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9. The Marrow of Tradition: "The Very Breath of His Nostrils"
- University of Georgia Press
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9 The Marrow of Tradition "The Very Breath of His Nostrils' The differences between entities . . . are shown to be based on repression of differences within entities, ways in which an entity differs from itself. —BARBARA JOHNSON,A World of Difference The railroad is a potent American symbol, so readers should not be surprised to find that Chesnutt begins three of his novels with his protagonists aboard or descending from a train. But Chesnutt's trains bear a different thematic weight than do other, more familiar appearances of the iron horse. This is not the machine whose shrill whistle disturbs Thoreau's pastoral garden, nor is it the continent-spanning engine of progress celebrated in western romance. These more familiar trains follow America's most famous trajectory, which runs—for good or for ill—from east to west, from civilization to wilderness. But other routes are possible. The train that bears Dreiser's protagonist at the beginning of Sister Carrie carriesher from rural Indiana to Chicago, from the plains to the metropolis. More important, Dreiser's train projects Carrie out of a stable world of comfortablecertainties into a dynamicworld of moral and social ambiguity.Like Dreiser,Chesnutt is interested in ambiguity; more specifically, in this novel he uses the train journey to introduce his keytheme: the confounding problems of differences and similarities between and within the races. Chesnutt's railroads mJVLandy Oxendine and TheMarrow of Tradition run north-south, from relativelybroad racial tolerance to narrowlyenforced Jim 148 «The Very Breath of His Nostrils» Crow. The train from which John Waiden descends in The House behind the Cedars might seem an exception from this pattern, because it has come up from South Carolina. But Walden's voyage is essentially the same as that of Tom Lowrey and Dr. Miller. The racialdefinitions under South Carolina law were more liberal than those of North Carolina; thus Waiden boards the train legally a white man and descends, if he is discovered, a Negro. For Chesnutt, the value of the railroad as symbol—and, more specifically , the value of the north-south road—resides in the tension between seeming clarityand deep ambiguityin racialmeanings. Nothing seems more straightforward than atrain's carefully timed, linear progress.And yet, at the point where the iron rails cross another line, a state boundary, the identities and rights of those who ride the road dramaticallychange. Even in the South, each state had its own definition of "Negro," definitions that Chesnutt describedand mocked in his essay"What Is aWhite Man?" The conflict that Chesnutt's train journeys dramatize is,to use alinguistic metaphor, the tension between horizontal syntactical progress and the vertical proliferation of semantic meanings. It wason atrain traveling through Louisiana in 1892 that Homer Plessysought to challenge the constitutionality of Southern "separate but equal" legislation. However, independent of this recent and important historical echo, there are other features of railroad travelthat recommended it for Chesnutt's deconstructive purposes. The velocity of steam-powered travel, the rapid movement of people across political and cultural boundaries, intensified the violent collision of conflicting ideologies . The new mobility brought into contact, and thus called into question, assumptions that, left in isolation, seemed natural and immutable. Dr. Miller's journey southward, the event that precipitateshis entry into this novel, began in New York. Beyond this, however, his travels have a longer itinerary,for Miller, anAmericanNegro, studied in ParisandVienna. We are then, initially on this journey, in contact with broad and cosmopolitan values, which will be strained and constricted asthe train moves south. The narrative takes up its protagonist when he meets his former professor Dr. Burns, a white man who boards the train in Philadelphia. The meanings associatedwith Pennsylvania's cityof brotherlylove, our constitutional cradle, are, of course, immediately to the novel's ironic purpose, as is the city's proximity to the Mason-Dixon line. It is the train's transgression of [54.196.27.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:55 GMT) "The Very Breath of His Nostrils" 149 that line soon after Burns's boarding that produces the novel's first ideological collision. Before that collision, however, the narrator gives us two readings of the scene created bythe chancemeeting of two professionalcolleagues. The first is from the perspective of a "celebrated traveler,"whose broad experience in the world's remote corners causes him to assert that "among allvarieties of mankind the similarities are vastly more important and fundamental than the differences."1 The traveler to whom the narrator refers is not...