SOURCE: Cheng, Anne Anlin. “Race and Fantasy in Modern America: Subjective Dissimulation/Racial Assimilation.” In Multiculturalism and Representation: Selected Essays, edited by John Rieder and Larry E. Smith, pp. 175-97. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Cheng examines the intersection of fantasy and representations of the racialized body in M. Butterfly and Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man.]

Why does race have such a hold on us?

This paper explores the role fantasy plays in the narrations of race and ethnicity in American cultures, with the goal of expanding our understanding of fantasy beyond its conventional terms. While much critical energy has been directed towards deconstructing categories such as race and gender, less attention has been given to the ways in which an individual, as well as a community, remains invested in maintaining such categories, even while such identifications prove to be prohibitive and limiting rather than enabling. The fantasm of “race,” with its assimilative and dissimulative effects, requires further rethinking in such a way as to neither dismiss nor sentimentalize the racial subject.

In the vexing and varied vocabularies surrounding the discourse on race and ethnicity, the term “fantasy” remains troublingly untroubled: that is, fantasy is most often understood as ontologically negating, politically suspicious, and a prerogative of the “dominant” culture. Yet can we so easily extract the minority subject's self-representation from hegemonic representation? When we claim with political savvy that women and/or minorities have internalized dominant cultural demands, do we really know what that means? How do we begin to conceptualize that identificatory assimilation in such a way as to both critique and accommodate the desire for identity? To what extent is the concept of “minority” itself the formation of popular fantasies and representations? What is the relationship between the public repertoire of racial images and the individual's process of self-fantasy? What are the normative (in the sense of the usual and the normalizing) fantasies of race, and what would be the effect of reading alternative fantasies into these models? Is there such a thing as private fantasy?

In order to begin to answer these questions, this paper focuses on David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (and in particular, the figure of Rinehart) as two instances where fantasy is revealed as constitutive of and fundamental to the formation of any racialized body. Both texts proceed from the premise that fantasy provides a mechanism of identification which has profound structuring effects on the individual's self-conception with respect to race, class, and gender. Central to my analysis is an exploration of the connection between racial assimilation and other forms of subjective dissimulation. Both Hwang and Ellison, diverse in their ethnic backgrounds and relationship to America, suggest that the fantasies of communal assimilation always require acts of private dissimulation. This connection can be easily and conventionally understood as the price of “fitting in.” My essay, however, attempts to re-theorize the notion of inauthentic performance and its relationship to assimilation and fantasy. I want to suggest that these terms are not causal but structurally identical and mutually effective. Consequently, the traditional understanding of their political implications needs to be recast.

Re-reading psychoanalytic theories of fantasy and melancholia and drawing from post-colonial theories on mimicry, I argue for fantasy first as an identificatory structure that operates assimilatively and dissimulatively: in fantasy's tableau, “I” enjoy myself as an “Other,” the other that is me. Does this identificatory structure translate into our colloquial understanding of cultural assimilation, and what would that tell us? I propose that this making-the-self-as-other provides the melancholic precondition for identity. This proposition radically re-signifies the notions of cultural interpellation and racial identification, and how we read racial fantasy (its pleasure of the other) as a political concept. Hwang's M. Butterfly and Ellison's Invisible Man offer complex and sometimes troubling representations of the negotiation between self and other at the juncture of fantasy and disguise. Until we relocate these terms at the convergence of the often agonistic discourses of critical theory, psychoanalysis, and political exigencies, we cannot begin to address fully these texts' theoretical preoccupation with the fantasies of identification and their political ramifications.

REPULSION AND INVESTMENT: SEXUAL DISSIMULATION AS RACIAL PRESENCE

Many readers may assume quite reasonably that the phrase “race and fantasy” alludes to fantasies about minority subjects: stereotypical images generated by mainstream culture about the exotic or unknowable Other. Indeed, in the field of minority literature, fantasy is almost always seen as a privilege of the dominant. It has been largely inflected in negative ways as something that is at best an unreal or false projection, and at worst, objectifying and ontologically impoverishing. It is, in other words, a political taboo. This line of thinking was dramatized for me a few years ago at an academic conference, where following a talk I gave on fantasy and ethnicity in Maxine Hong Kingston, a member of the audience stood up and informed me in no uncertain terms, “We minority subjects cannot afford to have fantasies.” Although I understood the political concerns which prompted such a pronouncement, I was nonetheless disturbed by its disavowal, as though one could not have fantasies, and as though to be a fantasizing subject is to have already failed to be a political subject. It seems to me, on the contrary, that fantasy and political conviction are far from mutually exclusive; in fact, one might go as far as to say that they are profoundly related. I am thus interested in pursuing a concept of the “fantasmatic,” which is not at all about what is real or unreal, but rather refers to a psychical principle which organizes our beliefs and faiths—organizes, above all, our faith in ourselves socially, racially, sexually, and ontologically.

I open with David Henry Hwang's award-winning drama of political and sexual faith M. Butterfly. The story of a French diplomat who after ten years discovers that his Chinese mistress was not only a spy but also a man, M. Butterfly has become an almost-classic text of how racial fantasies can facilitate sexual fantasies. Central to much critical attention has been the play's exposure of the consistent emasculation of the Asian male in white society (Eng, Fong, Garber, Horn, Remen, Skloot). Song's “ruse” deploys the very racial, cultural, and gender stereotypes that Gallimard has in order to seduce and manipulate the latter. As Song's infamous and much-quoted lines state:

SONG:
because when [Gallimard] finally met his fantasy woman, he wanted more than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman. And … I am an oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.

(Hwang, 83)¹

Song attributes the success of his sexual disguise to the over-determinacy of race: his racial difference facilitates his sexual disguise. He believes that Gallimard's sexual blindness derives from his racial ideology, so that a man can walk up to Gallimard, even sleeps with Gallimard, and still convinces Gallimard that he is a woman because he is Asian and thus already emasculated. Song, the play's internal political critic, explains to us that the “Perfect Woman” culturally connotes the passive “China doll,” which in turn connotes the effeminized Asian male. In the political agenda of M. Butterfly, the fact that the cultural emasculation of the Asian male makes possible his sexual “passing” is quite clear.²

What have been critically neglected and cannot be as easily accounted for are alternately: 1) Gallimard's repulsion for the racial myth that he enacts, and 2) Song Liling's investment in the very myth that he exploits. If one were to read racial stereotype as the sole cause of Gallimard's blindness, then one would also have to assume that if he had been more politically and culturally savvy, he would not have been duped by the deception. Yet can “knowing better” or “political correctness” redirect, correct as it were, one's desires and fantasies? Gallimard the character seems at times, oddly enough, to “know better.” Among the oddest aspects of Gallimard's dupability are those moments of seeming self-derision and awareness, his repeated and conscious re-staging of himself as a “player” within the cultural cliché of Madame Butterfly. How do we account for the co-existence of fascination and contempt within Gallimard towards his assigned role?

GALLIMARD:
Cio-Cio San … is a feminine ideal … the man for whom she gives up everything, is—(He pulls out a naval officer's cap … pops it on his head, and struts about)—not very good-looking, not too bright, and pretty much a wimp.

(5)

In parodically miming Pinkerton, Gallimard exposes the racial and cultural assumptions underlying the logic of that story. He has understood the racial “trade-off” in this Pinkerton-Butterfly contract. If, as recounted by Gallimard, “he” gets the beautiful feminine ideal, what does “she” get—except the badge of his whiteness? The first time Gallimard meets Song in person, he is intrigued by the latter's political shrewdness and refusal to fit into a stereotype. Song essentially gives him a lesson in cultural politics. They meet backstage after Song's theatrical performance of Madame Butterfly:

GALLIMARD:
You were utterly convincing. …
SONG:
Convincing? As a Japanese woman? The Japanese used hundreds of our people for medical experiments during the war … But I gather such irony is lost on you. …
It's one of your favorite fantasies, isn't it? The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man. …
What would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese business man. … I will never do Butterfly again, Monsieur Gallimard. If you wish to see some real theater, come to the Peking Opera sometime. Expand your mind.
GALLIMARD:
So much for protecting her in my big Western arms.

(17-18)

Their first exchange circles around the topos of demythification. Gallimard's last statement (an aside to the audience) ironizes his own clichéd position as the “powerful white man.” Song appears to be offering Gallimard anything but fantasies. Song has given Gallimard a quick lesson against an ideology of authenticity. In this first meeting of lovers, the play's central conceit (the question of who is really a “Butterfly”) has been deconstructed by the dissimulator. We (as well as Gallimard) have already been told that the image can be a lie.

If Song has refused outright to play Butterfly and proceeded to humiliate Gallimard's white assumptions, then why does Gallimard and even Song himself continue to narrativize and experience the affair through that myth? It is at the conjunction of Gallimard's repulsion and Song's investment that we arrive at an issue more disturbing than popular racial fantasies: the draw and promise of identificatory possibilities inhering in those fantasies.

In order to help us understand the significance of re-reading fantasy not as content per se but as a promise of indentificatory structure, I want to take a detour through the writings of Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis and their notion of fantasy. One of the more fascinating moves in their seminal essay “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality” is how Laplanche and Pontalis read Freud's seduction theory and its vicissitude, not as a simple turn from reality to fantasy (from experience to fantasized memory), but its very opposite—that the turn turns out to be not a turn, that due to Freud's own anxiety of origin, although a fantasized scene has replaced an actual scene, the conceptual effect remains the same. And it is in this “failed turn” that Laplanche and Pontalis believe Freud to have opened up, almost in spite of himself, new dimensions for rethinking fantasy.

Let me crudely sketch out how their thesis works. The big discovery for Freud in the case of the hysteric is his abandonment of the idea of an “original, real” scene of seduction for fantasized memory. Freud initially posits an original scene of parental seduction, the memory of which can be triggered by a later event. Half way through his career, however, Freud abandons the “original, real” scene of seduction for a scene of fantasized memory (i.e., the child fantasized the seduction, which comes to acquire a psychical reality). It would seem that Freud has uncovered the heart of psychoanalysis: the existence of a fantasy that is so powerful as to achieve the paradox of “psychical reality.” Yet Freud goes on to claim that the fantasized memory exists to mask the development of infantile sexuality. This implies that sexuality is endogenous, traumatic, and therefore needs masking. Laplanche and Pontalis draw the following implications: 1) the retroactive, theoretical model has stayed the same for Freud: real or not, there is this so called first scene, and then there is the second scene which triggers the first; 2) Freud still offers us a conceptual scheme which divides the external from the internal, the event from its constitution; and 3) the description of a spontaneous infantile sexuality (which was disguised by the fantasy) is nonetheless basically endogenous in development, so that when Freud relegates the first scene to fantasy, he has actually undermined the point of “psychical reality” because the move merely signals a return to biologism. Fantasy in fact serves as a “double disguise” for Freud (L&P, “Fantasy,” 14). By claiming that the fantasy of seduction is a disguise for infantile sexuality, Freud is in fact disguising his old allegiance to “reality.” This suggests the following paradox: at the very moment fantasy is discovered by Freud, it is also in danger of being obscured by endogenous reality. As Laplanche and Pontalis conclude, “We have indeed the fantasy, but we have lost the structure” (L&P, “Fantasy,” 16). That is, Freud is still trapped by needing to show “what's under the counter” even though he has said that there is nothing—nothing “real” that is—under the counter.

Although Freud seemingly uncovers the “truth” (which is fantasy), he still feels the need for further truths—in other words, for some form of “original scene” in some way. His next step then is to posit a “primary or original fantasy” which is phylogenetic and pre-historic. What is radical in Laplanche and Pontalis' assertions is the implication that Freud's fantasy of origin is exactly that: myth of a myth, fiction of a fiction, the analyst's fantasmatic projection of an origin to cover up the gap between “the before and the after.” Laplanche and Pontalis are not so much interested in validating the Freudian concept of “original fantasy” as they are interested in fantasy's originating function. What they want to salvage from this Freudian blind spot is the discovery of “the unconscious as a structural field, which can be reconstructed since it handles, decomposes and recomposes its elements according to certain laws”(L&P, “Fantasy,” 16). We can infer that this composition—maybe the very work of the unconscious itself—is subjected to fantasmatization—novelizing we might say. The term the fantasmatic stresses the structuring action of fantasy and designates not mere daydreams, but a “principle of organization” that shapes our life as a “whole” (Laplanche, The Language, 317). We can infer that this composition, subjected to fantasmatization, provides the narrative for the subject's life. In other words, the fantasmatic renders autobiography possible. What is at stake in distinguishing a vernacular understanding of fantasy from the Laplanchean sense of the word is the question of agency in relation to that autobiographical narrative. Rather than presupposing a fully-formed subject day-dreaming, fully in control of his/her fantasies/stories, Laplanche and Pontalis propose that fantasy provides the scenario which poses subjective possibilities: “it is a scenario with multiple entries, in which nothing shows whether the subject will be immediately located” (L&P, “Fantasy,” 22). This suggests that fantasy always structurally entails some kind of subjective dissimulation; the subject in fantasy can be disguised in various roles. In fantasy, not only do we witness a subject in disguise, but it is the disguise that conditions the subject position.

For our reading of M. Butterfly, the concept of the fantasmatic drastically rearranges the identificatory implications of the racial and sexual fantasies for Gallimard and for Song. It is easy enough to locate racial fantasies within the play, but what if we were to read those very fantasies as the psychical reality which constitutes the very idea of race in the first place? The “original secret” of this dramatic plot may be said to be another question of “what's under the counter”: does “she” or does “she” not have a penis? How could drama come from a fact that everyone in the audience knows? The audience may feel safe from deception since they are not the ones fooled and are there merely to watch for Gallimard's rude awakening. Yet why is it then the three times I have seen the production on Broadway, each time the infamously jaded audience of Manhattan still gasped when Song undressed and revealed his masculinity? The physical reality of Song's manhood can neither be news to the audience nor finally that astounding. As Gallimard himself comes to say, Song's physical body is quite irrelevant (90). We might relocate our focus from what is beneath the costume to the surface of the costume itself. Both the audience and Gallimard himself, I propose, have been enthralled not by the question of “what's under the counter,” but rather by the structure of the counter itself, the simultaneous operations of display and concealment. We do not want to know the secret (because we already do); we want to know how the secret came to be a secret. The question of truth versus falsehood has been replaced by the more vexing question of how do we process the real and the fictive. The question of fantasy is finally not one of truth versus fiction or the real versus the unreal; rather it is a question of how those categories come to acquire their particular status and currency. It is within the elaboration that Gallimard undertakes to explain radically disjunctive experiences (i.e., the gap between his instinctual and social desires) that we can begin to discern the deeper structure of fantasy and what it achieves for Gallimard.

Gallimard finds himself enacting, not so much the content of the Madame Butterfly story, but the fantasy of that fantasy: the fantasy of being able to act “the Pinkerton.”³ The “real theater” to which Song directs Gallimard and that which Gallimard comes to enact is not the content of Madame Butterfly, but its theatricalization of positionality. He falls, not for the fantasy, but for its structural guarantee: an organization of roles which shapes identificatory possibilities. Let us trace out the connection between fantasy and identificatory formation within the play. We have been told that racial fantasy comes to supply the explanation for and the narrative of Gallimard's life: how he could have mistaken a man for a woman; that is, how he could have desired a man. Fantasy bridges the disjunctive experiences of Gallimard's erotic life: his instinctual lack of heterosexual desire and its social injunction. As a child and later as a young man, Gallimard suffers acute abjection in face of his own pornographic tableaux (10). He remains passive in front of images of available women and is impotent within his own fantasies. The problem with Gallimard then, prior to meeting Song, is not one of weakness but desire. The real anxiety derives not from shyness, but from Gallimard's lack of desire for women. What requires explanation is Gallimard's lack of proper desire. What comes to supply the desire is the Madame Butterfly fantasy. Indeed, as Laplanche and Pontalis point out, fantasy tells us less about desire itself than the setting/staging of desire. To categorize the “reality” of Gallimard's sexuality—whether he is simply a foolish, racist straight man or a gay man pretending to be straight and racist—is finally not as revealing as how Gallimard comes to stage himself as a desiring subject. The initial “social” desire represented by Butterfly/Song, a desire that is colleague-approved and socially expected, allows for Gallimard to stage social injunction as an “original” or “subjective” desire. The fantasmatic helps us locate, not the content of Gallimard's fantasies, but how those fantasies structure his self-organization and provide the story of his (homosexual/heterosexual) aspirations. To read Gallimard's faith in Song-the-woman as a “fantasmatic constraint against homosexual desires”(Eng, 95-6) or its inverse (a fantasmatic investment in homosexuality, a mise en scène designed to stage homosexual possibilities) is to miss a crucial Laplanchean point: that the event cannot remain discrete from its constitution. Analogously, the content of desire cannot precede its staging. Indeed, desire does not give rise to fantasy, nor does fantasy satisfy desire per se. For “fantasy is not the object of desire, but its setting”(L&P, “Fantasy”, 18). Fantasy merely and solely performs a mode of desire, not the mastery of desire.

What operates as the fantasy of racial certitude in Madame Butterfly thus disguises another story, performs yet another process of elaboration: the staging of power. The racial stereotype embodied within Madame Butterfly turns more on power relations than racial assumptions. Or rather, racial assumptions tell us less about race than power. Let us return again to that first meeting. Song's message for Gallimard in that encounter about Madame Butterfly is above all a lesson in power. Song was derisive and dismissive of Gallimard. Song's analogy of the “blonde homecoming queen with the short fat Japanese businessman,” more than it mocks racial stereotypes, highlights the play of power underneath. Although Song's analogy is designed to point out the unlikeliness of that pairing due to racial assumptions, one could very well believe in Song's scenario in light of the recent, increasing white anxiety regarding Asian “buying power.” That is, one would quickly believe the scenario if the “short, fat Japanese businessman” was, say, the president of Mitsubishi. The point is that Song's version of the reverse myth is indeed quite believable, thereby exposing the power structure underlying the racial discriminations. Consequently, instead of demonstrating the fact of racial inequality, Song betrays its contingency. He himself exercises that power in this conversation with Gallimard: he dismisses and acquires supremacy over the white man by denigrating the white man's racial assumptions. His derision, based on cognitive advantage, reverses their supposed racial hierarchy.

One may say that Gallimard learns his lesson in humiliation so well that he repeats it as the master. Gallimard's coming-to-love parallels his coming-to-sadism:

GALLIMARD:
I began to wonder: had I, too, caught a butterfly who would writhe on a needle?
… I felt for the first time that rush of power …
Watching the secessions of her humiliations is like watching a child under torture.

(32-3, 42)

The table has been turned. Gallimard has not learned the “truth” of Madame Butterfly as taught to him by Song in that first meeting. What he learns, instead, is the structure of that interaction, which he now repeats with role reversal. Already, we see how the performance of power functions reflexively. In the fantasy tableau of Madame Butterfly, Gallimard's racial and gender positions (as the white man and the dominant male) do not remain stable, and that is precisely why the fantasy holds him. In other words, Madame Butterfly affords Gallimard the luxury of “multiple entries,” so to speak. The tale of Madame Butterfly allows Gallimard to play out not only the white male position but, more crucially, his identification with the passive woman. According to existing cultural formulæ, Gallimard appears as something of a “manly” failure since the beginning of the play. Already a “racial” cross-breed and far from being the “great white man,” Gallimard is shy, effeminate, married to an emasculating wife, does not know what to do with girls, has a phonically gender indeterminant name. Critics have pointed out that Song's super-femininity allows Gallimard to compensate for his uncertain masculinity. Yet Gallimard's attraction to Song goes beyond mere compensation to one of replication. Song provides a mirror image of Gallimard. They are both described as shy, passive, not wanting to undress, etc. Indeed, Song-as-woman very much resembles Gallimard-as-man. Gallimard's moments of mastery over Song speak more profoundly of moments of identification with the victim. Gallimard's sadistic position derives its pleasure and potency precisely through identification. Gallimard enjoys the sadistic position because it ensures his own subject position. “I” get to do this to “her”. Thus even while sadism promises mastery, it also denotes a mastery that is based on denial. As much as Gallimard can say, “she is a butterfly on a needle” or a “child under torture,” he is also saying, “I am not that.” I am not the butterfly on the needle; I am not the child under torture.

Every statement of imaginary coherence that Gallimard utters merely inverts its negation. The heterosexual injunction, which Gallimard experiences as instinctual displeasure or anxiety, has been apprehended, mastered, and managed by the subject as the social pleasure of sadism. That is, after all, the heart of the cultural lesson itself: that we are to learn to transform instinctual displeasures into cultural pleasures and, in Gallimard's case, the cultural pleasure of being a man, a master. The cultural position of being a “man” allows him to re-manage his own instinctual uncertainties as cultural triumphs (being “one of the boys at the office,” etc.). His capacity for abjection suggests, however, that his pleasure in these moments of sadism, his fascination of the sadistic point of view, may be merely that it provides the best vantage point, the best seat in the house, from which to witness the masochistic story unfold.⁴ I might even go as far as to say that it is Song the victim, the figure who supposedly occupies the passive position whose subjection Gallimard experiences as a pleasurable repetition of his own history.⁵ It is exactly that subjective uncertainty and even multiplicity, rather than certitude, that holds Gallimard. Within the power structure of Madame Butterfly, it is the reflexivity of the sadistic and masochistic positions that Gallimard comes to mime and repeat. We have not been given the fiction of a desiring subject, but the desiring subject as fiction.

When Gallimard takes on Song's identity as Butterfly at the end of the play, he is but re-performing the incorporation that he has been enacting all along. Having established Gallimard's attraction for Song as one of identification rather than difference, what conclusions can we draw about Gallimard's racial status in this mirror structure? Gallimard tells us that the assumption of Song's role is so powerful as to effect a morphological change: “[it] re-arranged the very lines on my face”(92). What exactly is this facial change? Is it the change of lineament from man to woman, from white to Asian? This transfigurative and incorporative moment denotes a racial as well as sexual crossing on Gallimard's part. What falls apart in this last scene are his “masculinity” and the “whiteness” elicited to mask that first “failure.” His “white assumptions” paradoxically open him up for counter-occupation. Not only has Gallimard fantastically created an ideal “Asian Woman,” he literally recreates himself as the Asian Woman. The process of racialization de-stabilizes and multiplies, rather than secures, identificatory possibilities. The myth of racial certitude has been revealed as a myth, a secondary elaboration of composition and decomposition. The racialization of Song in turn racializes Gallimard. Thus racial fantasy, although obsessively thematized by the play, serves as something of a red herring. Race operates as a “double disguise”: it seems to be the key to unraveling this amazing case of misidentification, when in fact it is itself generative of cross and multiple identities. The solution itself stands as a cipher.

The exposure of Gallimard's “false” assumptions reveals (literally gives us) the process of masking. We end with Gallimard painting over his face. What can be recoverable underneath the “false type” is not a hidden “true type,” but the act of disguise that goes into creating a type at all. The “origin” or “truth” of race has been disclosed to the extent that it has been revealed as a myth of disclosure, a myth of explanation. In speaking about “original” or “primal” fantasies, Laplanche and Pontalis emphasize the point that what makes fantasies original or primal is not temporal antecedent or phylogenetic inheritance (as Freud posits), but that they are already secondary elaborations in order to address an enigma. “Original fantasies” are original in that they are originating:

the origin of the fantasy is integrated in the very structure of the original fantasy. …

Like myths, [original fantasies] claim to provide a representation of, and a solution to, the major enigmas which confront the child. Whatever appears to the subject as something needing an explanation or theory, is dramatized as a moment of emergence, the beginning of a history.

(L&P, “Fantasy,” 18-9)

What interests Laplanche and Pontalis about original fantasies is not their original status as such, but how they constitute, help to originate sexuality and identity. What interests us here is how race offers an originary fantasy of its own. If as Laplanche and Pontalis write, “the origin of fantasy is already integrated in the very structure of original fantasy,” then suddenly we have this radical notion that the so called fantasized, secondary scene may always already be the beginning. The schema of division between first and second scenes turns out to be profoundly unstable. Instead of a forgotten or repressed original scene to be recalled, original fantasy can be seen as something that happens repeatedly—every time something needs explaining. It is dramatized as a moment of emergence, the beginning of history. I submit that racial fantasies are also “original” and “primal” in that they are secondary elaborations which dramatize both emergence and history: they place a subject in relation to self and history, an autobiographical ma(s)king. Anthony Appiah once wisely said, “there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us”(Appiah, 45). But it is also precisely race's surplus value as value that masks its non-referentiality. In M. Butterfly, rather than seeing racial difference as facilitating sexual dissimulation, it is the fantasm of that difference which enables a racial “presence” to come into being.

But what about Song's role in this reflexive drama? Where is his desire? We now come to the other puzzle of M. Butterfly: Song's investment in the very role that he claims he despises. Aside from his “professional” objective to fool/seduce Gallimard, does Song “get” anything out of his disguise? And what would it mean for the political agenda of the play if he does? Song has been seen through the play alternately as either the object of Gallimard's desire or the critic of Gallimard's desire. Song's “private” desires remain largely unspoken and untheorized by both the play and the criticism surrounding it. This omission brings up the larger question of fantasy at the juncture of the private and the public. Can a subject loaded down by stereotypical projections come to have private fantasies discrete from that persistent repertoire of public images? Is it even possible for the cultural Other to remain un-assimilated? In his essay “The Other Question,” Homi Bhabha points out, “… the stereotype, which is [colonial discourse's] major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated”(Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 18). Bhabha locates the stereotype as a specific discursive mode that identifies and isolates. Who, however, is “anxiously repeating” this discursive mode, the colonizer and/or the one stereotyped? Who performs for whom? As we see from M. Butterfly, within the dynamics of specularity, the line between audience and performer (even between performer and performance) remains far from discrete. We are all too painfully familiar with the clumsy, popular racial fantasies that circulate within our public sphere. But rather than citing again and again those obviously troublesome stereotypes, it seems more fruitful and important to go on to the more vexing question of how exclusion in the forms of those clumsy fantasies have worked to structure minority identities in the first place. In her article “Defining Asian American Realities Through Literature,” Elaine Kim rightly traces those persistent racial fantasies as part of our cultural inheritance (Kim, 89). In uncovering the “realities” of Asian-American life, however, Kim implies that some kind of “Asian-American truth” discrete from the public repertoire of images may be recoverable. I suggest instead that the minority identity as such does not exist in a vacuum, but remains structured through exclusion and loss. To propose that the minority subject may also be anxiously re-staging those fantasies is not to reinscribe him/her back into the stereotypes, but to perform the more important task of unraveling the deeper identificatory operations produced by those projections.

Not accidentally, the question of Song's desire collapses into the question of Song's identity. Let me set the stage by offering three incidences where we get glimpses of Song's desire (the fact he may have one at all). The first moment is provoked through an observation made by Comrade Chin:

CHIN:
You are wearing a dress! And every time I come here, you're wearing a dress. Is that because you're an actor? Or what?
SONG:
It's a … disguise, Miss Chin.

(48)

The unspeakable possibility residing in Comrade Chin's “Or what?” has been confirmed and silenced within Song's pause. The second incident comes from Gallimard's query:

GALLIMARD:
Don't you, even a little bit, wish you were here with me?
SONG:
I'm an artist, Rene. You were my greatest … acting challenge.

(63)

One might imagine other options for that telling pause. The third moment comes from the trial:

JUDGE:
Just answer my question: did he know you were a man?
Pause.
SONG:
You know, your Honor, I never asked.

(83)

In the series of cryptic moments cited above—moments of deferral and pause, of blanking out and of “disguise”—Song's desire is not articulated. Or rather, Song's desire can be located precisely in these pauses … culturally and subjectively un-uttered. It is as though to articulate Song's desire would render him less “cool” or jeopardize his position as a proper critic of Western male fantasies. The moment of self-revelation for Song is made possible only through relegating that revelation to the realm of disguise. In other words, Song's inauthentic performance must remain inauthentic in order to guarantee the authenticity of his critique.

However, if we have learned anything from tracing Gallimard's fantasmatic identification with Song, then we would have to re-examine Song's investment in his disguise. In particular, we need to focus on Song's self-identification within the play. We recall that Song appears quite critical of the elision of national identity by racial identity. In their first meeting, (s)he informs Gallimard that he should not confuse the Chinese with the Japanese. As a Chinese, (s)he therefore could not possibly make an authentic Cio-Cio-san, nor would (s)he want to assume such a false role. By the end of the play, however, Song does take on another racial role, that of the white man. Clad in Armani slacks, Song assumes the colonial voice:

You think I could've pulled this off if I wasn't full of pride? … Arrogance. It took arrogance, really—to believe you can will … the destiny of another.

(85)

His earlier statement that he has “learned a few things about Western men”(82) must now be understood as implying not only that he has learned how to be with a western man, but also how to be a western man. This suggests that, within stereotype's necessary repeat performance, the other identificatory position available for the one stereotyped is not another stereotype (“don't mistake me for the Japanese”), but the role of the master.

It is through identifying with the master that Song assumes a fantasy of his “selfhood.” In his final gambit for love (not belief) from Gallimard, Song says startlingly and revealingly, “So—you never really loved me? Only when I was playing a part?”(89). By insisting on his subjective essence prior to “playing a part” and discrete from the dissimulation, he has missed the very crux of the power he exercised through the play. We can no longer accept his sexual disguise as pure performance; rather, we begin to see that disguise itself has had a performative effect on Song. We find Song protesting to Gallimard: “I'm your butterfly. … It was always me. … You adore me”(89). His failure to play his own game to the end reveals that within a fantasy structure, a “correct” political position is difficult to maintain since positionality is exactly what has been placed under question. This failure of complete mastery on Song's part must be further understood as revealing a desire for identification. The seduction of dissimulation—the making of oneself into another/the other—turns out to promise nothing less than the possibility of a “self.” When Gallimard “choos[es] fantasy”(88), he too chooses the fantasm of subjecthood: “‘I’ am pure imagination”(91; my emphasis). Only through the detour of the “other” can a self be most effectively simulated. For both Song and Gallimard then identification resides within disguise, and the racialization of their respective subjective positions is but an effect of that dissimulation.

In Gallimard's repulsion and Song's investment, we come to see racial fantasy as at once productive and prohibitive of identity. Because race as a fantasy promises a subject both origin and narrative, it has come to acquire primacy over other modes of identification. It mimes a structural basis for self-identification: I am the other that is me. The difficult lesson of M. Butterfly 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 … to come to know and love ourselves.

ELLISON AND THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE

Is there any getting over race? Freud distinguishes mourning from melancholia by designating the latter as the pathological version of the former—pathological because, unlike the successful work of mourning, the melancholic cannot “get over” loss. According to Freud, that loss becomes internalized, incorporated, and disguised (my addition) as a part of the melancholic's ego. Melancholy is thus this incorporative fantasy designed to hang on to a loss that cannot be grieved.⁶ That incorporated loss, furthermore, has a constitutive effect on the ego. I want to propose that race lives in America as a melancholic presence. Race—or more specifically racialization—may be considered to be profoundly melancholic: that is, racial identification operates by incorporating an exclusion that cannot be admitted. Toni Morrison's well-known thesis in her article “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” arrives at one side of this equation when she describes the formation of the nineteenth-century American literary canon as having been built on “things unspoken,” the negative space that is “Afro-American presence.” I say “one side” of the equation because, in addition to identifying African-American presence as the symptom of American melancholia, I want to emphasize that the process of racialization itself functions as that melancholic double-movement of denial and incorporation within the pluralist project of American cultures. The fantasy of multiculturalism depends as much on the exclusion of cultures as on their melding. Furthermore, the ontological status of that lost “presence” requires analysis as well.

What I hope to accomplish in this second half of the article is to rethink race in Ellison in terms of a cultural exclusion and its subsequent melancholic incorporation.⁷ If melancholia is ungrieved loss and if the ideology of “American cultures” sustains itself via the repeated exclusion and staged re-incorporation of excluded Other(s), then one may begin to read “racialized America” (for both the minority and the dominant) as a fantasy built on absences. In light of the American rhetoric of equality and freedom, loss and exclusion are especially inadmissible (though active) in America. This is why I said that race lives in America as a melancholic symptom. It is crucial to recognize that identity structured by loss operates on both sides of the mainstream and the marginalized, because a melancholic identity is built on incorporative confusion, a mimetic identity. In his introduction to Abraham and Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic Word, Jacques Derrida meditates on the fantasy of incorporation, interestingly enough, in a vocabulary that runs closely to what we have been examining:

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.

(Abraham and Torok, xv, xvii)

The “foreigner inside” lives as the “self.” Earlier with M. Butterfly, we have traced how the internalization of the other holds profound subjective effects, how taking on a role can mean taking in an identity. We saw too how the activity of dissimulation stages subjectivity. To racially assimilate (in the senses of blending in and taking in) implies an act of private and subjective dissimulation.

In the field of post-colonial studies, Homi Bhabha's work on mimesis adds another slant to this issue of incorporative identity. He identifies in his article “Of Mimicry and Man” an injunction to assimilate within what he calls the “colonial discourse of mimicry.” Bhabha sees mimicry as a disciplinary 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” (Bhabha, “Of Mimicry,” 126). By this account, the colonized subject finds him/herself in the position of melancholically echoing after the master: incorporating the master as well as his denigration. What we have been calling the “internalization of the other” he attributes to colonial strategy itself. Within this context, we see a sophisticated version 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.

But if we were to interject at this point what we have learned about the structuring and reflexive effects of fantasy and dissimulation, then we would have to broaden Bhabha's theoretical trajectory. What if “colonial desire” itself is melancholic and longs clandestinely to mime the “foreigner” inside? What if we recast that disciplinary failure (built into the injunction for mimesis) as instead an allowance for dissimulation? What if we alter the value attached to dissimulation? And what if dissimulation—the Other that is me—provides the very structure of identification? These alternative possibilities expand our assumptions about the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. To return briefly to M. Butterfly, the play theorizes through the figure of Gallimard the inherent inverse of the Bhabha paradigm: that the colonizing subject may himself counter-identify with the Other. It is the failure of the colonizer—to be the same but not quite (as the Butterfly)—that opens up the space of re-inscription within the colonizer's subjectivity. The play also suggests that the colonized may have internalized the very fable that he debunks precisely because it is profoundly difficult to dislodge the very internalization that is productive of identity: “I'm your Butterfly. … It was always me”(89; my emphasis).

I turn now to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man because its narrative of fantasy, disguise, and identity offers us an opportunity to develop further our examination of cultural loss as constitutive of racial identity. The benefit of linking a colloquial understanding of racial assimilation to a psychoanalytic notion of melancholic incorporation lies in how we learn to read cultural loss and foreclosures. By locating cultural and racial exclusion as a loss, Ellison's text offers a theorization on identity which does not recuperate that loss as presence, but as invisibility. Or, more specifically, Ellison re-valuates invisibility as strategy to identify that absence without denying that absence's constitutive power for the formation of the racialized subject (for both the master and the oppressed).⁸

The question of “how to master the master's tongue” can be said to be a central question confronting the narrator. Metaphors of mirroring, swallowing, and even gagging abound in Invisible Man. The novel offers a series of assimilative fantasies: the yes'em to death of the grandfather, the mad internalized cynicism of the vet, Trueblood as the fantasy of in-bred narcissism, the incorporating politics of the Brotherhood. Remember Mr. Norton who sees himself in the invisible man's face (Ellison, 42)?⁹ Or Dr. Bledsoe who had to act like what the white men think (“‘I had to act the nigger!’”[143])? Here we have the double equation of mutual, counter-incorporation where the white man and the black man mime one another, both trying to approximate their own identity through the other, supported by their fantasmatic image of the other. In fact, the novel is constructed around a series of reflexive mimetic figures. In this world of mirrors, the individual characters, for all their striving for individuation, more often than not find themselves in a crowd, or worse, inevitably served up for crowd consumption.¹⁰ There is no gaze that is not always already a mirror of another gaze. Consider, for example, the narrator's high school graduation. Instead of finding an audience for his speech, the narrator finds himself in a spectacle of humiliation arranged for the enjoyment of the white audience. The blond dancer, as well as the staged blind fighting afterwards, enable the white audience to witness the “bestial” nature of the black boys. The description of the woman offers a curious mixture of in-animation and bestiality:

The hair was yellow like that of a circus kewpie doll, the face heavily powdered and rouged, as though to form an abstract mask, the eyes hollow and smeared a cool blue, the color of a baboon's butt.

(19)

The dancer's face and body mirror the very qualities that the men have attributed to the black students. When the narrator reacts to her with desire and hatred, “to caress and destroy her, to love and murder her”(19), he is but performing the inseparability of desire and shame that he is supposed to feel. What has been exposed in that moment is not so much his subjectivity, but a reflection of the constitutive history of the representation of black male sexuality in relations to white men and women. The mise-en-scene exposes the black gaze as a confirming mirror for white male anxiety: the fantasy of black male hyperbolic sexuality. What is fascinating here is not that the fantasy exists, but that that fantasy needs to be staged and re-staged, for the re-staging provides the tableau in which the white audience can mediate and witness their own desires through the Other. The spectacle offers that detour, that doubling. The blonde's display exhibits the spectacle of the boys' arousal and shame, which in turn reflect the arousal of the white audience.

If the invisible man's response in front of that nude is but assenting to a stereotype, then is there any escaping that history? If a subject position has been preconditioned by certain laws and prohibitions, the exposure of that law/prohibition alone cannot suffice to restore that subject to a “wholeness” it never had. The “black gaze” is always already a historical construct. The one character who manages to “fall outside history,” Clifton, does so by acting out, not denying, that history. After recognizing that he has been duped by the Brotherhood, Clifton takes to the streets of New York performing the Sambo doll. Rather than reading his action as a concession to stereotype, I suggest that he is dramatizing and exposing the role that had been assigned to him. In taking up the Sambo doll, he is acting out what the Brotherhood has made him. The idea of a healthy progressive history, in which events can be successfully mourned and left behind (that is, gotten over) echoes far too closely the kind of blind, corrective, historical logic which undersigns projects like the Founder's dream (“the history of the race a saga of mounting triumphs”[134]) or the Brotherhood's idea of progressive history.¹¹ How can one restore invisibility?

Description—the delineation of presence and absence—turns out to be both the problem and the critique of the problem of invisibility. Beyond the standard reading of invisibility as a metaphor for exclusion (that the black man is invisible because white society refuses to see him), the text offers us invisibility as a strategy of critique: a metaphysical, intellectual meditation about invisibility as it comes to be associated with abstraction, the power of disembodiment and illusion. In the Prologue, the narrator relates an incident where he runs up against his own invisibility:

One night I accidentally bumped into a man. … He … called me an insulting name. … I sprang at him. … But he continued to curse and struggle. … I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat … when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! … a man almost killed by a phantom.

(4-5)

This collision literalizes the question: if the black man is the melancholic ghost of American culture, what happens when that culture runs up against this ghost? Furthermore, is the white man not constituted by the very nightmare he dreamt up? The image of the narrator as a phantom denotes not only the narrator's erasure but, more importantly, signals that erasure as the principle fantasmatic which shapes the reality of the white man.

As the inadmissible fantasm configuring (not just configured by) social visibilities, the narrator's invisibility is not only an effect of, but affects social reality. As we know from M. Butterfly, prohibition, like most injunctions, operates reflexively. Ellison's narrator gives us the vocabulary with which to conceptualize this reflexivity:

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.

(3)

Within that mirroring structure, who distorts whom? As much as racial blindness renders the narrator invisible, surely his invisibility reflects emptiness back on those gazers as well? If he has been assimilated only through his invisibility, then he also dissimulates—renders dis-similar—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 fantasm of the narrator's invisibility imitates the fantasm that is mainstream society. While blackness has traditionally been seen as all too visible/readable, whiteness operates through invisibility:

Trying to think about the representation of whiteness as an ethnic category … is difficult, partly because white power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular. … This property of whiteness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of its representational power.

(Dyer, 44-5)

The narrator in the Prologue (which is also the end) assumes this representational power through camouflage. He hides under the city, so in it that he becomes undetectable. The city's “Monopolated Light & Power” company observes a source draining their energy but whose origin they cannot determine. The narrator is at once everywhere and no where.

The character who anticipates this strategy of omnipresent non-description is of course the fantasmatic figure of Rinehart. Perhaps 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. He represents form without substance, yet his substancelessness provides him with pure potential. The narrator muses:

Could [Rinehart] himself be both rind and heart? What is real anyway? … His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. … It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.

(498)

We return to the issue of authenticity. When it comes to identity, the question goes beyond what is culturally real or racially genuine to the question of context. 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. He is at once the ultimate “outsider” and “insider,” making visible the contingency of division 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 ideal of an uncompromising individuality.

But what does this figure of re-signable tabula rasa mean in racial terms? Is Rinehart a racialized figure in the text? Rinehart (and even, the narrator) is all too easily recognizable as “Rinehart” in his glasses, his hat, and even shoes. As a type (“poppa-stopper,” “daddy-o,” the “stylin'” one), Rinehart seems more stylized than racialized. More to the point, he exposes the idea that racialization is always a matter of style, rather than essence—a performance of type that can either be stereotyping or employed by the Other as self- identification. As the narrator says, “I was recognized [as Rinehart] not by features, but by clothes, by uniform, by gait”(485). It is no coincidence that the narrator does not run into Rinehart, but becomes Rinehart in an identificatory collapse. His disguise (the dark glasses which throws him into a sequence of “dreamy, distorted” events) literally calls forth Rinehart. Rinehart as an event of visual performance demonstrates that 1) the act of identification is not far from representation (and thus involves and requires our attention to the power dynamics of viewer and spectatorship); and 2) that any act of identification tends to involve simultaneously an act of dis-identification.

By assuming Rinehart's subject position, the narrator at once acquires an identity and loses his capacity for naming. Even as he enjoys the disguise, he asks repeatedly, “who actually was who?” The site of identification is presented as difficult and ambivalent precisely because there is a cost in every identificatory staging. “It” is not just a costume, as Song and Gallimard have discovered. To impersonate Rinehart is to personify Rinehart. The narrator finds himself not only acting like Rinehart, but acting Rinehart. The narrator tells us, “Something was working on me, and profoundly”(486). Rinehartism exemplifies the contextuality of identity, a question of “place and circumstance”(489). By dissimulating the dissimulator, the narrator perceives for the first time the originating, rather than trapping, possibilities of identity: “being mistaken for him … my entire body started to itch, as though I had just been removed from a plaster cast and was unused to the new freedom of movement. … you could actually make yourself anew” (498-99).

It is crucial, however, to nuance this liberation as provisional, if not downright shattering. By impersonating Rhinehart, the narrator arrives not at an identity, but the fantasm that is the mode of identification. To follow Rinehartism is to plunge into the very heart of racial melancholia:

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.

(508)

The metaphor of gagging instantiates the melancholic condition of race in America: we gag on what we refuse to see. American culture is continually confronted by a ghost (the ghost of race) that it can neither emit nor swallow. Rinehart as a “Spiritual Technologist” recommends a remedy for that social malady: “Behold the Invisible”(495)—the invisibility that serves as a precondition for visibility. When Toni Morrison speaks of the “African-American presence” in American literature, what is the status of that “presence”? Is she referring to “real” African-American presence or the fantasm of African-American presence? I propose that the answer can only be the latter. The racialization and phantomization of African-Americans exist to condition “American” presence. The always already 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 a wholly melancholic activity. The act of delineating absence preconditions presence. Race in America is thus “stuck” within the moebius band of inclusion and exclusion.

Invisible Man finally hints that the first solution to that melancholic condition is not to recover a presence that never was, but to recognize the disembodiment that is both the master and the slave. Disembodiment, metaphorized by Rinehart, becomes literalized in the narrator's hallucination, the scene of castration. In that 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 and 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.”

(569-70)

The narrator's dismemberment, his scattered, castrated ego becomes the resistance 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 and produces loss, but the scene also theorizes the possibility that that place of violent intra-subjectivity might also be the very place where freedom lies.

This scene speculates that freedom comes not from historical or social liberation, but specifically identificatory renouncement (“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. Like the white man whose reality can only be shaped by his nightmare, the narrator's perception has for the most part, prior to this scene, been shaped by the ideologies which he tried to assimilate, his “soul-sickness”(575). Throughout the body of the narrative, he had been searching for visibility, individualism, as well as communal identification. The only kind of possible 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 intra-subjective negotiations—negotiations that are experienced intersubjectively and violently. The narrative has consciously tried out various political positions/strategies and then undermines them so that the resolution of Invisible Man remains far from certain. What is the “socially responsible role” that he 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 defend. … I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. … So I approach it through division”(580). The politics of this novel offer us description rather than prescription.¹²

“Community” embodies its inverse: exclusion. Invisible Man remains wary of the very group ideologies which “create” and isolate African-American communities in the first place. As the enclave that protects but also marginalizes, Harlem is not free from that “soul-sickness.” The narrator tells us that he had been “as invisible to Mary (the nurturing ‘mother’ in the heart of Harlem) as [he] had been to the Brotherhood”(571). 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”(441), he anticipates his own falling underground, significantly on the edge between the margin of 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 disidentification as well (I am this; therefore I am not that). The Brotherhood provides a quintessential example of group ideology: its membership requires the forsaking of other identities. Furthermore, its recruitment works through the borrowing of another communal value: “black brotherhood.”

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 non-existence 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. The invisible man tells us in the Epilogue, “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, a persistent fantasy of identification that cleaves and cleaves to the marginalized and the master.

Notes

1. All further citations from this text will come from this edition.

2. For a critical, cultural examination of the consistent emasculation of the Asian male—this time in the field of gay pornography—see Richard Fung's provocative essay, “Looking For My Penis?” The title of the essay derives from the piece's thesis that in gay male pornography the Asian man is repeatedly displayed in the passive “female” position; consequently, one rarely actually sees the Asian male penis.

3. In fact, Pinkerton was always already a type, a role. Power has never come from him per se, but from his cultural position, the colonial privilege of being a “Pinkerton.”

4. See Kaja Silverman's article on “Masochism and Subjectivity” for an insightful look into the reversibility of masochism and sadism as identificatory positions.

5. A pleasure, by the way, that can in no way be admissible. Since for centuries the writing of masculinity constitutes an elaborate denial of passivity and masochism, Gallimard could no more admit his masochistic pleasures than he could his homosexual desires.

6. My reading of melancholia as incorporative fantasy is indebted to the works of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. See The Wolf Man's Magic Word.

7. To my knowledge, melancholia has been theorized only in gender terms: in terms of female subjectivity for Kaja Silverman in The Acoustic Mirror and in terms of homosexuality for Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter. In the former, Silverman in analyzing Luce Irigary speaks of how the female subjectivity has been constructed as inevitably melancholic, via the negative oedipal complex (i.e., not getting over the mother). Silverman recasts that melancholia over the mother as an instance of identification that is productive. In Butler's argument, melancholia has been read in terms of gender in two ways: 1) homosexuality as the pathologized version of heterosexuality; 2) homosexuality as the melancholic loss for which the heterosexual norm cannot grieve, but a loss that must be maintained and managed all the same.

8. More than Asian-Americans, Afro-Americans hold a problematic and particularly melancholic relation to American culture as that presence which has been historically excluded and simultaneously and consistently re-gathered as exclusion.

9. All further citations from this text will come from this edition.

10. See Phillip Brian Harper's article for an excellent reading of the struggle of the invisible man as a continuous negotiation between the demands of individual versus communal voice.

11. It is outside the scope of this present paper, but Ellison's meditation on subversive strategies in relations to the “master's tongue” can be placed very interestingly within the context of existing debates regarding the critical treatment of minority literature with respect to mainstream literary criticism. See, for instance, the debate between Barbara Christian and Henry Louis Gates in Cultural Critique.

12. Indeed, Ellison's questioning of stable political grounds and acts of political intervention has led critics to accuse him of neglecting “Negro duty” (Bone, 110). The counter critical tendency to read the text as a manual for the achievement of black identity equally neglects this text's unease with individualism as an uncompromising ideology.

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———. The Language of Psychoanalysis. trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1993.

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