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h Chapter 4 Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative In an oft-quoted passage from his 1845 Narrative, Frederick Douglass describes his reaction to the slave songs he heard in the “dense old woods” of his master’s plantation: “I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.”1 These lines are particularly intriguing for the way they disjoin the categories of knowledge and experience. As a slave living“within the circle” of the institution, Douglass was too steeped in the terrifying daily effects of slavery to comprehend its“deep meaning.” It is only with distance and, as he will importantly add, with education that real insight into these songs occurs. Indeed, Douglass contrasts his compromised understanding of these songs as a slave with the more sophisticated comprehension that literacy has afforded him, by explicitly referencing the intense emotional reaction that accompanies the moment of his autobiographical inscription: “The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek” (24, emphasis added). According to Douglass, the act of writing is linked to understanding and therefore to an appropriate affective response. True enlightenment is only possible, then, when one removes oneself from experiential immediacy—or exits what Douglass calls “the circle”— and acquires the perspective afforded by composition and other educational practices. These lines trouble contemporary readers of the Narrative in part because they seem to suggest the total cognitive impoverishment of slave experience and Outside the Circle 105 the impossibility of knowledge outside Western systems of literacy. If Douglass can acquire insight into his position only through traditional forms of education (i.e., through learning to read and write), then black subjectivity and consciousness would seem to be utterly dependent on a submission to dominant white Western discourse.2 Moreover, as scholars have pointed out, these lines speak to the painful loss that must accompany this shift toward self-enlightenment . In exiting “the circle,” Douglass must necessarily distance himself from authentic black experience and from a community of peers. This results in what David Van Leer calls Douglass’s “anxiety of ethnicity”: “Frederick Douglass’s dichotomy between participation and knowledge theorizes the narrative irony by which the flight from slavery becomes a flight from culture. . . . The mature narrator’s greater understanding is balanced by a clear nostalgia for the time ‘within the circle’ of the black community. . . . And he experiences the black hermeneutic circle . . . as a measure of his loss of group identity.”3 Thad Ziolkowski has also argued that Douglass’s acquisition of literacy results in a degree of alienation and a necessary distancing from his authentic community of origin: “While‘within the circle,’ Douglass’s understanding was but nascent; yet having attained the critical distance requisite for appreciation, he is as cast away, without real community, by virtue of the medium of a distancing discourse.”4 But if Douglass’s lines register a loss of authentic black community, they also, I would argue, register a gain of fellowship with his Northern white readers . As subjects who are themselves outside “the circle,” Douglass’s readers are assured at this moment that their extraneous position is no impediment to their insight into slave culture. Indeed, like Douglass, their distance from the experience of slavery may actually contribute to an increased comprehension of the institution. Even more important, these lines suggest an intimate proximity between Douglass and his white readership on account of their mutual exclusion . While he dismisses the mass of Northerners, who are so ignorant of slavery as to misinterpret “singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness” (24), Douglass, like Melville, devotes himself to a select group of sympathetic readers, whom he imagines as psychic and bodily extensions of himself. It is these readers whom he invites to take up the very place in the woods where he first heard the slave songs:“If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation . . . place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul” (24). Douglass imagines the reader here as fellow voyeur—eavesdropping from the same deep [18...

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