The Life and the Mind: A Reconciliation

Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. By Claudia Tate. Oxford UP, 1998. xvi + 238 pp. $19.95, paper.

With Psychoanalysis and Black Novels Claudia Tate significantly advances efforts to push understandings of African American literature beyond the social-action model that equates legitimacy with commitment to the political struggle to end oppression. In saying this, I do not at all intend to denigrate or diminish the significance of either the struggle or the criticism which has illuminated its position in the African American canon. Properly used, this model of commentary has made essential contributions to American literary scholarship. As with all critical models, however, it presents problems when it becomes a procrustean bed that critics use to cast off whatever offending textual limbs do not fit their particular paradigm.

In the case of the social-action school of African American literary criticism, these amputations prove especially problematic. The insistence on a political engagement orientation certainly limits the possibilities open to African American writers; more importantly, though, it also reinforces a narrow interpretation of African American being, one that often emphasizes oppression at the expense of exploring the depths and densities of lives richly and fully lived. Tate responds by employing the structures of psychoanalysis to read what she calls anomalous texts, works that do not conform to the structures of racial and gender identity that critics "rather spontaneously impose on black textuality." She argues that each of the five texts she treats--Emma Dunham Kelley's Megda, W.E. B. Du Bois' Dark Princess, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee, and Richard Wright's Savage Holiday-- concerns itself primarily, although not exclusively, with issues of personal desire. As she demonstrates, however, these questions of individual longing necessarily function within a larger context which has been traditionally defined by what she calls the "public, collective protocols of race," those standards of behavior and definition that shape societal perceptions of black identity.

Part of the power of her work lies in her ability to reconcile these apparently contradictory impulses. Reading each of the novels through the lens of a particular psychoanalytic model, she suggests how it mediates the tensions between these private aspirations and public demands. In doing so, she helps illuminate the roots of a tradition of African American writing which flourished in the universalist literature of the 1940s and 1950s and which has reached a new pinnacle in the aftermath of the Black Arts Movement. She also demonstrates how such an approach can help break down previous rigid classifications of core texts within the tradition. This facet of the text is most apparent in her explanation of the links between these anomalous novels that ground her study and her authors' major works. By showing that the matricidal impulse Wright explores fully in Savage Holiday appears more subtly in Native Son and Black Boy, for example, Tate offers a new means of understanding work that has frequently been cited almost exclusively in the protest vein of the African American canon. This leads ultimately to a new way of seeing Wright's position in the tradition.

Among the series of effective, convincing readings, the assessment of Nella Larsen's Quicksand stands out. Like the other chapters of the study, this discussion of Quicksand iseffectively organized and clearly written. As Tate rightly notes, the novel has received a great deal of attention from African American cultural and feminist critics. The story of a racially mixed protagonist's efforts to find a place in society where she can satisfy her longings for both acceptance and sexual fulfillment has proven fertile ground for scholars interested in issues of racial identity and gender dynamics within American society. Building on that foundation, and incorporating fundamental principles of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Tate argues that the novel "is ultimately controlled by its desire to recover and forget, [and to] express and silence a lost primary love at the...