Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth- Century African American Literature

CHAPTER ONE: PASSING (ON) TEXTUAL HISTORY: The Ends of Nella Larsen’s Passing

[ 37 ] PASSING (ON) TEXTUAL HISTORY The Ends of Nella Larsen’s Passing Nella Larsen’s Passing has become one of the most widely read New Negro Renaissance novels in recent years, but no one really knows how it ends. By this I do not mean that critics have not determined how much guilt to assign Irene Redfield in Clare Kendry’s fatal fall, or to what extent the narrative is actually a lesbian story “passing” as a racial one. I mean the ending is actually unknowable, because the original last paragraph disappeared from the first edition’s third printing, and no extant evidence can explain this change. There is no conclusive answer to the question of presenting this textual crux “correctly”—despite assumptions to the contrary by Larsen’s editors—but I will argue that this textual problem itself bears an important lesson: the best response to a gap in textual knowledge is to recognize the absence and its causes, not to produce editions that gloss over such gaps, thereby eliding the social and cultural elements of these textual histories and compelling Larsen’s novel to pass as textually and historically stable. In this chapter, I connect Passing’s incomplete material history to the circumstances of its production and reception, which I take to be indicative of the broader cultural tensions at work in the New Negro Renaissance between African American authors and their white publishers. As I argue in the introduction, the tensions in this period between the culturally hybrid circumstances of production and publishers’ continued marketing of New Negro literature in racially marked terms reflect the unbalanced power dynamics that produced what Gilles Deleuze terms a“minor literature”:“that CHAPTER ONE which a minority constructs within a major language” (152). The record of that minor language lies in the material traces of its production history. In this case, the primary material issue is the inclusion or omission of the original last paragraph. Knopf’s first two 1929 printings of Passing ended with the following two paragraphs, after Clare Kendry has fallen to her death from an open window and Irene Redfield has descended from the party to the street: Her [Irene’s] quaking knees gave way under her. She moaned and sank down, moaned again. Through the great heaviness that submerged and drowned her she was dimly conscious of strong arms lifting her up. Then everything was dark. Centuries after, she heard the strange man [a police officer, presumably] saying : “Death by misadventure, I’m inclined to believe. Let’s go up and have another look at that window.” The second paragraph disappeared in the novel’s third 1929 printing, so that “Then everything was dark” ends this version, not the police officer’s remark. There is no archival evidence to explain whether Larsen requested that the “Centuries after” paragraph be omitted, or if she approved of this change as a revision initiated by Knopf, or even whether the omission was intended by either party. The extensive Alfred A. Knopf archive in the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center contains no files on Larsen that resolve or even address this matter, and there is no Larsen archive as such. My discussion focuses first on the various editorial approaches to this problem. Of the four editions currently available, three include the second paragraph above, while the other does not (except in a footnote). The practical matter of choosing one version or the other, I argue, masks the deeper historical and cultural issues that generate this choice in the first place. After demonstrating the interpretive consequences of using a particular edition without taking account of the novel’s full textual history, I turn to the pedagogical implications of this essentially unknowable ending. As Pamela Caughie contends, Larsen’s novel is an especially effective vehicle for teaching the fluidity of cultural identity, for “we are always ‘passing’ in the classroom” (137). To edit or teach Passing without acknowledging its incomplete history, I conclude, forces the text to [ 38 ] NELLA LARSEN’S PASSING pass as stable, and thus erases the material and racial histories behind this textual mask. PUBLISHING “NEW NEGROES” Our lack of contemporary knowledge about Larsen’s authorial agency echoes her own tenuous status as a new black novelist establishing herself within the New York literary scene. Beverly M. Haviland observes,“All of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance faced difficulties about how they would...