The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by John Sheehy

The boy's mother, of course, never precisely answers her son's question. How could she? And yet this question, or questions - " '... am I white? Are you white?' " - are central to this uncolored boy's later transformation into an ex-colored man, his quest to create for himself an I. The I, for Lacan, is intrinsically alienating, but is also the key to social interaction; conceivably, in "mediating" the encounter between the inarticulable, "instinctual" self and the other, the I contains within it the possibility of a tenable resolution between self and other - all other influences being equal. For the colored and ex-colored men and women of the Autobiography, however, all other influences are clearly not equal.

The main problem one encounters in trying to apply Lacan's mirror-stage model to the "passing" figure is an obvious one: The Lacanian model does not take into account the various ways race distorts - "colors" - the child's confrontation with the mirror. The Lacanian model of I-formation assumes a fairly normative family structure, with both mother and father present, within a fairly normative societal structure; the construction of the I, in an important sense, frees the child to make a series of further resolutions of ambiguity which culminate in his introduction to language, his entrance into history, and his creation of an identity which allows him to function among other people. For the ex-colored man, not only is this "normative" family environment absent - he is raised only by his mother - but, more importantly, his mirror-stage encounter is rendered non-resolvable by the fact that, when he looks in the mirror, what he sees - and the range of possible identities available to be constructed from what he sees - has already largely been determined for him. Lacan's "natural maturation" from specular I to social I is precisely reversed, in that the child has already been labeled, has already been handed a rigid social identity from without, and is for this reason unable freely to construct a personal identity based on the image he sees in the mirror. What does he see in the mirror, after all? Whiteness and blackness. But the racist environment in which this and further encounters take place mandates his creation of an identity which is either white or black. In either case, his view of himself must remain fragmented, must deny some part of what he sees in the mirror, leaving him finally with the unresolvable choice between living either as a physically "white" black man or as a secretly "black" white man.

The failure of the Lacanian model to address the implications of racial difference in the formation of identity leads us, although perhaps through a back door, into what Henry Louis Gates calls the "hall of mirrors" that is Signification:

Thinking about the black concept of Signifyin(g) is a bit like stumbling unaware into a hall of mirrors: the sign itself appears to be doubled, at the very least, and (re)doubled upon ever closer examination. It is not the sign itself, however, which has multiplied. If orientation prevails over madness, we soon realize that only the signifier has been doubled and (re)doubled, a signifier in this instance that is silent, a "sound-image" as Saussure defines the signifier, but a "sound-image" sans the sound. (Gates 44)