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2. Doomed to Be a Witness: The Authroity of Ineluctable Vision in Douglass's Slave Narratives
- The University of Alabama Press
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2 Doomed to Be a Witness The Authority of Ineluctable Vision in Douglass’s Slave Narratives One of the pivotal experiences Douglass records in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) is a vicious assault by white workers at the shipyard where he worked: “[O]ne of [them] gave me, with his heavy boot, a powerful kick in the left eye. My eyeball seemed to have burst” (68). Much like Jacobs’s eye at the attic peephole , Douglass’s eyeball has both historical and rhetorical significance: it signifies real violence while also being caught up in the dynamics of literary authority. Returning to his owner, he finds that his hardened mistress is “melted into pity”: “My puffed-out eye and blood-covered face moved her to tears. . . . [W]ith a mother’s tenderness, [she] bound up my head, covering the wounded eye with a lean piece of fresh beef. It was almost compensation for my suffering to witness, once more, a manifestation of kindness from this, my once affectionate old mistress” (63). Through an eyeball literally battered into intense visibility and rendered unable to see, Douglass “witness[es]” an audience’s potent reaction to that very eye. Neither transparent nor omniscient, but profoundly dependent on his audience’s reaction , Douglass writes an eyeball that ironically gains its rhetorical authority by being subject to the disabling violence of American slavery. Scholars have noted Douglass’s movement away from the role of embodied eyewitness toward a more disembodied verbal authority as his narrative proceeds, but what this passage suggests is that he casts his verbal authority as simultaneous to, ironically and ineluctably derived from, his embodied, violated perception .1 Like Emerson, Douglass suggests that he inevitably finds rather than forges his powerful American text; unlike Emerson, Douglass attributes this ineluctable visual discovery of an American narrative to an eye that is itself made visible by the brutality of slavery.2 On the one hand, Douglass would have every reason to dodge a strong Authority of Ineluctable Vision in Douglass 53 link between literary authority and perception. As I suggested in the discussion of Jacobs in chapter 1, the analogical structure of perception that allows many white American writers to lay claim to national authorship is pitted against black writers, for the Emersonian emphasis on a correspondence between visible sign and discursive meaning is the same structure of perception that drives racism.3 The attention to the slave narrator’s body invoked by the dual roles of witness and victim heightens his or her status as a solid object of the nation’s punitive vision, reinscribing the institutionalized surveillance of slavery since racism would have led even sympathetic readers to scan for “fugitive” evidence of rebellion, dishonesty, or mediocrity, undermining the slave narrator’s efforts to act as an authoritative seer. The eyesight of African Americans was already dismissed through legal terms that denied them the right to serve as material witnesses against a white person accused of a crime.4 As slave narrators sought to report authoritatively on what they had seen and experienced firsthand and thus to challenge racist perceptions of human destiny, the discourse of American authorship would seem to require that they position themselves as disembodied seers even as the racist corollaries of these perceptual conventions made disembodiment impossible.5 More pressingly, such racism made it essential to dismantle the ideology of visible correspondence and to diminish the eye’s traditional authority . On the other hand, in the very process of contending with perpetual visibility and disenfranchised vision, slave narrators like Douglass had much to gain from tapping into the authority of American authorship-as-seership. In this chapter, I argue that Douglass navigates this bind, ironically gaining narrative authority by in fact attributing his first autobiography to his unwilled, embodied viewpoint and to the compulsory logic of perception. Enlisting and even intensifying the conflation of American sight and American text, he argues that he cannot help but see the narrative of slavery he writes, for slavery forces him to be a witness. Then, according to the physical laws of perception, he cannot help but see what lies in his field of vision, and, according to the laws of literate perception, he cannot help but read the meaning that lies before him. He thus strategically casts the slave narrative as the unmediated, unwilled transcription of this literate reading of the American landscape. If Jacobs’s peephole literalizes the Emersonian notion of transparency...