Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2000 by Abigail Cheever

Dr. Comeaux's crude fantasy of the "best of the Southern Way of Life," however, derives less from a late-nineteenth-century fantasy of slavery than from a twentieth-century fantasy of Africa. For if the African Americans in Dr. Comeaux's experiment have lost a certain selfhood through their exposure to Na-24, they've retained what can best be described as an identity. As Dr. Comeaux explains:

"Have you driven by the old project in Baton Rouge lately? ... You know what you'd see now? ... Green! Trees, shrubs, flowers, garden plots--one of the anthropologists on our board noted a striking resemblance to the decorative vegetation of the Masai tribesman-- and guess what they've done with the old cinder-block entrances? ... They're now mosaics, bits of colored glass from Anacin bottles, taillights, whatever, for all the world like--can't you guess? ... The African bower bird, Tom. Lovely!" (198-99)

Correlating the renewal of the African American urban community with the reemergence of so-called traditional African culture, Percy satirizes the multicultural and specifically Afrocentric movements of the 1980s that sought to reawaken the spirit within African Americans through the "language, dress, behavior, and games ... derived from [an] African heritage" (Asante, Afrocentricity 21). African Americans exhibit on Na-24 a predisposition to certain artistic forms: "the decorative vegetation of the Masai tribesmen" and "The African bower bird." [4] That such a predisposition exists forms the basis of Afrocentric philosophy; as Molefi Kete Asante explains, "whether you are speaking of the Brazilian, Jamaican, Cuban, Haitian, or United States African, they all share the same forms of experience ... the same source of energy" (Ideal 183). But what Maulana Karenga sees as the emergence of American "blacks' real self, hidden under layers of false roles and identities imposed by the dominant society" (346), Percy represents as the moment of the self's radical absence, when identity takes over. And perhaps most ironically, what for Asante represents freedom--in this case, from the Eurocentric ideals that constitute a "most pernicious kind of enslavement because the person ... never see [s] clearly for himself' (Afrocentricity 40)-- for Percy is a new form of slavery--the enslavement to identity--in which the slave acts entirely "of his own accord."

Percy's hostility to Afrocentricity is not in and of itself surprising-- Afrocentric interpretations of culture and history were frequently made the scapegoat category for the extremes of multiculturalism during the 1980s and early 1990s. [5] What proves more interesting are the competing definitions of selfhood around which such hostility appeared. While most proponents of multicultural theory disdain arguments positing, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s, words, "a mystically shared essence called blackness" (111), there remains a consensus: first, that individuals are crucially constructed through their cultural communities; and second, that contemporary studies of culture need to compensate for the fact that, until now, "no women and people of color were ever able to discover the reflection or representation of their images, or hear the resonances of their cultural voices" (Gates 111). While those in favor of "traditional" culture argue that literature and the humanities "transcend accidents of class, race, and gender"--they "speak to us all," as Lynne Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities declared (qtd. in Fish 258)--it is the multicultural project precisely to challenge who "us all" might be, noting as Stanley Fish does that "it is obvious who will not get a say, those for whom matters of class, race, ethnicity and gender are of paramount importance and abiding concern" (258-59). [6] Percy however would agree with neither of these two perspectives. For Percy, there is no guarantee that African American students will respond better to African American than to Anglo American or Asian American literature, that in the fullness of selfhood they will create an African bower bird and not an Elizabethan sonnet. So to understand literature merely as an opportunity for identic consolidation--in which African Americans read Toni Morrison, Anglo Americans read John Updike, and Jewish Americans read Saul Bellow--is to deprive it of its most powerful role as a aid to identic expansion. It is the natu re of the human--not the humanities, as Cheney would have it--to transcend the limitations imposed by historical or cultural contingencies.