Deauthenticating Community: The passing Intrusion of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen's Passing

Abstract

Lost totality, or totality accomplished in the lie of the individual: there is no way out of this circle of disenchantment. --Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (38) In The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that the possibility of the individual is necessarily predicated upon the possibility of a stable community, a pre-existing totality that encompasses and defines the individual as a coherent I. In stating that am white or am a man, I assume that my individuality adheres to certain fixed categories of being. In short, my individuality is determined by the community of being to which I ostensibly belong. Obviously, then, to say am white or am a man is to say that I have an essential link to both a community of whites and a community of males. By implication, and quite paradoxically, I am a singular and coherent entity only insofar as I am (in one way or another) indistinguishable from a certain communal whole, or plurality. As a result, if my identity as an individual is ambiguous or unfixed--if I do not clearly belong anywhere--then I disrupt the stability of the communities to which I only seem to belong. For this reason, the issue of (racially or otherwise) in twentieth-century American literature is inextricably linked to the issue of community and the possibility of communal stability. Characters who refuse to align or identify themselves with the communities to which their lineage (and/or gender, class, sexuality, etc.) assigns them deny their origins and, by implication, the communal stability upon which their coherence as individuals is based. They challenge the possibility of communal totalities and, thus, the possibility of a stable and coherent individual. It is hardly surprising, then, that characters like Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) have been identified as lamentable, failed, or simply disturbing. (1) This reading has been prevalent both in the texts in which such passing characters are presented and in some of the early criticism of those texts. (2) After all, by refusing, or being unable, to acknowledge the authenticity of the communities to which she is socially obligated, Clare disrupts and challenges the possibility of an essential social bond, or common upon which communal ties are legitimated. In focusing on Clare's disruptive and subversive nature, I am taking as my point of departure an already well-established field of criticism. However, I am not interested in simply reiterating the fact that racially and sexually ambiguous characters like Clare frustrate essentialist notions of identity while forcing us to accept the impossibility of interpretive and/or narrative closure; this has been clearly demonstrated already, in one way or another, by Judith Butler, Martha J. Cutter, and Elaine K. Ginsberg (to name a few). (3) Rather, I am concerned with how the act of passing (especially in Passing) confuses and, in turn, exposes our virtually default assumptions about community and individuality. What follows, then, is as much a reading of Passing as it is a consideration of critical responses to both Passing as a text and passing as a behavior. Read alongside critical discussions of the novel and the act, Passing suggests that racially and sexually ambiguous characters who embrace the flail implications of their marginal status threaten the possibility of totalized or totalizing communities because they frustrate the validity of the assumptions upon which their failure as individuals are necessarily predicated. Clare's (non)presence disrupts the illusory possibility that any community can be rigorously defined by an essential--or, as Nancy would have it, immanent--bond. In other words, and if we employ the work of Slavoj Zizek alongside the work of Nancy, we might say that Clare functions as a symptom of the Lacanian Real--that is, the impossible Real of essential bonds, or categories of identity. …