence the force of politics. Accordingly, he deploys the linguistically allied phrases “politics of universalism” and “politics of difference” in a characteristic (and characteristically cogent) historicizing of communal claims on representation and visibility. His Essay is not without its points of arguability, as the accompanying response pieces in the volume attest. But in terms of my own difference from Taylor, what I mean by the “politics of recognition” is an unavoidable surplus of identity borne by actors in intersubjective dramas of recognition which italicize, as it were, their “particularity,” namely, as Blacks or Jews. Ethics would be the phenomenon, then, and politics its epiphenomenal shadow; or, in Taylor's terms: “We must be open to comparative cultural study of the kind that must displace our horizons in the resulting fusions” (73), where “displacement” signifies for me an ethical troubling of intact political “fusions.” For alternative approaches, see Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge, 1995); and David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995).

6. Roger Simon, “Face to Face with Alterity: Postmodern Jewish Identity and the Eros of Pedagogy,” in Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation, ed. Jane Gallop (Bloomington, 1995), 90-105; quotation from 90. See also S. P. Mohanty, “Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criticism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (1989): 1-31.

7. Simon, “Face to Face with Alterity,” 90.

8. Saul Bellow, The Victim (New York, 1975 [1947]), 21, 27.

9. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (New York, 1986 [1945]), 203.

10. Bellow, Victim, 256.

11. From the essay of the same title in Elias Canetti, The Conscience of Words, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York, 1976), 140-44. Since these are experiential as much as discursive issues, socio-phenomenological analyses like those of Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and Alain Finkielkraut gloss these texts as readily as any literary criticism might. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (Reflections on the Jewish Question), trans. George J. Becker (New York, 1948); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1967); and Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O'Neill and David Suchof (Lincoln, 1995); see also the essays in The Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis, 1990).

12. Himes, If He Hollers, 2, 3.

13. Ibid., 5, 7, 17, 19, 65.

14. Ibid., 129, 59, 39, 127.

15. Bellow, Victim, 31, 33 (my emphasis), 99, 151.

16. See Newton, Narrative Ethics.

17. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, 1968), 89; my emphasis.

18. Cf. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971); and Justice as Fairness (New York, 1991).

19. Emmanuel Levinas, “From Ethics to Exegesis,” in In the Time of Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith (Bloomington, 1994), 109-13; quotation from 110-11.

20. See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington, 1994).

21. Levinas, “Ethics to Exegesis,” 110. Compare the following critique of politicized pluralism from “Phenomenon and Enigma,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, 1987), 65-73: “The saraband of innumerable and equivalent cultures, each justifying itself in its own context, creates a world which is, to be sure, deoccidentalized, but also disoriented. To catch sight, in meaning, of a situation that precedes culture, to envision language out of the revelation of the other … in the gaze of man aiming at a man precisely as abstract man disengaged from all culture, in the nakedness of the face … is to find oneself able to judge civilizations on the basis of ethics” (101). See also Emmanuel Levinas, “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other,” in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, 1994), 116-25; and the essays in Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore, 1990).

22. Levinas, “Ethics to Exegesis,” 110.

23. Emmanuel Levinas, “Demanding Judaism,” in Beyond the Verse, 3-10; quotation from 4.

24. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 180. Cf. these remarks: “I am the slave not of the idea that others have of me but of my own appearance” (116); “with the Negro the cycle of the biological begins. … The Negro is the genital” (161-62); “the Negro is comparison” (211). Even more pointedly: “The Jew is attacked in his religious identity, in his history, in his race, in his relations with his ancestors and with his posterity; … But it is in his corporeality that the Negro is attacked” (163). “Is this the whole story? Unfortunately not. The Negro is something else. Here again we find the Jew” (180). See also Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: The Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, 1986); and The Jew's Body (New York, 1991). What makes the role of representation so tricky here, however, is its duality: on one hand, it can take the form of an unreflective process of symbolization (anti-Semitism/philo-Semitism, Negrophobia/Negrophilia), and, on the other, it is sustained by a wholly otherwise, second-order level of ethical judgment and political critique. Still, any gesture toward some kind of ethnic Imaginary will almost inevitably betray the long arm of fiction, another reason why Himes's and Bellow's novels gloss Levinas's ethics as aptly as it applies to them.

25. As Levinas says elsewhere, “The approach to the face is the most basic form of responsibility. As such, the face of the other is verticality and uprightness: it spells a relation of rectitude. The face is not in front of me (en face de moi) but above me”; quoted in Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany, 1989), 13-33; quotation from 24.

26. For Levinas Jewish particularism is always a historicized particularism. Yet he oscillates (as does Jewish self-understanding generally) between two legitimating explanations: a nationhood founded on sacred responsibility (“You shall be holy for I am holy”), and responsibility ensuing from the continued travail suffered as, or in, peoplehood. Answerability for the other is first enjoined on Mounts Moriah and Sinai, then earned as the dialectic response to repeated political scourgings and ethnic cleansings. “The congenital universality of the Jewish spirit,” Levinas writes in “Assimilation and New Culture” (Beyond the Verse, 196-201), “involves an ineffaceable moment of isolation and distancing. This peculiarity is not simply the fruit of exile and the ghetto, but probably a fundamental withdrawal into the self in the awareness of a surplus of responsibility towards humanity. … This is undoubtedly what the awareness of being chosen is,” as opposed to “an irremediable particularism, a petitioning nationalism” (198). See also “Judaism and Revolution,” in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. A. Aronowicz (Bloomington, 1990), 94-119, where Levinas syllogizes “Judaism or responsibility for the entire universe, and consequently a universally persecuted Judaism” (115). The particular particularism, in this case of Jewish peoplehood, derives from its being absolutized from both within and without.

27. See note 21; and David Theo Goldberg's helpful essay “Multicultural Conditions,” in Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism, 1-41.

28. These matters certainly warrant more than cursory attention since, even within the strict confines of Levinas's oeuvre, they pose real structural difficulties. For him, the overriding cultural distinction is between Jewishness and the West or “Hebrew” and “Greek.” The “Orient,” in other words, denotes Israel. His political loyalties as a French national, his directorship of the Westernizing Ecole Normale Israelite Oriental, and his resolute “Europocentrism” all lend a significant bias to the terms he dignifies for argumentation, as well as underwriting the ideological assumptions on which he proceeds. The “other” in Levinas is thus not entirely pre- (or even post-) cultural; alterity is implicitly Western and masculine. A wider ambit for considering this conceptual shibboleth is offered in Ernst Simon, “The Neighbors Whom We Shall Love,” in Modern Jewish Ethics: Theory and Practice, ed. Marvin Fox (Columbus, OH, 1975), 29-56; and Jacob Katz, Exclusivism and Tolerance (Oxford, 1961).

29. Levinas, “Judaism and Revolution,” 113. The point of reference here is a debate on revolutionary politics in the tractate Baba Metzia, 83a-83b, of the Talmud. See also the essays in the “Politics” section of The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford, 1989).

30. See Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), 24-44.

31. Cf. Roland Barthes's analysis of verbal precision in The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1975): “The exactitude in question is not the result of taking greater pains, it is not a rhetorical instrument in value, as though things were increasingly well described—but of a change of code: the (remote) model of the description is no longer oratorical discourse (nothing at all is being ‘painted’), but a kind of lexicographical artifact” (26-27). But in Bellow's case, the language of the text does in fact take greater pains.

32. Bellow, Victim, 20.

33. Ibid., 31.

34. Ibid., 36.

35. Ibid., 77.

36. Himes, If He Hollers, 12-13.

37. Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skin, White Masks, 109-40. See also the following passage from Himes, If He Hollers: “I just had time to see him: a tall young blond guy about my age and size. His mouth was twisted down in one corner so that the tips of his dogteeth showed like a gopher's mouth and his blue eyes were blistered with hate. I'll never forget that bastard's eyes. Then that sick, gone feeling came in the pit of my stomach—just a flash. And a blinding explosion went off just back of my eyes as if the nerve centres had been dynamited. I had the crazy sensation of my eyes popping out of my head. … Bile rolled up in my stomach and spread out in my mouth. I started retching and caught myself. The sun beat down on my head like showers of rain. My skin was tight and burning hot, but it wouldn't sweat. Only in the palm of my hand holding the knife did I sweat” (33, 35).

38. Levinas, of course, would insist on the necessary contradiction between ethics and politics (or the subordination of one by the other) in this sense. See “Ideology and Idealism,” in Hand, ed., Levinas Reader, 235-47: “The otherness of the absolutely other is not just some quiddity. Insofar as it is a quiddity, it exists on a plane it has in common with the quiddities that it cuts across. … Absolute difference cannot itself delineate the plane common to those that are different. The other, absolutely other, is the Other [L'autre, absolument autre, c'est Autrui]. The other is not a particular case, a species of otherness, but the original exception to order. It is not because the Other is novelty that it ‘gives room’ for a relation of transcendence. It is because the responsibility for the Other is transcendence that there is something new under the sun” (245). When asked in an interview about Israelis and Palestinians as each others' paradigmatic “Other,” Levinas replied, “My definition of the other is completely different. The other is a neighbor, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you're for the other, you're for the neighbor. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust”; see the interview with Levinas, Finkielkraut, and Shlomo Malkr on Radio Communauté, 28 September 1987, in Les Nouveaux Cahiers 18 (1982-83): 1-8. What can one say but that Levinas finesses the issue of particularity in a not altogether unambivalent fashion, at times disallowing it and at times appealing to it.

39. To be sure, victimization—real persecution predicated on ethnic hatred—explicitly enters Levinas's philosophy only in his treatment of historical Jewish identity. Yet it almost surely serves as an implicit model for the recasting of terms he introduces in Otherwise Than Being: Or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague, 1978), where subjectivity becomes a “persecution” and a “wounding” by the Other, with the self “held hostage” by the claim of alterity in a steady state of unwilled “substitution.”

40. See Bellow, Victim, 33, 95, 96, 119, 198.

41. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 151.

42. Himes, If He Hollers, 119, 16.

43. Cf. the similar—and self-conscious—predicament described by Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York, 1951): “It troubled me that I could speak in the fullness of my own voice only when I was alone on the streets, walking about. There was something unnatural about it; unbearably isolated. I was not like the others! I was not like the others!” (24).

44. Apropos of the cleft without and the fissure within, see Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1991): “Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the peace that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns ‘we’ into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities” (1). Charles Taylor comes at this dialectic of interiority and exteriority from a similar (though differently historicized) angle of approach in Multiculturalism and … “Recognition”: “What has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the condition in which the attempt to be recognized can fail” (35).

45. Bellow, Victim, 29.

46. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 198. For the allusion to Song of Songs, see Otherwise Than Being, 141-42. See also Jacques Derrida, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernascon and S. Critchley (Bloomington, 1991), 11-48, which begins, “He will have obligated … as after the passing of some singular visitor, you are no longer familiar with the places, those very places where nonetheless the little phrase—Where does it come from? Who pronounced it?—still leaves its resonance lingering” (11 [Levinas's emphasis]).

47. Bellow, Victim, 66.

48. Ibid., 249.

49. Ibid., 34, 70, 131, 179.

50. Himes, If He Hollers, 19.

51. Ibid., 27. For a comprehensive analysis of racism as language, see David Theo Goldberg, “The Social Formation of Racist Discourse,” in Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism, 295-318.

52. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 140.

53. Himes, If He Hollers, 3.

54. Bellow, Victim, 75.

55. Ibid., 144. In the dream sequence that follows, Leventhal has “an unclear dream in which he held himself off like an unwilling spectator; yet it was he who did everything” (150).

56. See especially Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior (Garden City, 1967); and The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, 1959).

57. Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 1-12; quotation from 6. See also Newton, “Face and Monstration,” in Narrative Ethics.

58. Emmanuel Levinas, “Freedom and Command,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 13-22; quotation from 21.

59. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (New York, 1927), 21-22.

60. Finkielkraut, Imaginary Jew, 71.

61. Bellow, Victim, 245.

62. Himes, If He Hollers, 183.

63. Bellow, Victim, 249. Tickets of admission form a motif in their own right here; cf. pages 27, 30, 112, 150, 155, and 186.

64. Lyrics of “They Don't Care about Us” by Michael Jackson, from his recent CD HIStory, Epic Records, MJJ Productions, New York, 1995: “Sue me, Jew me, everybody do me / Kick me, Kike me, don't you black or white me.” These lines have since been revised for a second pressing.

65. Himes, If He Hollers, 184.