Freudian Knot or Gordian Knot? The Contradictions of Racialized Masculinity in Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go

This article situates Chester Himes' hard-boiled excoriation of American racism, If He Hollers Let Him Go, in relationship to larger critical and political debates about the value and limitations of negative representation. Taking Himes' use of the forms of negative representation associated with the hard-boiled narrative as its jumping off point, the article argues that Himes' novel, in its representation of the violence that overdetermines black and white social and sexual relationships, reveals the specific forms of negativity that structure the social field in the United States. Positioned historically between the broad social mapping of Native Son and the surrealist psychological narrative of Invisible Man, as well as more broadly between the proletarian aesthetic of the thirties and the popular psychodramas of the fifties, If He Hollers Let Him Go gives a unique account of the ways in which the intersection between psychological and material forms of racism-or as Himes puts it Freudian and Gordian knots--shape the position of the black male subject. In addressing these dual forms of racism, Himes' novel engages in a form of negative fantasy-work: revealing the ways in which the negations experienced by the black male subject are structured in part through the sexualizing fantasies constructed by a white supremacist culture as well as by the same culture's systematic erasure of the distinction between fantasy and action. This fantasy-work forms a key part of the anti-racist praxis that the novel implicitly suggests, a praxis of working-through the Freudian knots and cutting through the Gordian knots of American racism.